Question Is Subliminal Messaging possible via Gadgets?

Is Subliminal Messaging possible via Gadgets?

'Cause if they aren't, then Goodvibes is a Devisor, as he used subliminal audio to make people more alert in Wednesday Morning 5am ...

Subliminal messages are a 'real thing' since the, I don't know, '40's? '50's?

The delivery mechanism isn't anything great, it's the knowledge of what frequencies and audio levels and how 'complicated' the message can be.

I know there was an experiment where they put single frames repeatedly into a movie with the words 'eat popcorn' and there was a mesurable increase in popcorn sales.

Soo....

And that was instrumental in the banning of subliminal advertising!

I even remember that subliminal images were an important plot point in one of the Columbo episodes.

John.

Phoenix Spiritus wrote: Subliminal messages are a 'real thing' since the, I don't know, '40's? '50's?

The delivery mechanism isn't anything great, it's the knowledge of what frequencies and audio levels and how 'complicated' the message can be.

I know there was an experiment where they put single frames repeatedly into a movie with the words 'eat popcorn' and there was a mesurable increase in popcorn sales.

Soo....

I remember as a class projectionist for the film history course--- I would from time to time get original unedited prints from the 30's and 40's that still had theses ads intact --expl one was in the starting credits for Campbell's soup!

According to Wikipedia, 'Subliminal Stimulus' is only really good for nudging people into doing what they were going to do anyway. The Popcorn Experiment is flawed because, well, you're at a movie theater, you eat popcorn at a movie theater, you're at the snack counter- why not? What it doesn't do is spur you to do things that you wouldn't do, just as Hypnosis, despite the Hollywood booga-booga, can't make you do anything you don't want to do or are actively resistant to doing. There's a reason it's called the Power of Suggestion. As in 'Suggest'- not 'Order' or 'Compel'.

So, if used unscrupulously, you might get a bump in your votes from the undecided sector, or from those who normally don't bother to vote.

BUT, there's a problem there: you see, one of the reasons why subliminal advertising isn't used - besides the fact that it's illegal- is the fact that there's a backlash factor. If you don't want to do whatever the subliminal suggestion is telling you to do, you resent it, if only subconsciously. Do you remember those 'Do Not Steal' suggestions that department stores were supposedly using back in the 1970s? Well, from what I heard, the department stores that tried this did show a drop in 'shrinkage' (retail jargon for 'Shoplifting'), but there was shrinkage of another sort: there was also a noticeable drop in sales and even casual customer visits. People were put off by being 'nagged at', and they took their business elsewhere.

BTW, that last bit is completely hearsay, something that I heard over a gaming table. Take it with a grain of salt.

and, technically speaking, subliminal advertising / messaging via television would not work well before digital broadcasting./ HDTV

the very low pixel count of older televisions and the fairly slow scan rate of the CRT used in them made using a .25 second image to subliminally affect people wasn't effective, the image was clearly visible consciously. HDTV and digital now make the short display times needed possible( .01 second). ( still illegal )

it's also kind of like the foil helmets to stop radio waves from impacting you and reprogramming you.
( study done at MIT by undergraduate showed that these helmets actually increased the strength of radio waves, on frequencies reserved for the US Government. )

watch television? with all that subliminal message brain washing in it?

Kristin Darken wrote:

Dawnfyre wrote: it's also kind of like the foil helmets to stop radio waves from impacting you and reprogramming you.
( study done at MIT by undergraduate showed that these helmets actually increased the strength of radio waves, on frequencies reserved for the US Government. )

Of course they do... its obvious none of these conspiracy types ever watched television in the days of rabbit ears. Aluminum foil was worth its weight in gold on the night of the big season finale or the playoff game.

Aluminium foil wasn't that popular around where I was, it was always pried open metal coat hangers.

Steel wool. The best thing.

Who needs gadgets, to try to get people to be more awake while listening to your radio station all you need is higher tempo music. No really, it doesn't even need to be super fast, or loud, or happy music can change your mood subtly and playing more active music can wake you up.

Jarjaross wrote: Who needs gadgets, to try to get people to be more awake while listening to your radio station all you need is higher tempo music. No really, it doesn't even need to be super fast, or loud, or happy music can change your mood subtly and playing more active music can wake you up.

This.

When busking i've seen people, even if they didn't drop money in the box, would almost always end up walking in time to the music.

It also ends up being used in supermarkets and shopping centres, as a method of regulating footfall, and inducing the "shopping trance" where customers spend more money.

Dawnfyre wrote: and, technically speaking, subliminal advertising / messaging via television would not work well before digital broadcasting./ HDTV

the very low pixel count of older televisions and the fairly slow scan rate of the CRT used in them made using a .25 second image to subliminally affect people wasn't effective, the image was clearly visible consciously. HDTV and digital now make the short display times needed possible( .01 second). ( still illegal )

This is untrue. Pre-HDTV broadcasts were 25 or 30 frames per second. Movies are only 24 frames per second (in the 40s). If it works with "Eat popcorn" for 1/24 of a second it works on an old TV just as well. You don't need .01 seconds to do subliminals. 0.03 works just fine.

The real limitation with old-style scanning tube TVs is not the frequency; it's the fact that the phosphor dots on the screen had a high persistence, BY DESIGN.

Meaning that they weren't really designed to change fast from "light" to "dark" and back, so a single totally-different frame inserted in the middle of the stream worked less like a tachytoscope (flashing one image very fast) and more like a washed-out "watermark" lasting a few tenths of a second.

Yes, but that has nothing to do with the frame rate or refresh rate. That's a physical limitation of the screen. The content broadcast for TVs of the era was sufficient for subliminals.

Semi-related, the French laws against subliminal messages requires images to last at least 4 (or was it 6) frames to avoid being banned. 4 frames is a long time and always reaches the conscious mind. I wonder how that law works in HD. There's probably a minimum persistence "time" for words.

Warren wrote: Subliminal by definition is: (of a stimulus or mental process) below the threshold of sensation or consciousness; perceived by or affecting someone's mind without their being aware of it.

This could and has taken many forms. Everything from the changing of a frame of film with a frame of advertising, to the use of sound, and even hidden images in static advertising.

subtitle positioning to infer drinking this beer will be sexy.

Or desperate.

There was one perfume ad that i saw on a bus-stop nearly twenty years ago. It had a woman with a neo-40's style haircut, bit like the female lead in Bladerunner. Her hand was gesturing so that her fingernails were almost touching a rose.

But seen from the perspective from the upper deck of the bus, the rose looked like a glans from an uncircumsised penis, almost being stroked by her fingernails.

I had to get off the bus and go back and check if it was real. From the ground level, you couldn't see it unless you were deliberately looking for it, but from the angle from above it was incredibly obvious.

I'm not sure what this form of perspective-skewed pictures is called.

I've seen other versions of this sort of thing since. there was a Disney-branded icecream, where the shape of the icecream was a silhouette of Mickey Mouse's head.

On the external packaging was an angled-perspective picture of the icecream, looking like someone had taken a bite from it, with a few drops of melted icecream running off of it. Looking at it when it was sitting on the shelf in an upright freezer, in a display stand, if you were at the correct angle, it looked like a silhouette of an ejaculating penis.

I wasn't sure if this was just in my head, so i asked my flatmate to come back to the supermarket with me, and he saw it too.

This stuff is well-designed, ubquitous, and insidious. These days i try to avoid going anywhere there is advertising, or logo's, but i live in a city, so it doesn't make my life easy.

Shades of Roddy Doyle's "They Live!"

And that's just scratching the surface of the tricks that stores use. Another is that they include higher priced items in order to make the ordinary items seem more reasonable. I'm told that when the first bread-makers were invented, they didn't sell at all until the company started offering a larger and more expensive version. Then the regular ones sold just fine.

This is why Costco puts their computers and jewelry at the front of the store where everyone will pass them.

Kristin Darken wrote:

Mister D wrote:

Jarjaross wrote: Who needs gadgets, to try to get people to be more awake while listening to your radio station all you need is higher tempo music. No really, it doesn't even need to be super fast, or loud, or happy music can change your mood subtly and playing more active music can wake you up.

This.

When busking i've seen people, even if they didn't drop money in the box, would almost always end up walking in time to the music.

It also ends up being used in supermarkets and shopping centres, as a method of regulating footfall, and inducing the "shopping trance" where customers spend more money.

<-- sound designer, remember. I do that sort of stuff for a paycheck.

I just realized I should have messaged you when I was writing Mice in the Churchhouse with Domoviye. I could have asked you about how far to take Peppers powers.