If you’re in the UK and at all interested in hypnosis then you might be interested in checking out Derren Brown’s new TV series called ‘The Events’ as one of the episodes called ‘How to control the nation’ will involve an attempt to hypnotize viewers in being unable to leave their sofa.

For those that don’t know, in last week’s episode Derren Brown claimed he could predict the lottery results, and he did manage to reveal the correct numbers on a set of small balls as those that had just been called out on the lottery TV show. A few days later he attempted to give an explanation in a separate hour long programme.

Now Derren’s particular approach is to use a mix of mentalism and magic effects which in laymen terms means that he uses human psychology, hypnosis and what you could crudely call simple tricks. For example you may have seen a bunch of explanation for the ‘lottery prediction’ on YouTube using split screen technology or ‘augmented reality’ which involves the real time mixture of computer graphics and real life. But the mundane reality of how a magic effect is achieved is not the interesting aspect of the overall effect. The magic and mentalism actually happens in the build up, the story, the drama, the fact that everyone is talking about what happened for days before and after the actual event.

Now a lot of people were disappointed with the explanation he gave of how he ‘predicted’ the lottery results. I have to say I didn’t watch that programme but heard it involved a mixture of pseudo-psychology, and correct sounding (but inaccurate) maths and statistics. But the point is that there will be people out there that really believe he predicted the results and further more a subset of those people will have believed the explanation he has given.

Now what’s interesting is that Derren has now set himself up as an authority in the minds of a group of people who watched the ‘prediction’ and the ‘explanation’ and to them he is now someone who actually has the power to predict the lottery. Having this status will allow him to be more persuasive with that group of people, which is interesting as I mentioned earlier that the programme this Friday involves him trying to hypnotize everyone who watches the show. If you’re interested in how to set yourself up as an authority and how to set the precedence for yourself that you have hypnotic power, thus actually increasing your ability to hypnotize people then as usual I recommend you take a look at Igor Ledochowski’s conversational hypnosis course.