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Abstract
The visual subliminal perceives 24 frames per second. In this sequence succession there can be inserted the 25th frame, in no relation with the visible message, yet perceived consciously by the human brain. The subliminal images are invisible at normal speed. The eye would not see them and the spectator would not question this image. Sigmund Freud has demonstrated that a word or an image can activate a juncture, a complex, a repudiated feeling. But even if images or usual words, which are part of the immediate reality, come up weird, forced in a context, there is a relation of retrospect to a domain, to a form or a structure in the subconscious, fixed through other anterior relations. In transmitting a message, what certainly exists is only the intention. On the way of transmitting, the message suffers various modifications, and if it reaches the subconscious zone, it can be no longer controlled and enters a medium with its own mechanisms of action.
Keywords: communication, subliminal message, subconscious, frame, mass media.
"The whole is more than the sum of the parts" pleads professor Beau Lotto from the University College of London, which considers that the audience sees 10% of an image with the eyes and the rest with the brain.
Max Sutherland and Alice K. Sylvester accredit the idea that this is "the biggest myth of all": the fact that publicity manipulates by using the subliminal stimulus. They consider that we only speak of a modern legend, which does not determine the increase of sales for a specific product. The phenomenon has taken in ampleness in 1957, at the moment when, in a cinema in New Jersey, a marketing specialist, the American James Vicary, would have introduced in the film "Picnic" the slogans "Drink Coca Cola" and "Hungry? Eat Popcorn". These images and the respective writings repeated themselves each 5 seconds, without being perceived consciously by the audience, their length being under 50 millisec, therefore under brain's capacity of reception. Therefore, these images have been perceived only subconsciously. The experiment lasted for 6 weeks, 45,000 people having been exposed to this kind of impulses. Studies have shown that after this experiment the sales have increased with 57.5 % for popcorn and 18.1% for...