There are in fact psychological phenomena that NLP talks about too – a good example being classical conditioning (called »anchoring« in NLP lingo). Psychology, the third item on the list, is another thing worth taking into account when explaining what Derren does. The whole point of Derren's tricks (and magic in general) is to make it seem like he has some extrodinary abilities – be it mind reading, clarvoyance, speaking to the dead … or indeed, a power of suggestion so strong it erases a memory and subsitutes it with a new one. In the BMX bike trick, the one being suggested something is not his spectator, Simon Pegg – it is you. What about the second one on the list, suggestion? He does use it, but often not in the way you think he does.

I reserve the same scepticism for subliminal messaging, as well as a lot of body-language reading and the like.« On the contrary, I have written very critically about it in Tricks of the Mind. I have never claimed to use NLP to achieve my ‘tricks’. All else is most likely misdirection and should be taken with a hefty pinch of salt.

»My techniques are rooted in conjuring magic and hypnosis. This is what Derren wrote about using NLP in his blog post To claim or not to claim: Instead of getting into the details about the topic, let’s start by simply looking what the man himself says about it. This is not surprising either, since the internet is full of NLP practitioners trying to explain Derren’s tricks in the context of NLP. And we actually got a few angry emails about it – people claiming with great confidence that Derren actually does use NLP, and they know exactly how he does it. We offered a much simpler explanation for this, claiming that faking someone’s handwriting and doing some pickpocketing is a much easier thing than installing a false memory with such precision in under 3 minutes. Probably the best example is his BMX bike trick with Simon Pegg, where Derren hints that he used a wide mixture of suggestion techniques to somehow install a false memory into Simon's head. In fact, Derren himself often quite clearly suggests that he is using something like NLP in his show. Speculations about Derren using NLP techniques shouldn't come as a surprise at all.

Derren brown secret