Zeke Newbold
Carbon based biped.
- Joined
- Apr 18, 2015
- Messages
- 1,249
This has bugged me for years.
You may recall that back in the early noughties - circa 2004 or thereabpouts - the illusionist and confidence trickster Derren Brown was a big name on television. This was on the back of a TV series in which he performed a series of fiendish stunts on members of the public, usually involving mind games of some sort.
A few came my way, as I'm sure they did yours (if you live or lived in the UK, that is). These stunts were usually entertaining and sometimes insightful - and I never doubted their essential truthfulness. Anyway, Mr Brown himself, in numerous interviews, has always insisted that he doesn't use actors or anything like stand-ins in these shows and that WYSIWYG.
But...but, there exists one episode that has always puzzled me - and made me doubt his claim. I'll try to recount the contents as best as I can remember them - some sixteen years later.
The unwitting victim this time was a computer games buff. He had been invited to try out a `new game` by a supposed computer game company (which was really a front for You Know Who). The location was a coffee bar and the game being `road tested` was installed into a arcade game like terminal in a corner of the bar. The game itself consisted of the standard shoot 'em up Zombie fayre.
Brown then explained - as an aside to the viewer - that he was going to put the player in to a trance using strobe lights built into the game - and then trick him into thinking that he was inside the game itself. So the player - a nondescript young man in his twenties - began the game and soon flashing synchronised lights appeared on the screen which - lo and behold! - did indeed put the man into a mild trance of some kind!
The man - who was kind of catatonic - was then lowered horizontally onto a stretcher and then wheeled to a building acoss the road where he was taken into a room mocked up to resemble the interior used in the game. Then, actors done up to look like zombies began to advance towards him and, in an excited state, he began to shoot at them with some sort of would-be ray gun that he had been given.
Then a klaxon or horn of some kind was sounded - a low single note - and this somehow had the effect of putting him back in the trance, whereupon he was whisked back to the coffee bar next door, raised upright and returned to the computer game. Then the same horn was sounded - and this time it released him from the trance.
He was then interviewed about what he thought of the game and he was very enthused, saying that it made you feel that you `were right in there` (he was of course unaware of what had been done to him).
That's the best memory of it I can offer - some minor details might be jumbled up (I'm a bit unclear about the exact role of the flashing lights and the klaxon/horn - but I'm sure that both featured in there somewhere).
This seems highly unlikely to be an event which happened as depicted for the following to reasons: (1) It seems to me that a random person would not be reliably susceptible to being put in an induced trance with flashing lights - and taken out of it with a horn. If it were that easy, I'm sure the medical establishment - and the military for that matter- would know all about it and be busy putting it to use. And (b) carrying out such a stunt on an unsuspecting memeber of the public would be illegal as well as in breach of various Health and Safety regulations - any such participant would have had to have signed various consent forms in advance and take medical tests and hence would have had to have been in on the proceedings from the get - go.
Thoughts?
You may recall that back in the early noughties - circa 2004 or thereabpouts - the illusionist and confidence trickster Derren Brown was a big name on television. This was on the back of a TV series in which he performed a series of fiendish stunts on members of the public, usually involving mind games of some sort.
A few came my way, as I'm sure they did yours (if you live or lived in the UK, that is). These stunts were usually entertaining and sometimes insightful - and I never doubted their essential truthfulness. Anyway, Mr Brown himself, in numerous interviews, has always insisted that he doesn't use actors or anything like stand-ins in these shows and that WYSIWYG.
But...but, there exists one episode that has always puzzled me - and made me doubt his claim. I'll try to recount the contents as best as I can remember them - some sixteen years later.
The unwitting victim this time was a computer games buff. He had been invited to try out a `new game` by a supposed computer game company (which was really a front for You Know Who). The location was a coffee bar and the game being `road tested` was installed into a arcade game like terminal in a corner of the bar. The game itself consisted of the standard shoot 'em up Zombie fayre.
Brown then explained - as an aside to the viewer - that he was going to put the player in to a trance using strobe lights built into the game - and then trick him into thinking that he was inside the game itself. So the player - a nondescript young man in his twenties - began the game and soon flashing synchronised lights appeared on the screen which - lo and behold! - did indeed put the man into a mild trance of some kind!
The man - who was kind of catatonic - was then lowered horizontally onto a stretcher and then wheeled to a building acoss the road where he was taken into a room mocked up to resemble the interior used in the game. Then, actors done up to look like zombies began to advance towards him and, in an excited state, he began to shoot at them with some sort of would-be ray gun that he had been given.
Then a klaxon or horn of some kind was sounded - a low single note - and this somehow had the effect of putting him back in the trance, whereupon he was whisked back to the coffee bar next door, raised upright and returned to the computer game. Then the same horn was sounded - and this time it released him from the trance.
He was then interviewed about what he thought of the game and he was very enthused, saying that it made you feel that you `were right in there` (he was of course unaware of what had been done to him).
That's the best memory of it I can offer - some minor details might be jumbled up (I'm a bit unclear about the exact role of the flashing lights and the klaxon/horn - but I'm sure that both featured in there somewhere).
This seems highly unlikely to be an event which happened as depicted for the following to reasons: (1) It seems to me that a random person would not be reliably susceptible to being put in an induced trance with flashing lights - and taken out of it with a horn. If it were that easy, I'm sure the medical establishment - and the military for that matter- would know all about it and be busy putting it to use. And (b) carrying out such a stunt on an unsuspecting memeber of the public would be illegal as well as in breach of various Health and Safety regulations - any such participant would have had to have signed various consent forms in advance and take medical tests and hence would have had to have been in on the proceedings from the get - go.
Thoughts?