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Beej

macrumors 68020
Jan 6, 2002
2,139
0
Hmm, interesting. It strikes me as weird that an ad flicking on the TV screen isn't noticed... max TV frame rate is what, 30 fps? Surely you'd notice something flick on the screen for 1/30th of a second?
 

gooddog

macrumors regular
Mar 22, 2002
185
0
The stachistoscopic image (flashed) could be watermarked or otherwise made less noticeable.

The real "backward masking" phenomenon involves flashing a supraliminal black circle that encloses the image to be masked. Even though the circle is flashed AFTER the image, it somehow prevents conscious perception of an otherwise supraliminal image and makes it subliminal *retroactively*. The exact mechanism for this is not understood. Some hypotheses involve the nerve impulses of the circle overtaking those of the image on their way to the brain. Others hypothesize that the brain uses a buffer of sorts that delays cognition after perception.

This stuff is fascinating , if you get past the sensationalistic media stuff and read up on human perception studies in a good university library.

I would not flip it off. Some of it is described well with very high-power mathematics and physics ( multi-pole expansions, hypergeometric functions etc.). It isn't all fluff and "quit smoking" cassettes. Some of it, in the USA is VERY spooky as it pertains to post-WWII mind-control researchers slipping into the US advertising professions.

See also the Poetzle Effect.

---gooddog
 

MacBandit

macrumors 604
Muahahahah! You're all under my control. I've been programming you with subliminal messages for weeks now on the boards here. You will all continue to surf and write in to Macrumors or what ever you planned on doing.


Hahahahah. See you're doing what I told you to do without realizing it.:D
 

iwantanewmac

macrumors 6502
Oct 24, 2001
356
0
Haha. So many company's allready tried that type of "hidden" advertising.
On television and in cinema's.
All kind of beer brands, pepsi, coca cola.
It never really worked. It really doesn't. :)
 

drastik

macrumors 6502a
Apr 10, 2002
978
0
Nashvegas
Originally posted by iwantanewmac
Haha. So many company's allready tried that type of "hidden" advertising.
On television and in cinema's.
All kind of beer brands, pepsi, coca cola.
It never really worked. It really doesn't. :)

Actually, those ads work very well, and advertisers still use them, all the time We have just become so accustomed to them that we now relly don't notice. Your average amercan sees 30,00 ads a day. All of them are wizzing by in a blur, and all of them mke n impression. Ever wonder what women have to do with beer? Nothing at all, but if domething make you think se, you're gonna remember it.
 

iwantanewmac

macrumors 6502
Oct 24, 2001
356
0
You mean those ads that are put in movies (only a few frames). so that you dont really notice them?
They really don't work.
I had a book and some study's and articles that psychologist wrote about that matter. Ill see if I can find it.
I also spoke to various advertisers.
There is really no proof at all that it works.
There is more proof that it doesnt really affect people.
 

alex_ant

macrumors 68020
Feb 5, 2002
2,473
0
All up in your bidness
Originally posted by gooddog
The stachistoscopic image (flashed) could be watermarked or otherwise made less noticeable.

The real "backward masking" phenomenon involves flashing a supraliminal black circle that encloses the image to be masked. Even though the circle is flashed AFTER the image, it somehow prevents conscious perception of an otherwise supraliminal image and makes it subliminal *retroactively*. The exact mechanism for this is not understood. Some hypotheses involve the nerve impulses of the circle overtaking those of the image on their way to the brain. Others hypothesize that the brain uses a buffer of sorts that delays cognition after perception.

This stuff is fascinating , if you get past the sensationalistic media stuff and read up on human perception studies in a good university library.

I would not flip it off. Some of it is described well with very high-power mathematics and physics ( multi-pole expansions, hypergeometric functions etc.). It isn't all fluff and "quit smoking" cassettes. Some of it, in the USA is VERY spooky as it pertains to post-WWII mind-control researchers slipping into the US advertising professions.

See also the Poetzle Effect.

---gooddog
I understood precisely none of what you just said here, but it does still sound interesting, anyway. :D
 

gooddog

macrumors regular
Mar 22, 2002
185
0
One of the five men who were scandalised , in the fifties, for flashing soda pop subliminal ads in movie theatres , wound up teaching Marketing at my Alma Mater in Florida, during the eighties. My roommate, a Marketing major, told me about him and so I phoned him during his office hours. I had spent many afternoons in the fifth floor of our library reading up on the physics and mathematics of human visual perception and information theory etc.

To my surprise, he was extremely friendly and pleasant as well as informative. We chatted for a little over an hour. I then asked him if he would be willing to deliver a colloquium for my grad physics classmates. He said something like: "Oh, my world - no, I don't want to call attention to myself again..."

A top beer label has it's brewery within blocks of the University. They regularly paid for keg parties where jocks would go for free beer provided they submitted to tests and questionaires of "weird" character regarding TV ads that they were required to watch.

Let me address a few myths that are often parroted by the vulgate:

MYTH 1 : This has been tried many times and failed to perform.
FACT : It has been USED many times and still is. Prior to the advent of inexpensive digital image processing, companies who have the very best of anything they need by way of scientists, equipment, marketing studies, etc. spent FORTUNES producing these ads -- they are not fools.

MYTH 2 : There are severe legal penalties for this -- none would dare risk it.
FACT : There are *no laws* against it. There are only oblique and nebulous mentions of it in a few "Better Broadcasting Practices" - type guidelines that are totally non-binding, voluntary and respected as much as the famous "Prime Directive" in Star Trek.

MYTH 3 : It does not produce robot people , therefore it doesn't work.
FACT : It isn't supposed to make robots . It is intended to shift the center point of buying decisions made by large numbers of viewers just a few percentage points . This is enough to make fortunes and drive competitors out of town.

MYTH 4 : It is just too sci-fi and a product of our Cold-War paranoia.
FACT : Veiled images and "imagery" evoked by the written word are ancient.
Medieval tapestries and design elements in all the arts , including literature and screenwriting is replete with subliminal suggestions that induce anticipatory tension and cognition in the intended audience.

------------------------

The most fascinating experiment I ever read , that reveals the strong ties between vision and conscious cognition goes like this :

You are hooked up to a Macworth camera-like device that tracks the foveal point (the center point of your stare in your visual field -- the point that is best FOCUSED , most rich in rods and cones in the retina, and in which you are most consciously aware. It also tracks the macular spot (blind spot) in your visual field as it moves over the display screen in front of you. This blind spot corresponds to the place, in your retina, where the nerves exit and is bundled into a lump that can not see. Some optical illusion books demonstrate this blind spot by having you stare intently at a dot on a blank page. After fixing your eye on it, a second dot to one side of it will disappear until you instinctively move your eye off the foveal target.

As you wind your gaze over an image of , say, the Mona Lisa, the computer tracks along replacing the part of that image that lies in the blind spot with a distinct underlying image of, say, Abraham Lincoln.

Because the switch/wipe takes place in your blind spot at any given moment, you are not aware of it. Bystanders whose blind spot and tracking (saccades) do not coincide with yours , can see clearly that one image is being wormed away and replaced by another.

When asked to give a running commentary of the image on the screen, you start with a very assertive identification of the famous Da Vinci. As the switching begins and progresses, you become confused, sometimes anxious, and much more tentative in you utterances. Sometimes you seem baffled and speechless as you repeatedly make successive corrections to your decription of the image. When it is over, you at last reach a concensus with your self and seem a little exhausted and disturbed at your prior inability to recognize Lincoln more quickly. You may even apologize for this.

MMMMUUUAHHH HHAA HHAA !!!!!!!

Seeing IS believing.

So drop the trash literature, and get to a good library.

Do you see what I mean ???


---gooddog
 

gooddog

macrumors regular
Mar 22, 2002
185
0
Dukestreet,

If you mean the Poetzle Effect , it wasn't a link; just the name of a phenomenon observed in subliminal perception studies.

Briefly, attempts to teach precise ideas like math, history, etc. by way of subliminal stimuli failed. It seems that peripheral and otherwise subliminal visual inputs seem to talk to a symbolic/emotional part of our mind rather than to the highly analytical and conscious part usually associated with the neocortex (outer, wrinkled layer) of the brain.

A subject who was flashed with an image of a gory castration, never did verbalize knowledge of it. HOWEVER , it was observed that, very often, after an average of three days or so, the subject would have a dream that was strongly suggestive of the subliminal message --- that a sausage was placed on a butcher block and cleaved in two, that a bananna was peeled and the top of it fell off, that the crescent moon swooped down from the sky and lopped the top off a tall tree.

This delayed-reaction, highly emotional, and symbolic dream is known as the Poetzle Effect.

It was very commonplace back when The Exorcist was first screened publicly.

It certainly worked on me. But this film used mostly the sound track for it's subliminal stimuli - and got an industry prize (Oscar?) for THAT -- not the visuals.

The latest revision , now on DVD, rides piggyback on the subliminal fad by adding a number of very LIMINAL (obvious) flashes of the death mask etc. where the original film was much more professional.

The main idea in subliminal advertising is to link your strongest, deepest emotions
(fear of falling, being devoured, burried alive, spiders, snakes, sexual anxieties, the word FAT or the word SEX, political and religious thorns, etc.) with the label of a product. This will make the label jump out at your conscious mind as you scan a store shelf crowded with all sorts of competing labels. If you have already been primed by ads that promise to get you cuddled once you lose weight, once you smell fresh, once you get some hair, or to protect you from various other consumer-eating monsters, then the anxiety will work for the marketing team.

My interest in it centers on the unbelievably complex processing that takes place in the retina and before the impulses even get to the brain. You are actually doing things , by way of signal processing, that a mathematician with several Ph.D.'s can scarcely put into very high-level formulations. But you do it in some meaty analog fashion. In fact, I ran into this literature at my U. library during a search for a rather arcane mathematical technique used in the theoretical physics of stellar atmospheres and neutron star collapse.

I could describe an experiment that you could do at home which will baffle you :
Your eyes will perceive clearly a feature that you have previously rendered invisible.

The only existing analysis of the feat involves muti-pole Maclaurin decomposition into
fifth and sixth derrivatives of certain measured quantities in the image.

The details of it all are out of my head, since this was twenty two years ago.

But the experiment works and baffles.

But maybe it is too off-topic for this site.

What does the moderator think ?


---gooddog
 

Chisholm

macrumors regular
May 31, 2002
242
12
Tuscaloosa, Alabama
holy sh*t dude!

Wow! After reading Gooddog's posts I feel like the lines of text are pulsating and flowing from side to side. But I would attribute this to OSX.2's antialiasing feature.

I work in the College of Communication at a state university. Off topic it might be so I'll start a thread elsewhere...but this reminds me of "product placement" research some advertising profs were looking into. For instance, how many times did they show a Starbucks cup/store etc. in a movie such as "You've Got Mail?"

Have you ever noticed how many Macs are shown exclusively in movies and tv shows? These are ads. People see them. It doesn't necessarily register as an ad to the viewer. But when the consumer walks into an Apple Store they feel comfortable with that iMac like Jennifer Aniston has on "Friends." Jennifer---->beautiful---->"Friend"--->iMac ----->me--->beautiful.

Oh well, never mind.

cheers!
 

gooddog

macrumors regular
Mar 22, 2002
185
0
Hey, I feel terribly guilty about this, but I have a purple crush on the "beep, beep, beeep" girl in the switch ad. My gawd, what eyes she has. And me at 49 years old !!!!

Do you suppose there is something hotsex hidden in those "beeep"'s ???

---gooddog
 

rainman::|:|

macrumors 603
Feb 2, 2002
5,438
2
iowa
Most ads contain some sort of subliminal advertising anymore, it all depends on how you define subliminal. most people are too busy to psychoanalyze each and every commercial, billboard, and slogan they see-- but they're driven to buy certain products (or think certain ways) because the advertisers have gotten very good at manipulation. I just heard a car dealership commercial on the radio the other day, and if you stop and think about it, it says "if you love your child at all, and want them to be normal and happy, you'll come buy a new car". but it's in the guise of a flashback-child's-point-of-view cute narrative.

as far as the technicals of actively subliminal messaging, gooddog is hotsex right on the yourtreat money.

:)
pnw
 

Chisholm

macrumors regular
May 31, 2002
242
12
Tuscaloosa, Alabama
Originally posted by gooddog
Hey, I feel terribly guilty about this, but I have a purple crush on the "beep, beep, beeep" girl in the switch ad. My gawd, what eyes she has. And me at 49 years old !!!!

Do you suppose there is something hotsex hidden in those "beeep"'s ???

---gooddog

I don't know about you, but my wife wouldn't let me bring that girl home!

Damn wedding vows...

Just kidding honey!;)
 

Scepticalscribe

macrumors Ivy Bridge
Jul 29, 2008
63,957
46,414
In a coffee shop.
Not sure, but you may have just broken the record for the oldest resurrected post at MR

Yes, that is a serious thread resurrection; I doubt that I have seen a thread as old resurrected in my time on the forum.

Likewise, many of the names of the posters are completely unknown to me, & I've been a member of the forum for twelve years.
 
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