Do you like to be manipulated? If you’re like most people, the answer is ‘nope.’ Well, you are being manipulated! We all are! How could one not be swayed by the massive tsunami of information, much of which is aimed at us to consume and be consumed?

In this rant I will speak of Subliminal Persuasion: just one of the mind-fishing techniques that the promoters of consumption use to catch your attention.

Subliminal Persuasion:

Do you see what I see?

Did you hear about the experiment done on theatre goers watching a movie back in the 50’s? Apparently they had this device that would flash a slogan, a command to ‘Drink Pop and Eat Popcorn’. This command was flashed at a rate that could not be consciously perceived. It was believed that the eye would take in the message, and it would be seen in the subconscious and rise to the seer’s consciousness as a thought rather than a visual sight.

Offensive to women

Perhaps I should tell you about consciousness and subconscious before going on. Your consciousness is the thoughts, feelings, visions and sensations you have: the feeling of ‘you’, often tricked by the position of the eyes and ears to be situated in your head (a few cents behind the eyes). The subconscious basically means the humungous pool of information that pours in from your senses that is organized, filtered and trickled into your consciousness. Huh? Yes, this assertion is slightly problematic, because if the subconscious is below our consciousness, and unperceived, then how can anyone assert we have a subconscious? We can’t! Just like we cannot say for sure what an atom looks like. Yet we can still describe it in theory.

So, back in the theatre, a few moments after being flashed with the command, many people got up because they were suddenly thirsty and snackish. Capitalism, which survives on consumption, got a steroid boost right then and there. And after the movie, when polled not a single theatre goer said they saw anything out of the usual.

Click to see close up

When I was a kid, I was quite a science geek. I also marvelled at the weird and wacky. Our elementary school required all students to create a yearly science project. I loved science fairs, as I was good at the projects and I discovered I could win and get great free trips to foreign lands like Flin Flon. As I was born and raised knee deep in chilly isolation (Thompson Manitoba), I found liberty in the fair. One of the projects I created was called Subliminal Persuasion. I began to comb and then find ads that contained subtle painted words and pictures. I read books on subliminal seduction. And I created a remarkably simple text based program on my Apple //c. I subjugated 20 viewers to two rounds of watching the computer monitor full of white asterisks. 30 seconds later the screen changed and the numbers 1 2 3 4 5 were shown with a sentence: “Pick a number.” They typed any number they wanted into the computer. I had the participants do it twice. Both times the computer generated a random number that neither I nor the participants were informed of. The two experiments were exactly the same, except during the first round no number was flashed on the screen, and the participants randomly chose their own number. This was the control sample. It helped to establish the chance that a person would choose the same number that the computer chose without visual influence. The odds of this happening are about 1 in 5 or 20%. The second time they watched the monitor the number randomly chosen by the computer was flashed at a speed too fast to be consciously perceived.

We can easily prove that there is a threshold speed of flashing at which the eye and brain get confused and miss things because it occurs too fast. Such as movies! I am amazed at how many people do not know that a movie in the theatre is a continuous projection of flashed single frames. To give the illusion of flow and continuous movement the frames must be more than 24 per second. At a little higher speed you would not consciously see the frame with the embeded subliminal command, but you may be influenced by it.

Like the group of participants of my science fair project. 80% of them chose the random number that the computer flashed at them. None of them said they saw a number. You could imagine how excited I was as an 11 year old!

When you eliminate the element of chance (the 20% of the control group) the difference is 60%. Even at my age I knew that was tremendous. So much so that the science fair judges didn’t believe me. One pointed out that my sample was way too low- only 20 participants. I was 11 freaking years old what did you expect? I did, however, win my school, local and regional science fairs to go on to the Canada Wide Science Fair in Toronto. Unsurprisingly I didn’t win at the Nationals, something to do with the whole mixed up independent and dependent variables thingy (that I still don’t get!). Maybe I should have flashed “make me win” on the monitor at them!

Some More Subliminal Ads:

Here is a simple newspaper print ad:

Read the ad headline

Flipping and inverting the ad reveals a subliminal embed made more clear by the ad headline "Laid by the best"


Click on the next ad to see more closly that this is not a seeminly innocent beach scene:

There is something more going on in this icecube:

Click to see bigger picture

A powerful symbol of a smashed bottle of alcohol with the ad copy "Have you ever seen a grown man cry?"

Click to see full ad

And below is a portion of this ad with a subliminal embed that I found as a kid for my science fair project: What I see is a grim reaper. We know that alcohol is used to drown sorrows. Tsk, Tsk ad makers!

Anyways, subliminal advertisements became a big fad around the late 60’s through to 80’s. You’ll still find the odd one, but it’s rare. Does it work? Was the movie experiment a hoax? There is absolutely no doubt that we perceive subliminally. Whether we are persuaded subliminally is the question. Why don't you try our Subliminally Embeded Card Experiment as an example of mind manipulation? There are many sites that debunk the belief that subliminal content can influence consumers. The Skeptical Inquirer magazine (Spring 1992) has a well researched article that promotes the belief that subliminal persuasion doesn't work. I personally believe that symbolism, innuendo and the more visible and obvious parts of the ad can have a much greater impact than a hidden dirty word. Never the less, I still find them amazing to look at and find.