Whether the newly-discovered art of invisible advertising will hasten the Brave New World, or prove a blessing, depends on us
The theory of subliminal perception holds that man is influenced by and may even yield to impulses which aim below the threshold, or limen, of his consciousness—and is not new. Discussed for a hundred years, it attained scientific respectability with the publication of Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death by F.W.H. Myers half a century ago. It is the subliminal self, psychologists tell us, that is responsible for “automatic writing,” a well-known psychic phenomenon in which a person absorbed in one activity will, at the same time, write words or sentences of which he has no conscious knowledge. It is the nudging of the subliminal self by spirits, the mediums tell us, that results in planchette writing. And it is to this same subliminal self that Madison Avenue proposes to address its commercials in the near future.
Comments