How I Mastered Derren Brown's Subliminal Suggestion Technique

The most popular Derren Brown techniques include achieving "mind-reading" effects by subliminally suggesting an idea to a subject, and then getting the subject to regurgitate the idea back.

For example, DB might suggest to someone the shape "circle." Then he asks the person to choose a shape. The person chooses a circle, just as DB expected. DB produces the paper on which he wrote his prediction - circle - and looks as if he has read the subject's mind.

DB uses a variety of techniques to subliminally suggest ideas. Sometimes he's very obvious, stating his instructions in plain English, but buried inside of a distracting monologue.

I decided to try this type of obvious technique for myself. Last night, I asked a friend to choose one of four shapes I had drawn on a piece of paper. Before he looked at the paper, I explained a little bit about Derren Brown, something like this:

"...and he does lots of tricks with people. For example, he guesses the cards people pick out of a deck of cards, he hypnotizes people, choose square, he makes people forget their names, and so forth..."

My instruction to "choose square" was embedded in my monologue. I thought it was obvious, but my friend did not consciously notice it. And when I asked him to pick a shape, he chose the square.

I repeated this experiment three more times, with different shapes and similarly obvious subliminal suggestions. It worked each time. The odds of this result happening by chance are 1 in 256 (i.e., 4 x 4 x 4 x 4), so I am quite confident that the technique worked for me.

O.K., I probably haven't mastered the technique yet, but I am thrilled that it has worked. And obviously I will experiment with it more.