Post #2: Darren Brown

    I didn’t know who Darren Brown was before listening to his TED talk and watching his older series about debunking other psychics, but I am so glad I know of him now. He truly is a great mentalist and has an amazing showmanship factor. The key thing for psychics really is the idea of being vague and generalizing things for their audience. Brown shows that he can match the “famous” psychics by being so vague and really “faking ‘til he makes it.” In my personal experience, I used to love getting my tarot cards read and looking up my astrology for compatibility or if I would want to know what would be my ideal career. Now I know that something like the “stars” and “signs” cannot define who I am as a person but it can generalize a majority of people who share the same birth month as me. As for the tarot reader, looking back now this old italian woman that I had met in Venice  Beach, CA was able to sell me more of an “experience” rather than answers to my future and reading of my past. I found the Ted talk enlightening because as someone who used to rely so heavily on these psychics can now see that it is a trick of just reading a person's mannerisms and more relating to humans and their habits.

Fortune Telling- Real or really fake??

Has anyone paid $10.00 to $15.00 to get their fortune read by a fortune teller? This is similar to palm reading and predicting one's future goals, career goals and love. Not only can the readings tell good news, but they can also tell bad news. So should we believe what a fortune teller presents to us and how accurate are fortune tellers? How can they sometimes accurately tell how we are feeling or what is going on in our lives?

This idea of examining a person's behavior can be found in a Darren Brown post in which he told the participants to do certain things which would determine their behavior and certain characteristics about them. This is called cold reading in which the observer determines characteristics about the person based upon their actions,things they like or things they may have described during their lifetime. Some things are accurate, but some things are innacurate.

So are the clients who actually pay the money telling the the psychics things about them unconsciously? Does anyone believe in psychics and the ability to predict events past or present? I dont believe in psychics and I believe that the ideas they come up with are just good guesses based upon a persons character or body language. Going to see a psychic may be fun but it may also be a rip off.