Benefits of Subliminal Tapes May Be All in the Listener’s Mind

The music on the tape is boring and repetitive, with the occasional livening up of crashing sounds that are supposed to remind me of the pounding of ocean waves.

Now and then there’s a slight change in the tune, but it doesn’t much matter. The melody isn’t the message, it’s what is beneath the music that counts. Recorded on a separate track and hidden from conscious awareness by the sounds of music is a subliminal message that my active, critical, reasoning mind cannot hear or object to.

The subliminal voice is pitched at my subconscious mind instead, and it’s telling me that I want to lose weight. I can do it, the voice assures me, because I am really a slim, attractive person inside, and I love myself enough to let the real me come out.

I know what the inaudible voice is saying because I have also heard it at a conscious level. Side 1 of my taped aid to effortless weight loss gives it to me straight, along with instructions in deliberate relaxation. When I am relaxed, my mind is supposed to be more receptive to the message.

I could also buy a subliminal tape that just tells me to relax. Or to stop smoking, mobilize my immune system, relieve pain, reduce stress, encourage success, improve at sports, become more intuitive, attract a lover, enjoy more sensuality, drive more safely, sleep more easily, study more effectively.

I don’t have to do anything, learn anything or even pay attention. I can do my nails, clean my kitchen, read a book or watch TV while the message sneaks past my defenses and programs me to do what I want to do but have not been able to accomplish in a frontal assault.

The notion that subliminals, embedded in audio or visual programs, could change or direct behavior hit the U.S. psyche in 1956, when a marketing whiz reportedly flashed “Eat Popcorn and Drink Coke” on a movie screen at a New Jersey drive-in. It led, he said, to a substantial increase in popcorn and soft-drink sales.

Print advertisers were said to have followed suit, hiding sexually explicit words and graphics in pictures of their products. You could not really see the breast in the booze bottle, but your unconscious mind was supposed to pick it out and send you to the store, drooling for that brand of liquor.

“ Supposed is the operative word,” said Joseph Smith, Ph.D., president of Oxtoby-Smith Inc., a consumer research and consulting company in New York. Smith is also a past president of the American Psychological Assn.’s division of consumer psychology.

“What happens when you try to track down these purported usages is that they’re all apocryphal,” he said. “You never get your hands on the evidence.”

There have, however, been some experiments in subliminal perception. In one, test subjects were exposed to a series of numbers masked by other noise. Afterward, they reportedly guessed the numbers correctly more often than mere chance would have predicted.

In other tests, people exposed to subliminal images are said to have responded to them more positively afterward than other people did.

“Even if it were true that the ability to recognize digits is influenced by subliminal messages, I can’t get from there to teaching you to be a National (Football) League quarterback subliminally,” Smith said.

A Leap of Faith

“It’s hardly new information that there are unconscious influences on human behavior, but to leap from that to the assertion that I can teach, instruct and modify your behavior with subliminal messages is outrageous and naive.”

Nevertheless, subliminals have surged to popularity again. Retailers are reportedly using messages buried under background music to exhort employees to sell more and to tell customers to steal less.

But secret sentences are not the point of the new slew of self-improvement subliminals aimed at the home audience through bookstore and mail-order sales, for $8 to $36. Such companies as Alphasonics, Audio Activation, Mind Communications, Potentials Unlimited and others let you match the message to your own needs and desires.

“I started using the ‘Peak Performance’ tape,” said Kate Burton, editor-publisher of Sources magazine. “It’s one of those nebulous things where you don’t see a difference unless you’re observing carefully.”

Tapes Worked for Her

Burton did observe carefully. After exposure to the tape, she said, “I expanded my business and started new projects. Then I decided to try the weight-control tape . . . and I dropped 12 pounds. I tried ‘Get Organized,’ and compulsively balanced my checkbook. I listened to ‘Prosperity,’ and the money is flowing in.”

Part of her business expansion, it should be noted, is a distributorship for the Alphasonics line of subliminal tapes, which are the ones she used.

“We’re always absorbing more than we’re aware of,” said Kelly Howell, founder and president of Audio Activation, which makes a line of subliminal tapes for Bantam Books. “We’re hearing, smelling, seeing things all the time. Our senses are picking up information and storing it in our brains.”

A lot of that stored-up information, she said, has to do with negative self-images. The point of the subliminals is to replace those with upbeat ideas.

But even Howell has questions about the tapes.

“It’s difficult to determine what’s at work,” she said. “Is it the subliminal, or is it the placebo effect? That’s where more testing needs to be done.”

In other words, if you want to stop smoking and you buy a tape with a subliminal message about smoking cessation in it, and then you actually kick the habit, are you doing it because you’ve been reprogrammed by the tape or because you want to believe that the taped message has the power to make you do it?

And did I not lose weight, with the tape, because I didn’t really want to or because the music was so mind-bendingly boring that I unconsciously blocked out the whole thing and eventually stopped listening?

“Experiments to determine the effectiveness of the tapes seem never to have been done,” said Gregory Kimble, Ph.D., professor of psychology at Duke University in North Carolina. “There’s a lot of publicity about them, but whatever data there are about them are ‘business secrets.’ In my opinion, there are no positive benefits--or damages.”

The tapes do no great harm, in and of themselves, Smith agreed. Still, he saw a potential for problems:

“People are always looking for an easy method--to stop bed-wetting, to regain sexual vigor, to control an eating compulsion or dependence on nicotine. These are often intractable problems.

“If you think, ‘Here comes the miracle worker,’ it distracts a lot of attention from issues that should be attended to more seriously.”