LAST night I asked Derren Brown to what extent we can each exercise our own free will, and whether there is indeed any such thing.
A number of surprising things happened.
I was surprised to be in a position to ask him any questions at all. I was surprised that he took this question seriously and was happy to answer it.
I was also surprised that he had not considered the question before.
Here is a man who makes a living out of claiming to be able to influence and even control our choices. I reckon that often, he actually does. He was busily chatting away, signing theatre tickets and programmes for his fans, beaming a piercing smile through his eyes as his pen swept stylishly across the pages.
I emerged from the darkness to ask him the question. He stopped everything, stepped back two paces, and began to peer into the middle distance whilst the coterie and the curious paused their conversations to listen.
"Free will," he mused, widening his eyes and breathing deeply. "I'm not sure whether that's really the question."
I tried to help. I mean, there's all this marketing all around us, everything that happens influences how we feel and what we do. Derren repeated the words "free will" many times, began several sentences at once and finished none of them. Derren Brown, former evangelical Christian turned atheist and master of mind control, seemed to be thinking about the question of free will for the very first time. How odd.
"This distinction between them and us, the marketing men and everyone else, it's false. We're all at it. We're all influencing each other all the time. You could make a decision now to run across the road and touch the railings there, but would that be your choice, or would you be trying to prove a point?"
I glanced across at the railings, and instantly recognised that my choice to look at the railings had not been mine. Whether he meant me to or not, I had proved his "point" at the railings without him stretching out his index finger. Secretly I imagine that he noticed that I looked at the railings, because he appeared to smile a little in response. Then, was it his choice to smile, or did my glance make him smile? Oh dear. To me, this all rather seemed to underline my question about free will. But Derren wouldn't have it.
"It's not about whether we have free will. Of course we have free will. It's about whether we are able to be rational in our choices. People don't make choices in anything like the way one might expect."
I took him to mean that our mood is important. Our feelings are triggered irrationally by a wide range of events. It is these feelings, our mood, that determine how we interpret facts and make a decision. The same set of data in different moods can lead the same person to different conclusions. A dad might say, after a successful day at the races, "Sure, son, have a bag of Haribo." Normally you wouldn't let your kids near the stuff. They're still sugar-filled and otherwise nutrition-free blobs that induce elevated free radical damage during metabolism, contributing to accelerated ageing and the earlier onset of a wide range of ailments, but somehow a successful day at the races seems to make them more acceptable.
Derren's Enigma show was extremely well-executed. He has superb recall, the very freshest trickery, imaginative maths and logic, and he knows a thing or two about using an audience to his advantage. Yet I'd hoped to enjoy more psychological effects and to have had more surprises.
"What's your name?" he asked.
"Darren," I said.
"Nearly perfect," he said. Like his show.
I thanked him and disappeared back into the night.
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