buy more coke, praise satan

The year was 1957 and marketer James Vicary was experimenting on unsuspecting moviegoers. While they innocently watched a movie, he was projecting enticements for drinking Coca Cola and getting more popcorn for just a fraction of a millisecond at a time. He would then claim that his “subliminal messages” boosted concession sales and inspire journalist Vance Packard to write his famous tome The Hidden Persuaders. At the time it was a warning about the exploitation of the subconscious mind by corporations and governments.

Packard’s book is the bedrock on which conspiracy theories about media manipulation by all sorts of bogeymen are built. Fans of the subliminal advertising theory claim that through the cunning use of symbols, vague cues and masked messages, people with enough money and motivation can get direct access to your brain and make you do what they want without you knowing it. It’s perfectly creepy and makes for great conspiracy theory fodder.

And it’s not only conspiracy theorists who bought these claims. Fundamentalist Christians in the middle of a Satanic panic spent hours listening to music backwards, desperately trying to hear references to blood, suicide, Satan or demons. While accusing daycare workers of ritual abuse, molestation and human sacrifice (fueled in no small part by Geraldo Rivera’s downright moronic claims about Satanism), they dragged metal bands to court, insisting they could hear sinister messages during their long sessions of backwards listening.

Of course there’s something very important to keep in mind when listening to a music track in reverse. The human brain listens for patterns and corrects our senses to match the pattern we expect to hear. Listen hard enough to almost any track and at least a few words you’re trying to find will jump out at you. Try it at home. All you need is an MP3 and some basic video editing software. Upload your music and reverse it. Play it backwards and listen intently until you start hearing sounds that resemble words. Write down what you think the words might be, embellish them for dramatic effect and play the track again, this time following the words you’ve written. You’ll hear them loud and clear.

Subliminal advertising was put to the test too. Since The Hidden Persuaders was written, mental health experts and market researchers tried to replicate Vicary’s experiment without success. British popular science show Brainiac thoroughly tackled the idea of subliminal messages on TV. From flashing a single frame with a message to crew members wearing white t-shirts with instructions in black letters, nothing worked.

That’s not surprising since one thirtieth of a second isn’t long enough to even see a message, much less read one. Same goes for an obscure t-shirt or a strange, backwards noise that zips by in just a few seconds. Vicary claimed that his subliminal messages flashed by in only a third of a millisecond. For the human mind to detect and decode any message and make a decision of what to do with it in this time span is impossible, even on a subconscious level. If we don’t know what a message means or can’t decode it, the mind will just discard it and we’ll go on our merry way.

There’s one more thing that needs to be mentioned. James Vicary’s bold claims of raising the sales of popcorn and Coke in a New Jersey movie theater were a gimmick. As Snopes.com will kindly point out, Vicary admitted that his test was just a publicity stunt after he failed to repeat its results for the Psychological Corporation.

But alas, his admission came too late. The urban legend of secret messages in your movie and TV shows were out of the bag and thanks to the paranoia stoked by tabloids (there’s a reason why Geraldo Rivera is a punchline in journalism classes) and religious zealots, it expanded to include music. No wonder that every experiment with subliminal advertising after 1957 failed. The original experiment wasn’t successful in the first place.

If you really want to make someone do your bidding, flashing messages at them hundreds of times faster than the blink of an eye isn’t going to do you any good. The sinister corporations and governments interested in brainwashing the masses could do it much more effectively just by lying.