Can someone tell if subliminal technology really works? I hear alot of things about it and I don't which is true and which is not. I thought asking someone on this newsgroup would help? Thank you and God be with you. Experiments on so-called subliminal *audio*tapes shows no benefits from the subliminal messages (where messages even existed). What benefits listeners did enjoy seem to have been placebo, which is not to be sneered at. *Video*tape subliminals, on the other hand, do show some effect, but only when the viewer is emotionally receptive to the message. Bryan M. Knight, MSW, PhD                             This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it Author, Health & Happiness with Hypnosis      fax: 514-485-3828      Books, videos, referrals: http://www.odyssee.net/~drknight Professional Book Reviews Moderator,  Self-Help & Psychology  ezine:                         http://cybertowers.com/selfhelp

Can someone tell if subliminal technology really works? I hear alot of things about it and I don't which is true and which is not. I thought asking someone on this newsgroup would help? Thank you and God be with you.

_base_d on my own experience and the below, I must, respectfully, STRONGLY disagree with you. The effect from subliminal audio tapes is teporary/temporal, but it IS subject specific. I tested many on people without their knowledge re: topic and they proven to have impact (variable, of course). Many people try, or turn to, subliminal tapes in their quest for self-improvement. Several years ago, Stanford University released a study denying their viability. Harvey Simon was a pioneer in subliminal programming. He cited several reasons studies come to such false conclusions:         First, the credibility and competency of the manufacturer are paramount.;         Second, you CANNOT put out a maternal or paternal tape that will appeal to 100 percent of the people.;         Third, results can be deceptive for reasons not obvious to those not expert. The new programming may not take hold, or wear off quickly, because it's superimposed over the original conditioning, which has to be erased for the new conditioning to hold.         Fourth, even if the subliminal tape was tailored specifically for the individual subject, it takes at least 21 listenings to hold permanently. Regards, Jim

I've long been a critic of subliminal persuasion technology (for example, see my article at http://www.actwin.com/NLP/random/sublm00.htm).  There, I express the same opinion as the one so concisely stated by Dr. Knight.   My article above, while I believe basically accurate, is admittedly very one-sided, however, because I am criticizing the existing industry of subliminal self-help tapes more than addressing subliminal persuasion in general.   The argument can always be made that none of the ones tested were any good, though a properly made one works.  To play devils advocate, I'll suggest a better balanced article on the theoretical possibility of subliminal persuasion through the 'mere exposure' effect. It can be found at : http://www.gettysburg.edu/~s365942/SUBLIM2.html, an excellent effort by a student to review the field and explain a wider variety of effects than I attempted to tackle.   The 'critics of the subliminal effect' that the author at that page refers to is me, but the hyper_link_ is incorrect.  Use the one I supplied above, instead. Subliminal perception refers to a collection of real effects, there is no doubt about that.  In principle, they could potentially be either visual or audible, though the clearest experimental results occur with visual effects.   There are also some effects demonstrated where subliminal messages could potentially influence opinion or behavior.  There are real limits on this, however, it is not in any way some sort of carte blanche into the unconscious mind, as the self-help tape promoters often imply.  By all indications, it is inferior to audible and visible hypnotic methods as a means of therapy or self-improvement. The truth is only too obvious by now.  If the technology is so tricky or so subtle that the foremost experts in perception and psychological testing can't get them to work when they test them, it is not really what the vendors claim anyway.  It is at best, and doubtfully, a very weak form of hypnotic suggestion, so why even bother ?   Why not learn self-hypnosis and make better use of the suggestion effect ? It doesn't have the same mystique, that's why.  If you want to influence someone in advertising without their knowledge, there may be some potential there, though I doubt it is as much potential as so many people fear.   But if you have the option of using a proven self-improvement method like self-hypnosis instead, why not use it ? _base_d purely on opinion, I'll offer in addition that if someone does come up with a working subliminal audio technology, you'd still be better off knowing what you're hearing, if you can learn to properly use self-hypnosis, because it will usually be more potent, having the force of audible perception as well as suspension of critical judgement. It would require a lot of customization and knowledge to use such a technology to change someone's behavior in a positive and reasonably predictable way.  Certainly not in the realm of generic off-the-shelf self-help, more of a potential tool for therapists, IMO.  Personally, I wouldn't waste my time on subliminal products.   Some additional sources on both subliminal perception and subliminal self-help : http://weber.u.washington.edu/~scd/psych/papers.html http://weber.u.washington.edu/~scd/psych/research.html http://psg.com/~ted/bcskeptics/ratenq/Re6.1-SublimTapes.html http://www.gettysburg.edu/~s334383/PSYCHPRO.html http://sands.psy.cmu.edu/ACT/papers/Reder_Gordon95-abs.html kind regards, Todd I. Stark     This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it     This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it NeuroPsych Research Associates

I posted a response to this in alt.hypnosis, but I wanted to repeat some of this information in a different, more detailed form for sci.skeptic as well. IMO, the published scientific research on subliminal influence indicates the following : 1.  Subliminal audio tapes have never been shown to reliably produce any behavioral effect specific to content, regardless of how well made the tape, or what state the subject was in.  That is not to deny that someone has somehow gotten it working somewhere.  If a working subliminal audio technology is found, it is expected, _base_d on known principles, that the effect of any verbal message will still be very strongly dependent on the expectations and psychological state of the recipient, just as we know from hypnosis and suggestion research. Arbitrary commands simply are not very effective, _base_d on all available research, whether given consciously (explicitly) or unconsciously (implicitly/'subliminal').   The question remains whether any of the extant audio encoding technologies actually allows meaningful stimulus exposure without awareness.  But the result for self-help is pretty clear so far, it just doesn't work.  Either the messages are not there, or there is too much variability in the psychological conditions under which they are used.  The expectations of the user are the key factor in what happens, not the putative content of the tapes.  Aronson and Pratkanis provide summaries of this in their Age of Propaganda (1992, W.H. Freeman), and a past issue of Skeptical Inquirer dealt with it in additional useful detail. 2.  There is sufficient evidence that information provided visually very briefly by tachistoscope (on the order of  under 10 milliseconds) can produce _recognition_effects_, even though there is no conscious awareness of perception. What exactly is perceived, as determined by recognition testing, is simple or complex shapes, faces, and written phrases.   R.F. Bornstein and colleagues have reported this in the literature most convincingly, in the Journal of Personal and Social Psychology, and with a _meta_-analysis of research, published in Psychological Bulletin in 1987.  Dr. Bornstein, Associate Psychology Professor at Gettysburg, did his doctoral dissertation at SUNY on the generalizability of effects of stimuli 'perceived' without awareness on social behavior.   3.  The crux of the argument on subliminal tapes rests on two points : (a) is the technology being tested actually providing a message the equivalent of Bornstein's 5mS images ?   (There is no good evidence to my knowledge yet that any extant audio subliminal technology does this, but it's possible in theory.) (b)  How do _recognition_effects_ relate to behavior changes ?   (In other words, do subliminal messages sneak past our defenses and reprogram our unconscious minds ?) While Bornstein and others were validating the hypothesis that people could recognize meaningful stimuli that they were not aware of perceiving, they also validated another hypothesis.  The secondary hypothesis supported in the experiments was that subliminally perceived images of this type follow the rules expected for mere exposure.   Mere exposure is a term coined to represent the way repeated exposure to a stimulus influences our attitude toward that stimulus.  It's very similar to the repetition principle in hypnosis and auto-suggestion. You keep repeating something, and by simple virtue of constant exposure, we become familiar with it and begin to accept it more readily.   Constant exposure to something that we are not otherwise predisposed to reject tends to make us more comfortable with it.  Of course, constant exposure to an irritant can sometimes have the opposite effect, we get more and more annoyed with it, just as familiarity breeds contempt when it is untrusted.   But over time, the tendency to like something we are more frequently exposed to keeps chipping away at our attitudes. Note that this is very different from the older notion of giving unfiltered and unstoppable commands to the subconscious mind.  We respond to the repeated message behaviorally only if it is emotionally and socially meaningful, not as an arbitrary command or some bizarre form of one-trial learning.   So while it appears various kinds of unperceived  messages are a reality in human life, their effects are not to program us with commands, but to indirectly affect our preferences by repeated exposure as we become more comfortable with them.  While hypnosis uses similar effects, skillful hypnosis goes far beyond simple repetition, and so the use of hypothetical subliminal suggestion is not in any clear way comparable to hypnotic suggestion. One discovery by Bornstein from his experiments was that subliminal effects (5 Ms flashes) registered stronger regognition scores than perceived images (500 mS flashes).  But the 'visible' control flashes, at 500 mS in these same experiments, produced a telltale unexpected result, subjects could not tell polygon shapes apart flashed at this speed.  Bornstein explained this as a 'boredom' effect in the longer exposures.  But this tells us that even the 500 mS exposures were marginally perceived in detail, and were also critically dependent upon attentional factors (novelty) of the stimuli. So the experiment basically compared a barely consciously perceived image with a consciously unperceived one, and showed that the novelty of repeated and varying stimuli were more effective than monotonous stimuli in producing recognition effects, presumably because of the relationship of novelty and attention.   This does _not_ appear to support the argument  that subliminal messages should be acted upon more readily than consciously perceived ones, or that they are treated cognitively as uncritically accepted commands.   It reaffirms that we can _link_ sensory images with drive states outside of our awareness.  It also establishes that in this particular type of stimulus association, there is a critical dependence on the nature and duration of the stimulus.  Long exposure to the same stimulus produces less of an association than brief exposure to the same stimulus, or longer exposure to varying stimuli.   It is a more sophisticated form of conditioning, but not altogether all that different from Pavlovian methods.   kind regards. References : Bornstein, R.F., Kale, A.R., Cornell, K.R., (1990).  Boredom as a Limiting Condition on the Mere Exposure Effect.  Journal of Personal and Social Psychology, 58, 791-800. Bornstein, Robert F. (1987).  Exposure and Affect: Overview and _meta_-Analysis of Research, 1968-1967.  Psychological Bulletin, 106, 265-289. Bornstein, R.F., Leone, R., & Galley, D.J. (1987).  The Generalizability of Subliminal Mere Exposure Effects: Influence of Stimuli of Stimuli Perceived Without Awareness on Social Behavior.  Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 53, 1070-1079. Bornstein, R.F., & D'Agostin, P. R. (1992).  Stimulus Recognition and the Mere Exposure Effect. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 63, 545-552. Bornstein, R. F. (1989).  Subliminal Techniques as Propaganda Tools: Review and Critique.  The Journal of Mind and Behavioir, 10, 231-262. Pratkanis, A. & Aronson, E. (1992) Age of Propaganda; Everyday Use and Abuse of Persuasion, W.H. Freeman Company. Pratkanis, A.R., & Aronson, E. (1991, September).  Subliminal Sorcery: Who is Seducing Whom? USA Today Magazine, pp. 94-98. Some web resources : http://www.gettysburg.edu/~s366165/BORN2.html      (an article by a Gettysburg student _base_d on Bornstein's work on mere exposure). http://sands.psy.cmu.edu/ACT/papers/Reder_Gordon95-abs.html   (an article on the cognitive processing on subliminal stimuli) http://www.nlp.com/NLP/random/sublm00.htm   (one of my articles on subliminal influence and its relationship to peripheral persuasion) http://psg.com/~ted/bcskeptics/ratenq/Re6.1-SublimTapes.html  (Rational Enquirer article by Beyerstein and Eich, critical of subliminal audio self-help)