The press release has been embargoed until today, but news of Derren Brown's latest project can now be made public, and hopefully you'll be able to say you heard it here first!

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The psychological illusionist Derren Brown has announced that at the end of his current UK tour he will be embarking on a project to memorise the entire Internet.

As part of his previous stage show he demonstrated his photoreading abilities by memorising an entire telephone directory before each show and then telling astounded theatre goers their home telephone numbers. Previously he had also demonstrated his speedreading skills publicly in 2001 during a visit to the British Library.

Compared to telephone directories, memorising the Internet is in a different league: conservative estimates of the amount of static data in web pages start at 167 terabytes, which is the equivalent to over 256,000 CDs full of information.

"Sure, it's a big task" said Brown last night in a brief interview at the stage door of Salisbury's City Hall, "but it's possible; information on web pages means something, a phone book is just abstract names and numbers. I love the Internet and spend too much of the day on it, so this seemed a great way to turn a hobby into something useful".

Brown will be working with the California based search engine Google which already has vast quantities of the Internet's contents indexed on their servers. Speaking from the quirkily named Googleplex, founder Larry Page said: "When Derren first got in touch with us we thought it was a neat idea but didn't believe he could do it. He spent a couple of days here and proved that it was possible. We've developed him a special browser which presents the pages to him in a logical order following the links from each one in turn."

Earlier this year Brown appeared in a one off special entitled 'Messiah' in which he attempted to debunk belief systems, he claims that completing this memory feat would safely debunk paranoid fears that computers are more powerful than humans.
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