useless.

[erastes]

Derren Brown didn't stick me to my seat.

Comments

[crawling-angel.livejournal.com]

Me and Dave neither. I did feel a heavy pull in my neck for the briefest of moments tho. What was it with the swirly grillpain thing? I spotted some flashes of what looked like someone stuck in a chair with their head lollin back...

[erastes.livejournal.com]

Blooming easily influenced people!! They looked like wynciette sheets to me!

[spindriftdancer.livejournal.com]

Not sure who Derren Brown is...

But this ought to perk up your day. You made the list twice.

http://www.reviewsbyjessewave.com/?p=6374

[beckyblack]

Oh, was he on the telly? :D Heh, I've just had A-Team DVDs on all night. Much more fun than broadcast telly.

[hybridartifacts.livejournal.com]

Me neither, but then by the look of things it was about 50% effective with the studio audience and would probably be less so with viewers, so that's no big surprise.
What interested me was the amount of basic hypnotic techniques used before the film, all of which in the right circumstances with suggestible people could achieve the effect without use of the film at all (though I have no idea what the success rate via tv would be).
Mass hypnosis is not as easy as one to one, and doing it over the tv where you have no control over environmental distractions/factors in peoples living rooms is normally close to impossible.
I was amused by the Guardian blog where the blogger mentioned one of the friends called in to watch and report if it worked wouldn't be able to get up anyway as they had a cat on their lap, while another had fallen asleep...

[erastes.livejournal.com]

Yes, he was doing a "mass hypnosis" thing which I thought wasn't allowed after a hypnotist affected thousands in the sixties I think it was - he told people they would be glued to their seats and most people were - not all, live audience, and live tv, but it didn't work for me. will be interesting to see whether it was real or whether people were able to be unstuck

[erastes.livejournal.com]

Yes, it did seem to me to be more like mass hypnosis with the techniques rather than subliminal but what do i know? I remember my mother saying that a hypnotist had been on the tv in the sixties i think it was, and he'd affected people adversely - making them act like chickens etc in their homes, and the BBC had to spend a fortune getting people un chickened. Since then no live hypnotists have been allowed on tv - Paul McKenna for example was never allowed to show his pre-hypnosis suggestions to ensure that no viewers were watching.

Laughs! Yes, a cat on the lap would certainly do it!

[erastes.livejournal.com]

He's a Mentalist, he was doing a live experiment on subliminal messages to see if he could get the viewers glued to their chairs, some did some didn't.

Yes! I saw that, it's very flattering. Thank you!

[hybridartifacts.livejournal.com]

The thing with hypnosis is that the process of inducting trance states can happen in an awful lot of ways, and to some extent we spend an awful lot of time in them daily without realising (hence things like driving on 'auto pilot'. I think awp just exploits that. Because people tend to break things into neat, but often erroneous, categories they sometimes miss the connections - so he can do more under the banner of 'awp' than he can if he said he is was using hypnosis. Thats just like he pointed out that 'subliminal' is banned but awp is not.
Things like advertising jingles tap into this as well. You don't notice you are picking them up, but then you find yourself humming one without ever making a conscious decision either to listen in the first place or to hum it.

[kittymay.livejournal.com]

Mentalist, yeah, you could say that : )

[spindriftdancer.livejournal.com]

Weird.

Well, some are more suggestible than others, I guess(:

[lee-rowan.livejournal.com]

A lot of commercials and almost all pulpit-pounders use hypnotic techniques... probably why so many fundy churches are opposed to hypnosis. I trained in hypnotherapy years ago, to use as an adjunct with massage. Most 'stage' hypnosis wears off after 15-20 minutes, so nobody is likely to be stuck to a chair for very long. The difference between that and hypnosis used for breaking bad habits like smoking is that for a suggestion to really stick, it needs to be reality-based (as opposed to "you can't walk off the stage, there are alligators there), beneficial, and true for the person. (I found things usually don't work unless the person's ready--no point in getting hypnotized because a spouse wants you to quit smoking, for instance.)