Jamming the Signal: Better Living Through Subliminal Messages

A little over ten years ago, I discovered a program that shipped with my screensaver package called xsublim. This program (which no longer ships with xscreensaver, and in fact no longer builds) takes a text file, splits it into individual words, and then displays each word on random place on your screen for a tiny fraction of a second. Experimenting with it led me on an interesting path through the backwoods of cognitive science.

XSublim was written as a lark, and by default it will display slogans from 1984 and They Live. However, in the half century since pop-culture’s ideas about subliminal messages crystallized, research has progressed: contrary to the media depictions of frightening hypnotic mind control, subliminal messages have only weak and difficult-to-predict effects, and complicated messages (longer than one or two words) are barely processed at all.

I’m mostly interested in the mind-expanding (rather than mind-controlling) potential of subliminal messages — an area they are ultimately better suited for. The point of greatest interest is the way that subliminal messages bypass conscious awareness and therefore do not require conscious attention: subliminal learning is a little bit like earning royalties or interest, in that the returns may be small but the effort-to-return ratio is nearly zero. Replacing a week of active study with a year of passive study is a no-brainer.

Mechanism of action