“Nothing focuses the mind’s eye like an erotic picture, according to the results of a new study. Even when such pictures were actively canceled out, subliminal images of female nudes helped heterosexual men find the orientation of a briefly shown abstract shape. Such nudity-driven focusing worked almost as well for women, as long as the image accorded with their sexual preference. Cognitive neuroscientist Sheng He of the University of Minnesota and his colleagues gathered groups of heterosexual men, heterosexual women, homosexual men and bisexual women numbering 10 each. Each viewed special images pointed directly at each individual eye. The researchers could cancel out vision of one eye’s image by presenting a specific high contrast image to the other eye. Such an image, called a Gabor patch, consists of a series of contrasting lines that form an abstract — and visually arresting — shape. ‘Normally, the two eyes look at the same image. They don’t have any conflict,’ he explains. ‘We create a situation where the two eyes are presented with two images, and then they will have binocular competition. One image is high contrast [and dynamic], the other is static. You basically just see the dynamic image.’ Into the canceled out image slot, the researchers slipped an erotic image; for example, a naked woman displayed for a heterosexual man… Over the course of 32 trials, men were significantly better at detecting the orientation of Gabor patches when they appeared in the slot formerly occupied by an invisible image of a nude woman. The heterosexual men, however, had a more difficult time detecting the same orientation when it was located where an invisible picture of a nude man had been; this was not the case for heterosexual women when viewing their own sex naked… This focus benefit did not carry over, however, when the participants were allowed to consciously see the naked photos, the researchers report in the paper published online in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA.” — Scientific American (US)

If you’re a man, it’s difficult not to read this study without thinking, “Aha, that explains it. The environment must be saturated with subliminal erotic images. Why else would I walk around with a boner 99% of the time?”

Seriously, there has been a lot of debate about the efficacity of subliminal images. Sceptics have pointed out that the very concept seems self-contradictory: if a stimulus lies beneath the threshold of perception, how can it have any effect? However, that logical argument always smacks face-first into empirical results that suggest otherwise. For example, there was a study of the connection between alcohol and arousal that used subliminal lettering in an apparently effective way. And now this new study, which seems perfectly solid in its methodology, indicates that subliminal images can and do attract attention. What’s more, the study clarifies that this attention is not merely a passing but rather a comprehending glance whose results the brain really chews over. It’s an astonishing result.

In another article, Professor He asserts that you don’t have to worry about this subliminal technique making its way into advertising, since the physical setup that enables researchers to “cancel an image slot” would be difficult to replicate on a television screen or magazine page. But still, it is tempting to think that there are ways in which society could make a beneficent use of this discovery. For example, cockpits could be configured with some sort of eye-divergence mechanism, so that pilots could be presented with subliminal erotic images to stimulate their waning attentions over the course of a long flight. Of course, the effects of eight or ten hours of constant subliminal stimulation have yet to be researched. Subliminal stimulators in the cockpit might cause a dramatic upswing in the molestation of stewardesses. But wouldn’t the advances in airline safety be worth it?

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