The Age of Enlightenment is a term used to describe a phase in Western philosophy and cultural life centered upon the eighteenth century, in which reason was advocated as the primary source and legitimacy for authority.
In Buddhism, enlightenment is when a Buddhist discovers the truth about life, generally achieved through meditation and the forced “clearing” of one’s mind. Enlightenment is attained when you look at everything positive because all the negative has gone away. Buddha is said to have reached this goal at the young age of 35 after meditating for forty days under a tree.
But for most of us, learning progresses over a much longer period of time. This is marked by acquiring new knowledge, behaviors, skills, values, preferences or understanding, and may involve synthesizing different types of information. It may occur as a result of habituation, classical conditioning, or play. It may occur as part of education or personal development. It may be goal-oriented or aided by motivation. And learning may occur consciously or without conscious awareness.
In early In-Home Display design trials, Aztech engineers noticed that an In-Home Display could fade into the background of a room when residents got used to its presence. Lack of awareness of the In-Home Display resulted in energy conservation becoming less of a conscious priority. The savings that were achieved when the In-Home Display was first introduced into the residence would start to slip backward toward older usage patterns.
This is what has come to be known as the “Hawthorne Effect”.
Between 1924 and 1932, a series of experiments were carried out at a factory called the Hawthorne Works near Chicago. This led to an important milestone in organizational behavior. Although the study was far-reaching and attempted to examine the physical and environmental influences of the workplace, it was discovered that productivity amongst employees increased in response to lighting changes when they thought they were the subject of an efficiency study. These levels diminished when the same workers thought they were no longer part of the study.
All of us have had the experience of suddenly seeing something we didn’t consciously look for. Examples are noticing a car that looks like the one you drive in a stream of traffic. Or a certain designer shoe on a person in a crowded mall. These are examples of pattern recognition. The phenomenon focuses your attention without conscious thought when a familiar pattern presents itself. It bypasses the conscious mind.
Aztech addressed this phenomenon by experimenting with ways to catch the residents’ attention and hit on the idea of a flashing light bar. The In-Home Display could still fade into the background, but an unexpected change in movement or color on the light bar would alert the customer and bring their attention back. They suddenly found themselves asking, “Why?” Aztech had rediscovered the power of subliminal learning as a powerful way to overcome the Hawthorne Effect.
A subliminal message is a signal or message embedded in another medium, designed to pass below the normal limits of the human mind’s perception. These messages are unrecognizable by the conscious mind, but in certain situations can affect the subconscious mind and can negatively or positively influence subsequent later thoughts, behaviors, actions, attitudes, beliefs and value systems.
It has been said that the advertising industry engages in deceptive subliminal advertising of which most us are unaware. By bypassing our conscious mind using subliminal techniques, advertisers tap into the vulnerabilities surrounding our unconscious mind, manipulating and controlling us in many ways. In today’s Information Age, there is considerable debate as to whether or not people are still in control of themselves. Nevertheless, it would seem the ones in control are the ones with the power.
But subliminal perception is not a newly discovered physiological phenomenon used only by the advertising industry. Historical scholars such as Plato, Aristotle, and even texts such as the Bible have alluded to a subconscious phenomenon. Early artists, such as those in the Renaissance, used subliminal techniques in their artwork.
Before one can understand the subliminal techniques advertisers use to influence the audience, one must understand the vulnerabilities in humans they tap into. The human being is a complex creature. The same complexity that gives us the ability to manipulate objects also makes us vulnerable to manipulation.
As defined, perception is the brain's reception of incoming stimuli. Some of this perception is conscious, while most of it is unconscious. But our primary sensory input is visual perception. It is believed that the eyes do not edit perception, and the retina transmits everything to the brain's visual cortex for processing. Not everyone perceives an image the same, however. Different perceptions would ultimately affect each person's level of subliminal receptivity.
In the 1960’s, scientists discovered that messages flashed on a screen too fast for the human eye to see could still pass suggestions to a person unconsciously. Advertisers began to flash messages just below the threshold of recognition to see if this would increase a consumer’s impulse to buy one brand over another. The fad passed, but the point was made: some things can become recognized subliminally and this can change behavior.
Marshall McLuhan from the University of Toronto looked at the phenomenon and popularized his thoughts about it in his famous 1964 book The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects (the pun on “message” was intentional). He went on to discover an association between “thoughts and feelings" and the subliminal, imperceptible environments of media effects in the 1970s. In other words, subliminal learning is associated with emotional responses in addition to simple recognition of a person or object.
In 2001, Takeo Watanabe and his colleagues at Boston University re-examined the phenomenon once again and discovered that people who watched a particular direction of subliminal dot movement during a letter-naming trial were significantly better at picking it out later.
Phil Merikle, from the University of Waterloo, commented on the results of Watanabe’s study: "I think it's one of the nicest sets of data I've seen for learning outside of perceptual awareness…This perceptual learning is influencing how they see the world. Subconscious learning may affect our conscious decisions -- without our knowing it. It's what advertisers have known all along: if we just keep the exposure rate up, people will be influenced.”
Thus, the information communicated through the screen of an IHD alone may not be enough to encourage people to change their behavior when it comes to energy conservation. But the more interactive and more engaging an IHD can be, the greater effect it will have. The light bar atop Aztech’s In-Home Display serves as a constant influence to make people more aware of changes in their energy use without their consciously thinking about it.
Educator Henry van Dyke once said, “No amount of energy will take the place of thought.” We disagree.
Wednesday, August 26, 2009
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