Leonard Mlodinow’s interest in the subliminal began with the installation of an fMRI lab at Caltech, a machine capable of noninvasive analysis of blood flow in the brain. If you can figure out which parts of the brain are using oxygen during certain brain functions, you can learn something about how the brain works. Of course, this is a bit like scanning the temperature of a tube radio and attempting to explain telecommunications from the resulting data. Something happens here and there, but what exactly? Still, it’s a major step forward.

Mlodinow read a pile of books and some eight hundred research papers in the process of becoming an fMRI groupie. You should be so lucky as to have someone of his caliber volunteering his time, energy and insight. And then he wrote the national bestseller Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior. I wrote the last five numbered posts in response to that book, or vaguely in response. The cover of the book plays with the concept of subliminal, but I’ll let you discover that for yourself. I was in the middle of chapter 2 when I closed the book and it caught the light differently. Of course, subconscious and subliminal aren’t quite the same thing. While Subliminal is the title, the book is really about the subconscious. I suspect that was not his doing.

How things work, rather than how things can be used to persuade is what interests him. The classic book on persuasion was published when I was twelve, is The Hidden Persuaders by Vance Packard (1957). I was almost in junior high school when it first came out. I remember discussions of it at the dinner table and with teachers who weren’t afraid to have opinions about difficult things. Sex was a very difficult matter back then. I had friends also who read the book. After the Army I read Subliminal Seduction, which is now out of print, by Bryan Key (1972). I have a copy of it in a box somewhere. But by then, no one I knew had any interest in such things. Of course, it sold lots of copies, but I never ran into anyone who actually read it. There are many others, among which is The Secret Sales Pitch: An Overview of Subliminal Advertising by August Bullock (2004). I should probably read this one too. And various websites, such as Questia with a long list of books and articles on the subject that, were I much younger, I might pursue.

The subconscious and subliminal persuasion are, of course, related. I stopped for coffee on the way home from Barnes & Noble after buying Subliminal and three different people I knew asked me what I was reading. The first waved it off completely. “I don’t have a subconscious,” he said. “I have a brain. I saw you sitting there and I decided I would stop and ask what you were reading. Nothing persuaded me to do that. I decided to do that on my own.” End of conversation. So, we talked about him for several minutes and he was gone. The second explained to me that the subconscious was just one of those things they try to make you believe. “Because if you do, then they control you.” We talked about his day for a while before he left. The third, rather mysteriously, said that he used to have a subconscious, but he has grown way past that. I’ll leave it to you to figure out what kind of people I know, but it’s clear that they are all afraid of having something going on inside them that they don’t control. Of course, they control very little in their lives, so there might be a connection there.

I said earlier that you should read this book, i.e. the one by Leonard Mlodinow. But you should also read the ones about hidden persuasion. Once you do, you will never be able to look at a nationally distributed magazine without cringing. And you will begin to see just how much control your subconscious has over you and your behavior. It’s a fascinating, though also possibly a depressing subject, that I strongly recommend.