Thursday, October 2, 2008

Politics and Advertising

Researchers, lead by Bahador Bahrami, discovered that a subject's brain was able to register images that were faint or those flashed at speed if they were in their visual line of sight, even when the subject was adamant that they had not seen anything i.e. subliminal messages.

Although current psychological assumptions work on the belief that what we pay attention to and what we are aware of are the same, this study shows otherwise. Bahrami and his team have shown that we do not need to be aware of subliminal messages for them to have an affect on the brain. Even though we can be totally unaware of any images being shown to us in the form of subliminal messages, the brain is aware and registers them!

This could account for being aware of billboards on the roadside or flashing computer graphic ads on websites not to mention the use of visual subliminal messages in magazine advertisements! It could also account for the phenomenon of being in a crowed room with a lot of conversations going on and suddenly being aware of someone mentioning your name across the room!

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