Speed cards - Derren Brown: Do you think it's possible?

Memory Sports
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It is possible, albeit not from traditional memory methods:

Japanese Methods: Schichida

Indian Methods: Heguru

American Methods: Glen Doman

How does it work: Flashing pictures and words at high rates of speed using the the still growing brain of a child to strain the right hemisphere of the brain for high speeds of information processing.

For the rest of us at older ages: Paul Scheal Photo Reading 3rd edition

Keep in mind Darren is a hypnotist. Right brain methods perform at low brain waves. Hypnotism performs at low brain waves such as Alpha. He may have combined hypnotism with traditional memory techniques for an even more robust approach. I have yet to master the photo reading but I have done my research. Best way to learn anything… Find a real human that can do it. Convince them to teach you.

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The magician needs the simplest most repeatable method that works. If film editing creates the appropriate suspension of disbelief then so be it.

While mechanics appreciate a continuous unobstructed view this almost certainly won’t be the most entertaining way to present the piece. Magic is entertainment. In most cases it still follows rather constrained vaudevillian patterns that audiences have learned to engage with. Artistic magicians have been few and far between, ala Doug Henning, and for the most part not well received.

Table magic at stagettes and children’s shows still exist and Vegas has a small space but the days of the amazing Kreskin have come and gone. Modern audiences see impossible acts on a daily basis and many cannot differentiate them.

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If you’re thinking about photoreading, check out the photoreading and mental photography discussion.

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Regarding Photo Reading, I suspect you’ll have trouble finding many people who can do it. But I’m sure you’ll find plenty willing to teach you!

Regarding hypnosis, I’m afraid that the majority of the latest research would question your assertion. It has very little to do with brainwaves.

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Is photo reading real?

A hot decade ago during my third year of Computer Science after a solid 4 days of not sleeping I discovered that I got my hand-in dates wrong and I had just 23 hours to write my dissertation instead of another 3 months.

I went to the library and pulled out 29 books related to my topic, which was pedagogy. At that point all I knew was that I was going to study how people learned and I had a rough idea of a hypothesis.

I’d never heard of photoreading. I had read about speed reading from some website I visited around 2000, but I was a fairly slow reader.

So I have these 29 books.

There’s no way I could read them because I only had 23 hours (well 21 by the time I got to the library) so I just flicked through all of the books hoping to find anything corresponding to my hypothesis.

Sometimes I’d be scanning one book and my brain would identify a page number from another book with an idea that linked to what I was scanning, and each time it was right.

I tend to find it easier to learn concepts than facts when I read.

And let’s just say that by the end of the 23 hours I had a dissertation that linked learning, perception / cognition, communication and teaching together with quotes linking the ideas together.

I think that’s pretty close to what they say is possible with photoreading.

I’ve only done this once in my life, but I do think our brains perform a lot of useful processing instantly, which I suspect is quickly discarded because there is no use for it based on my experience.

My hypothetical model for this is based on a lo-fi processing. So to the lo-fi brain it is happy to mistake add for odd and edd, and “add new comment” creates 3 items of memory in the form of “add/edd new/naw/nem/nam comment/camment/cawwent/etc.”

“Add/edd” is really a single word (it can’t distinguish a from e in lo-fi).

Evidence for lo-fi processing
When the brain has been sleep deprived, fMRI showed that parts of the brain go into a sort of sleep state, leaving a smaller lo-fi alternative processing unit to carry out tasks. Subjects are completely unaware this is happening, but when it does their competency in affected tasks is significantly reduced.

My suspicion is that that lo-fi processing goes hand in hand with low resolution image processing where the brain can more quickly encode images into lo-fi lexemes and then pass that onto your conscious mind in the form of intuition or transcribe to memory.