Choices and Illusions (14 page)

that is supposed to prevent the broadcast of subliminal messages.

The unfortunate truth of the matter is that more than one case has

been taken to the FCC and no penalties have ever been imposed.

Even the now infamous “RATS” ad that appeared on television dur-

ing the Bush/Gore presidential campaign failed to move the FCC

to do anything more than condemn. You may recall that in this

advertisement, the subliminal message bolded above Mr. Gore’s

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head was “RATS,” taken from the small print BureaucRATS. The

democrats cried foul, and the people behind the Bush advertise-

ment first asserted “accident” and then conceded intention, but

that it was just a joke and not meant to be taken seriously.

You might be interested to know that researchers at Adelphi

University conducted an experiment replicating the Bush/Gore

campaign and the infamous “RATS” ad and found that the ad defi-

nitely skewed the election in favor of the Bush-like candidate. They therefore concluded that it was very likely that the ad did influence the outcome of the election. That said, despite the democratic Party pursuing this as far as it could, nothing happened—there was nothing they could do. That tells all of us that if they could do nothing, no one can do anything about this sort of subliminal influence.

Another point worth noting regarding the law has to do with

legislation proposed in the state of Utah. This legislation would not have made the use of subliminal information illegal; it would simply have required informed consent. So, if a retailer wished to use subliminal antitheft messages, that would be fine—provided the retailer published the fact that such messages were used and made the affirmations available upon request. The reason for the latter was simply due to some so-called antitheft messages I had seen. Bear in mind

that a message such as “Buying is honest” is also a motivational message, not just one discouraging theft. The legislation was approved by the committee after a veritable who’s who in the advertising world

showed up in Utah to oppose it. The opposition loudly asserted that the law was unnecessary since no one used subliminal messages, and

that they would not do so simply because they did not work in the

first place. Although the committee approved the proposed law, it

never went to the floor for a vote.

To this day, no legislation protects

the consumer from subliminal manipulation.

A representative of a foreign politician contacted my office

regarding subliminal advertising. I advised against using it unless it was done with full disclosure. For example, informing the public that you were using a subliminal message to get out the vote might

attract favorable attention to both the politician and the campaign.

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On the other hand, it could backfire. Either way, if it was used it would in all probability be discovered.

The Secret Recipe

now back to my story. Because many companies were offering

subliminal tapes, I phoned a number of them. I explained who I

was and asked how they made their tapes. You would have thought

I was asking for the secret recipe for Coca-Cola. In my opinion,

companies that made so-called scientific claims were obligated to

provide at least some information regarding how they prepared

a program that supposedly altered behavior. no one was forth-

coming. Eventually I purchased some programs and sent them

to Audio Forensic laboratories in California for analysis. When I

received the report, I knew why the matter was such a secret. The

bottom line was that there were no subliminal messages on the

tapes—on any of them. At least, there was no recoverable verbal

content of any kind.

It was clear that for a stimulus to affect someone, there must

be sufficient signal strength. Subtract the signal strength, and

everything became about as subliminal as something being said a

mile away. For some this result may have been satisfactory because, after all, the mind was magical and it could extract verbal messages from the ether. This notion did not work for me, however, so I went back to the drawing board.

Dichotic Listening

Reviewing the literature again, I found quite a bit of good

audio work on what is called shadowing, or dichotic listening,

experiments. Essentially, this type of work masks one message with

another. One ear may receive random numbers for a period while

the other perceives a partial story, then the partial story switches to the numbers ear and the numbers switch to the story ear. Subjects

normally report hearing the story and fail to report the numbers.

Sometimes random words are presented to one ear and a partial

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story to the other. The brain selects the words it needs to complete, or fill in, the story, which is simultaneously delivered to the opposite ear. See the following illustration.

Figure 21

In a typical shadowing task, the messages are presented simul-

taneously to the left and right ears, and the subject attempts to

shadow one ear.

Figure 22

Here the subject follows the meaningful message as it moves

from one ear to the other.

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Mirror Image

now I must take a step or two backward. I was familiar with

something called “back masking,” and a sound engineer for a couple

of major artists had told me that he personally mixed backward

messages into their songs. I was also convinced that children mixing up
5
’s and
S
’s by writing them backward, as so very many seem to do, were simply correcting for some mirrored image in the mind.

Further, the holographic models put forth by such researchers as

Karl Pribram and david Bohm had provided a simple mechanic

by which this speech reversal, or mirroring, was accomplished. I

have referred to this mirroring model as the MIP method, or Mirror

Imaging Paradigm, in my books on subliminal information. As you

may recall, Karl Pribram, the noted neuroscientist, and david Bohm, the nobel Prize–winning physicist, advanced the theory that the

brain stores information holographically—that is, across all of the brain. According to this theory, every cell carries information, or, more specifically, memories, like a tiny piece of holographic film.

(When a film plate catches a holographic image, the plate can be cut into many pieces; but when light shines through any of the pieces,

the contents of the entire plate are visible. In other words, unlike a picture cut into several pieces, perhaps forming a puzzle, every

fragment of the holographic film contains the entire image.)

The right hemisphere is the spatial, creative,

and nonlinear hemisphere; the left hemisphere is

subject to the rules of language, logic, and linear thinking.

Brain hemispheric specialization theories argue that the right

hemisphere, for typical right-handed people, is the spatial, creative, and nonlinear hemisphere; whereas the left hemisphere is subject

to the rules of language, logic, and linear thinking. The right hemisphere is also the seat of the unconscious or subconscious. Using

simple deductive reasoning, it occurred to me that the right hemi-

sphere probably acquired language first, because its development by way of specialization precedes the left. (Infants first perceive dark and light, then shapes, and so forth.) If this were the case, and since hard research has proven that memory is indeed stored across all of 79

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the brain,2 then word representations in an oversimplified model

may look like the following illustration.

Figure 23

Reverse Speech

I added this all up, and the light dawned. What if I were to

mask forward speech with reverse speech? Would this confuse the

mind enough for it to fail to consciously discriminate the speech?

You see, hemispheric specialization explained the famous Stroop

Effect, in my view. Because one hemisphere entertained more than

the other such things as space and color while the other hemi-

sphere dealt with the rules of language, logic, and so forth, when

a person is called upon to integrate the two, there is a noticeable failure. The Stroop Test prints the names of various colors in colors that to do not correspond with the name of the color. For example,

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the word
yellow
would be printed in green, the word
blue
printed in red, and so forth. (If you would like to try this test for yourself, please go to
www.eldontaylor.com/choicesandillusions
.)

What most people find is that there is substantial interference

between the spelling of the word and the color of the typeface.

What should be a simple task becomes quite difficult. Combining

this information, I decided to deliver both forward speech and

reverse speech and disguise it with a soundtrack—sounds of the

ocean with birds or music. In doing so, I found that a person’s

ability to discriminate the speech was almost entirely lost. In

time, this became known as the Taylor Method, and I patented it,

together with some other claims, totaling 105 in all. (This tech-

nology is known as InnerTalk today.) When I ran studies, at least

everyone would be able to see exactly how we did things by simply

viewing the patent and, as with all good science, test or replicate my findings.

All right, I had a method. And, by the way, unknown to me

at the time, another researcher by the name of david Oates was

simultaneously working on reverse speech. There is little doubt

today that some children process language in reverse. (You might

want to visit his website,
www.reversespeech.com
, and listen for yourself.) We often mistake as gibberish the speech of small children in the phase of development where the child looks you right

in the eye and says something that is not goo-goo gaga, but you

don’t understand what he or she is saying. Yet, when such speech