-Caveat Lector-
The evil eye...the unaceptable face of TV
G L Playfair
6THE INVASION OF IDEAS
'AMAZING NEW TAPE SEDUCES WOMEN!' The advertise-ment that appeared under
this headline in several American magazines in 1986 gave an idea of the
shape of social life to come. It went into some detail: She thinks it's only
music, but she's being erotically programmed subliminally to love you! Is
push-button sex finally here??? YES!
The advertiser, an outfit called Mephisto Metamorphics Inc., claimed
that the music cassettes on offer contained 'in-audible hidden commands'
that 'penetrate her subconscious mind'. The predicted result: 'Soon, she
wants you with an overpowering passion and a throbbing determination!' The
explanation: like hypnosis, subliminal motivation was irre-sistible since it
operated undetected by the conscious mind, and there was no known defence
against it.
Reporter Bob Greene thought this all sounded too good to be true and
so it was. When he tracked down the author of the ads, who refused to be
named, he learned that the tapes had not actually been made yet. Even so,
'Mr Mephisto' seemed serious, pointing out that subliminal messages were
already being included in the taped music heard in shopping malls. Messages
like 'I am honest' were apparently lowering shoplifting statistics, and if
the meth-od worked on potential thieves it should also work to the advantage
of potential seducers, he thought. He was even working on a tape for married
women to play in order to get their husbands to speak to them. This was all
most of them wanted, he claimed. Asked if sublimi-nal seduction was ethical,
he reckoned it was 'probably a step up from trying to seduce her with booze
and drugs'. 1 played backwards. It was not clear if anybody ever did play
the records backwards, and if so, how.
I am sure it was, if it worked, which I doubt. Subliminal messages
are indeed used in shopping areas, though precise information on either
content or effectiveness is hard to come by. However, there is quite a
difference between reminding people not to do what they already know to be
wrong and bringing about an instant change in normal behaviour. Subliminal
communication does work, as we shall see, though not quite in the way Mr
Mephisto seems to think.
Scarcely had society recovered from the backward masking scare than
it had to cope with the 'embed'. This was a simple message, usually just one
word, either flashed during a commercial or written (embedded) on graphic
material such as posters or record sleeves. Barbra Streisand's otherwise
innocuous album 'A Star is Born' is supposed to have all kinds of suggestive
symbols embedded in its cov-er design. A TV commercial for some stuff called
Drano showed water gurgling down a plughole while the letters S, E and X
were flashed briefly over what could be considered a fairly unsubtle symbol.
The word subliminal (from the Latin limen, thresh- old) means below
the threshold of conscious perception, whether of a sound or an image.
Subliminal propaganda made headlines in 1957 when it was revealed that a
cinema in New Jersey had been urging patrons to EAT POPCORN and DRINK
COCA-COLA in messages flashed briefly on the screen during the main feature.
After six weeks, popcorn sales were up by 57 per cent and Coca-Cola sales by
18 percent. To some, it was a touch of Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four,
although all that had happened was that some movie-goers had been perstiaded
to do a little more of what they would have done anyway.
Then there was Super Paper, which hit the market in the early '80s.
It looked like ordinary paper, but had two extraordinary features. One was
the price, nearly a dollar a sheet, and the other was the subliminal words
printed on them. According to the makers, these came in two styles, positive
(YES, BUY, PAY) and negative (NO, DON'T COME). The latter was for party
invitations you hoped would not be accepted. The Wall StreetJournal, whose
dancing mouse stories are in a class of their own, took a closer look at
Super Paper and had it examined under infrared, ultraviolet and oblique
light. 'If anything is there', said a forensic expert, 'we don't have the
capacity to findit.' The reporter wondered if the embedded messages were so
subliminal they didn't exist.*
Stories about subliminal messages soon became regu-lar space fillers
in newspapers. When I worked for Timemagazine, we used to do what we called
'dancing mouse' stories now and then if absolutely nothing newsworthy was
happening. We would go out and find somebody who had done something unusual,
such as teaching a mouse todance. Some of the subliminal stories were hardly
more
serious. There were allegations that pop musicians were indulging in a
seditious practice called 'backward masking' superimposing messages such as
'I love Satan' on their songs so that they would only be heard when the disc
was
The first known casualty of the subliminal war was an Indiana
teenager who went along to see the horror film The Exorcist at his local
cinema. The film was scary enough, but it also allegedly contained
subliminal flashes of a death mask. During the performance, the lad passed
out cold, hitting his head on the seat in front and breaking his jaw. When
he recovered he took legal action against the
film's producers, his lawyer claiming that the death mask was a 'major
issue' in the case.
Once a topic has been made into a dancing mouse story, it becomes
hard to take it seriously. This is unfortunate in the case of subliminal
communication, for there are those who have taken it seriously and put it to
good use. In 1939, psychologist James Miller did an interesting experiment
in which he asked people to sit in front of an opaque screen in a darkened
room and guess which of five ESP symbols, of the kind used in telepathy
tests, the experimenter was looking at. The screen, he told them, would
serve as a kind of crystal ball to boost their clairvoyant powers. Results
were amazing, but subjects were told that faint images of the symbols had
actually been projected on the screen dur-ing the experiment. So they had
not been using their ESP after all, but actually seeing the symbols
subliminally.3
Twenty years later, two researchers from Indiana Univer-sity
repeated this experiment using a real television screen. They prepared a
feature film so that an ESP symbol was flashed every fifteen minutes, and
asked volunteers to watch the film on their TV receivers at home and record
their guesses. They were told that symbols were to be flashed, but if they
were just guessing they could only expect to get one in five right, or 20
per cent. In fact, of 103 guesses the overall hit rate was 34 per cent.
The researchers, sociologist Melvin De Fleur and lecturer Robert
Petranoff, then carried out a real-life experi-ment in subliminal persuasion
with the co-operation of an Indianapolis TV station. In fact they did two
experiments at once. The first was to see whether they could persuade
viewers to buy something, and the second was to get view-ers of the evening
feature film to watch the programme after it, a newscast hosted by Frank
Edwards.
Slides with the words BUY (PRODUCT A) were superim-posed on the film
for two weeks, with a special commercial for the same product shown during
the second week. This enabled the researchers to see what difference the
subliminal message made to an ordinary TV commercial, and what effect it had
on its own. Results showed a massive victory for commercial methods. Sales
of Product A (a variety of
bacon) rose by just I per cent in the first week and 282 per cent in the
second.
In the third week, the slides subliminally ordered viewers of the
feature film to WATCH FRANK EDWARDS. Results were marginally positive for
the first two days, with an extra 0.2 per cent of sets in the area switched
on. Poor old Frank's audience dropped from then on until by Friday it was 7
per cent down. For the remaining two weeks of the experiment, two other food
products were advertised both subliminally and normally, and again sales
shot up by as much as 500 per cent, as did those of a product advertised
only normally.
The researchers concluded that there was 'absolutely no evidence
whatever that the subliminal messages broadcast in the present experiment
had the slightest effect in persuading the mass audience.'4 (Their italics.)
However, their report raises the question that the subliminal messages may
not have been perceived at all. Duration of flashes is not stated, nor is
frequency. We are told only that the message slides were projected at 1 per
cent of the normal level of the picture. (Presumably 'level' means light
intensity.) This is very subliminal indeed, and reminds me of Super Paper. I
am tempted to speculate that despite its apparent thoroughness, this was a
non-experiment designed (no doubt unconsciously) to produce negative
results. The possible biases of one of the researchers, described as a
lecturer in the Department of Radio and Television, were not stated. We
shall come across more examples of what I call non-experiments later, and it
is important to distinguish between those in which there is no evidence of
deliberate intent to deceive (as here) and those in which there is.
One subliminal researcher who is undoubtedly biased, though in a
strongly positive direction, is New Orleans inventor Hal C. Becker, holder
of several US patents in the field of what he calls auditory and visual
stimulation. He set out to make money from this, and with the best of
motives - to help people. After carrying out a number of experiments
he became convinced that people can be made to absorb information 'at
non-reportable levels', and he published his early research in support of
this claim
in respectable scientific journals. In 1980 he addressed a conference at
Massachusetts Institute of Technology on 'applications of subliminal video
and audio stimuli in thera- peutic, educational, industrial and commercial
settings'. He preferred to describe what he was doing as 'human resource
potentiation' rather than what some critics were calling 'subliminal
seduction', though he admitted that his work could be seen as a way of
'changing unhealthy thoughts and ideas to healthy thoughts and ideas'.
reduced to zero. Harmony and co-operation among staff members had improved
noticeably, though this could not be properly measured. One target area in
which precise measurement had been possible was smoking in the staff lounge
- down by 70 per cent according to a cigarette-butt count.
Equipment made by his Behavioral Engineering Cor- poration of
Metairie, Louisiana, was already being used in a variety of settings from
offices and stores to medical and dental clinics. Although only one of his
clients wished to be named, the press managed to track down others,
including a New Orleans supermarket owner who reported a 75 per cent
reduction in shoplifting after he had installed one of
Becker's black boxes broadcasting continuous messages like I WILL NOT STEAL.
IF I STEAL I WILL GO TO JAIL underneath the background music. At the same
time, losses from cash registers dropped from an average $125 a week to less
than $10. In Buffalo, New York, the staff at an estate agency were told
every day by the same method that I LOVE MY JOB. I AM THE GREATEST SALESMAN,
with the result, according to the boss, that revenue was more than 30 per
cent up although advertising had been reduced. This appears to be clear
evidence, supported by statistics, for subliminal behaviour control.
Most of Becker's work in public areas involved sound only, but he
also made use of visual messages with a machine called the Mark II Video
Subliminal Processor. This had been used on patients seeking help for
obesity and alcoholism, and also on paranoid schizophrenics. He reckoned
that if he could show his tapes on television he would eliminate weight
problems in one generation. He also thought he could reduce car insurance
payments by half with the help of messages targeted at bad drivers.
This was not all. 'When a specific behavioural attribute is
appropriately and adequately addressed subliminally,' he said, 'it appears
reasonable to expect a IO to 50 per cent improvement.' He admitted that what
he was doing amounted to invasion of privacy - so did a police siren in the
middle of the night, he added. They both had 'a nuisance factor but good
results'. ACLU officials were less generous.
'It's tantamount to brainwashing', said one, 'and ought to be prohibited by
legislation.'
Time magazine, in a generally favourable article on Becker, noted
that 'many Americans would undoubtedly be outraged by any secret attempts to
influence their behaviour for better or worse. '5
The reason most of Becker's clients were unwilling to go public was
usually given as fear that the American Civil Liberties Union would picket,
attack or sue them. The exception was the McDonagh Medical Center in
Gladstone, Missouri, where a number of benefits had followed the
installation of Becker's equipment. Restlessness ('steam-ups') in the
waiting room went down by 60 per cent, while a problem that had bothered one
of the clinics for some time - patients fainting while being given therapy
involving somewhat painful injections of Vitamin C - had been The man who
did most to make subliminal communi-cation acceptable was New York
psychologist Lloyd H.Silverman, who made no secret of his attempts to
influence his private patients for the better and published his findings in
several leading professional journals.
He developed a technique he called 'subliminal psychodynamic activation'
based on 'symbiotic fantasies', which was actually much simpler than its
description might suggest. All patients had to do was to sit in front of a
screen at the beginning and end of their weekly counselling sessions while a
single message was flashed at them for a few milliseconds, far too short a
time for it to be received by the conscious mind. That was it.
When Silverman began his experiments in the early '7os, it was well
known that some subliminal messages had far more effect than others. The
greater the emotional content the better, especially if the message was
related, however indirectly, to the patient's problem. According to the
tra-ditions of Freudian analysis, many of the world's troubles can be traced
back to an individual's unconscious desire to reunite with the
mother-figure, so Silverman came up with what has become one of the standard
phrases used in this kind of therapy: MOMMY AND I ARE ONE.
In one of his best-known experiments, Silverman offered free
treatment for obesity at his New York clinic to thirty overweight women aged
twenty-two to fifty-nine. To test the effectiveness of his MOMMY AND I . . .
message, he only gave it to half the women, the other half being shown the
control message PEOPLE ARE WALKING, chosen on the assumption that as it had
no emotional content it would not cause any unconscious activation at all.
After eight weeks of subliminal therapy together with conventional
counselling, the MOMMY group had lost an average of 81bs, while the control
group had lost five. A month after the end of the course, Silverman weighed
his patients again and noticed a relapse in the control group, which had
begun to put on weight again. The experimen-tal group, however, had lost
another Sibs on average. This was encouraging, but there was a completely
unexpected development.
A year later, Silverman checked the women's weights again and
confirmed that he had achieved statistically sig-nificant results. There was
one woman, though, who had been part of the control group subliminally
receiving the 'neutral' message to the effect that people were walking, who
now turned up for her weighing appointment looking trim and healthy, having
lost as much weight as any member
of the experimental group. Silverman complimented her on her appearance and
asked how she had done it.
'Oh,' the woman replied, 'since I came to see you last year I've
been walking everywhere.'
The moral of this hitherto unpublished story, which Silverman told a
colleague shortly before his death, is that the power of indirect suggestion
should not be underesti-mated. It also shows that one can never be sure
exactly what effect it will have on any individual. In this case one woman
was affected whereas fourteen others presumably were not.
If Silverman had urged her verbally to take more exer-cise in the first
place she might have staggered round the block a few times just to please
him (and awarded herself an extra chocolate or two for her effort). Yet the
indirect suggestion of 'people walking' received subliminally was enough to
alter her behaviour - and her shape. In this case the alteration was for the
better, yet in the wrong hands it could have been for the worse.
In an early project Silverman himself actually did alter behaviour
for the worse deliberately. He spent four years studying various different
groups including homosexuals,
schizophrenics, depressives and stammerers, and by using a variety of
'wish-related' stimulus symbols represent-ing incest, aggression or
anality he managed to increase the homosexual orientation of the first group
(which the volunteers concerned presumably considered to be an altera-tion
for the worse), the 'thought disorder' of the second and the depression and
stammering of the remaining two respectively. Neutral stimuli, he found, did
not have these effects while the 'symbiotic gratification fantasy' (such as
the Mommy message) helped resolve unconscious conflicts."
We have come a long way since the unsuccessful WATCH FRANK EDWARDS
experiment. Pioneers such as Silverman and Becker have shown that when the
right symbol reaches the right person, it gets the right result. Subliminal
messages have been put to use, and it now seems likely that they have even
helped save lives, thanks to a technique developed in Sweden in the 1950s
and still practically unknown anywhere else outside the aviation business.
Ulf Kragh, the psychologist with the Swedish Institute of Military
Psychology who developed it, called it the Defence Mechanism Test (DMT). To
take it, candidates sit in front of a device called a tachistoscope in which
images are projected very briefly on a screen for as little as five
thousandths of a second, well below the minimum time required for an image
to be fully perceived consciously. At first, viewers have no idea what the
image is, yet as it is flashed a few more times some vague impressions of it
begin to find their way into their conscious minds, and by the end of the
hour the image has been flashed fifteen or twenty times and the viewer
should be able to complete an accurate drawing of it and describe it
verbally in detail. The examiner learns a good deal about people's
personalities from the way they draw and describe their impressions, and
can make predictions as to how they would behave under extreme stress. The
images have been carefully designed to contain elements of threat and
conflict, and the purpose of the DMT is to see whether people are affected
by 'preconscious modification' to the extent that what they describe is not
what they saw at all, the discrepancy being caused by 'defence mechanisms'
that distort impressions or suppress them altogether in order to reduce
anxiety. This can lead to a wrong course of action being taken, in the case
of a pilot a fatal one.
The Swedish Air Force made the DMT a compulsory part of its pilot
selection procedure in 1970. Since then, pilot deaths have gone down from
4.9 per IOO,OOO flying hours to 2. I, and there has been a similar drop in
crashes in which pilots were killed, indicating that more pilots of aircraft
that were about to crash were managing to eject themselves in time. Of the
760 pilots who took the DMT between 1967 and 1971, only 2 per cent of those
in the low category - that is, those with the most serious defence mechanism
problems - were still in service in 1978. The percentage of those in the
highest category was 60.
Dr Thomas Neuman, the military psychologist in charge of the
programme from the beginning, reported in a 1988 follow-up study that only
one of the 138 pilots in the original high-category group had subsequently
crashed, compared with 13 out of 91 in the lowest category.7 High scorers in
the DMT are, it seems, definitely safer in the air, and the test is now
used in several countries (though not in Britain, where the RAF Tornado
pilot loss rate is thought to be even higher than the 7 per IOO,OOO flying
hours admitted by the Ministry of Defence). One of the few to have
appreciated its potential value to anybody in a high-stress job, and
not only to pilots, is psychologist Norman Dixon, a recognised
authority on subliminal communication. He considers it to be 'one of the
greatest benefits that experimental psychology has ever conferred upon
suffering humanity'.8
What, some will be wondering by now, does all this have to do with
television, which does not use subliminal techniques? It may have done so in
the past, as in the 1970 Labour party political broadcast, but it certainly
does not make regular use of it, and even if it did, so what? Labour failed
to win the 1970 general election, after all.
I am not suggesting that television uses secret subliminal
techniques designed to turn us all into zombies and make it easier for a
tyrant to take control of the country. I am not fond of conspiracy theories,
and with one or two exceptions to be mentioned later I have nothing against
any individual in the industry. Indeed, almost all those I have met have
struck me as honourable, well-intentioned and very competent professionals
doing a job in which they believe. My argument is with the technology, not
the people who use it, and my purpose is to show that the act of watching
television - any television - has something in common with the process of
subliminal communication.
This must be understood before I move on to a discussion of some of the ways
in which television achieves its effects. I cannot claim that it has any
undesirable effects at all unless I give some idea of the means by which it
does so.
To return to Dr Silverman and his overweight women;
the work of the psychodynamic activation specialists has now shown
convincingly that an implanted image can modify behaviour - for better or
worse according to the image and the person receiving it - without the
person having any conscious knowledge of it. This can also be done
accidentally as in the case of the woman who walked her way back to
slimness. That particular story had a happy
ending, yet it raises a disturbing question: she started walk-ing everywhere
on her own initiative, or so she thought, and Dr Silverman never
specifically suggested this course of action. Yet it was his idea and not
hers. He had changed her mind.
Television is non-stop image implant. Much of the imagery cannot be
consciously processed for two rea-sons: the viewer's brain is in a state in
which logical and sequential thought is not possible, and there is simply
too much of it for any brain, even one in a normal state, to keep up with.
Yet all the imagery is absorbed, and the fact that it is not consciously
processed means that it is absorbed in much the same way as subliminal
imagery. It can therefore be expected to have the same effects. Commenting
on research into subliminal communication, Norman Dixon has written: 'The
most striking finding to date . . . is that subliminal effects appear
negatively corre-lated with stimulus energy. The further below threshold,
the weaker or briefer the stimulus, the stronger its effect.'
This, he adds, may in turn be 'qualitatively quite different from that of a
supraliminal stimulus.'9
The reason for this is presumably the same as the reason for the
effectiveness of post-hypnotic suggestions: there is no resistance to them
for the simple reason that we do not see them come in. They are suddenly
there, like a burglar who has crept silently through the back door.
'Nothing is so powerful as an idea whose time has come,'
Victor Hugo is often quoted as having said, though it was in fact one of his
translators who said it. What Hugo wrote, at the end of his Histoire d'un
Crime, was, 'One can resist the invasion of armies; one cannot resist the
invasion of ideas.' This needs some qualification. If we hear somebody
shouting in the street that the end of the world is at hand, we can evaluate
that idea briefly and reject it (although we will not forget having heard
it). If the same idea is put in our minds camouflaged as a post-hypnotic
suggestion or a subliminal flash, we cannot evaluate it, so we cannot reject
it. We will only become aware of it when it turns up in our conscious minds
as one of our own ideas. By then, of course, it is too late to do anything
about it.
The Shoppers' Trance phenomenon mentioned in the previous chapter is
an example of how the successful inva-sion of ideas can affect us. There may
seem to be nothing indirect or subliminal about television commercials, yet
many viewers use the commercial break for a quick trip to the kitchen or the
lavatory while others will talk over the ads, apparently not paying any
attention to them. As any hypnotist knows, such a state of half-attention is
ideal for the insertion of suggestions, since resistance is at its lowest.
It is not necessary to watch a TV commercial to get the message. A word in
the ear from a distance while opening the fridge, or a brief glimpse of the
product while settling down for Part Two is just as effective, probably more
so. On the next trip to the supermarket, the cans of Gloppo or whatever will
simply fall off the shelves and into the baskets without their programmed
purchasers having any idea what they are doing.
Nobody would deny that television advertisements are made in order
to persuade people to buy things. Presum-ably this is what they do, or
companies would not spend such huge sums making them and having them
screened. It is worth pointing out that TV commercials make as much use of
indirect suggestion as the direct kind. Repeating the product name ad nameam
(direct suggestion) is not enough; there must also be the indirect
suggestion that life will be somehow transformed by buying the product.
During my viewing years, the trendy thing was nostalgia - for good
old bread like Granny used to make, or good old real beer like the stuff
that helped our lads win World War I. I went on buying Czechoslovakian beer
and Covent Garden bread, neither of which I have ever seen advertised
anywhere.
If indirect suggestion sells products, is it not likely to influence
thought and behaviour in other ways as well? The telly generation has been
force-fed with images almost from the moment it first opened its eyes. Many
of those born after 1950 have acquired most of their first knowledge of the
outside world at second hand through the mediation of the magic box. Their
upbringing seems quite normal to them since they have no experience of life
without tele-vision with which to compare it. No previous generation has
ever had any remotely comparable experience, and it would be surprising if
this sudden change in early learning habits had no lasting effects. To claim
otherwise is rather like throwing things out of high windows into crowded
streets and claiming that there is no evidence they have ever hit anybody.
76
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