“Advertising men once used it to try to increase sales of popcorn, and Formula One teams have been accused of indulging in it to sell cigarettes. But it turns out that subliminal messaging – flashing an image or words on a screen for a fraction of a second – works best if it leaves the viewer in a state of fear.
An experiment by British researchers has found that even though subliminal messages are shown so briefly that the human eye cannot consciously read them, the brain is particularly good at picking up on the emotional meaning of a word if it is negative.
Scientists at University College London believe the results of the study, in which participants correctly identified when a subliminally transmitted word had negative connotations more than seven times out of 10, shows that humans are programmed at a sub-conscious level to respond to any stimulus that contains a potential threat.”
Read more at The Independent (Thanks Tracey)
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It’s why religion is so successful – they trade on fear
that’s very inneresting…it splains the effectiveness of those damn negative political ads.
Definitely. I was recently dared to watch some stupid video that apparently had ‘satanic’ messages in it. I don’t believe in Satan, so I had no trouble watching it, but afterwards, I was very scared. I couldn’t understand why, because the video was just a black and white film of people swimming; but when you slowed it down, you saw all these scary faces that were flashed at random parts of the film. I had picked up on the scary faces, but had not consciously seen them.
This reminds me of a classic Bill Hicks sketch. Religious loons in the USA claimed that if you played some rock records backwards you could hear subliminal Satanic messages. Bill reckoned that if someone played records backwards then they were Satan.
@PommieBarsteward I hear some people think that there is a satanic message hidden in…..wait for it…..the Pokemon theme tune!