Brainwashing and The Media

The other day I rented a movie from Blockbuster. My girlfriend and I sat in the living room that evening with a bag of popcorn and started the movie. We were sitting together on the couch with about three feet separating us. Thirty minutes later I was immersed in the movie. My thoughts for a moment switched to my girlfriend and when I turned to speak to her she was gone. It turns out she went to the kitchen to answer the phone and was having a conversation. The disturbing thing to me was that she walked directly in front of me to leave the room and I didn�t notice. I wanted to know how this could happen. The following is my research.



When you watch TV, brain activity switches from the left to the right hemisphere. In fact, experiments conducted by researcher Herbert Krugman showed that while viewers are watching television, the right hemisphere is twice as active as the left, a neurological anomaly. The brain's left hemisphere, which processes information logically and analytically, tunes out while the person is watching TV. The crossover from left to right releases a surge of the body's natural opiates: endorphins, which include beta-endorphins and enkephalins. Endorphins are structurally identical to opium and its derivatives (morphine, codeine, heroin, etc.). Activities that release endorphins (also called opioid peptides) are usually habit-forming (we rarely call them addictive). These include cracking knuckles, strenuous exercise, and orgasm. External opiates act on the same receptor sites (opioid receptors) as endorphins, so there is little difference between the two.

Psycho physiologist Thomas Mulholland found that after just 30 seconds of watching television the brain begins to produce alpha waves, which indicates torpid (almost comatose) rates of activity. Alpha brain waves are associated with unfocused, overly receptive states of consciousness. High frequency alpha waves do not occur normally when the eyes are open. In fact, Mulholland's research implies that watching television is neurologically analogous to staring at a blank wall. Regardless of the content being presented, television essentially turns off your nervous system.

Further research revealed that watching TV produces similar brain waves to hypnosis. When you watch TV, you passively absorb all the information without being aware of it. Later, when your brain needs to decide about something, it automatically trawls your mental database for relevant information. Your brain doesn't differentiate between information received from the real world or TV, this information dictates your responses to any stimuli.

In an attempt to influence and persuade the masses, advertising addresses the psychological needs and wants of the consumer. North American society has a vested interest in reinforcing an individual's failure to achieve sexual maturity. By exploiting unconscious fears, the media guarantees substitutes through commercial products and consumption. Sexuality, as reinforced by the media, is a most viable marketing technology. Repressed sexual fear, much like all types of repression, makes humans highly vulnerable to subliminal management and control technology. Through subliminal appeals and reinforcements of these fears, people can be seduced into believing almost anything. Advertisers have tremendous power to influence the thoughts and actions of society.

Violence in news preys on Americans fears of war, death and financial ruin to name a few. These fears are ingrained in every human�s primal nature. If society is in constant fear of losing their �way of life� they would never question supporting the military and political complex thereby giving these groups the ability to guide society in a direction that allows them to achieve their hidden agendas and personal goals.

�Human brains were never designed to handle the stream of gory, violent, heartbreaking images that come at you during a typical newscast these days. The consequences of consuming these broadcasts are many-fold. From my perspective as a mental health counselor, I'm seeing more depression, insomnia and anxiety surface.�

The TV 'world' becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: the mass mind takes shape, its participants acting according to media-derived impulses and believing them to be their own personal choices arising out of their own desires and needs. In this situation, whoever controls the screen controls the future, the past, and the present.
Considering the hypnotic state of the brain when viewing movies, mental imagery, biased news reporting, and advertising you soon realize we don't have a chance in hell to live an un-manipulated life.


[Edited on 29-5-2004 by kinglizard]

I suppose after your research and my own thoughts, I do believe that television and it's material "feed" the minds what the creators want the masses to absorb. I understand as well that when watching tv, people just sit, while the brain receives what it is fed, we don't really think while watching tv, but rather, we become the experience of the tv programs themselves.

Later, when it comes time to make choices, we do call upon these "artificial" experiences fed to our brains. These tv commercials and movies with violence are almost like implants into the human mind, because they are not of our own experience, but what the tv puts into us.

Tv shapes so much of our lives, that we act only on what the tv dislplays, what to do, buy, how to think, etc.

It's almost like losing free will, but acting out the will of the tv material itself, when really the tv is not our own experience.

Think about how early in life this brainwashing starts. Apparently the �programming� starts in infancy. Some mothers call the TV the babysitter because the normally rambunctious children sit down in front of it and are drawn into that world. Cartoons start them off with the life long interest in violence.

Alot of things besides watching tv can hypnotize you. reading, daydreaming, listening to music, etc.

I think something can only influence you if you give it the power to. But I have also found myself not noticing things around me when Im watching tv. It kind of sucks you in.

Well, technically, you have no power over it since it's working suggestion through your subcon mind. When you watch TV you are in receptive mode as opposed to interaction mode. It's as if you downloading info into your subconscious mind like you would to a hard drive. You are watching fantasy unfold yet at the same time the same medium is being used for non-fiction news. So you have an outlet or medium that switches back and forth between fantasy and reality(thining that line). Keep in mind that this while under a semi-conscious state. This is of course not mentioning the fact of redundancy and it's effect. Editing and angles are also played to a maximum effect.

I rarely watch TV, not only because it does no longer interests me, but also because it is a very powerful tool for manipulation. It kills me when I see parents sticking their children in front of a TV. Kids are easily susceptible to the power of suggestion. And it's one of the reasons I believe that we have so many kids diagnosed as ADD (or ADHD).


[Edited on 6-3-2004 by Aliceinwonderland]

I agree guys, here is an interesting take on Advertising by Fred Reed off his website www.fredoneverything.net...

December 22, 2003

I�ve found a socially conscious use for nerve gas. Advertisers. I�m going to embalm them with it. I�ve cooked up about a gallon. The recipe is on the internet: 3,4-diethylbenzopolywannacrackerine. The feedstock is triphenyldeoxymoron�but I�m getting technical. Anyway it�s great stuff. If I threw it out the window, it would kill every fly between here and the Guatemalan border.


(Watch. In five minutes the FBI will have ninja�d-out agents swinging through my window on ropes, like federal pi�atas, to arrest me for Terrorist Thought. I�ll have to replace the screens. The price of liberty is mosquitoes.)


I thought the other day, Doesn�t everyone see how crazy this wretched ad racket has gotten to be? How unpleasant it makes much of life? Maybe not. That�s the frightening thing. The Skinnerian mind-warp�conditioning us suburban rats to push the reward lever�has become ubiquitous, normal, like air: the reason for everything. Everything else is just props.


Isn�t it true? We have a global economy founded on sinus drainage, headaches, winged sanitary napkins, soap that will make all the girls want you, and cars without characteristics except that they swish through lovely countryside containing people far more handsome than you will ever be.


I must get three hundred emails a day for Viagra, or secret Eastern training methods to make mine taller, stronger, or faster than a speeding bullet. It�s wild. If I bought it all I could put up monster antennas and skyscrapers, oil rigs, weird phallic monuments, and maybe raise the dead.


The lobotomy box is all ads, with a sprinkle of stupid shows for people with the IQ of an avocado. Yes, I�ve heard the sheepish shuck-and-jive toe-dance about �But Fred�there are some good things�the History Channel and�and Discovery.� Yeah: Sharks, Nazis, and pyramids. The absolute minimum necessary so that people who can�t be alone with themselves will gawp at singing deodorant applicators.


Radio is the same: Unlistenable, because of ads. Roads? Likewise. Our highways wend in painful ugliness through endless billboards in what once was lovely countryside. Anyone who objects is a tree-hugging commie trying to destroy capitalism and the constitutional right of nasal decongestants to self-expression.


Even in your house you can�t escape. The phone rings every five minutes because some larcenous swine wants to sell you aluminum siding. The web: You have to buy pop-up killers so you don�t get pitches for Dory Does Dallas. You get pop-up ads for pop-up killers. The outsides of buses crawl with ads, as do the insides of buses. Stadiums are lined with ads. Mailboxes bulge with urgings to switch from one to another usurious credit card designed to make you an indentured slave of Bank of America. Everything is advertising and the attempt to escape from it.


It used to be we had magazines supported by advertising. Now we have extended advertisements pretending to be magazines. The male toy-fetish mags�computers, cameras, scuba, motorcycles, guns�are mostly ads, and the purported editorial content is written, if not by the companies, at least for the purpose of selling their various contrivances.


How did we get here? The old economic model was that you increased your wealth by forming an army and attacking villages. You killed the men, raped the women and farm animals, and stole what was left. Then you imposed crushing taxes at the point of a sword, but without requiring the filling out of forms. It was strenuous but not tasteless. With the pernicious discovery of democracy, a new means to the same end became necessary. Sell�em junk.


The Industrial Revolution was the real villain. Supply�of virtually everything�outstripped demand. Used to be, nobody had squat. In say 1850, there was a vast pent-up demand for refrigerators, air-conditioning, and computers, even if nobody had heard of any of them. So when some rascal invented, say, a washing machine, everybody charged out to buy one. A washing machine actually had a purpose, so you didn�t have to advertise. Pretty soon everybody had everything he needed or could reasonably want. Warm dry house, plenty to eat, appliances, car, shoes.


Yet factories in their reckless lunge toward ill-considered fecundity produced more junk than anyone in his right mind could conceivably want. Things kept getting incontinently invented. You know, electric toothbrushes with New Miracle Bristles, or strangely colored toothpastes.


The stuff piled up and threatened to unbalance the planet, causing it to break into asteroids. Advertising exists to sell people things they wouldn�t buy if left to themselves, spreading the weight of the electric tooth brushes and thereby saving the earth.


So the central question of human survival became: How do you make a once-reasonable man want a 400-horsepower riding mower with farm attachment, snow-plow blade, internet connectivity and guest bedroom, so as to cut an eighth of an acre of grass around a suburban box that he doesn�t really like? Answer: Carefully crafted psychologically astute advertising appealing to (for example) the man�s gadget fetish and the woman�s desire for security and social standing.


That and the Winter Holiday Season.


Now, much of advertising doesn�t increase demand. It just divides the spoils and increases the price. Face it, people only need a limited amount of toilet paper, no matter how well it sings�jazz riffs, three-part harmony, it doesn�t matter. Advertising for cold remedies doesn�t make you catch more colds. But it can make you buy �New! Improved! Naso-Rooter! with Trifeculum,� this being a sticky red goop containing exactly the same ingredients as �New! Better than ever! Drip-clogulan!,� a sticky green liquid.


I�ll guess that the ads account for maybe ninety percent of the price of products like aspirin. Aspirin unannounced would cost three cents a trainload. In economic terms, it may be less important than the ads.


All of this makes life hideous. Can you imagine a radio station that just played music and otherwise shut up?


I�m going to fix the sumbitches. Yep, with my trusty nerve gas. I�m gonna hire two huge, sweaty, nasty-looking professional wrestlers, puffed up on steroids like hairy dirigibles. Jesse Ventura might do. Or Arnold. (Governors may actually be becoming useful.)


The next time someone sends me Viagra spam, or sings bewitchingly to me about wonderful gentle laxatives, the wrestlers are going body-slam the rascal, and I�m going to pour the whole everlovin� gallon of nerve venom down his throat, glurgle. And then stuff in a wad of Silly Putty to keep it there, or an old gym sock that hasn�t been washed in its life. Jesse probably has some.


And I�m gonna sit back with a cold one and watch that sucker twitch. Ha.

Hidden Persuasion?

A subliminal message, borrowed from psychology, refers to the fact that we are able to perceive or apprehend something even though we are not actually conscious of it through our physical senses. Hence, we are made aware of some bit of information by an appeal directly to our subconscious minds, without our being aware of seeing, hearing, or feeling the information itself. The method has already been tested with some success in the movies, where a special projector is used to flash a brief commercial on the screen for only 3/3000th second. In a second method that has been tried over the air by an independent TV station, the subliminal ad is put on one frame out of 250 frames in a film loop. The commercial is sent out once every 11 seconds more or less steadily on some of the station�s programs.

Is Subliminal Advertising Effective?

Anything unusual in this advertisement ?




Do you see the "excited" man ?

Now look at the advertisement above one more time.




But tobacco companies wouldn't do something like that.



[Edited on 20-5-2004 by kinglizard]

I never would have noticed that Camel man, but maybe it is most directed to men who smoke it to be more virile??

Anyway, I rmember all those great books by Vanca Packard like The hidden persuaders and the Status Seekers. I just checked amazon--they all seem to be out of print. But, he was talking about that in the 60s-70s. When many thought he was making it up. He was ahead of his time, is all.

This is a Jack Daniel's Whisky Add. I am sure that if you use your imagination you will have little difficulty in identify two faces glaring at each other in the glass.

How about some tuna on a bed of rice.

You got some nice subliminal advertisements there my friend.

About your first post... Maybe they're narrowing down our attention span to a straight line. Maybe they're trying to destroy the multitasking abilities of our brain.

Originally posted by m0rbid
You got some nice subliminal advertisements there my friend.

About your first post... Maybe they're narrowing down our attention span to a straight line. Maybe they're trying to destroy the multitasking abilities of our brain.

They know our brains are in a hypnotic state when we watch TV and in that frame of mind we are susceptible to unseen and underling imagery and sounds. They can make us think anything they want. The disturbing thing is that we will ultimately think it was our own idea, not suspecting any manipulation. If someone tells you something you will give it thought and believe or not believe. But if you come to your own conclusion on a subject you are more likely to fight like hell for that thought because it was your logical thinking that leads you to it. That�s what the media uses against us. Your logical conclusion was manipulated by the media, it wasn�t your thought you were fighting for, it was theirs from the very beginning.

Advertisers do put in easter eggs. Hidden messages and such. I can tell the original poster is still a young fella, when you get older and have kids you will eventually notice that you can watch a tv program and ignore just about anything. The attention focuses and you tune out anything the brain isn't interested in. The brain is marvelous. Like JustAnIllusion said, you can do it with reading or just day dreaming.
How about this, your driving somewhere and realize you do not recall the last 8 miles or whatever. I do this sometimes, thinking about something and realize you were basically on auto pilot the whole time.

V

Talk of subliminal advertising puts me in mind of this site that I ran across previously.

www.albinoblacksheep.com...

Originally posted by Variable
you can do it with reading or just day dreaming.

How about this, your driving somewhere and realize you do not recall the last 8 miles or whatever.

The issue is what�s being put in your head while you are in this hypnotic state. If you are day dreaming and experiencing this type of thing the government and media aren�t programming your subconscious it�s just your own mind. However if you are watching TV or a movie and experience this you can be programmed by subliminal messages and imagery while you are in this vulnerable hypnotic state.

The Media's spin in things is also something to consider. For example, I haven't seen any news agency give a fair analysis on Ephedra. Everything is negative and demonizes claiming it will kill you.

Take the death of Baltimore Orioles' pitcher Steve Belcher. The media was so quick to jump on the bandwagon of "the ephedra killed him!" What they failed to mention was that the fellow was overweight with borderline high blood pressure, an enlarged heart and an abnormal liver.

These are all reasons for NOT taking the drug, thus the WARNING on the bottle.

But through several other cases, with similiar bias on information, the media has successfully manipulated the view of the masses as to view ephedra as a drug that kills!

Now I just wonder how many other news stories that I may be not as informed on has the media spinned to effect my opinion on? Guess it's best just to question everything and "Deny Ignorance."


Some info taken from: www.fumento.com...

Originally posted by kinglizard
The issue is what�s being put in your head while you are in this hypnotic state. ... However if you are watching TV or a movie and experience this you can be programmed by subliminal messages and imagery while you are in this vulnerable hypnotic state.

I believe the actual goal of using TV in this manner is to induce society into a permanent hypnotic state. In an effort to completely dominate minds, the government is using this medium to slowly lull the populace to sleep so the messages will stop being subliminal and start being more overt. I would believe that if you compared a person who was "raised on TV" versus someone with limited or no TV viewing, the person who had been exposed to more TV would be far more succeptable to suggestion, through the media or through simpler means, like peer pressure or societial influence.


[Edited on 21-5-2004 by el_topo]

The real question here is NOT what "they" are doing to "us" but how I can change myself so that it does not make any difference. If I can alter my expectations and beliefs to short out these messages they will have no effect.
The old saying is true,
If you're tired of people pushing your buttons, disconnect them.

I'm new here, are there any threads going about "Anti-Mind Control"?

I agree about people being brainwashed in the media. It is not just the media, but vurtually everywhere.