Derren Brown: Seance Yesterday

[G4Z]

he is a very clever guy, i would like to see if he could trick me.

[funnelhead]

he would . In my opinion i owe Derren i big debt - like most people i dismiss the power of sublininal suggestion with ' i'm too clever for it, won't work on me....' but seeing the things derren pulls off, it makes you realise how wide open we are. It has the most horrible implications ....

* shoves cd of Zonealarm into earhole*

And please don't hijak this thread with religous insults that won't lead anywhere. Any scientist knows you can never prove something will *never* happen as you would have to test for all time. What Derren did was show the weakness of the Human mind and how someone wanting to fake a seance, could... Does not prove all seances are fake, and certainly does not prove the absence of 'god' in any fashion. ..

and no i don't believe in either of those things. But that's what they are: beliefs. i.e. not necesserily true. i.e. i might be wrong. i.e. guess i'll find out when i die during sex with too many women ( or one really big woman )

i just hope i never meet Derren.... I mean, if i said something ....wrong......well i dont want to end up like that woman in the woods..... or the man he convinced he punched....he's a jedi!..

[Elmo]

not meaning to call you a liar but tbh... you are ignoring the basic rules of physics, objects cannot move without a force acting upon it, and seeing as you werent holding it and I presume you werent in an earthquake it didnt move.
tbh anybody who belives in "spirits" and "ghosts" wants their heads examined, no sane and logical person could come to the conculsion that these things exist.
when you die, you brain stops working and all the little neurons and synapses stop working and break down you are dead. We all know the brain is the source of personality and higher reasoning not some invisible "soul", its been proved by biologists for fecking ages. Get over it and use your head ffs, because one day your gonna die and it wont work anymore.

/end rant....

I take it u've never been to see a practicing spiritualist? They are fascinating people. I met one once and he actually scared me. I'd never met this guy before and he told me my late grandfather's name, where he was born, and a message he wanted to give me - which did actually relate to my situation at the time. As i said, i had never in my life met this guy before and he didnt know anyone i knew, i just went to a spiritualists church i'd heard about on a video we got in RE.

I've not been back since, but i'm tempted...

[Ravens Nest]

I've seen a ghost as i have posted on here a couple of times before, it moved up the stairs got to the top of my landing and disappeared then when i went to bed i heard it walking on the carpet in my bedroom and stopped in the middle of the room and then it proceeded to sit on my legs, i freaked out ran out of the room and slept in my mothers room on the floor the rest of the night.

The back bedroom where i used to sleep was always cold, i used to get the feeling someone was in there with me on a regular basis, this all happened to me from age 11 to 21 and it happened to other people in the house too.

My mother told me last week that my sister keeps hearing footsteps coming into her room (my old room, the back bedroom), and my mum has been alone in the house sitting in the living room and would hear footsteps walking upstairs from the landing into the back bedroom to the middle of the room and then suddenly falling silent.

Other occurence's were my brothers guitar be unzipped from it's protective cover and a few notes played in the middle of the night 3 a.m., 3 time he was on his own in the house and was playing his electric guitar and everytime he went down stairs for five minutes when he came back upstairs someone had altered all the settings on his pedal!

Strange thing's do happen and just because someone can fake it quite convincingly do's not mean that everything to do with the paranormal must be fake then, the world is full of lie's and half truths but there is still some truth there and if i am weak for believing in the afterlife then so be it. im glad to be, i saw on that day when i was 17 something that made me realise that each of our lifes still go on even if it is only a small part of what we were when we were alive.

[Knoxville]

It must be sad to live life with the view that nothing happens after we die, that life is infact pointless and there's no reason for us being here.

If there is a point to us being here what is it? I'm sorry for dragging us off topic but I am of the view that my generation at least is born with nothing to live for, we have no great war to fight, no oppression to overcome and no great or divine purpose, we're a generation of people born to work dead end jobs, have kids and a mortage we can't repay. The only point i can see to human existence at the moment is to continue the species.

[G4Z]

I take it u've never been to see a practicing spiritualist? They are fascinating people. I met one once and he actually scared me. I'd never met this guy before and he told me my late grandfather's name, where he was born, and a message he wanted to give me - which did actually relate to my situation at the time. As i said, i had never in my life met this guy before and he didnt know anyone i knew, i just went to a spiritualists church i'd heard about on a video we got in RE.

I've not been back since, but i'm tempted...

well, Elmo I hate to point this out but derren brown does this every week and he doesnt claim to be speaking to ghosts. IMHO these people are just conmen/women and they are just playing on peoples vunerabillities to earn a living.

[headbrace]

Indeed sir, you are entitled to your opinion, but please do not make out that other people are stupid for not believing the same as you.
/puts thread back on track

[fondie]

Some of it was impressive, as ever, the spirit box thing and the actual seance itself, but choosing the right picture and the weegee board were weak though. As soon as he started talking about a suicide pact i had a feeling that they were still alive, fairly obvious for the experiment i guess. I'd say a very worthwhile experiment but not his best work.

I think he was a complete w*nker for doing it, just because that one was fake does not prove all are fake. After the show as we had all the equipment set up we tried to do a proper one. I'm not going to go into details but it was real. It took us a while for it to work but once it did we got scarily accurate results, at one point we all got so scared we let go of the glass and it kept moving by itself.

Brings back memories of the Roman Inquisition's persecution of Galileo, what is it that Derren has done to offend yourself enough so that you have to resort to name calling? You have different views to me about God, aliens, spiritualism, that's fine, but you've just insulted a man for doing a legitimate scientific experiment?

He never claimed all seances are fake, he demonstrated, very well i may add, and has done on many other occasions as well that the human brain can be manipulated to a suprising extent. The seance he conducted was a fake, why is it you can't hack that? I'd love the details as to your 'real' seance, what makes you sure that yours was real? The students in his experiements were very much into it, is your mind immune? I'd claim fairly obviously not seeing as how you've recently seen a glass move by itself.

[Elmo]

well, Elmo I hate to point this out but derren brown does this every week and he doesnt claim to be speaking to ghosts. IMHO these people are just conmen/women and they are just playing on peoples vunerabillities to earn a living.

I hate to point this out gaz, but i wasnt actually referring to darren brown, in fact i was indeed referring to your comment about the afterlife, whatever it may be, and trying to show that there is some truth in it, just because some people chose to make a mockery of it, doesnt mean it isnt true.

As for earning a living by conning people, this man i went to see runs a church, you dont pay to get in you just go along and sit in the audience and see if anything is said to you. If he was conning me, please explain to me how he knew so much about me and my family.

[Kezzer]

ouija boards a dangerous. My mums friends sister (hah!) did a ouija board and she either did get possessed or just went crazy and decided to big leg it off a 10 story building.

true story too.

[fondie]

I hate to point this out gaz, but i wasnt actually referring to darren brown, in fact i was indeed referring to your comment about the afterlife, whatever it may be, and trying to show that there is some truth in it, just because some people chose to make a mockery of it, doesnt mean it isnt true.

Not wanting to speak for him but surely G4z was just commenting on the fact that Derren has created experiences similar to yours for numerous people on numerous occasions claiming to only use psychological techniques, I don't see what you were referring to is relevant, you put forward you experiences and they were commented upon. It seems as though you are trying to deny us the possibility that spirits don't exist while you will not open your mind to the possibility that your experiences could have been created by similar techniques to that that Derren uses.

[funnelhead]

What Derren did was show the weakness of the Human mind and how someone wanting to fake a seance, could... Does not prove all seances are fake, and certainly does not prove the absence of 'god' in any fashion. ..

excuse the vanity.

[Slick]

If there is a point to us being here what is it?

So we can be judged, to see if we live a good life, how we treat people etc.

Brings back memories of the Roman Inquisition's persecution of Galileo, what is it that Derren has done to offend yourself enough so that you have to resort to name calling? You have different views to me about God, aliens, spiritualism, that's fine, but you've just insulted a man for doing a legitimate scientific experiment?

He didn't explicitly say that all seinces are fake but that was definitly the impression he was giving and I think that's the impression most people would leave the show with. I believe this is very unfair, many people have contacted dead loved ones through this which had left them with a feeling of happiness. If you were one of those people and you watched this you're being told that you were just hearing/seeing what you wanted to and infact there was nothing there. I find that cruel, it wasn't a legitimate scientific experiment, it was a TV show to make money.

[Slick]

Not wanting to speak for him but surely G4z was just commenting on the fact that Derren has created experiences similar to yours for numerous people on numerous occasions claiming to only use psychological techniques, I don't see what you were referring to is relevant, you put forward you experiences and they were commented upon. It seems as though you are trying to deny us the possibility that spirits don't exist while you will not open your mind to the possibility that your experiences could have been created by similar techniques to that that Derren uses.

I made a post in the other seance thread which I'll paste:

My mum's done it and talked to her dead mother. This was done in Durham and my Grandmother lived and died in Scarborough. The things her mother was saying through this other person was scary and things no one could have known.

An example of one of the things she was told is that the guy from the japanese war camp had died. My mum had no idea what this meant or who it was. She later phoned up her brother and he got the shock of his life. He told my mum that there was a bloke in Scarborough who had been in a japanese prisoner of war camp who use to talk to my Grandma before she died and that bloke had died this week.

To me that isn't psychological trickery as it was something my mum didn't know. You shouldn't judge these things till you try them yourself.

[kemosabe]

It should be said that Derron Brown himself stated before recording the show that he doesnt believe in the supernatural, ie spirits, and that what he was trying to achieve would be fake. He said he doesnt think of himself as a true magician or spiritualist, he's just an entertainer who messes with people psychologically, a "psychological illusionist"

[fondie]

He didn't explicitly say that all seinces are fake but that was definitly the impression he was giving and I think that's the impression most people would leave the show with. I believe this is very unfair, many people have contacted dead loved ones through this which had left them with a feeling of happiness. If you were one of those people and you watched this you're being told that you were just hearing/seeing what you wanted to and infact there was nothing there. I find that cruel, it wasn't a legitimate scientific experiment, it was a TV show to make money.

I agree his aims were probably not guided wholly and probably not even the majority by science, though he is clearly interested in the subject matter.

There are plenty of TV shows which give the opposite side of the story though, numerous ones where some guy stands up and claims to talk to the dead relatives of members of the audience.

That you or other people are incapable of seeing that Derren and his program have their own beliefs and agendas and take it as part of a big picture isn't his problem. I don't think he should have to put a disclaimer on his program to cater for others ignorance. In no way do I think he has attempted to broadcast false information, frankly I find your discomfort at him standing up and putting forward fact and (very little of) his own beliefs disturbing.

I'm sorry that you find the truth difficult to deal with, even if you do believe in spirits etc, the possibility that the same effect can be achieved through psychological techniques surely highlights the fact that there most probably are con artists out there. That you believe there are legitimate spiritualists out there or not, surely you are not that far removed from the world to see that where exploits do exist, people will exploit them. If people are so happy in their ignorance that they don't wish to be educated as to other possibilites, they probably shouldn't watch television.