Closing his eyes as if to block out all of those sights he wasn’t aware of seeing, Dawson said, “You’ve made three points.” He ticked them off on his manicured fingers. “One, the subconscious is the dominant half of the mind. Two, we don’t know what our subconscious minds have observed and remembered. We can’t recall that data at will. Three, subliminal perception is nothing strange or occult; it is an integral part of our lives.”
“Perhaps the major part of our lives.”
“And you’ve discovered a commercial use for subliminal perception.”
Salsbury’s hands were shaking. He was close to the core of his proposition, and he didn’t know whether Dawson would be fascinated or outraged by it. “For two decades, advertisers of consumer products have been able to reach the subconscious minds of potential customers by the use of subliminal perception. The ad agencies refer to these techniques by several other names. Subliminal reception. Threshold regulation. Unconscious perception. Subception. Are you aware of this? Have you heard of it?”
Still enviably relaxed, Dawson said, “There were several experiments conducted in movie theaters-fifteen-maybe twenty years ago. I remember reading about them in the newspapers.”
Salsbury nodded rapidly. “Yes. The first was in 1957.”
“During an ordinary showing of some film, a special message was superimposed on the screen. ‘You are thirsty,’ or something of that sort. It was flashed off and on so fast that no one realized it was there. After it had been flashed-what, a thousand times? nearly everyone in the theater went to the lobby and bought soft drinks.”
In those first crude experiments, which were carefully regulated by motivation researchers, subliminal messages had been delivered to the audience with a tachistoscope, a machine patented by a New Orleans company, Precon Process and Equipment Corporation, in October of 1962. The tachistoscope was a standard film projector with a high-speed shutter. It could flash a message twelve times a minute at of a second. The image appeared on the screen for too short a time to be perceived by the conscious mind, but the subconscious was fully aware of it. During a six-week test of the tachistoscope, forty-five thousand theater-goers were subjected to two messages:
“Drink Coca-Cola” and “Hungry? Eat Popcorn.” The results of these experiments left no doubt about the effectiveness of subliminal advertisement. Popcorn sales rose sixty percent, and Coco-Cola sales rose nearly twenty percent.
The subliminals apparently had influenced people to buy these products even though they were not hungry or thirsty.
“You see,” Salsbury said, “the subconscious mind believes everything it is told. Even though it constructs behavioral sets based on the information it receives, and although those sets guide the conscious mind-it can’t distinguish between truth and falsehood! The behavior that it programs into the conscious mind is often based on misconceptions.”
“But if that were correct, we’d all behave irrationally.”
“And we all do,” Salsbury said, “in one way or another. Don’t forget, the subconscious doesn’t always construct programs based on wrong-headed ideas. Just sometimes. This explains why intelligent men, paragons of reason in most things, harbor at least a few irrational attitudes.” Like your religious fanaticism, he thought. He said: “Racial and religious bigotry, for instance. Xenophobia, claustrophobia, acrophobia . . . If a man can be made to analyze one of these fears on a conscious level, he’ll reject it. But the conscious resists analysis. Meanwhile, the inner half of the mind continues to misguide the outer half.”
“These messages on the movie screen-the conscious mind wasn’t aware of them; therefore, it couldn’t reject them.”
Salsbury sighed. “Yes. That’s the essence of it. The subconscious saw the messages and caused the outer mind to act on them.”
Dawson was growing more interested by the minute. “But why did the subliminals sell more popcorn than soda?”
“The first message-‘Drink Coca-Cola’-was a declarative sentence,” Salsbury said, “a direct order. Sometimes the subconscious obeys an order that’s delivered subliminally-and sometimes it doesn’t.”
“Why is that?”
Salsbury shrugged. “We don’t know. But you see, the second subliminal was not entirely a direct order. It was more sophisticated. It began with a question: ‘Hungry?’ The question was designed to cause anxiety in the subconscious. It helped to generate a need. It established a ‘motivational equation.’ The need, the anxiety, is on the left side of the equals sign. To fill the right side, to balance the equation, the subconscious programs the conscious to buy the popcorn. One side cancels out the other. The buying of the popcorn cancels out the anxiety.”