Yesterday Mike Reeves-McMillan has commented on one of my article on subliminal advertising. He opine that its a hoax. I have heard like this earlier too. There is no scientific evidence to claim that subliminal advertising works.
I have read it in Vilayannor S Ramachandran’s world famous best seller The Phantoms In The Brain, that people has something called an unconscious perception. Ms Diane, an Italian women who lost her eyesight after having suffered from carbon monoxide poisoning was experimented by Dr.David Milner (University of St.Andrews, Scotland).
He asked Dane to post a letter through a vertical slot.Even though Dane can not see the slot, when her hand neared the slot, it turned automatically to vertical and posted the letter exactly through the slot. This phenomenon is called “blind sight“
This happen because we have two different visual pathways an old one and a new one. The old pathway goes to parietal cortex from the eye through a structure called superior colliculus. This pathway is for subconscious vision using which we swivel our eyeballs and turn our neck for focusing our vision. This happens without our knowledge most of the time.
The newer pathway (eye–>lateral geniculate body–> occipital lobe –> higher visual areas) is for conscious vision using which we see our friends, read books etc etc.
In Dane’s case, her newer pathway was damaged, but her subconscious vision through her older pathway is intact. That help her see everything even though she is not aware of that.
That means everything get registered somewhere in her brain even though her consciousness do not detect that.
Consciousness is just another property of mind. Scientists has found that when we do an action, we start it earlier than we are consciously aware of that, anyway that is another story.
Sex, anxiety, fear, love, anger, whatever it is, every emotion originate from paleocortex (evolutionarily old brain). Activities in this part of brain is almost independent from the neocortex which has developed later in evolution. Even though our consciousness knows these emotions happen inside the brain, they can happen in older organisms without a conscious brain.
So a subconscious perception can get registered in our mind in connection with a subconscious information like emotions.
Subliminal advertisers use this trick to in advertising. They hide an image in their advertising. The hidden image will enter in the brain bypassing the consciousness. Such an image, if has a sexual content, excites our sexual feelings subconsciously. At the same time the conscious mind is seeing the brand name or reading the product description.
The sexual excitation in paleocortex can get connected to the brand name in the neocortex. ( Two excited parts of brain gets interconnections by synaptic strengthening, it is the Hebbs rule ). If we hide a sexual item in a Pepsi adverisement, Pepsi will get blend with sex which is a natural emotion. This will convert “Pepsi” also into a natural emotion in our mind. This is the science behind subliminal advertising.
This hypothesis is to be vigorously tested, for the time being we have enough scientific background to believe subliminal advertising may work.
Related posts:
Thanks for submitting this post to our blog carnival. We just published the 41st edition of Brain Blogging and your article was featured!
Thank you.
Sincerely,
[ November 8th, 2008 at 4:41 pm ]Shaheen