From subliminal recordings promising better memory and concentration to increased business success, the Internet has it all.
But is the key to unlocking your full potential really hidden below your conscious awareness?
And do subliminals work?
I had to find out. Especially given my particular approach to what I call “true skepticism.”
Ever since I memorized over 1700 words in Sanskrit to test the claim that certain mantras can completely silence the mind, I’ve always found it important to make conclusions based on experience.
That’s why I’m excited to share with you the results of my experiments with subliminals promising better memory.
Why else should you care about my findings?
For a few reasons.
As a PhD with a long history of studying memory improvement, I had an entirely different career before I started teaching mnemonics on this blog.
I’ve lectured on and published studies about the unconscious transfer of messages as a Film Studies professor.
And as someone who is generally scientifically literature, I took every possible step to combine research and n=1 experimentation to form my analysis.
That’s why on this page, you’ll discover what you want to know.
All without the hype of nods to visualization like you get from celebrities like Oprah.
And without the easily manufactured testimonials you get from so-called “every day people.”
Today, we’re exploring the truth about claims people have made about subliminal recordings with a special focus on memory and business success.
In fact, I’m listening to a “manifest business success” subliminal as I’m typing up this report.
Has it worked? Did my memory get any better?
Read on to find out.
What Are Subliminals (And Do They Work)?
According to Leonard Mlodinow in his award-winning book, Subliminal, this term refers to content that you absorb automatically without any level of awareness, intention or control.
In other words, you literally have no understanding of what is influencing you.
Petr Bob said much the same in his book Brain and Dissociated Mind.
Bob differentiates material made present to the conscious mind as explicit from implicit information where introspection is not possible.
This definition poses trouble for the idea of listening to a subliminal recording.
Even if you can’t hear the message, by listening with intention, some kind of introspection is going on.
This would suggest that, at best, choosing to listen to such a recording is actually “supraliminal.”
That’s because this term typically means that a stimulus exists above the threshold of consciousness.
A simple visual example we’re probably all familiar with will help clarify:
When you see a politician holding someone’s baby, you are perfectly aware of what you’re seeing.
But you might not introspect about the propagandistic meaning of the presentation.
According to A&E’s History website, Alan Lowe tracked this campaign cliche back to Andrew Jackson’s New Jersey tour of 1833.
As Jackson stopped to greet a mother and baby, the woman thrust her little boy into his arms. “Ah! There is a fine specimen of American childhood!” declared the president, who then passed the dirty-faced infant over to Secretary of War John Eaton for him to kiss.
Over time, this practice came to convey the idea that a baby-kissing politician can be trusted by the public at large.
Speaking of politics, you can find a provocative fictional example of visual supraliminals being used to train an assassin in The Parallax View.
Back To The Big Question: Do They Work?
Mlodinow provides a nuanced answer that brings together social psychology, cognitive psychology and neuroscience.
According to his findings, there are some ways in which various contexts influence us.
But it’s the brain in context we need to look at, not just the stimuli in isolation.
Andy Clark says much the same in his book, The Experience Machine: How Our Minds Predict and Shape Reality.
He says something interesting that’s worth touching up:
There is a fundamental drive, instantiated by the brain, to minimize errors in our own sensory predictions. That same drive guides, and is guided by, our own internal bodily states and a rich array of physical actions, many of them designed to gather information and reduce uncertainty.
If this statement is true, then perhaps the reason we are drawn to subliminals comes not from any scientific evidence supporting that they work.
Rather, we are driven to try and get results from such questionable practices because our quest to reduce uncertainty overrides the rational mind.
The History Behind The Historical Hype
As this Consciousness and Cognition article suggests, the idea of subliminal perception goes at least as far back as philosophers like Leibniz and Kant.
Peirce and Jastrow were likely the first to try and detect the smallest possible differences in sensory stimuli.
In their 1885 paper, On Small Differences in Sensation, they reported an experiment in which participants compared two small weights and selected one they believed was heavier.
The researchers found that even when participants were guessing, they were correct slightly more than 50% of the time.
Even though participants felt uncertain, they still performed slightly better than chance. According to the researchers, somehow a significant number of participants were able to register an extremely minimal difference in the weights.
The Psychology of Suggestion
Following Peirce and Jastrow, Boris Sidis studied ways that unnoticed stimuli could affect behavior in The Psychology of Suggestion (1898).
Sidis identified a number of contexts in which suggestibility might take place, from listening to Antony’s speech in Shakespeare to looking at images he considered too faint to be consciously recognized.
Although intriguing, I couldn’t find any studies that attempted to reproduce Sidis’ experiments.
Several other studies of the thresholds of perception followed, but let’s move on to less scientific discussions that help explain the popularity of subliminal products today.
There are a lot more scientific studies to consider, but none of them have revealed anything massive when it comes to the promises made about subliminals promising better memory.
The Pseudoscience that Inspired a Bankrupt Industry
Perhaps the most famous case of fraud in the realm of subliminals belongs to James Vicary.
In 1957 he claimed to have conducted an experiment involving 45,699 moviegoers.
As they watched movies, he said he flashed subliminal prompts on the screen with messages like “Eat Popcorn” and “Drink Coca-Cola.”
He claimed that popcorn sales rose by 57.5 percent, Coca-Cola sales by 18.1 percent.
The problem?
Vicary offered no details on exactly how he conducted the experiment. In the absence of details, no one could verify exactly how he did it.
Eventually, Vicary retracted his claims during a television interview.
It had all been a hoax.
Saving Grace?
Despite Vicary’s admission, researchers at Princeton tried a similar experiment in 2002. The subliminal message was designed to make viewers of an episode of The Simpsons thirstier.
Although the researchers found that 27 percent of viewers said they were thirstier after the show, others were only marginally less thirsty. In other words, there was no substantial difference.
The researchers ultimately concluded that if there was an effect, it came from the fact that the study participants were unnaturally focused on the Simpsons episode.
And most people would feel thirsty after not having a drink after that amount of time anyway. Perhaps more so due to the artificial environment of the scientific study.
The Darkness Lurking Behind the Promises
Strangely, many people know little of Vicary’s fraud.
Even though the Flynn Effect showed a rise in IQ scores around the world, countless people around the world still engage in countless recordings promising weight loss, business success, better memory and improved creativity.
One of the biggest problems I see in this field involves ethics.
For one thing, during my experiments with subliminals, I suffered tinnitus symptoms.
It kept me wondering whether or not listening to such recordings is actually physically safe for the ears. Have any of the people producing such recordings tested to make sure there aren’t any issues?
We also have a dearth of instructions. All kinds of people in comment sections are willing to say that people seeking guidance have failed because they didn’t use the recordings “correctly.”
But since there’s a lack of evidence that any of this works in the absence of instructions, we simply cannot take such statements as anything other than dishonest. If not abusive.
Then there are psychological risks.
A big one is called illusory correlation.
This condition occurs when people imagine that they’re getting a result when there is in fact no such relationship between, say, listening to a subliminal for memory and an actual boost.
I experienced this myself a little bit during my experiments.
And the reason illusory correlation takes place is because striking or unusual events stick out. They grab our attention and help to foster false beliefs.
Over time, this study shows just how easily illusory correlations can reinforce baseless beliefs and lead to destructive stereotypes.
The solution to falling into this trap? A big one is critical thinking.
Another is applying critical thinking to your own experiments, which is just what I’ve done.
Ready?
My N=1 Experiments: Testing Subliminals for Better Memory on Myself
The first thing we have to recognize is that my “experiments” suffered from the getgo.
As Mlodinow’s definition of “subliminal” makes clear, you can’t be influenced subliminally if you’re aware of the signal.
And being able to introspect as I’ve done?
That’s anathema to the concept, something the bankrupt charlatans have no problem with as they pour their subliminal audio programs into the market.
But that’s no reason not to at least give them the benefit of the doubt and test their claims.
Experiment #1: Binaural Beats for Memory Vs. Subliminal Memory Improvement “Training”
Before starting the experiment, I dug up my old baseline from the last time I trained with memorizing words from screen. I was never very good at memorizing from screens, but at least tend to have high accuracy.
For seven days, I listened to a binaural beats recording that promises better memory while memorizing physical playing cards. You can listen to the same binaural beats for memory if you want to reproduce my experiment.
I decided to listen to these beats to create a “split test” against memorising vocabulary using the International Association of Memory software while listening to this subliminal recording.
The initial result with cards was a bit surprising in a positive sense, especially since I was memorizing through some serious sleep deprivation. But I knew this was a case of illusory correlation.
This state was confirmed across the subsequent days. There was only one other session where the amount of cards correctly remembered was a bit higher than average.
When it came to my vocabulary results, they were continually reduced by listening to the subliminal recording.
To be fair, during this experiment, I memorized the vocabulary immediately after memorizing the playing cards.
(You can also learn how I memorize vocabulary and how I commit cards to memory quickly if you like.)
The fact that I memorized vocabulary after a run with playing cards could have caused some cognitive drain that diminished the vocabulary trial.
But I did it this way for a reason. Theoretically, the subliminal recording should have overridden any cognitive drain.
It did not.
As you can see, my baseline dropped from 32 words to 19 as a result of listening to the subliminal recording for better memory.
32 down to 19 is a massive drop if you ask me.
Here are the results from the entire week:
- Day one: 19 correct
- Day two: 24 correct
- Day three: 21 correct
- Day four: 20 correct
- Dave five: 27 correct
- Day six: 29 correct
- Day seven: 24 correct
If you noticed that there was a slight rise in results on days five to seven, you’d be correct.
But is the improvement coming from listening to this highly distracting recording?
I doubt it.
Instead, my sleep improved over the course of the week. I also started to enjoy what my friend and 3x USA Memory Champion John Graham calls “chaos training.”
That’s the main benefit I got from memorizing while listening to these recordings: the grit needed to push through distractions.
As Graham has regularly reported, memorizing while listening to TV and having his kids run around gave him the edge during competition.
Experiment #2: Subliminal Recording vs. Heavy Metal
Immediately after concluding experiment one, I switched the binaural beats for a heavy metal song called “Born” by Nevermore.
I also changed the language from English to German.
In this case, the test run with subliminals outperformed listening to the Heavy Metal song.
Whereas I got 28 German words correct while listening to the subliminal, I only got 14 correct while listening to the song.
On average, the results remained at this level across the week.
But was the subliminal helping?
No, because I never got closer to my baseline in English than 28 German words.
And the only reason I believe the Nevermore song crushed my results is because it’s simply more distracting. It’s catchy too and I couldn’t resist singing or humming along with it.
Analysis of My Experiments
Overall, I’m not impressed.
At best, I got in some of John’s “chaos training.”
But to little effect.
And the tinnitus I believe the recordings caused simply wasn’t worth it.
Plus, the problem with memorizing from screens while listening to these recordings is simply that this is not how I ever use memory techniques in real life.
No, I memorize names at events.
And I learn languages by studying from print books and working with native speakers in person.
The Ultimate Reason Why Subliminals Do Not Work
While doing my research, I came across a YouTuber who typifies the problems with the promises people make.
Consider the major contradiction in this video.
On the one hand, this person says that the recordings work best if you listen to them while you’re “not alert.”
Yet, she also says she usually listens to them while working.
She also says that you should only focus on one subliminal recording for one outcome at a time. Yet, she offers a playlist on YouTube that strings a bunch together – using autoplay.
By design, this offering pulls you from one stated purpose to the next.
I could go on with other observations, but I have long concluded that people working in this field are suffering illusory correlations.
That, or my expectations are much higher than theirs.
If you claim that listening to a recording is going to make my memory skills explode, or my business results soar…
I want epic results.
Otherwise, I’m not sure why these recordings exist.
The Alternative to Subliminals for Better Memory
If you’ve looked at my results and wondered, “How can I memorize 28 words in a foreign language while listening to distracting music?” let me explain.
The first thing you need is the Memory Palace for language learning.
Make no mistake.
A proper Memory Palace is the key to learning and remembering just about anything.
Unlike the exaggerated problems of the subliminal hucksters, everything about the memory techniques I teach is validated by science.
Although a small amount of effort is required, you don’t have to be a memory champion to quickly master these skills.
You just need a bit of guidance, which you can get now through my free memory improvement course:
It give you four video lessons and three worksheets that walk you through everything.
Mastering the Memory Palace technique is worth it.
From using it study better to committing poetry to your long-term memory, it clearly and obviously beat subliminal recordings in my tests.
Of course, so long as you don’t mind the risk of tinnitus and illusory correlation, I encourage you to run experiments of your own.
You’ll learn a lot along the way.
And my buddy John Graham is right.
Chaos training does help you use the techniques better when things are calm.
And reasserting the truth of that?
Golden.
