Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [424]
An enormous literature has been generated by both believers and nonbelievers, but we can take a shortcut: You will recall from an earlier chapter that in 1988 and 1991 the National Research Council (of the National Academy of Sciences) appointed a Committee on Techniques for the Enhancement of Human Performance to advise the Army of any psychological techniques that could extend human capabilities.91 Let us look at the committee’s findings on five particularly popular techniques or theories, adding notes on any later studies that add anything significant to those findings.
Subliminal self-help: Annual sales of subliminal self-help tapes, available by mail order and on racks in supermarkets and bookstores, now exceed $50 million. Their producers claim that by using them one can reduce pain, break the smoking habit, control eating, build self-esteem, counter depression, overcome impotence, and achieve other worthy goals.
Unlike subliminal advertising, the messages in the tapes are presented not in microsecond doses but at normal spoken speed, although they are hidden by music, the susurrus of the surf, or other covering sounds. A tape said to build self-confidence may contain, imperceptible beneath such sounds, the repeated message “I believe in myself more and more each day.” The claim is that hidden messages are subconsciously perceived and powerfully affect the user’s feelings, thoughts, and behavior.
The most conclusive study reviewed by the committee was a double-blind experiment in which volunteers were tested for memory and self-esteem, then for five weeks used commercially produced subliminal self-help tapes either for memory improvement or self-esteem enhancement, and later were retested. What they did not know was that only half of them got the tapes they thought they were getting; of the other half, those who were told they got self-esteem tapes actually got memory-improvement tapes and vice versa.
The results achieved with all these groups showed that the tapes “had no appreciable effect, positive or negative, on any measure of either self-esteem or memory, but many of the subjects believed otherwise.” Another research team that did similar work said less discreetly that subliminal self-help audio tapes are “fraudulent” and “complete scams.”92
Later studies of these and other kinds of subliminal self-help items, and legal actions against them, have been equally damning. Several companies have marketed gadgets that deliver flashing lights and sounds through modified eyeglasses and headphones; typically, the Relaxman Synchroenergizer was claimed to improve digestion and sexual function and control pain, habits, and addictions. Because such flashing lights can trigger epileptic seizures in susceptible individuals, including some with no prior history of seizures—and did so—in 1993 the FDA initiated a seizure of the manufacturer’s entire supply, which a judge subsequently ordered destroyed.93
The FDA also stopped the marketing of the InnerQuest Brain Wave Synchronizer, which was said to provide diet control, stress relief, pain relief, and increased mental capacity; the FDA also ordered Zygon International, Inc., to make refunds to users of its Learning Machine (and to develop proof of claims for it) from which people were supposed to learn foreign languages overnight, quadruple their reading speed, expand their psychic powers, build self-esteem, and replace bad habits with good ones.94
But the latest news on this matter is depressing: A scan of the Web in late 2006 found only a handful of articles or book chapters repeating or amplifying the National Research Council committee’s findings about subliminal self-help devices but over thirty thousand entries promoting and offering such devices for sale.
Learning during sleep: From 1916 to the 1970s a number of psychologists tried softly playing to people, while they were sleeping, material to be learned, on the theory that it would be heard at an unconscious level and effortlessly