posted on Dec, 27 2005 @ 06:22 AM
I'm a musician and a music fan. I've also worked in advertising for nearly a quarter of a century. I've haunted concert stages, recording studios,
video edit rooms, post-production facilities and those nasty little chambers behind the one-way mirror from which advertising folk watch, enthralled,
as consumer focus groups respond to our feeble attempts to manipulate their behaviour via the idiot box.
This is what I have learnt, from experience, about subliminal communications:
1. They don't work. It seems our brains never evolved an instinctive capacity to run sounds backwards and work out whether they have any additional
meaning when heard that way. We are not programmed to obey printed instructions flashed across our field of vision for less than a twentieth of a
second. Worry about the power of subliminal communications is based on superstion -- or at least, on an outdated, inaccurate model of how the brain
processes input.
2. They do work. It is, in fact, quite easy to use pictures, sounds, text, film and a variety of other sensory stimuli to make people feel, and even
feel like doing, whatever you want them to. Chances are, moreover, that they'll never figure out they're being manipulated by you until it's too
late. Worse, it is even possible to select your target -- say one person in a crowd of fifty -- and make that person respond as you want them to,
while the other forty-nine are left stone cold. It's quite easy, I say, but only to those in possession of the secret formula.
The secret formula is called artistic talent.
The real experts in subliminal communications are not psychologists and media experts: they're artists. And they've been manipulating the rest of us
for ever. If you find this hard to swallow, consider the following fact: artists have more sexual partners, on average, than any other occupational
group. Oh, I know that isn't *proof*, but how much evidence do you need?
The real rulers of humanity aren't aliens or the Illuminati or the New World Order -- they're members of the international brotherhood of
manipulators of light and sound, the Princes Formerly Known as Artists.