Subliminals unmasked: What’s really inside subliminal self-help audios

In Britain, an interesting experiment was performed in a supermarket.

Several German and French wines of the same price and sweetness were displayed for sale. On alternating days, the store played either German or French music at a low volume. When the results were in, it was found that sales of German wine increased on days when German music was played, and the same occurred with French wine when French music was played.

When asked later, buyers reported that they did not even notice what music was playing. Their choices and actions seemed to be affected entirely by their subconscious.

“The subconscious mind is the primal mind and constitutes about 90% of our brain,” says author and lecturer Dr Bruce H. Lipton. “The subconscious mind is habitual. It has programs in it—habits. These habits play automatically without us thinking about them.”

No wonder, then, that so many people claim that listening to subliminal recordings can change their habits, affect their mood, help them lose weight, and the list goes on.

Are such claims justified? Are they merely the results of willpower and the placebo effect? Or can subliminal messages really reach the mind?

What the proponents claim

Most subliminal audio products on the market contain music or nature sounds along with hidden, inaudible messages such as “I like myself and others” and “I have enormous concentration ability” played over and over again.

The theory, according to people promoting subliminals, is that the listener's subconscious can pick up these “positive affirmations” even though the words are too quiet to be consciously heard, and drive out unwanted habits and beliefs.

Some go even further and claim that subliminals can help people change their eye color, be taller, shrink their nose, enlarge their breasts, make cancer go into remission, and more - just by listening to inaudible affirmations.

“Subliminal audio can be used to improve any area of your life,” according to Real Subliminal, a company in Darlington, England, “from deep internal changes to improvements in the physical body.”

On the other hand, some scientists give subliminals a thumbs-down, saying they are simply a waste of money.

Controversial science

For decades, researchers have conducted studies on subliminal influence, with mixed results.

Anthony Pratkanis, professor emeritus of psychology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, conducted a number of experiments in the 1980s and 1990s in which he switched the labels on cassettes that promised either better memory or self-esteem. He found the tapes did neither, regardless of the label.

Luis A. Cordón, associate professor of psychology at Eastern Connecticut State University, states “No evidence whatsoever exists to show that an unheard message can have any impact on behavior.”

Some scholars, though, say that certain types of subliminal stimuli can affect the brain. Consider the following.

Researchers at the Münster University’s Institute of Medical Psychology discovered in 2014 that emotional words flashed quickly on a screen triggered specific responses in the amygdala, a portion of the brain responsible for memory and learning.

Sid Kouider, a professor of cognitive neuroscience at Paris’ Ecole Normale Supérieure, reviewed brain imaging studies and concluded that “priming from genuinely subliminal stimuli is a real phenomenon.”

But what exactly is “subliminal priming” referred to by Dr Kouider?

Subliminal priming: subtle but not invisible

According to the magazine Psychology Today, subliminal priming refers to “the use of stimuli to influence a person’s cognitive processing without that person being aware of the prompts.”

Remember the wine experiment we mentioned earlier? Buyers of French or German wines made their decision based on music that they did not recall hearing. This non-conscious perception affected their motivation because they were subliminally primed.

It’s important to note that the music was audible, but because it was in the background, buyers did not notice it.

Subliminal priming can occur when an image or word is flashed very quickly on a screen, or when spoken words are audible, but partially masked by music or other sounds.

One problem with most of the subliminal self-help audios on the market is that the messages are far too faint to be heard, and in many cases, are not there at all.

Dr. Philip M. Merikle, professor of psychology at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, tested tapes made by Midwest Research Inc. and Mind Communications, two big promoters of subliminal tapes. Merikle tested the tapes using sophisticated machines called spectrographs and found no evidence that any subliminal messages existed. "We couldn't find any identifiable signal," he said.

But what about the few audios that do have messages on them? Can positive affirmations repeated over and over sway our thinking?

The negative side of positive affirmations

Typical subliminal audios claim to contain affirmations usually in the first-person tense, such as “I always put myself first” and “I love myself.”

However, there is a flip-side to such positive “I” statements. “For people with lower self-esteem, positive thinking is counterproductive” says Whitney Goodman, a Florida-based licensed psychotherapist. “They eventually realize they are lying to themselves.”

Research conducted at the University of Central Florida tested the effects of positive “I” statement affirmations on anxiety.

Tapes with various combinations of affirmations and music were prepared. The tapes with affirmations had no greater effect than the tapes with only music. The conclusion, according to researcher Christine Marie Karper at UCF, was “Clinicians who are reporting having success with the use of affirmations for anxiety may actually be benefiting from some other phenomenon rather than the affirmations statements.”

Medical professor William T. Jarvis says “What people who use these subliminal tapes get is a placebo effect.”

But what if, instead of inaudible affirmations, the audios used sound scientific principles? Is there a better way to influence the subconscious?

A different approach to an old problem

We have considered two reasons why typical subliminal audios may fail to work. First, most subliminals on the market are improperly designed and do not contain detectable messages. Second, even if they were audible, so-called “positive affirmations” supposedly contained on those audios do not cause subliminal priming and do not have any effect on motivation.

In order to be truly effective, a subliminal audio must overcome those two deficiencies. It must have detectable messages that use established scientific principles such as subliminal priming.

Researchers at Psychodynamics Research Institute believe that their subliminals meet those strict criteria and are the only true scientifically valid subliminal programs available outside of the research lab.

Subliminal priming put to use

The Psychodynamics programs use messages that are audible, but masked.

Behind a layer of music, messages can be heard. However, the speech is remixed using frequency filtering so that only a portion of the voice wavelength is preserved. The end result sounds muffled, like hearing a voice through a wall.

This requires the listener’s long-term memory to reconstruct the messages from subliminal priming. That’s because the instructions, played before the subliminal portion, contain all of the messages in normal speech at full volume, implanting those messages into the listener’s memory.

Psychology professor John R. Vokey says “The term ‘subliminal’ is derived from the construct of a ‘limen of consciousness’, a threshold or line separating conscious from unconscious.” The Psychodynamics method uses that principle, making the voices audible, but only capable of being decoded by the listener’s memory subconsciously.

It is not only the method of encoding the messages, but also the content of the messages that sets Psychodynamics programs apart from typical subliminals.

Messages that reach the subconscious

Recall that positive affirmations in the first-person, such as “I am thin” or “I have a photographic memory” are unlikely to sway the subconscious, and some evidence indicates that they may be counterproductive. The listener knows he does not have a photographic memory, so he naturally resists the statements as false.

Some early subliminal recordings, such as the records produced by Subliminal Productions Inc. in Canada in the 1970s, contained audible affirmations in the second-person tense, such as “you will not smoke…you will live longer.” Research indicates that these messages are more likely to be accepted.

But there is a third type of message which is even more acceptable to the subconscious, against which the mind has no defense.

“Psychological distancing is a psychological technique where we step away from a situation or position so that we can gain perspective,” says psychology professor Alicia Nortje, Ph.D.

Rather than “I am…” or “you are…” statements, Psychodynamics uses the language of possibility, psychologically distancing the listener from his own self-consciousness. These they call “true suggestions.”

A true suggestion may go something like “Some people have a photographic memory. Those people seem to remember everything.” The suggestion appeals to the subconscious because the listener feels a sense of agreement.

The desire to become like the person described teases at the subconscious mind, which works away day and night constantly finding ways to achieve that goal.

Research indicates that it works. In a published study, neurologist and author Dr Andrew J. Funk reported “Subliminal priming with positive auditory stimuli significantly improves self-esteem and emotional well-being... Statistical analysis of pre- and post-treatment questionnaires revealed significant improvement in subjective reports of self-esteem, depression, anxiety, stress, worry, and state of being.”

As we have seen, correctly designed subliminal audios can affect peoples choices and emotions. But what about claims that they can change physical attributes, such as making someone taller, changing the color of the eyes, or increasing bust size? This question will be examined in a future article.