| How Subliminal Messages Can Enhance the Hypnotic Experience
There is often a deep mistrust of anything to do with subliminal messages in any kind of media. This mistrust probably stems from some of the abuses of subliminal messaging in certain types of advertising perpetrated in the early days of cinema and television. These practices were, of course, ceased many years ago. Nowadays, subliminal messages are used with good intent and with great success in enhancing hypnotic sessions and self-help recordings. However, not all recording mediums are compatible with subliminal material, as will be discussed.
In the late 1960s, subliminal cuts, as they were then known, were banned from all advertising in cinemas and on television.
Subliminal cuts were single frames picturing a product to be sold. 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!"
The cut was spliced into the reel of film being shown and because it was only one frame, it passed by too quickly for audience to consciously see. The beauty of it was that the human eye does see everything that is presented to it and that visual information is sent to the brain. So even though the audience would not have consciously registered the picture of the hot dog, that picture and message would have certainly been imprinted on their subconscious minds. 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 recipient. The cinemas found that sales of hot dogs went through the roof during the intermission.
It was discovered that using these one-frame pictures of products to be advertised, increased sales of those product quite significantly but ran afoul of broadcasting censorship boards for abusing the public's trust and so the use of subliminal cuts was banned. It remains so today.
Of course, used in a positive way to benefit people, subliminal messages can be a powerful tool in assisting the hypnotherapist to help the client to overcome their problem. Simple audio messages buried in 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. The brain then acts on the messages it hears. 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 old days of recording onto audio tape, there was no problem, because everything that was recorded onto the tape, including the subliminals was physically encoded onto the tape. Also, with digital recording, as long as the highest quality encoding was used, the subliminals would also be physically encoded into the digital stream.
The problems began several years ago, when digital recordable mini-disc became popular. It wasn't possible to fit large .wav files onto the mini-disc, so some digital processing was necessary to reduce the size of the files so that they did fit. That digital processing removed any bits that the algorithm determined would not be heard with the human ear. This reduced the size of the file considerable, while retaining the digital quality of the recording.
Good news for audio, bad news for subliminals.
Because the subliminals were determined to be below the threshold of human hearing by the algorithm, the digital bits that contained them were removed from the recording. Ok, no more subliminals.
Not quite.
Because the subliminals were spoken messages and the human voice modulates at different levels and pitches as it is spoken, some parts of the subliminal message are not removed. So what you end up with is partial messages being heard subliminally by the recipient - and these could be potentially damaging depending on what the message was.
Let's take a possible message on a quit smoking audio, for example:
"You will never want to smoke again."
Lets take the worst possible scenario and the algorithm only removes one word from the message - the word never. Now the message unconsciously decoded by the recipient's brain reads:
"You will want to smoke again."
Oh, dear!
Ok, that was a worst case scenario, but it could happen in a way that creates unpredictable results.
The reason I'm highlighting this here, is that since the demise of mini-disc and other format has become rather more popular, but uses a similar algorithm to reduce the file size as mini-disc.
MP3
Now, with MP3 recordings, the algorithm used to reduce the file size will remove most, if not all subliminal material. At best, the entire subliminal message is removed and there would be no problem, as long as the subliminally encoded music was only intended to enhance the overall hypnotherapy recording. There may be problems if only part of the subliminal messages were removed, as highlighted above. But it would be no good at all to create a subliminally encoded piece of music to be used on its own for whatever purpose, if it was in MP3 format. It would HAVE TO BE recorded as a .wav file using the highest quality digital encoding, with a bit rate of at least 44100 Hz (This is the recording industry standard).
So, in a nutshell, if you want to create successful subliminal recordings digitally, you must use a CD quality format. If you want to use MP3 or similar formats, you will have to do without subliminals.
All of my self-help hypnotherapy CDs are recorded with subliminal messages encoded in the background music and these were recorded at 44100 Hz and are in .wav format. I am currently creating hypnotherapy recordings in MP3 format which do NOT contain any subliminal material whatsoever, in order to negate any potential problems. For more information on this and other topics relating to the world of hypnosis, please visit my website.
Terry Didcott DHP http://www.hypnosic.com
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