Tricks of the Mind

                                         Tricks of the Mind

by Derren Brown

390pp, Channel 4 Books, £18.99

If you see anybody with this book, go the other way. Following in the footsteps of the renowned TV illusionist, they may impress you with their super-power memory by reciting the FA Cup winners for the last 20 years: though "for real impact, it is worth stretching this to 50 years". They may spring upon you time-worn puzzles in probability theory. They may hypnotise you, and suggest you forget your name. By the time they're through, you may forget your manners - but don't expect to land a punch. Expert readers of body language, they will know the blow is coming, just by the way you clench your fist.

Derren Brown gives us fair warning: "If the techniques and thoughts in this book are new to you, there will be a tendency to be excited about them and want to show off what you have learned." If they are new to you, you are either aged nine, or a Martian. Brown offers a good deal of dusty stuff from the self-development shelves: how to remember people's names, how to spot liars. But he is interesting, and convincing, when he writes about the psychology of delusion. His shows, he says, involve "deception and exaggeration ... I happily admit to cheating, it's all part of the game." He's not going to tell you how he cheats, but he will give you some pointers. "Magic ... isn't about fakes and switches and dropping coins on your lap. It's about entering into a relationship with a person whereby you can lead him, economically and deftly, to experience an event as magical." When a trick is performed, the harder you watch, the more you may miss. You become committed to its process; you are complicit, and your attention moves as directed. It is natural, when we are surprised, to exaggerate the oddity and wonder of our experience. The truth of what happened is soon replaced by a "lovely false memory".

Every trickster is a debunker of other people's tricks. Brown debunks himself, pre-emptively, and undercuts his cleverness with facetious asides. He wants to be seen as thoughtful, ethical, and self-deprecating, and is certainly the latter. The central problem with his book is that the phenomena he looks at become less, not more interesting as he describes them. His pages on irrationality feel like a boiled-down version of other texts, perhaps not read with much attention. If you write on luck and chance, should you not check the meaning of "fortuitous"? If you crusade against the exploitation of the credulous, should you know what "disinterested" means? And these days, even writers with no magic powers have a spell-check.

Are these points worth making? Yes, because this book of weak jokes is serious in aim; he wants to straighten out the way we think. Some aspects of English grammar are a dark mystery to him. These aside, he seems to have got life worked out to his satisfaction. An evangelical Christian as a teenager in Croydon, he has not understood that belief may take more subtle forms than those Croydon offered him. He thinks of God as a slot machine into which you insert prayers, and which you kick to bits when you don't get a result. He is a reductionist and a literalist, and in order to attack Christianity he reduces it to a literal belief in the Bible: "Once you realise that the Bible isn't history ... it all falls apart." He doesn't see the difference between explaining and explaining away, between clutching at a delusion and embracing a metaphor.

Brown is fascinated by how human beings work, but the flow of scepticism is all one way. He has faith in the objectivity of scientists and in the peer-review process, neglecting to say that in science you get what you pay for. He stomps brutally on alternative medicine; if a treatment can be shown to work, he says, it's not alternative, it's scientific - it's really one of ours. So heads I win and tails you lose. In his view the healing arts are simple and testable, like car mechanics; let's get that heart of yours on the bench, and see if it's still broken.

Though he makes a good living as an entertainer, is Brown really up for fun? The more the debunkers stamp and shout "These are the laws of nature", the more some of us hope they will be broken. The psychic trade (a stench in the nose of rationalist piety) is full of frauds, for sure, and lottery tickets are a government-sponsored racket. But the sentiment that "It Could Be You" is incontrovertible, and hope keeps people going. Psychics are soft targets and there seems no point in attacking them and their audiences, or any other group of believers, without noting the social context in which belief flourishes.

It is true that people are not good at assessing risk, and are usually alarmist rather than blasé; but caution preserves us. We are not good at thinking about coincidences - nowadays we tend to call them "ironies" - but we like them because they seem to subvert the good order of the world, and they make us laugh. Superstitions unite and demarcate communities. A group of people praying together, or telling each other ghost stories, are engaged in an emotional bonding exercise of considerable social utility. Brown does not see this, and thinks religion is just for poor saps who need comfort.

If you want to start an argument this Christmas, this is your book; and you could do worse than look at the "suggested reading", though the main suggestion is that you read Richard Dawkins, whose recent The God Delusion is to our Derren a holy book. He mentions the scientist many times, and I hope that no intellectual snobbery prevents the admiration from being reciprocated. It would be gratifying to think that Professor Dawkins will work through these pages keenly and add to his repertoire of card tricks, which will be the talk of north Oxford well into the new year.

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