Subliminal Messages to Further Enhance the Hypnotic Experience

People often display a deep mistrust of anything to do with subliminal messages in any kind of media. This stems from certain abuses of subliminal messages in audio and visual form by the advertising fraternaty in the early days of cinema and television. In the late 1960's "subliminal cuts" as they were then known, were completely banned from all advertising in cinemas and on television.

Subliminal cuts were simply single frames picturing a product to be sold, that were spliced into a reel of film at certain points. In cinemas, these would be something that the cinema would be selling during the intermission, say for instance a picture of a hot-dog with a simple message, saying something like "Enjoy a delicious hot dog". Because the "cut" was only one frame, it passed by much too quickly for the audience to consciously see.

The beauty of subliminal cuts were that the human eye does see everything that is presented to it and that visual information is sent to the brain to be processed and stored in memory. So even though the unsuspecting audience would not have consciously registered the picture of the hot dog or the message that went with it, that picture and message was imprinted on their subconscious. The picture combined with the simple message would have been interpreted by the brain as something the individual might have thought of themselves, so an unconscious desire to eat a hot dog had been implanted in the subconscious minds of the audience. Not surprisingly, the cinemas found that sales of hot dogs went through the roof during the intermission!

Despite the discovery that using these one-frame pictures of products to be advertised increased sales of those product quite significantly, the advertisers ran afoul of broadcasting censorship boards for abusing the public's trust and so the use of subliminal cuts was eventually banned. It remains so today.

Of course, not all uses of subliminal messages are soley for monetary gain. Used in a positive way to benefit people, subliminal messages can be a powerful tool in assisting hypnotherapists to help their clients to overcome their particular problem. Simple audio messages buried in background music can be used to help a person to relax and then to feel comfortable working with their problem to affect a permanent cure.

Subliminal Audio

Subliminal audio messages work on the same principle to visual ones, in that the human ear also registers everything it hears and sends the messages to the brain to be processed and stored in memory. The brain then acts on those messages. If, for example, the message said simply "relax", the recipient would naturally begin to relax. This simple example is used often in the background music played along with self-help hypnotherapy CDs and is helpful and effective in helping a person to relax and nothing more.

There is a technical downside to this, however. When recording subliminal messages within music, the levels of those subliminals are set below that of the music. In the past, all music was recorded onto analog audio tape, so there was no problem because everything that was recorded, including the subliminal material was physically encoded onto the tape. So even though the subliminal messages were set at a threshold below the level of the music, they were still present and could be interpreted by the human brain..

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