Derren Brown Quotes

You have to realise that hypnosis doesn't exist: it just works on people's natural suggestibility, their expectations and capacity to unconsciously role play. You can't make someone do anything they don't want to do.

Psychologically, when you hear something a number of times, you start to believe it.

None of us is immune to suggestion. We are social beings and live in a social world.

Propaganda tries to surround man by all possible routes in the realm of feelings as well as ideas, by playing on his will or on his needs, through his conscious and his unconscious, assailing him in both his private and his public life. It furnishes him with a complete system for explaining the world, and provides immediate incentives to action.

Hypnosis is about shutting down the conscious mind and re-igniting the unconscious and the imagination, so while I give instructions to them under hypnosis, the contestants might interpret those instructions in all kinds of ways.

I am ultimately convinced that people must first be told that so and so is great, and then, after a period of given time, they come to believe it for themselves.

There are absolutely ways to manipulate behavior, because our behavior is endlessly being manipulated by the world around us.

It turns out we are all quite easily swayed if someone knows what they are doing - which is a great thing and a dangerous thing.

Hypnosis is just suggestibility; you see it in certain people.

We are all in a post-hypnotic trance induced in early infancy.

If the brain expects that a treatment will work, it sends healing chemicals into the bloodstream, which facilitates that. And the opposite is equally true and equally powerful: When the brain expects that a therapy will not work, it doesn't. It's called the 'nocebo' effect.

People, even independently minded people, do to an extent draw their impressions from what they are told, especially if they are told it incessantly by newspapers.

After people have repeated a phrase a great number of times, they begin to realize it has meaning and may even be true.

You know what it's like to persuade a pigheaded child to do something they don't want to. If they hear the same suggestion from someone else, they'll go right off and do it.

I found that if I stack the moments correctly, people will believe in the most outrageous things.

Any thought that is passed on to the subconscious often enough and convincingly enough is finally accepted.

Humans naturally think more highly of themselves and their communities than their evidence can justify, but deny that they are biased in this way. This sincere confidence helps people to convince others to think highly of them, and to convince their group of their strong attachment to it. If you force yourself to face facts squarely you may gain better insight into yourself and human nature, and perhaps even signal a certain rare ability to achieve this result. But you may less convince others of your other abilities, and to convince your group of your loyalty

If I get ‘em by the short and curlies, the hearts and minds will follow.

The question is the propriety of how we go about influencing and changing behavior.

All we can do is apply the physical stimuli which we have at our disposal to bring about a change of mind in these recalcitrant persons. Of this you may be sure: we shall continue to operate on the Italian donkey at both ends, with a carrot and a stick.

The secret to modern propaganda is to simplify and repeat.

The number one rule of today's marketing – the key secret of those who seek to control your beliefs and habits in order to take your money, your votes, your time or whatever else it is they desire from you – is to always keep in mind that nobody really believes they can be manipulated.

When the conduct of men is designed to be influenced, persuasion, kind, unassuming persuasion, should ever be adopted.

If you've got creativity, imagination, and intelligence, and you want to be hypnotised, then there's no reason you shouldn't be able to.

The most important thing when you study hypnosis is that you learn that humans are irrational. Until you understand that, hypnosis is hard to do... For me, it was this great awakening to understand that humans are deeply irrational, and it's probably the greatest influence on me in terms of my writing.