Last night I finally got to sit down and watch Derren Brown’s “Something Wicked This Way Comes”, a live performance from the Old Vic shown on Channel 4 over Christmas. If you missed it, you can download it from www.channel4.com/4od, money will exchange hands I believe, however it is well worth the cash as it is great to see him performing live.
There is a trick that runs throughout the show, as the audience randomly picks a person from the audience who is given a briefcase to hold on to. The person is then given a small piece of a newspaper torn from 1 of 10 randomly selected newspapers, and then torn randomly by another person. Lots of random as you can guess. From the small piece of paper she picks one word, and Derren stuns the audience by taking from the locked briefcase the exact page from the very same newspaper with that particular word circled on the page from which it was torn. Wow. Except then he goes on to reveal that the trick was pulled off by delivering a series of fairly overt embedded messages through the performance. At various points he directly instructed the audience which paper to pick, which page to select and which word to tear around and keep track of. Of course there are a few bits at the end that he doesn’t reveal, however it is the overtness of the embedded commands that made me smile, in recent times I have been using embedded commands a lot and I can only recall a couple of times where anyone has even said “pardon?”, let alone actually register what I was doing.
And the fact that I am consciously aware of embedded commands and still didn’t pick them up until they were pointed out to me at the end of the show, shows how easy it is to use them and get away with it.
So firstly I thought it would be useful to explain how and why embedded commands work.
For the purposes of simplicity let’s assume that there are two discrete parts to the mind - the conscious and unconscious. Of course this isn’t true but it’s a reasonable model. The conscious is what is reading this now, and is very focused, through necessity, as it can only keep track of 5-9 things at a time. It is easily directed, if I mention your big toes, parts of you that you weren’t consciously aware of a moment ago, you will suddenly become aware of your big toes and their sensations, even though they were there all of the time.
And this is where your unconscious comes in. Your unconscious can track thousands of things - it’s been around a lot longer than the conscious mind and is the reason that our species is still around. Whilst you are drinking a cup of coffee and reading this, your unconscious is monitoring the room temperature, scanning for interesting smells, processing everything you hear and checking your peripheral vision for tigers or anything else that may physically threaten you. When I bring your attention to your big toes, it is your unconscious, who has been looking after them all along, that passes you that information.
The unconscious is not only a really good juggler, but it has an excellent memory. Have you ever had those moments where you are trying to remember a name or a song title or something, and you know that you know it but you just can’t seem to find it in your head? Then hours or days later it suddenly pops in there? Well that’s your unconscious mind rooting around in filing cabinets for the information. You knew you knew it because your unconscious knew it was stored somewhere, because it stores everything you see, hear, feel, touch, taste and smell, and more besides. And what’s more all of this stuff that your unconscious is recording? It’s changing your programming every second of the day (for more on this see my article on Influence).
Now we get on to the embedded commands. Have you ever heard somebody say something and then realised that’s not what they said at all? That is because we don’t process raw information, our mind tries to make sense of it, and sometimes, usually thanks to the thinker and prover, we interpret it wrongly. When making sense, it also filters out stuff that doesn’t, so nonsense is consciously ignored and we try to get the sentence to make sense.
However the unconscious mind is literal, it doesn’t filter, it listens and considers all of the possible meanings, and stores them. So whilst your conscious mind discards the irrelevent or nonsensical information, it is filed in the very same filing cabinets that contain your song titles and people’s names. And yes it very much affects your programming, particularly when someone as skilled as Derren Brown embeds commands.
Another neat way to improve your embedded commands is to mark them out with a change in tonality. Usually this is best done with a slight drop in tone, as western languages use lower tonality for instructions, you can also use analog marking, but pausing slightly before and after the command, however this takes practice - I tend to just use the tonality change and have fun with that.
And what to do if someone notices? Usually you will get a slight look of confusion (hey pattern interrupt alert) and “pardon?”, “what?” or something similar. If they do just repeat your sentence without the command - it’s already gone in!
Personally I like using this for fun stuff, such as “where subway shall we go for lunch?”, “when now shall we discuss that?”, or “what shall we pub do tonight?”. However there are lots of work situations that you can use it for, but i’d advise against using it in sales situations because using it to get someone to buy something they don’t need is definitely unethical influence in my book.
So go out there and have fun with it. Start small and dance like a monkey who knows perhaps you’ll have your own Channel 4 show in a year’s time…
For more information on the ideas and concepts, here are a few links:
Conscious and Unconscious - http://www.ayrmetes.com/articles/conscious_and_unconscious.htm
Embedded commands - http://www.nlp-hypnosis.ws/nlp_embedded_commands.htm
How to dance like a monkey - http://www.watchtheskies.co.uk/dance-like-a-monkey/
