Subliminal Advertising? : The Frontal Cortex

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Jonah Lehrer is a contributing editor at Wired. He's also written for The New Yorker, Seed, Nature, the Boston Globe and is a contributor to Radio Lab. He's the author of Proust Was A Neuroscientist. His new book is How We Decide.

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Subliminal Advertising?

Category: Culture
Posted on: January 24, 2007 2:02 PM, by Jonah Lehrer

Or just a mix-up with the cable feed?

Hat Tip: Kottke

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Comments (5)

Havn't looked at the research for a long time but that looks like liminal advertising to me. As the framerate of US TV is 30 fps at 60 fields, it's just not fast enough (hence it can be seen). Mind you - it may be that due to the temporal flexibility of viewer response that it has a minor effect...but who cares. The affects are small and wear off after a few seconds. Additionally, they are interpretable.

beyond this, in all seriouslness, it is illegal to have single frame edits of this kind due to 'epilepsy' restrictions. It's either a system fault or its fake.

Posted by: mgrierson | January 24, 2007 4:00 PM

I think the image lasted too long a duration to be considered an attempt at sublimial advertising. Although we were primed to recognize the logo in the intro.

Posted by: Sam | January 24, 2007 4:03 PM

It's not a fake -- I happened to have recorded this episode and confirmed it myself.

Posted by: Dave Munger | January 24, 2007 5:15 PM

being near the end of the show and thus before a commercial, i'd actually suggest is was a computer foul-up in the transmission booth.

in radio and in tv, most commercials and bumpers are now entirely digital and stored on hard drive space rather than the old way of flipping huge 2" tapes around. a quick double-click of the icon and off it goes either straight to the screen or into the queue.

in fact, broadcast radio now tends to have most of their songs pre-digitized and the "DJ" does no disc-flipping at all. They just drag the songs into the play list and they come up when they come up.

Or some stations like the new "George 104" (see the Washington Post for the huge upset of radio we've had recently) gets rid of the DJ entirely. They just brought in this giant box of RAID drives full of music, plugged it in, clicked "random" and are letting it run for 104 days straight, no DJs, no commercials (because this change was so rushed they didn't have time to line up new sales contracts for the new demographic).

Posted by: Joe Shelby | January 24, 2007 5:22 PM

One of Kottke's other readers also confirmed that this is real. Kinda frightening, even if it doesn't induce burger cravings.

Posted by: meerasedai | January 24, 2007 6:10 PM