Jamming the Signal

["Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>]

Begin forwarded message:

> From: John Ohno <john.ohno () gmail com>
> Date: October 23, 2017 at 1:39:01 PM EDT
> To: ip <ip () listbox com>, Dave Farber <dave () farber net>
> Subject: For IP: Jamming the Signal
>
> An article I recently wrote for Mondo 2000:
> http://www.mondo2000.com/2017/10/12/jamming-signal-better-living-subliminal-messages/
>
> Jamming the Signal: Better Living Through Subliminal Messages
>
>
>
> by John Ohno
>
> A little over ten years ago, I discovered a program that shipped with my screensaver package called xsublim. This 
> program (which no longer ships with xscreensaver, and in fact no longer builds) takes a text file, splits it into 
> individual words, and then displays each word on random place on your screen for a tiny fraction of a second. 
> Experimenting with it led me on an interesting path through the backwoods of cognitive science.
>
> XSublim was written as a lark, and by default it will display slogans from 1984 and They Live. However, in the half 
> century since pop-culture’s ideas about subliminal messages crystallized, research has progressed: contrary to the 
> media depictions of frightening hypnotic mind control, subliminal messages have only weak and difficult-to-predict 
> effects, and complicated messages (longer than one or two words) are barely processed at all.
>
> I’m mostly interested in the mind-expanding (rather than mind-controlling) potential of subliminal messages — an area 
>   they are ultimately better suited for. The point of greatest interest is the way that subliminal messages bypass 
> conscious awareness and therefore do not require conscious attention: subliminal learning is a little bit like 
> earning royalties or interest, in that the returns may be small but the effort-to-return ratio is nearly zero. 
> Replacing a week of active study with a year of passive study is a no-brainer.
>
> Mechanism of action
>
> When we talk about subliminal messages, what we’re really talking about is what cognitive scientists call ‘priming’: 
> a weak nudge that inclines us toward particular associations. Priming creates a sense of familiarity and 
> attractiveness — flash faces on a screen, and those faces will be rated as more attractive during a survey. Priming 
> also encourages similar ideas: people who see the word “water” flashed on a screen will be slightly more likely to 
> interpret “bank” as “river bank” than as “financial institution” and those who see “doctor” will respond slightly 
> more quickly to medical-related prompts — a concept known as “spreading activation.” It does this just by seeding a 
> pattern in working memory — ‘priming the pump’ and making related thoughts flow more easily.
>
> This makes it not terribly useful for advertising. A subliminal ad can make people who are currently thirsty slightly 
> prefer Coca Cola, but it can’t get them to buy a case when they already have Sprite in the fridge. Similarly, the 
> impulse is so weak that it can’t be used to get people to act out of character (you can’t be subliminally instructed 
> to kill the president, although if you are playing a first person shooter video game it might be able to get you to 
> shift your target one in a thousand times). If we want to squeeze utility out of subliminal messages, we need to be a 
> little more creative.
>
>
>
>  
>
> Applications
>
> Subliminal exposure can produce a sense of familiarity, which can be used to aid learning. Even though seeing the 
> contents of a math textbook subliminally a million times will not let you skip the math class, it will make the terms 
> and patterns seem more familiar, less imposing, and easier to remember — so later study will be easier. Seeing the 
> contents of the textbook after class can help keep the ideas in memory. I typically begin to display the ebook 
> versions of books I intend to read months in advance, continuously — making the actual task of reading them much 
> faster, when I finally get around to it. I have had dense philosophical texts in circulation for years.
>
> While sentence-scale patterns aren’t easily absorbed, the emotions associated with words certainly are — so you can 
> slightly boost your mood by priming yourself with happy words or positive affirmations, or slightly boost your sex 
> drive by displaying erotic fiction in this way.
>
> The most interesting use, for me, is simply scrambling normal responses. Our environment is full of cues (shared by 
> our peers) that subtly nudge our behavior using the same mechanisms as subliminal exposure; we are biased toward 
> repeating the same behaviors by staying in the same environment. But, we can take control of our cognitive 
> environment and add a random element, canceling out some of the weak impulses by adding new ones that pull in 
> different directions. This can be very useful in of itself, without planning: how much of what we call genius is just 
> seeing a familiar view through a slightly warped perspective? There is a greater possible range of 
> perspective-warping through subliminal nudges than through our go-to methods — drugs, sleep deprivation, 
> psychoanalysis, improv comedy games — even if the intensity is much lower. At the very least, a little bit of 
> randomness can keep us from indulging too much in our worst biases.
>
> There’s one other application I should mention — a social one. (I haven’t tested this directly since around 2006, but 
> the theoretical justifications are solid.) Watching the same subliminal messages as someone at the same time is a 
> great bonding experience: sharing the same slight behavioral biases encourages similar behaviors on a small scale 
> (body language, word choice), which is interpreted as mirroring. So, the shared biases from shared exposure leads to 
> a feeling of emotional connection and being ‘on the same wavelength’ — something that can kickstart a feedback loop 
> ending in an experience of ‘pseudo-telepathy’ where the two of you are thinking the same thing at the same time in 
> response to many various things.
>
>
>
> Notes on Priming Research
>
> The recent ‘replication crisis’ in psychology has hit the subfield of ‘social priming’ hard, with some popular papers 
> failing to have their results replicated, and with some even getting called fraudulent. So, the whole subfield is 
> being looked at with a skeptical eye, and some of that dubiousness is spilling over into priming proper by 
> nonscientists. Social priming papers have made suspiciously strong claims, and depend on a whole variety of 
> largely-untested assumptions. The replication failures of social priming do not extend to priming itself, which has 
> been robust under testing & forms the foundation of other research (like the stroop test and the implicit bias test).
>
> That said, my own experiments are the work of an enthusiastic amateur and are not properly controlled, although they 
> rely on what I consider to be obvious small extrapolations of reliable known effects. I would love to see serious 
> research in this domain.
>
> Some applications I’ve mentioned have been directly tested in a controlled environment. Specifically, the effects in 
> the ‘Mechanism of Action’ section above are all from serious published research.
>
> Social priming research tends to claim specific primed impulses have certain predictable responses — such as (in one 
> famous experiment) seeing words related to old people resulting in a slower walking speed. We could not reasonably 
> expect this to be true, for the same reason that  we can’t expect subliminal advertising to work: priming is weak, 
> and our environment is full of priming, so complex actions with many steps (like walking through a hallway) would be 
> affected by many nudges and would behave unpredictably.
>
> Notes on Implementation (or: Try this at Home!)
>
> As I mentioned earlier, xsublim is obsolete and doesn’t work on newer computers. I have written two programs that 
> duplicate the important parts of xsublim and add useful features. They are available here. They run only on Linux, 
> like the original xsublim. (If you find or create an implementation for another platform, I’d love to hear about it.)
>
> To make things easier, I have included a script called sublimWrap, which randomizes the font and color.
>
> These programs will read a stream of text and display it, word by word, until they run out of text to read. So, 
> normally, I write some code to keep them displaying text indefinitely. Here are some examples:
>
> # display dictionary words in a random order — good for scrambling responses
> (while : ; do shuf < /usr/share/dict/words ; done) | sublimWrap
>
> # display random wikipedia articles
> (while : ; do w3m -dump http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random ; done) | sublimWrap
>
> # I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and doggone it, people like me!
> (while : ; do fortune daily_affirmations ; done) | sublimWrap
>
>  
>
> John is a software engineer and blogger. In his off-time he writes computer programs that write fiction, and other 
> computer programs that write music.



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