Subliminal Messages and the Potency of Communication

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Richard: Everything is hypnosis.

John: There’s a profound disagreement between us. There is no such thing as hypnosis. I would really prefer that you didn’t use such terms, since they don’t refer to anything. We believe that all communication is hypnosis. That’s the function of every conversation. Let’s say I sit down for dinner with you and begin to communicate about some experience. If I tell you about some time when I took a vacation, my intent is to induce in you the state of having some experience about that vacation. Whenever anyone communicates, they’re trying to induce states in one another by using sound sequences called “words.”

…you will discover that somnambulistic trance is the rule rather than the exception in people’s everyday “waking activity.”

-          Richard Bandler and John Grinder, Frogs Into Princes

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Subliminal Messages: Audio and Visual

Smart companies frequently hire marketing and advertising agencies to design television, radio, and printed messages in an attempt to invoke the past. What they want is to get you to associate pleasant or strong memories with their client’s products and services. In other forms of media, you get similar and sometimes even more powerful results. For instance, players of video games often become susceptible to hypnotic suggestions when those games contain subliminal messages.

Trance researchers have studied this and understand that “the players who may be unhappy or angry or frustrated [with his or her own life] could become psychologically dependent on the positive strokes of some subliminal messages” (Wier).  They believe that this could lead to the development of addictions to such media. Also, today’s on-line marketers use emotional triggers very successfully to make sales and build contact lists.

Above you’ll notice an example of a subliminal message designed to appeal to men and women where sex appeal, hygiene, health, desirability, beauty, respectability, sophistication, and status become part of the message for the brand of razors and shaving cream, but also for the act of shaving. Below is an example of a subliminal message designed – undoubtedly – to appeal to men and two of his physiological needs: food and sex.

Aligning physiological, psychic, or spiritual needs with a given product or service is a very effective technique to use in audio and visual advertising. Sex, health, status, desirability, beauty, intelligence, hunger, sleep, wealth, hygiene are just a few examples of these needs. The range of techniques varies greatly and many clever minds have found numerous ways to combine and recombine effective assortments of essential needs. They then turn around and use these combinations of needs in association with all kinds of products and services. These products and services then become indispensable to our lives and forever own a piece of our minds. 

The Potency of the Medium of Communication

After many years of study and gathering lots of information on the subject of the power of words, trances, and communication, I’ve develop an idea that I call “the potency of a medium of communication.” This idea is based on a number of known facts about what elements contribute to the effectiveness or poor quality of a message from one person to another. In “Words in Songwriting and their Power as Emotional Triggers (Part 3),” I   wrote, “Strong evidence supports the conclusion that when it comes to person-to-person contact, facial expressions convey 55% of the message, the tone of voice 38% and the words just 7%. So while it may be useful to have an extensive vocabulary to use in our conversations with others, it turns out that it’s not as important as our facial expressions and tonality (body language).”

So how does this help us build more impact in our art and writing? Well, for example, it gives us an order of priority (facial expressions – tone – words or see – hear – symbols) when it comes to which senses we should address primarily or in sequence to provoke an emotional response. A primary attack would dictate that we focus our artistic energies to the sense or senses most receptive to messages such as sight or hearing. In contrast, a sequential attack would mean that we target a series of sensual attacks in combinations of 2 or more senses, linearly (a, b, c, d) or in cycles (repeated attacks – a, b, a, c, b, a).

For example, music recordings are a less powerful means of communication than music videos because the recordings don’t provide the visual elements we need to analyze the artist’s facial expressions and body language. The reason is because we retain less information from the things we hear in contrast to the things we see. But because the power that recordings of music possess is in their capacity to convey tonality and the artist’s use of words (prose, rhymes, and poetry), they are infinitely more likely to communicate than a photograph, which possesses less power because it contains even fewer elements of communication. A static visual moment – photograph – lacks movement, sound, and a stated message. [To learn more about this subject read "The Power of Frames in Communication."]

Now that we've covered these basics I can tell you what I mean by “the potency of the medium of communication.” The potency of the medium of communication is a cognitive diagnostic tool used to evaluate the number and strength of communicative elements present in any given message. Basically, it determines a messages potential for achieving understanding as well as the potency of the message delivered.

[Optional Exercises: This exercise is designed to help you see for yourself how important various communicative elements such as motion, body language, facial expressions, words, and tone are in relation to a message. With this exercise and variations on it, you can determine on your own the relative value of any given communicative element and the emotional or psychological impact it creates upon you.

Version 1: Watch a commercial or some part in a movie with the sound off (mute). Notice how the communicative elements besides sound and words push or do not push the message out from one person to the other. Can you pick up on the emotion, the message, the impact, and the understanding?

Version 2: Get a song from your music library and find the music video for the same song on YouTube. Go back and forth between them comparing each one’s power or impact upon you. Obviously, the visual component is the primary element that will be missing in this comparison, so test out the difference and evaluate the impact.

Version 3: Compare a photograph with a video. Find a celebrity’s photograph and footage of them on YouTube. In the photograph, notice the fixed facial expression, pose, make-up, attitude, and emotional impact. Now watch whatever video footage you’ve found and take note of the celebrity’s personality traits, tone of voice, use or command of language, their use and choice of words, facial expressions, sense of humor, and emotional impact. Which medium – the photograph or video – makes you feel more bonded or dismissive of the celebrity in question?

To take Version 3 a step further, you can compare the photograph with the video again, but this time mute the sound on the video to compare a still image with a moving image to see what discoveries you make.

There are many more ways to explore the comparisons between various communicative elements in regard to the power and influence they possess over human emotion. You should take some time every now and then to study each one I mentioned in this article and also try to discover more on your own. Other communicative elements that exist, but I didn’t find useful to mention here include touch, smell, confidence, and authenticity. Using these exercises, developing more on your own, and experimenting with them will have a dual benefit for you. On the one hand, you will become more aware of the effective communication patterns of others and, on the other hand, you can with discipline and practice develop more effective communication patterns within yourself.]

Afterword: On Understanding

In "The Power of Frames in Communication," I also wrote, “while words are important in many ways, they’re not as important as what a message or communication is intended to create, which is an understanding. Understanding is largely affected by whether or not one sees (or imagines) what the other person is communicating.” Understanding can be either positive or negative. One communication can lead to a state of understanding like love, whereas another communication will be understood as hate.

The only qualification for what an understanding is or is not, is whether or not what one party is communicating to another party is actually what the original party intended to get across. In other words, if what person ‘A’ sends as a message to person ‘B’ is not what person ‘A’ means, then there is no understanding. But if what person ‘A’ sends as a message to person ‘B’ is what person ‘A’ means to arrive at person ‘B’, then understanding has been achieved. This is all there is to effective communication in person, in print, audio, or visual.

When communication is clear and direct it is easy to tell who are one’s friends and who are one’s enemies because our body language, tonality, words, facial expressions, and eye contact (or lack thereof) project our love and hate. But when communication is unclear, socially acceptable, or politically correct it is not so easy to determine one’s friends and enemies. This can be problematic because we can inadvertently create what some people call “frienemies (friend-enemy),” which is the designation given to someone who is not always friend and not always enemy. Moreover, besides the type of associations that can develop out of unclear and indirect messages, misunderstandings are common and devolve into something much worse – manipulation.

“Frienemies” cannot develop a healthy or thriving relationship because they serve as tools for one another in the games that occur within most social circles. For as long as they allow such a “relationship” to continue, they permit tacit consent to guide their overall interaction meanwhile they remain silent on the manipulations they use on one another to get what they want or need out of the other party. This sort of relationship is also based on understanding, but it is a negative understanding involving psychological risks, physical abuse, and emotional dangers whose outcomes are difficult to predict and assess until the damage is done.

So in your communications via your art, music, songs, and writing, are you a friend, enemy, or “frienemy” to your audience, fans, and supporters?

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Related Music:

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Related Articles:

The Power of Frames in Communication

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Marc

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