Derren Brown Apocalypse, Fact or Fraud?

Perception is an equally interesting field of psychology. Having done my dissertation about subliminal messaging it may be reassuring to know that things aren€™t quite as simple as adding flash frames in movies to make people buy coke and popcorn. But there are definitely more subtle effects that you can make use of. Take a moment to think about what you are perceiving right now. This article for one. Can you smell anything? How about sound or vibrations? You€™ll notice that the more you think about what you perceive, the more you become aware of. Now, this isn€™t because your ears have only just picked the sound up, or that the Bonsai tree in the periphery of your vision has just appeared, it€™s because your brain had previously determined these to be irrelevant and so has not made your conscious mind aware of them. The information that doesn€™t make it to conscious process accounts for at least 60% of all environmental input and, despite you not being consciously aware of it, is all stored in unconscious memory (since the brain has already processed it to determine as unimportant). Another great example of how your perception is altered without realising too much is with writing. I can prvoe this by the fcat you hvae mgeanad to raed tihs eitnre senentce withuot too mcuh coilpmcation. Things that you expect to see are interpreted more intensely.Unexpected information (that poses no apparent threat) is then left out. In the sentence before, your expectation is guided by the first and last letters of each word as well as the context. When these crucial letters are scrambled as well (or even just by switching the first and last letters from an otherwise correctly spelt word) the tffece is completely lost as there are no guiding indicators. The idea behind perceptional manipulation takes this idea a step further to implant images in the subconscious that the brain doesn€™t consider important enough for you to know (or skims over). These images can then be used to affect behaviour later on.As you€™ll see in a bit, this technique is regularly used by Derren for his shows and can be found in many forms, from pictures to sounds. This is also the beginning of the technique used to make someone go to sleep suddenly without meeting them before (don€™t worry, although it seems this way from the show, this can€™t be done without per-preparation otherwise people would do it to each other all the time!). So, assuming they are not using actors, what does this mean for Apocalypse?

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Contributor

Former TV Exec now enjoying a calmer existence... Big lover of all things animated and sci-fi with a few guilty pleasures alongside