I just found this as a draft - I’m assuming Karen wanted to post it last Friday but had trouble figuring out how to post video. I guess I forgot to explain that - sorry Karen!
This is soooo freaky, that this is the Friday video on CatE today! I had never heard of Derren Brown until a few nights ago, when I ran across a mention of him on a skeptics website & stayed up way too late watching video clips of his shows online. (There was an hour-long show available, showed him doing multiple “tricks” of different types - I can look for that link if anyone here is interested.) His stuff is creepy, but his point seems to be that people can be “read” with pretty high accuracy.
Or, maybe it’s not so freaky that you’re showing this. More prosaically, it probably just goes to show that Karen & I are likely to come across similar information as we cruise the web!
From the Wikipedia page on him, Derren Brown is an “English psychological illusionist and skeptic of paranormal phenomena. …
Brown’s psychological illusions are skilfully performed and are enhanced by his personality and showman’s flair to influence and misdirect.”
This clip leaves it unclear exactly what message Derren Brown was trying to convey with this trick - from the shots we see, it’s pretty clear that the other guy (a normal to good-looking man) puts the happier-looking, more pleasant-looking, better-looking people in one pile, and the others (or those whose faces are obscured) in the other pile. Anyone could write one thing on the back of the pleasant-looking people’s photos and another thing on the back of the less-pleasant-looking people’s photos, & find that most people separate the photos into very similar piles as this guy.
I think Derren Brown is demonstrating here that we make similar judgments about people based on their faces (looks or expressions), not that the guy across the table from him is psychic….BICBW!
Thanks, Helen! Derren Brown is my favorite magician and I was planning to post that last week but had “technical difficulties.” ;-) (I should have asked you how to do it before you left.)
Yes, Eliza, there are myriad videos of his illusions on YouTube. They are all entertaining and amazing. He gets people to give him their keys and wallets on the street, pays shopkeepers with blank paper instead of money and cashes in losing tickets for money at the dog track.
The SciFi channel is running six episodes of his TV show, called “Mind Control,” this summer. They have an interview they did with him up on their website.
The trick he does on the guy in the above clip is a variation on an old card trick called “Out Of This World.” You can read about it at Wikipedia, where they give you the history and explain how it’s done. I honestly didn’t understand the explanation, but it’s known as the card trick that fooled Winston Churchill. What’s funny is if you listen very closely at the end of the clip, Brown says: “That’s out of this world,” giving away his secret. ;-)
On the TV show, he will sometimes deconstruct an illusion and show you how he does them. He plants verbal and visual cues into the subconscious mind a lot, which is really fascinating to see. We have no idea how much that reptilian part of our brain influences our perceptions and conclusions!
On the other hand, if he had like …. say 20 photos, and half of them are dead, and half alive, then some percentage of times the subject would sort them that way, just by chance, right?
Don’t ask me what percentage. I finished statistics spring quarter, and it gives me a brain ache to try to think about it.
Sorting them out accurately by chance is possible but would happen only rarely. Let’s see, there’s a 50% chance of putting each card in the correct pile, right? And there are 20 chances to get it right or wrong …
What does that mean? You’ve got a one in 10 chance of getting it right spontaneously? One in 20?
Eliza or one of the other numbers people could figure it out, I’m sure. ;-)
Apologies in advance for the “mathiness” of this post…
(0.5)^20 = 1/1,048,576 (or, roughly 1 in a million) = the chance of obtaining any one specific series of results from 20 independent coin-flips (all heads, or all tails, or one head followed by 19 tails, or 1 tail followed by 19 heads, or alternating heads & tails starting with heads, or alternating heads & tails starting with tails, etc etc). Overall, in many many tosses of an evenly weighted coin, 50% of the tosses will be heads & 50% tails, but in any one series of 20 tosses (or any finite number of tosses) that doesn’t have to be true.
With cards being dealt from a (standard) deck, it has to be a different calculation - there are 26 red cards and 26 black cards, not 52 red-or-black cards, so (for example) the chances of a card being red would depend on how many reds had already been dealt from the deck. If you are looking at the back of the cards (as in the “Out of this world” card trick - thanks for the lead, Karen!) & simply guessing, you have a 50-50 chance of being correct on each card. The “two states” there are not heads or tails, or red or black, but instead “correct guess: red guess + red card, or black guess + black card” and “incorrect guess: red guess + black card, or black guess + red card”. But you have to guess red a total of 26 times, and black a total of 26 times, to have any chance of calling the entire sequence of 52 cards correctly. (In that case, I’m not sure the chances of guessing the sequence of 52 is as good as 1-in-a-million, because of this: if you guess wrong, for example if you say “red” for a card but, unknown to you, it’s actually a black card, then you have “used up” one of the 26 “red” guesses that you are allowing yourself, but haven’t “used up” a red card from those remaining to be dealt. So, an incorrect guess actually decreases your chances of being correct on each of the subsequent guesses, until or unless it’s balanced out by an incorrect guess the other way (guessing black when the card is actually red). That’s different from coin tosses, where the toss results don’t have to add up to 1/2 heads & 1/2 tails (though on average they do add up). But I forget what calculation to use to figure this out. (It’s not 52 factorial ["52!"] because that would be the number of possible sequences of 52 unique items sorted independently, eg the order of a deck of cards if you are including information about the number/face value and suit, not just the color. Then the chance of the sequence coming up in the same exact order as the sequence you guessed, whether or not the guess is made ahead of time or while the cards are being dealt, unseen by you, would be 1/52!, which is 1/8×10^67, a much much less probable occurrence than the one we’re talking about.)
Another difference from the coin toss, because # of red + # of black has to equal 52, which isn’t true for the coin toss, is that you can follow a strategy to always have a 50%-of-guesses-correct. If you guess red every time, or black every time, you are guaranteed to have “called” 50% of the cards correctly. On the other hand, you will never “call” all of the cards correctly. (I think this strategy would make the “Out of this world” trick ineffective, because you would have put all the cards in one stack, & the illusionist wouldn’t be able to show you your “other” stack!)
OK, now, back to this video. With the alive/dead photo cards, the information on the front of the card - the photo - may not be independent from the information on the back (the word “alive” or “dead”). We, and the guy who sorted the cards, aren’t given the opportunity to look through the stack at the end to determine this. I haven’t watched the video specifically watching for DB to switch the stacks, but it does look like the faces the guy chose as “not appealing” are the ones that all say “dead” on the back, & the “appealing” faces are all those that say “alive” on the back. That’s why I said, in an earlier post, that I thought DB was using our fairly uniform agreement on what’s attractive in people’s looks or expressions to predict how the person will sort the cards, & that’s why the guy did it so accurately. (Remember, he asked the guy to sort them by whether or not he found them appealing = attractive, not whether or not he “sensed” they were dead, and he did not give instructions suggesting that roughly half would have been in one pile and half in the other, which would be understood in a game with a deck of cards. If he had given those instructions, not the ones he gave, then it would have been the “Out of this world” card trick, just with a stack of labeled photos, not regular cards.) I think!! BICDBW! (But I could definitely be wrong!)
OK, now to see if I cross-posted with anyone while creating this monstrous entry ;-)
OK, watched the video again more carefully; DB is (probably) doing the “Out of this world” card trick.
The “victim” deals the cards himself - that’s a difference from the way the trick is described on the Wikipedia page. The “marker” card or cards occur just over a minute into the sorting (the dour older man or the smiling young man, whose card comes right after an unpleasant looking woman). At the end of the sorting, there are 2 piles on the table. At the 1:44 mark, DB picks out one of the “marker” cards to ask about; immediately after that, you can see that he has separated that pile into 2 piles (probably those dealt before, & those dealt after, the marker card). At the 1:22 mark, he picks out the other “marker” card, from the other pile, to ask about. After that, from 1:15 to 1:10, you can see that there are now 4 piles of cards on the table!
From 1:04 to 0:58, you can see that there are no longer 4 piles, but once again 2 piles; he must have switched a pair of stacked photos then combined each with its new, unswitched, partner pile while talking to the guy. DB starts turning over the photo piles from the top, starting with one pile, then moving to the other pile, speeding up the pace as he goes. (DB would have to have put the card piles he moved underneath the card piles he didn’t move, since the other guy doesn’t seem to notice any change in the photos he can see.)
At the 0:47 mark, you can see that DB grabs the whole remainder of one pile & turns it over all at once, now not showing the photos on the front, then repeats this grouped turn-over at 0:44 with the other pile, again not allowing the individual photos to show.
The other guy expresses astonishment, but doesn’t pick up the piles & say “Let me see those again!” If he had done so, no doubt he would have found the photos/cards were no longer in the piles he’d put them in, but all of the cards early in the sorting were now in 1 pile, and all of the cards late in sorting were now in the other pile. (For each pile, the ones he’d intended to be in that pile would be in the top section, and the ones he’d put in the opposite pile would be on the bottom. “Top” meaning, as the photos are stacked so the picture side shows.)
Ha!
(I like to think that I would have reached over, picked up the photos, & said “let me see those again” - but who knows if I really would have had the presence of mind to do so, after such a weird encounter!)
Anyone wondering how we can be fooled so easily might want to check out The Color Changing Card trick, which Helen posted here about 3 months ago. (Helen, in a bit of sleight-of-hand, I dropped the “u”…) ;-)
Eliza, how did I know you’d be all over this one!?! :-)
You lost me right at “mathiness” up there (I have no - and I mean NO - head for numbers) but I can say that I’m persuaded you’ve got a firm handle on the situation.
In terms of probability of someone spontaneously separating the cards out correctly, are you saying it’s one in a million? wow.
As for how you’d react, I’m also positive that you’d look at the cards again and try to figure out what was really going on. But I think that’s you: A trained scientist with a very keen eye for things like probability and clever tricks.
It’s perfectly understandable, to me, that the guy in the video, put into an uncomfortable situation, with weird lighting and then confronted by a very smooth operator with the spooky news that he “sees dead people” is immediately willing to consider that something paranormal is going on. That kind of reaction seems to be almost standard with DB, although he is very upfront that he’s doing tricks and he’s a skeptic himself.
Karen, I’m sorry I didn’t think to explain how to post videos (it’s actually very easy - there’s a box called ‘embed’ on the youtube page and all you do is copy and paste the code in it right into wordpress) but I guess it doesn’t matter - the video is up now.
At first I thought it was done by choosing appealing and non-appealing looking faces of dead and alive people; but that would be a bit risky - what if the person didn’t choose as you planned? And given that Derren is a magician it seems likely he did switch the cards at some point.
Eliza, smooth sleight of hand on the ‘u’ in colour! ;-) Thanks for posting the link to that other video.
I think some people would be more freaked out by this than others; some would just assume it’s a trick or using some psychological facts about people. But others might assume, whoa, something spooky happened here! BICBW :)
No prob, Helen. I’ll keep that explanation for future reference, though. thanks!
I think some people would be more freaked out by this than others; some would just assume it’s a trick or using some psychological facts about people. But others might assume, whoa, something spooky happened here! BICBW :)
Yeah, I’m sure the reactions vary depending on how skeptical someone is, how willing they are to suspend disbelief and maybe even how susceptible they are to thinks like suggestion and hypnosis.
He has one video where he gets a room full of people who say they don’t believe in god to all say they do believe in god after about an hour. That one is really weird!
He has one video where he gets a room full of people who say they don’t believe in god to all say they do believe in god after about an hour. That one is really weird!
Wow! I don’t think that would work on the atheists who post on Off The Map’s blogs.
Comment by: Eliza
1 08/10/07 11:54 AM | Comment Link |This is soooo freaky, that this is the Friday video on CatE today! I had never heard of Derren Brown until a few nights ago, when I ran across a mention of him on a skeptics website & stayed up way too late watching video clips of his shows online. (There was an hour-long show available, showed him doing multiple “tricks” of different types - I can look for that link if anyone here is interested.) His stuff is creepy, but his point seems to be that people can be “read” with pretty high accuracy.
Or, maybe it’s not so freaky that you’re showing this. More prosaically, it probably just goes to show that Karen & I are likely to come across similar information as we cruise the web!
From the Wikipedia page on him, Derren Brown is an “English psychological illusionist and skeptic of paranormal phenomena. …
Brown’s psychological illusions are skilfully performed and are enhanced by his personality and showman’s flair to influence and misdirect.”
This clip leaves it unclear exactly what message Derren Brown was trying to convey with this trick - from the shots we see, it’s pretty clear that the other guy (a normal to good-looking man) puts the happier-looking, more pleasant-looking, better-looking people in one pile, and the others (or those whose faces are obscured) in the other pile. Anyone could write one thing on the back of the pleasant-looking people’s photos and another thing on the back of the less-pleasant-looking people’s photos, & find that most people separate the photos into very similar piles as this guy.
I think Derren Brown is demonstrating here that we make similar judgments about people based on their faces (looks or expressions), not that the guy across the table from him is psychic….BICBW!
Comment by: Karen
2 08/10/07 1:05 PM | Comment Link |Thanks, Helen! Derren Brown is my favorite magician and I was planning to post that last week but had “technical difficulties.” ;-) (I should have asked you how to do it before you left.)
Yes, Eliza, there are myriad videos of his illusions on YouTube. They are all entertaining and amazing. He gets people to give him their keys and wallets on the street, pays shopkeepers with blank paper instead of money and cashes in losing tickets for money at the dog track.
The SciFi channel is running six episodes of his TV show, called “Mind Control,” this summer. They have an interview they did with him up on their website.
The trick he does on the guy in the above clip is a variation on an old card trick called “Out Of This World.” You can read about it at Wikipedia, where they give you the history and explain how it’s done. I honestly didn’t understand the explanation, but it’s known as the card trick that fooled Winston Churchill. What’s funny is if you listen very closely at the end of the clip, Brown says: “That’s out of this world,” giving away his secret. ;-)
On the TV show, he will sometimes deconstruct an illusion and show you how he does them. He plants verbal and visual cues into the subconscious mind a lot, which is really fascinating to see. We have no idea how much that reptilian part of our brain influences our perceptions and conclusions!
Comment by: Benjamin ady
3 08/10/07 7:27 PM | Comment Link |On the other hand, if he had like …. say 20 photos, and half of them are dead, and half alive, then some percentage of times the subject would sort them that way, just by chance, right?
Don’t ask me what percentage. I finished statistics spring quarter, and it gives me a brain ache to try to think about it.
Comment by: Karen
4 08/10/07 8:47 PM | Comment Link |Sorting them out accurately by chance is possible but would happen only rarely. Let’s see, there’s a 50% chance of putting each card in the correct pile, right? And there are 20 chances to get it right or wrong …
What does that mean? You’ve got a one in 10 chance of getting it right spontaneously? One in 20?
Eliza or one of the other numbers people could figure it out, I’m sure. ;-)
Comment by: Benjamin ady
5 08/10/07 10:41 PM | Comment Link |No–I think you have to multiply.
as in .5 to the 20
no that doesn’t sound right either. Now I’m gonna have to get the stats book back out
Comment by: Eliza
6 08/11/07 2:24 PM | Comment Link |Apologies in advance for the “mathiness” of this post…
(0.5)^20 = 1/1,048,576 (or, roughly 1 in a million) = the chance of obtaining any one specific series of results from 20 independent coin-flips (all heads, or all tails, or one head followed by 19 tails, or 1 tail followed by 19 heads, or alternating heads & tails starting with heads, or alternating heads & tails starting with tails, etc etc). Overall, in many many tosses of an evenly weighted coin, 50% of the tosses will be heads & 50% tails, but in any one series of 20 tosses (or any finite number of tosses) that doesn’t have to be true.
With cards being dealt from a (standard) deck, it has to be a different calculation - there are 26 red cards and 26 black cards, not 52 red-or-black cards, so (for example) the chances of a card being red would depend on how many reds had already been dealt from the deck. If you are looking at the back of the cards (as in the “Out of this world” card trick - thanks for the lead, Karen!) & simply guessing, you have a 50-50 chance of being correct on each card. The “two states” there are not heads or tails, or red or black, but instead “correct guess: red guess + red card, or black guess + black card” and “incorrect guess: red guess + black card, or black guess + red card”. But you have to guess red a total of 26 times, and black a total of 26 times, to have any chance of calling the entire sequence of 52 cards correctly. (In that case, I’m not sure the chances of guessing the sequence of 52 is as good as 1-in-a-million, because of this: if you guess wrong, for example if you say “red” for a card but, unknown to you, it’s actually a black card, then you have “used up” one of the 26 “red” guesses that you are allowing yourself, but haven’t “used up” a red card from those remaining to be dealt. So, an incorrect guess actually decreases your chances of being correct on each of the subsequent guesses, until or unless it’s balanced out by an incorrect guess the other way (guessing black when the card is actually red). That’s different from coin tosses, where the toss results don’t have to add up to 1/2 heads & 1/2 tails (though on average they do add up). But I forget what calculation to use to figure this out. (It’s not 52 factorial ["52!"] because that would be the number of possible sequences of 52 unique items sorted independently, eg the order of a deck of cards if you are including information about the number/face value and suit, not just the color. Then the chance of the sequence coming up in the same exact order as the sequence you guessed, whether or not the guess is made ahead of time or while the cards are being dealt, unseen by you, would be 1/52!, which is 1/8×10^67, a much much less probable occurrence than the one we’re talking about.)
Another difference from the coin toss, because # of red + # of black has to equal 52, which isn’t true for the coin toss, is that you can follow a strategy to always have a 50%-of-guesses-correct. If you guess red every time, or black every time, you are guaranteed to have “called” 50% of the cards correctly. On the other hand, you will never “call” all of the cards correctly. (I think this strategy would make the “Out of this world” trick ineffective, because you would have put all the cards in one stack, & the illusionist wouldn’t be able to show you your “other” stack!)
OK, now, back to this video. With the alive/dead photo cards, the information on the front of the card - the photo - may not be independent from the information on the back (the word “alive” or “dead”). We, and the guy who sorted the cards, aren’t given the opportunity to look through the stack at the end to determine this. I haven’t watched the video specifically watching for DB to switch the stacks, but it does look like the faces the guy chose as “not appealing” are the ones that all say “dead” on the back, & the “appealing” faces are all those that say “alive” on the back. That’s why I said, in an earlier post, that I thought DB was using our fairly uniform agreement on what’s attractive in people’s looks or expressions to predict how the person will sort the cards, & that’s why the guy did it so accurately. (Remember, he asked the guy to sort them by whether or not he found them appealing = attractive, not whether or not he “sensed” they were dead, and he did not give instructions suggesting that roughly half would have been in one pile and half in the other, which would be understood in a game with a deck of cards. If he had given those instructions, not the ones he gave, then it would have been the “Out of this world” card trick, just with a stack of labeled photos, not regular cards.) I think!! BICDBW! (But I could definitely be wrong!)
OK, now to see if I cross-posted with anyone while creating this monstrous entry ;-)
Comment by: Eliza
7 08/11/07 3:15 PM | Comment Link |OK, watched the video again more carefully; DB is (probably) doing the “Out of this world” card trick.
The “victim” deals the cards himself - that’s a difference from the way the trick is described on the Wikipedia page. The “marker” card or cards occur just over a minute into the sorting (the dour older man or the smiling young man, whose card comes right after an unpleasant looking woman). At the end of the sorting, there are 2 piles on the table. At the 1:44 mark, DB picks out one of the “marker” cards to ask about; immediately after that, you can see that he has separated that pile into 2 piles (probably those dealt before, & those dealt after, the marker card). At the 1:22 mark, he picks out the other “marker” card, from the other pile, to ask about. After that, from 1:15 to 1:10, you can see that there are now 4 piles of cards on the table!
From 1:04 to 0:58, you can see that there are no longer 4 piles, but once again 2 piles; he must have switched a pair of stacked photos then combined each with its new, unswitched, partner pile while talking to the guy. DB starts turning over the photo piles from the top, starting with one pile, then moving to the other pile, speeding up the pace as he goes. (DB would have to have put the card piles he moved underneath the card piles he didn’t move, since the other guy doesn’t seem to notice any change in the photos he can see.)
At the 0:47 mark, you can see that DB grabs the whole remainder of one pile & turns it over all at once, now not showing the photos on the front, then repeats this grouped turn-over at 0:44 with the other pile, again not allowing the individual photos to show.
The other guy expresses astonishment, but doesn’t pick up the piles & say “Let me see those again!” If he had done so, no doubt he would have found the photos/cards were no longer in the piles he’d put them in, but all of the cards early in the sorting were now in 1 pile, and all of the cards late in sorting were now in the other pile. (For each pile, the ones he’d intended to be in that pile would be in the top section, and the ones he’d put in the opposite pile would be on the bottom. “Top” meaning, as the photos are stacked so the picture side shows.)
Ha!
(I like to think that I would have reached over, picked up the photos, & said “let me see those again” - but who knows if I really would have had the presence of mind to do so, after such a weird encounter!)
Comment by: Eliza
8 08/11/07 3:45 PM | Comment Link |At the risk of hijacking this thread…
Anyone wondering how we can be fooled so easily might want to check out The Color Changing Card trick, which Helen posted here about 3 months ago. (Helen, in a bit of sleight-of-hand, I dropped the “u”…) ;-)
Comment by: Karen
9 08/11/07 7:15 PM | Comment Link |Eliza, how did I know you’d be all over this one!?! :-)
You lost me right at “mathiness” up there (I have no - and I mean NO - head for numbers) but I can say that I’m persuaded you’ve got a firm handle on the situation.
In terms of probability of someone spontaneously separating the cards out correctly, are you saying it’s one in a million? wow.
As for how you’d react, I’m also positive that you’d look at the cards again and try to figure out what was really going on. But I think that’s you: A trained scientist with a very keen eye for things like probability and clever tricks.
It’s perfectly understandable, to me, that the guy in the video, put into an uncomfortable situation, with weird lighting and then confronted by a very smooth operator with the spooky news that he “sees dead people” is immediately willing to consider that something paranormal is going on. That kind of reaction seems to be almost standard with DB, although he is very upfront that he’s doing tricks and he’s a skeptic himself.
Comment by: Helen
10 08/12/07 12:40 PM | Comment Link |Karen, I’m sorry I didn’t think to explain how to post videos (it’s actually very easy - there’s a box called ‘embed’ on the youtube page and all you do is copy and paste the code in it right into wordpress) but I guess it doesn’t matter - the video is up now.
At first I thought it was done by choosing appealing and non-appealing looking faces of dead and alive people; but that would be a bit risky - what if the person didn’t choose as you planned? And given that Derren is a magician it seems likely he did switch the cards at some point.
Eliza, smooth sleight of hand on the ‘u’ in colour! ;-) Thanks for posting the link to that other video.
I think some people would be more freaked out by this than others; some would just assume it’s a trick or using some psychological facts about people. But others might assume, whoa, something spooky happened here! BICBW :)
Comment by: Karen
11 08/12/07 12:52 PM | Comment Link |No prob, Helen. I’ll keep that explanation for future reference, though. thanks!
Yeah, I’m sure the reactions vary depending on how skeptical someone is, how willing they are to suspend disbelief and maybe even how susceptible they are to thinks like suggestion and hypnosis.
He has one video where he gets a room full of people who say they don’t believe in god to all say they do believe in god after about an hour. That one is really weird!
Comment by: Helen
12 08/12/07 2:56 PM | Comment Link |Karen wrote:
Wow! I don’t think that would work on the atheists who post on Off The Map’s blogs.