Cheryl JPerson Swap Experiment
July 12th 2008 06:08
This is a great social experiment by Derren Brown, an English magician, psychological illusionist, mentalist, painter and self-professed sceptic regarding paranormal phenomena.
He recreates a psychological experiment where a person is asking a test subject for directions and a distraction of a large poster board is used to separate Derren from his subject momentarily and replace him with another person. The aim is to see if the subject recognises the switch.
Surprisingly they rarely recognise the new person. This works by first focusing the test subjects attention on the problem of finding the directions, not on Derren and how he looks, secondly the switch is performed outside of the view of the test subject. The test subject (consciously and subconsciously) assumes that the same person will emerge behind the poster board, and since not enough information has been stored in memory about Derren's looks, the test subject's mind subconsciously assumes and recreates a memory that it is the same person.
He recreates a psychological experiment where a person is asking a test subject for directions and a distraction of a large poster board is used to separate Derren from his subject momentarily and replace him with another person. The aim is to see if the subject recognises the switch.
Surprisingly they rarely recognise the new person. This works by first focusing the test subjects attention on the problem of finding the directions, not on Derren and how he looks, secondly the switch is performed outside of the view of the test subject. The test subject (consciously and subconsciously) assumes that the same person will emerge behind the poster board, and since not enough information has been stored in memory about Derren's looks, the test subject's mind subconsciously assumes and recreates a memory that it is the same person.
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