I'm sure that most Brits have heard of the illusionist, Derren Brown's, stunt last week at correctly 'predicting' that Wednesday's National Lottery numbers, something that is pretty much impossible. It's a first in a series of four 'events' that he has claimed have taken him a year of planning.

 

 

 

Many theories have cropped up about how he did it, split-screens, digital balls, all sorts of stuff. Now he explained it as being some sort of 'wisdom of crowds' thing.

 

 

 

A show aired, which stated three possibilities for winning the lottery. Two were quickly dismissed (faking a winning ticket, or tampering with the lottery machine), and the majority of the programme described Brown's use of automatic writing and crowd psychology to appear to predict the numbers ahead of time. Through a series of experiments and attempts at explaining complex psychology, while avoiding the underlying maths, Brown suggested that he may have predicted numbers using a phenomenon known as the "Wisdom of Crowds". He revealed 24 volunteers who, after a number of previous sessions, were shown to apparently predict the correct numbers by perusing a board filled with previous lottery numbers and guessing that week's through automatic writing.

 

 

 

Reading a lot of comments on blogs and such, it seems that nobody takes this as how he actually did it, I don't believe it either. However this Friday there is to be another 'event' where "Next week [brown is] going to induce an inability among viewers to move from the sofa by the use of subliminal messaging".

 

 

 

Despite the seemingly poor show last week, I'm eagerly waiting for Friday. I want to know what TIFers here think about this new series. Especially any theories on how he managed to do the Lottery.

I like it, and i like the things Darren brown does. He is an incredibly smart guy, he knows exactly how other people's minds work, and can manipulate them on an incredible scale. It's kind of like crossing a magician with a psychologist, he uses alot of trickery, but knows what to do to make it look as if it isn't, if you get me.

 

 

 

I watched last weeks lottery one and it's fairly obvious his explination, was just another misleading thing to give more questions than it answered. But you have to admit, it was impressive. Even a 60+ year old i work with kept talking about it the day after, it really does have incredibly wide appeal.

 

 

 

His programs really rely on a 'wow i want to see how he will prossibly do that/i want to shoe that he cannot do it' And then after, they spread by word of mouht, basically by 'wow'.

I've had a massive dislike for this guy since that horse racing one that was proved to be fake.

So... did he win anything for guessing the correct numbers? (i.e did he buy the winning ticket?)

 

 

 

Edit: http://thedrilldown.com/2009/09/12/how- ... n-live-tv/

 

 

 

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I've had a massive dislike for this guy since that horse racing one that was proved to be fake.

 

 

 

Ay? The whole point of the show was that Derren revealed at the end that it was just a massive numbers game how that one woman got lucky. That was probably my favourite of all his, I was sat in a room with lots of very smart friends and none of us really could figure it out, we just discounted the fact that he might be using luck, it was clever how he drew you in.

 

 

 

The lottery number thing was a bit of a let down to be honest, for someone with such a good knowledge of human behaviour he seemed to think we'd be surprisingly guilliuble in accepting the "wisdom of crowds" explanation. I mean a child could see that guessing the weight of an ox is different to guessing the outcome of a random process. Still, I like him and I'm sure the other events will be worth watching.