Subliminal Pseudoscience
The most popular false belief in our survey was the idea that “subliminal messages in advertisements can cause people to buy things,” which was endorsed by 76 percent of respondents. Subliminal persuasion, much like the belief that you can feel someone staring, is based on the idea that people are inordinately sensitive to weak signals, ones that we might not be able to detect using our normal sensory mechanisms. If we can change people’s beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors through subtle and undetectable influences, then in principle we could use those same powers to allow ourselves to accomplish great things, releasing abilities and skills we didn’t know we had. A belief in the power of subliminal persuasion underlies the idea that we can help ourselves quit smoking or learn a new language by listening to subliminal recordings while we sleep, unlocking the potential for change without exerting any conscious effort.
You might have heard of a famous experiment from the 1950s in which subliminal messages were shown during movies to drive up sales of soda and popcorn. You might also remember reading that advertisers embed sexual words and images in photographs to arouse greater desire for their products. In his 1973 bestseller Subliminal Seduction, Wilson Bryan Key described many examples of such subliminal “embeds” and his theories of the psychology behind them.37 The first sentence of Key’s book states: “Subliminal perception is a subject that virtually no one wants to believe exists, and—if it does exist—they much less believe that it has any practical application.” If Key was right about public sentiment at that time, then our survey and others like it show that popular beliefs have changed dramatically in the years since. People now overwhelmingly believe that subliminal information affects how we think and act.
The movie experiment is one of the first exhibits Key offers to support his contention that subliminal advertising has vast power to manipulate our minds. According to Key’s account, the experiment was conducted at a movie theater in Fort Lee, New Jersey, in 1957. The experiment ran for six weeks, during which time two messages were transmitted to viewers on alternate days: “Hungry? Eat Popcorn” and “Drink Coca-Cola.” The messages were displayed for one three-thousandth of a second, once every five seconds. The results were a 58 percent increase in popcorn sales and an 18 percent increase in Coca-Cola sales, presumably compared with the period before the messages were inserted into the movies. When the study was reported in the press, the National Association of Broadcasters quickly banned its members from using the technique, and the United Kingdom and Australia enacted laws proscribing it.
The first color illustration in Key’s book is now famous. It shows an ad for Gilbey’s gin, featuring an open bottle next to a tall glass filled with ice cubes and clear gin. It looks like an ordinary image, but if you look closely, you can see three distorted letters making up the word “sex” faintly outlined in the ice cubes. Key showed this ad to a thousand college students, and 62 percent of them reported feeling aroused, romantic, excited, and the like. Nothing about this study demonstrates that the embedded “sex” caused these responses, because there was no control group of subjects who were asked to describe their feelings without being shown a liquor ad. It’s possible that any kind of alcohol advertising would have induced a similar response, or that these college students were just perpetually horny.
Key reports a better-designed experiment in which two classes, each with one hundred students, were shown a Playboy magazine ad featuring a male model. The students were asked to rate how masculine the image was, on a scale of 1 to 5, with 1 standing for “very masculine,” and 5 standing for “very feminine.” One class saw just the ad and gave an average rating of 3.3 on the scale. The other class saw the ad with the word “man” subliminally presented on it, using the same technique as in the movie theater experiment. Their average rating was 2.4. Only 3 percent of the first class rated the image a 1 or 2, but 61 percent of the second class did. Merely pairing the image with a word that was compatible, but imperceptible, dramatically shifted the evaluations. Unfortunately, in light of everything else we now know about this kind of experiment, this shift was much too dramatic to be believable. Subliminal stimuli typically have tiny effects (if they have any effects at all), and larger effects likely result from stimuli that were not actually subliminal.38
What about the popcorn and Coke study? It may be directly responsible for the public’s belief in the power of subliminal persuasion techniques. Just one year after the study’s results were announced, a survey found that 41 percent of American adults had heard of subliminal advertising. By 1983, this number had increased to 81 percent, the majority of whom believed that it works, just as in our own poll. Wilson Bryan Key, writing in 1973, did not specifically mention that an advertising expert named James Vicary was behind the popcorn-Coke experiment. This could be because, more than ten years earlier, Vicary had publicly acknowledged that the study was a fraud. In an interview with Advertising Age, he confessed that his advertising business had not been going well, so he cooked up the “study” to help get more customers. Other researchers have attempted to replicate Vicary’s purported findings, and none have succeeded. A Canadian television station flashed “phone now” repeatedly during one of its programs, but there was no increase in telephone calls. People who were watching at the time were later asked what they thought they’d seen. Nobody got the right answer, but many reported having felt hungry or thirsty.39
If you’re like us, you probably first heard about the Vicary “results” in high school or college but were never told they were fabricated. By now you should sense a pattern that itself contributes to the persistence of beliefs in untapped potential: Initial claims for some new way of penetrating the mind’s mysteries are heavily promoted and take on a life of their own, but the follow-up research that refutes those claims goes almost entirely unnoticed. Scientists have debated for over a century whether we can even process the meaning of words or images that we do not consciously see.40 But even if we can, that doesn’t mean that the information in ultrabrief stimuli can cause us to do things we wouldn’t otherwise do, like buy more popcorn or soda. Despite the lack of evidence for subliminal persuasion, people nevertheless persist in their belief that such mind control is possible.41 The makers of self-help recordings that purport to reprogram your mind and eliminate unwanted behaviors like smoking and overeating via subliminal messages are not deterred by the double-blind, controlled studies that find zero actual benefit from them.42
The premise of Key’s Subliminal Seduction was the idea that subliminal communication might be even more powerful than more visible forms of persuasion, because if we aren’t aware of an advertising message, we can’t discount it or think carefully about how it is trying to influence our behavior. This belief in the powerful effects of subtle influences is a key part of the illusion of potential. During the 1984 presidential election campaign, ABC News anchor Peter Jennings smiled more when he spoke about Ronald Reagan, the Republican, than about Walter Mondale, the Democrat. (The anchors of NBC and CBS smiled about equally often for each candidate.) According to a small survey, ABC viewers in Cleveland were 13 percent more likely than NBC and CBS viewers to vote for Reagan in the 1984 election. In Williamstown, Massachusetts, the difference was 21 percent, and in Erie, Pennsylvania, it was an astonishing 24 percent.43 Did Jennings’s pattern of smiling cause his viewers to prefer Reagan? The researchers who conducted this study thought so, as did Malcolm Gladwell, who explained the results in his bestseller The Tipping Point: “It’s not that smiles and nods are subliminal messages. They are straightforward and on the surface. It’s just that they are incredibly subtle … the ABC viewers who voted for Reagan would never, in a thousand years, tell you that they voted that way because Peter Jennings smiled every time he mentioned the President.” But exposure to Peter Jennings was just one tiny component of the election coverage experienced by American voters, and the way the press reported the election was just one of many factors that affected people’s vote
s.
Think about what is really more likely: that Peter Jennings’s facial muscles caused a jump of 13 to 24 percent in votes for Ronald Reagan, or that people who viewed ABC News had some preexisting characteristics that made them prefer that network to the others and made them more likely to vote for Reagan. To us, it is much more logical to think that the three broadcast TV networks drew different kinds of viewers because they broadcast different mixes of shows, and ABC’s viewers at that time were just more conservative than those who watched CBS and NBC. Another possible explanation is that these percentage differences were just statistical blips arising from the small size of the surveys, which included only about one-tenth as many voters as modern-era political polls. One reason why many people, perhaps including the research team behind the study, prefer the causal explanation is that, like Wilson Bryan Key’s claims about subliminal advertising, it invokes the mysterious power of influences that lie outside of our awareness.44
Training Your Brain?
If we can’t unleash untapped mental powers through subliminal messages or hypnosis, perhaps there are other ways to enhance our abilities with relatively little pain. Unless you’ve been living in a cave for the past few years, you must have heard or seen advertisements like the following televis ion commercial for Nintendo’s Brain Age software for its gaming systems:45
ACTOR I: How long has it been? [hugs his friend and then turns toward his wife] Honey, this is my old friend David. We went to high school together.
DAVID: [turns toward his wife] Honey, this is … uhh … uhh … uhhh …
NARRATOR: Has this ever happened to you? Exercise your mind with Brain Age. Train your brain in minutes a day. By completing a few challenging exercises and puzzles, you can help keep your mind sharp.
Cognitive training is a growing industry that capitalizes on the fear most people have of cognitive declines that come with aging. Brain Age and its sequel, Brain Age 2, have sold a combined 31 million copies since their release in 2005.46 Many other cognitive training programs have appeared as well, often promoted with claims that they will help you overcome aging’s negative effects on memory with just a few minutes of training each day. The website for Mindscape’s Brain Trainer claims that “spending 10 to 15 minutes a day on a brain training workout using simple exercises and puzzles can improve the skills needed to achieve greater success academically and in everyday life.”47
Now that you have read about the Mozart effect, the 10 percent myth, and subliminal persuasion, you can see why these advertisements are so effective, and you can begin to inoculate yourself against their power. They work by playing on our desire for the quick fix, the cure-all salve that will remedy all our problems. By playing these games for only minutes a day, you’ll be better able to come up with that word or name on the tip of your tongue, you’ll overcome the limits on your memory, and your entire brain will get younger. Just as those promoting the usefulness of listening to Mozart as an intelligence booster appeal to the desires of parents to help their children succeed, cognitive-training games capitalize on our desire to improve our own minds. These appeals are in some ways even more powerful because they promise a fountain of mental youth that can return our brains to a state when they gave us better memory and more efficient thinking powers.48 We’re already familiar with the “potential ability” these games purport to release, because we know that at some point in our lives, this ability was real rather than just potential.
These companies are smart to focus on aging. Most aspects of cognition, including memory, attention, processing speed, and the ability to switch between tasks, decline throughout adulthood.49 These changes are noticeable and frustrating. The more often we forget conversations we’ve had with a spouse, or struggle to recall the name of a friend, the more we long to regain our previous abilities and skills. Just as competitive athletes normally experience a drop-off in skill as they approach their forties, the rest of us see many of our mental abilities go downhill in middle age. Even for games like chess, in which experts build up a mental database of patterns and situations over years of practice, the elite levels are dominated by young players; currently, only three of the top fifty players in the world are over forty years old, and approximately two-thirds are in their twenties.50
Not all aspects of thinking decline equally, though, and some don’t decline at all. Aspects of cognition that are based on accumulated knowledge and experience are relatively preserved with age and can even improve, especially when speed of processing is not crucial. An expert diagnostician like Dr. Keating, the pediatric “House” we introduced in Chapter 3, only gets better with age; the more unusual patients he encounters, the more able he is to spot similarities to his increasingly large mental database of familiar cases. That said, a doctor in his seventies, even if he’s better able to identify a disorder, might have more trouble recalling its name, and might be slower to learn the latest procedures to treat it than would a doctor in his thirties. Old dogs can learn new tricks—it’s just a bit harder and takes a bit longer.
Since cognitive-training programs appeal directly to the illusion of potential, at this point you might be inclined to dismiss them outright. But that would be unwise. Just because a man is paranoid doesn’t mean that people aren’t actually stalking him. We should be suspicious about any simple cure for a complex problem, and we should be hesitant about claims that we can acquire skills without effort. But there still could be some truth in the adage “use it or lose it.” So what, exactly, do the brain-training programs offer?
Most of the programs provide a set of basic gamelike cognitive tasks, such as arithmetic (with a time limit), word-finding, and Sudoku. They are chosen to stress your reasoning and memory abilities, and they can be fun and challenging. The programs show how your performance on each task improves over time, and in some cases they provide a composite “brain fitness” score. Most of the programs justify their claims of brain training by pointing to how much people can improve at these simple tasks.
If you play these games and stick with them, you will get better at them regardless of your age. Practicing anything diligently enough will make you better. The real goal of the brain-training systems, though, is broader than improving your performance on their specific tasks. Just as you don’t lift weights only to be able to lift bigger weights, you don’t play brain-training games to get better at playing brain-training games. Even according to the marketers of these programs, you use them to improve your ability to think and remember in your daily activities. Brain Age is supposed to help you recall your old friends’ names, find your car keys, and do two things at once, not just get better at solving Sudoku.
Few studies have even investigated whether training on simple perception and memory tasks has any consequences for our daily mental chores. Although many studies have shown that people who are more cognitively active when they’re younger preserve their abilities better as they age, such studies are correlational.51 Thinking about the illusion of cause reminds us that an association between two factors can occur even if neither one causes the other. The only way to study the effects of brain training on daily cognition is to conduct an experiment, randomly assigning some people to training conditions and others to control conditions, and then measuring the results of training. Over the past decade several clinical trials have done just that.
The largest experiment to date started in 1998 and randomly assigned 2,832 seniors to one of four groups: verbal memory training, problem solving, processing speed, or a control group that did no cognitive training.52 This massive clinical trial, funded by the National Institutes of Health and conducted by researchers from many universities, hospitals, and research institutes, was known as the ACTIVE trial, which stands for “Advanced Cognitive Training for Independent and Vital Elderiy.” In the experiment, each group practiced one particular task for ten sessions of one hour each, spread out over about six weeks, and after the training, their performance was tested both on a set of laboratory tasks
and on some real-world tasks. The hope was that training on the cognitive tasks would help to keep the brain sharp, leading to improvements on other cognitive tasks and on real-world functioning.
Not surprisingly, if you practice doing a visual search task for ten hours, you get better at visual search. If you practice a verbal memory task for ten hours, you get better at verbal memory. Many of the participants, particularly for the speed-of-processing training, showed improvements immediately after training, and the improvements lasted for years. However, the improvements were limited to the specific tasks they learned and did not carry over to the non-trained laboratory tasks. Practicing verbal memory buys you almost nothing for your processing speed, and vice versa.
Later followup surveys of participants in the ACTIVE study did show some evidence for transfer to real-world performance. Participants in the training groups reported fewer problems with daily activities than did people in the no-training control group. Of course, in this case, the participants knew they were in a training group and that they were expected to improve, so some of the self-reported benefits could be due to placebo effects.
Unfortunately, the results of the ACTIVE study are consistent with other studies. Training tends to be specific to the task that is trained. If you play Brain Age, you’ll get better at the specific tasks included in the software, but your new skills won’t transfer to other sorts of tasks. In fact, in the now vast cognitive-training literature, almost none of the studies document any transfer to tasks outside the laboratory, and most show only narrow transfer of skill between laboratory tasks—from the one practiced to those that are very similar.53 If you want to get better at Sudoku, and especially if you like doing Sudoku, by all means, do more Sudoku. If you think that doing Sudoku will keep your mind sharp and help you avoid misplacing your keys or forgetting to take your medicine, you’re likely succumbing to the illusion of potential. The same goes for solving crossword puzzles, a favorite recommendation of those who believe that mental exercise can keep the brain sharp and stave off dementia and the cognitive effects of aging: Unfortunately, people who do more crosswords decline mentally at the same rate as those who do fewer crosswords.54 Practice improves specific skills, not general abilities.
The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us Page 24