In The Times
(full article at http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article...100581,00.html)

''He is also sceptical about much of alternative medicine, though initially he considered practising it. “After about seven years learning hypnotism I had to choose some sort of career. I’d done some low-level therapeutic stuff, helping people with phobias and obsessions, so I thought I should go for a qualification and I joined an NLP course.”

NLP, popularised in the early 1980s by the American Richard Bandler, uses hypnotic techniques to embed ideas in practitioners and their clients, such as visualising themselves as successful and positive. Though many of Brown’s stunts seem to use its techniques — subliminal verbal suggestions cued up by gestures or friendly physical touches — he fears that NLP has become another cult. “It’s now huge, unchecked and unaccountable, full of nutty thinking. It’s staggering the sort of faith involved,” he says. “One guy I knew thought that he could use NLP to learn to juggle: he tried getting inside the head of a juggler friend of his to find out what unconscious processes he went through. This guy reckoned he was doing really well, but plainly he couldn’t juggle. Other people were using techniques they believed ensured they would never grow old.''