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.
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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