On Subliminal Advertising And “Subliminals”
Today, I woke up to a message from a friend of mine, who asked my opinion on “subliminal tracks.”
This is a subject I’ve been asked about a lot due to the overlap of advertising, copywriting, market psychology and my fondness for weird experiments of the 20th Century like the Mouse Utopia and Rat Park experiments. (That series of posts, I’ll continue now I’m blogging again.)
I’ve done a lot of reading and experimenting into the phenomenon and it’s a good little topic for a weekend night.
So let’s find out the details.
Subliminal Advertising Is Not “Subliminal Tracks”
Let’s just quickly get one thing out of the way. There are a lot of people who release, sell, and/or consume “subliminal tracks” online, and they use the “real evidence” and “studies that show subliminals work” to sell/justify the subliminal tracks.
I’m generally of the opinion people can do whatever they want, but that’s sketchy at best as it conflates two things:
- “subliminal audio tracks” which are basically an ASMR subgenre
- Subliminal advertising research
Subliminal advertising research basically found after years of studies that if people are repeatedly exposed to something, they’re more likely to buy it, regardless of what the exposure entailed.
It started as flickering screens and the sci-fi stuff you see in They Live, but quickly it turned into product placements and low-attention processing in marketing.
That’s real, scientifically-backed stuff, but it has zero to do with somebody selling you a blank audio file and telling you it’s got hidden frequencies.
Subliminal Audio Tracks
Subliminal audio tracks tend to be one of a few things:
- Ambient soundscapes which promise meditative effects
- Hypnosis audio where a hypnotist runs through a script and that gives you the benefits of weight loss/cigarette addiction release/relaxation
- Weird “masked” whispers and spoken audio at a level you can’t hear, sometimes sped up for “efficiency” or recorded/processed at a level you can’t hear
Let’s go through these one by one.
Ambient Soundscapes (And their effects)
Ambient soundscapes are pleasant to the ear for some. They’re white noise for others. Depending on the nature of the track, they can stimulate all kinds of imagination effects; for instance, you can listen to forest sounds and get some of the effects of forest bathing; or you can listen to rain tracks and it’ll be relaxing.
Some might get you into different headspaces because the frequencies of the sounds are at a particular pitch, but for the most part, this doesn’t happen because headphones, earphones and average computer/TV speakers don’t actually have a full sonic range.
In principle, they work as any other backing track does; they don’t have magical effects though, and there’s no “subliminal” stuff going on.
(You might want to, while you’re at it, have a think about what that word even means.)
Hypnosis Tracks
Once upon a time, I was a teenager who went on an NLP Practitioner course as part of a work experience module at university.
Hypnosis works, in terms of scientific principle. However, as I found on that weekend, the average hypnotist isn’t a scientific mind and they come up with all kinds of gobbledegook in order to ascribe to themselves magical powers through the dark art of pseudoscientific nonsense-talking.
Really, hypnosis works by acting as a guided meditation down into a relaxed state and by the hypnotist then working through the belief systems and individual beliefs of the subject, and then, with skill and compliance, reframing things so as to change those preconceptions.
Talented hypnotists can make dramatic changes by using the various skills that make up hypnotising people. None of it occurs at a “subliminal” level though. It’s language and biofeedback and psychological principles.
With hypnosis tracks, they act as guided meditation but there’s no feedback nor adaptation, which you get in real interactions with a hypnotist.
And again… no subliminal effect. (And again… ask yourself what that actually means?)
“Masked Subliminal 30x Speed Multithreaded Hypnoloops”
I imagine you already know what I’m going to say about this.
I don’t want to mention the word that starts with Place and ends with -bo because once you do, it’s like telling a kid that Santa isn’t real. There’s no going back. (And of course, Santa is obviously real to anyone with a working brain.)
However, there’s literally nothing to support the idea that the brain can do anything with sounds that it can’t hear; it can’t decipher whispers nor magically decode messages outside the range of audible perception.
All you’re doing is damaging the fine hairs in your ears, assuming your speakers can handle the “subliminal audio” and there’s anything on the recording… and that’s assuming a lot in both cases.
Final Thoughts
So, in conclusion, we’ve gone through the options. If you’re looking for something ambient to listen to, and meditation tracks or dark academia playlists help, then that’s fantastic. Go ahead, I also have ambient playlists because listening to songs with words and guitar solos and whatnot gets distracting.
It’s a meditative/concentration practice at it’s heart and you should look into how you can do that outside of ambient listening as well for best results.
If you find a hypnosis CD that addresses an issue you have and you listen along and you find it helps, then go for it. But probably, you’ll get better results fixing the problem yourself and/or seeing a reputable and qualified hypnotist who can assess and give you feedback instead.
And if you’re listening to masked audio, inaudible audio, weird ASMR whispers because you like it, then please continue. But it’s not doing anything to you outside of any other enjoyable/relaxing activity.
(If on the other hand you’ve stumbled across this article looking for “the goods” on low-attention processing and other dark psychological arts, then we’ll cover that elsewhere. Kind of got the itch for more of that at the moment.)