CAN ORDINARY PEOPLE FEEL NORMAL AROUND DERREN BROWN?

The Telegraph has a lengthy interview with Derren Brown which you can read HERE. In it Brown is asked "Can ordinary people feel normal around Derren Brown? Do they think he’s reading their minds? ‘I don’t do it; I’m not controlling or menacing. But I’ve got a good friend, and I found out the first two times he met me, he was convinced I was playing funny little mind games. I thought, I wonder if that happens often.’ It does: a friend told me that, after having Brown work his magic on her at a party thrown by Ben Goldsmith, she and some chums took Brown for a drink. All went swimmingly until one tipsy girl kept asking him, ‘Well, can you? Can you tell what people are thinking when you have sex with them?’ Brown shimmied off, pronto. To me he says that, ‘When I want to be persuasive or help someone who’s down, I know how to use those techniques. But I groan a little inside if I have to move into that way of thinking. Because it is a shift.’ " He also talks about using his techniques in daily life. "Here’s a Brownian example of ‘confusion techniques’. Once, late at night, he was confronted by a very aggressive drunk. His response to the drunk’s ‘What’re you f---ing looking at?’ was the magnificently tangential, ‘The wall outside my house isn’t four feet high.’ Brown takes the story on: ‘And he was, “What?’’ And I repeated, “The wall outside my house isn’t four feet high”.’ The man was utterly confounded, and wound up weeping and pouring out his tale of woe."