I feel like I’ve stumbled upon a giant prank that everyone is in on but me. Are “subliminals” real? Do they actually work? Or is everyone just delusional and people are lying to themselves by the thousands in various threads and YouTube comment sections?
In: Biology
Yes they are real but not in the way most commonly portrayed.
Our brains do alot of filtering of the inputs from our senses. Certain things draw our attention more than others but our brains still remember some of those details we don’t pay attention too at the time or that happen too fast for us to fully process.
The concept of subliminals is that messages can be hidden with the details of something else so that it is internalized in the viewer without them realizing that. The problem is that a message that’s too complex with draw our attention and it won’t be subliminal anymore. Simple things like flashing a number on screen in a video might influence somebody if you ask them to pick a random number after. But flashing a message to bake a cake with an attached recipe will almost certainly fail.
A good example of everyday subliminals is product placement in movies and tv. You’re focusing on the characters dialog or actions and don’t really notice the can of Pepsi in the back ground.
Subliminal messages are messages that are hidden in a piece of media, like a single frame saying “Buy McDonalds” or something.
The idea was that while you wouldn’t be conscious of having seen it, your unconscious mind would and that you could be influenced to buy something/believe something.
Covert mind control basically.
It doesn’t work.
If you can’t even tell what it was you saw then you aren’t going to remember what you didn’t see. It’s way more effective to just show someone eating a Big Mac in a commercial or as product placement, because then you can actually process what it is you’re looking at.
Here’s the [snopes article](https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/subliminal-advertising/) going more into detail about its history and stuff. Short version is some guy faked research results claiming it worked and the idea got embedded in pop culture.
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