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Hypnosis in Advertising;
Marketing and Advertising,
February 7th, 2008
“In 2007, to mark the 50th
anniversary of James Vicary's original
experiment, it was recreated at the
International Brand Marketing Conference MARKA
2007. As part of the "Hypnosis, subconscious
triggers and branding" presentation 1,400
delegates watched part the opening credits of
the film PICNIC that was used in the original
experiment. They were exposed to 30 subliminal
cuts over a 90 second period. When asked to
choose one of two fictions brands, Delta and
Theta, 81% of the delegates picked Delta the
brand suggested by the subliminal cuts.
To commemorate its 50th
anniversary, the Vicary experiment was
replicated at the International Branding
Conference, MARKA2007 as part of the Hypnosis,
Subconscious Triggers and Branding presentation
by Hypnotherapist and IDM Fellow Jim Brackin.
The 1,400 delegates watched the opening credits
of the movie used in the original experiment,
PICNIC into which subliminal messages had been
placed at six second intervals. Then, the
delegates were asked to choose between two
fictitious brands. One brand “Delta” had been
suggested using the subliminal messages and the
other “Theta” had not.
When choosing between the two
brands, 81% of the audience chose “Delta” in
preference to “Theta”. This suggests a
convincing substantiation of Vicary’s results.
“Even though this technique is 50 years old, and
there are more sophisticated techniques being
used in advertising today, this demonstrates the
powerful influence of subliminal messages” said
Brackin.”
Source:
http://bizcovering.com/marketing-and-advertising/hypnosis-in-advertising/
“Press cutting: Subliminal
promises; The Daily
Telegraph, April
17th, 2007
It is common knowledge that
an athlete will train harder for a high-stakes
competition. Now scientists have found that even
subliminal promises can drive us on. Professor
Chris Frith [UCL Institute of Neurology], author
of ‘Making up the Mind’, and colleagues at the
Université Pierre et Marie Curie in Paris,
showed volunteers subliminal images of either a
penny or a £1 coin and then asked them to
squeeze a hand grip. They told the volunteers
that the harder they gripped, the more money
they would earn. Overall, volunteers squeezed
harder after seeing the £1 coin than after
seeing the penny, even when they weren’t aware
that they had seen either. These experiments
took place in an MRI scanner, revealing that a
brain region called the ventral pallidum was
involved. … ”
Source:
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/news-articles/0704/07041702
Subliminal Advertising Leaves Its Mark On The
Brain;
Science Daily, March 9th,
2007
"University College London
researchers have found the first physiological
evidence that invisible subliminal images do
attract the brain's attention on a subconscious
level. Subjects' brains did respond to the
object even when they were not conscious of it.
The wider implication for the study, published
in Current Biology, is that techniques such as
subliminal advertising, now banned in the UK but
still legal in the USA, certainly do leave their
mark on the brain.
Using
fMRI, the study looked at whether an image you
aren't aware of ¬-- but one that reaches the
retina -- has an impact on brain activity in the
primary visual cortex, part of the occipital
lobe. Subjects' brains did respond to the object
even when they were not conscious of having seen
it.
Subjects wore red-blue filter glasses that
projected faint pictures of everyday objects
(such as pliers and an iron) to one eye and a
strong flashing image known as 'continuous flash
suppression' to the other. This recently
developed technique effectively erases subjects'
awareness of the faint images so that they were
unable to localise the faint images on screen.
At the same time, subjects performed either an
easy task -- picking out the letter T from a
stream of letters, or a task that required more
concentration in which subjects had to pick out
the white N or blue Z from the same stream.
During
the harder task, the subjects' brains blocked
out the subliminal image and the fMRI scan did
not detect any associated neural activity. This
finding -- that the brain does not pick up on
subliminal stimuli if it is too busily occupied
with other things -- shows that some degree of
attention is needed for even the subconscious to
pick up on subliminal images.
Dr Bahador Bahrami, of the
UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience and the
UCL Department of Psychology, said: "What's
interesting here is that your brain does log
things that you aren't even aware of and can't
ever become aware of. We show that there is a
brain response in the primary visual cortex to
subliminal images that attract our attention --
without us having the impression of having seen
anything. These findings point to the sort of
impact that subliminal advertising may have on
the brain. What our study doesn't address is
whether this would then influence you to go out
and buy a product. I believe that it's likely
that subliminal advertising may affect our
decisions -- but that is just speculation at
this point."
Dr
Bahrami said: "This is exciting research for the
scientific community because it challenges
previous thinking -- that what is subconscious
is also automatic, effortless and unaffected by
attention. This research shows that when your
brain doesn't have the capacity to pay attention
to an image, even images that act on our
subconscious simply do not get registered."
The
research challenges the theory of the pioneering
American psychologist and philosopher, William
James, (1842--1910), who said: "We are conscious
of what we attend to -- and not conscious of
what we do not attend to".
The
team's findings show that there are situations
where consciousness and attention don't go hand
in hand.”
Source:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/03/070308121938.htm
Subliminal advertising may
work after all; New
Scientist, April 28th,
2006
"Johan Karremans at the
University of Nijmegen in the Netherlands and
his colleagues wanted to see if they could
subliminally induce volunteers to favour a
particular brand of drink, Lipton Ice. For
comparison, they chose a brand of mineral water
called Spa Rood, as it was deemed to be as well
known as Lipton Ice and equally
thirst-quenching.
The researchers asked 61
volunteers to perform a nonsense task - counting
how many times a string of capital Bs was
infiltrated by a lower-case b as they flashed up
on a screen. The B strings appeared for 300
milliseconds each, and before them, a string of
Xs always appeared, flanking a 23-millisecond
subliminal message. For the experimental group,
the message was "Lipton Ice". Controls saw "Nipeic
Tol".
When the volunteers had
completed this task, they were asked to choose
between Lipton Ice and Spa Rood by clicking one
of two keys - though they were told this was
part of a separate study. They were also asked
how likely they would be to order either of
these drinks if they were sitting on a terrace,
and to rate how thirsty they were. Volunteers
who rated themselves as thirsty were more likely
to choose Lipton Ice, but only if they had
received the subliminal message.
In a second study the
researchers made half of their 105 volunteers
thirsty by giving them a very salty candy before
the task. As predicted, among the thirsty,
subliminal messaging had an impact. Eighty per
cent of thirsty volunteers who had been exposed
to the Lipton Ice message chose that product,
compared to only 20 per cent of the controls.
“Eighty per cent of thirsty
volunteers who had been exposed to the Lipton
Ice message chose that product” The thirstier
volunteers rated themselves to be, the more
likely they were to choose Lipton Ice. Those who
were not thirsty were only slightly more likely
to pick the iced tea (Journal of Experimental
Social Psychology, DOI:
10.1016/j.jesp.2005.12.2005).” "Priming only
works when the prime is goal-relevant," says
Karremans.”
Source:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19025494.400-subliminal-advertising-may-work-after-all.html
You may learn something and
not even know it;
Science Daily, May 26, 2005
“Boston university
psychologists find neurological mechanism for
subliminal learning
Watch out — you may learn
something and not even know it, says Takeo
Watanabe, an associate professor of psychology
at Boston University’s Center for Brain and
Memory. Watanabe and his team recently
pinpointed the mechanism that makes subliminal
learning work. Watanabe will present the team’s
findings at the American Psychological Society
meeting in Los Angeles, May 27 and 28.
Long considered the realm of
science fiction, subliminal learning occurs when
individuals are influenced by a stimulus they
are unaware of, like words played back below the
threshold of hearing or images flashed on screen
faster than the eye can perceive. Watanabe’s
recent findings grew out of his team’s previous
work in which they established that subliminal
learning is real and that the brain is capable
of learning without consciously focused
attention.
In this latest research,
Watanabe and his team uncovered the mechanism
that primes the subconscious, enabling
individuals to learn a task without actually
realizing it. They also showed this type of
learning is retained, giving a new
interpretation to how long a learned behavior is
retained in the visual cortex — an area of the
brain thought to be fixed very early in life.
To establish how the
mechanism worked, Watanabe's team devised a
series of perception tests. Initially,
participants watched a computer screen as a
series of letters flashed by and were instructed
to signal when they saw a gray letter. As
individuals concentrated on watching for gray
letters, sets of dots jiggled on the screen in
areas that were at the periphery of the visual
field. Five to 10 percent of the dots moved
together in a coherent direction -- a fraction
smaller than that easily detectible by the human
eye. Letters flashing on the screen were
randomly paired with the moving dots.
From this test, the
researchers established the length of time it
took each participant to identify the direction
and coherent movement of the dots on the screen.
Participants were next
exposed to a similar set of computer screens,
this time with the fraction of the moving dots
faded to just below the level of human
perception. As participants watched for gray
letters to appear in the center of the screen,
the imperceptible dots moved coherently just
outside their field of vision. Participants were
exposed again and again to the imperceptible,
moving dots as they signalled the gray letters
and were later tested to see if their
recognition time had improved.
In a subsequent round of
tests, participants showed marked improvement in
the time they took to recognize the coherently
moving dots. Watanabe says this improvement
demonstrates the participants learned to
recognize and better identify the movement
during the trials, even though their attention
was focused somewhere else and the moving dots
were faded to the point of being imperceptible.
The experiment differed from
previous studies in having participants focus on
something other than the moving dots -- in this
case, the letters on the screen -- while being
exposed to the movement of the imperceptible
dots. Watanabe says that having subjects focus
on letters activated an internal "reward"
pathway in their brains, priming their
subconscious to learn more efficiently.
According to Watanabe, the
visual cortex, the area of the brain tested in
his experiments, has long been considered
unchangeable in humans past 6 months of age.
Watanabe found it could be "changed" and that
the changes could last for a considerable
period; individuals were tested again six months
after the initial trials and show little or no
deterioration in their ability to recognize
moving dots in a visually noisy background.
"It's possible that other
parts of the brain could work this way too,"
Watanabe says. "People might be able to improve
their pronunciation of a new language, if it's
presented simply, without paying attention. It's
possible the brain could be changed without a
lot of effort."
The Watanabe group plans to
repeat their experiments using functional
magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, to peer
into the brains of participants. Using fMRI, the
team will essentially be able to look directly
into the portion of the brain involved in
subliminal learning.”
Source:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/05/050526225858.htm
Subliminal study shows
subconscious learning is possible;
New Scientist, 25 October, 2001
Subconscious learning
probably is possible, say US researchers. What's
more, subconscious learning may affect our
conscious decisions - without our realising it.
Takeo Watanabe and his
colleagues at Boston University found that
people who had watched a particular direction of
subliminal dot movement during a letter-naming
trial were significantly better at picking it
out later.
The finding challenges the
idea that attention is an essential element of
the learning process. "Attention can make
learning more efficient," says Watanabe, "but
it's not necessary."
Watanabe dismisses gimmicks
such as cassettes that purport to teach you
while you sleep. But he speculates that
listening to a foreign language being spoken at
low volume - loud enough that your brain can
perceive it but not so loud that you are aware -
could improve a person's pronunciation and
listening skills. "It could be useful," he says.
Cognitive aspects such as
sentence structure and semantics would not be
affected, he suspects.
Dancing dots
Watanabe's team asked
volunteers to name certain letters presented on
a screen. Meanwhile, behind the letters, dots
danced randomly - or so it appeared. In fact,
one in 20 shared a direction. This was just
below the threshold of conscious perception.
The volunteers did this
letter-naming task for an hour every day for a
month. Then they were asked to do another series
of tests. These involved watching moving dots
and identifying any underlying pattern, or
saying whether two displays of dots moved in the
same direction. In both of these cases only
about one in 10 dots were moving coherently - an
activity that was just above the conscious
threshold.
The team found that people
who had watched a particular direction of
movement during the first series of tests were
significantly better at picking it out later.
Advertising influence
"I think it's one of the
nicest sets of data I've seen for learning
outside of perceptual awareness," says Phil
Merikle, at the University of Waterloo in
Canada.
But there's an important
conclusion that the authors don't stress, he
says. The study shows that what the volunteers
learned subconsciously during the trials
influences their conscious experience.
"This perceptual learning is
influencing how they see the world," says
Merikle. Subconscious learning may affect our
conscious decisions - without our knowing it.
"It's what advertisers have known all along: if
we just keep the exposure rate up, people will
be influenced."
Journal reference: Nature (vol
413, p 844)
Source:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn1476-subliminal-study-shows-subconscious-learning-is-possible.html
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