• Question: Hey! do you think backmasking in songs really works? (Songs using backwards messageing to get people to do things with out the person knowing)

    Asked by calloway to Ben, James, Jen, Susanna on 20 Mar 2013.
    • Photo: Susanna Martin

      Susanna Martin answered on 20 Mar 2013:

      Hi Calloway, i’ve heard of this but don’t know much about it. From what I’ve read today about backmasking it sometimes occurs deliberately, but sometimes it is due to people interpreting a sound as a word, this is the brain trying to make sense of the sounds.
      Personally i’m dubious about how effective it is, I imagine for it to work you’d have to be in a similar state to during hypnosis so that you’d be susceptible to the messages. But hypnosis doesn’t work for a lot of people so similar backmasking would also be limited.
      I’d also add that sometimes people are looking for reasons to explain their behaviour so perhaps backmasking might be because people are searching for a reason.

      What do you think?

      Ps I like that Incubus put a positive message into their song “She’s worried about you. Call your mother”

    • Photo: Jen Todd Jones

      Jen Todd Jones answered on 20 Mar 2013:

      Hey calloway!

      Backmasking has a long history actually, and it’s been included in some pretty famous songs on purpose like Susie says, but the most famous example was during a court trial where the band Judas Priest were being sued for two men who had committed suicide apparently because the song told them to (backmasking showed that the song repeated the phrase ‘do it, do it’. They weren’t charged since there were also lots of other words backwards in lots of their other songs and the judge didn’t believe it was the reason for their deaths.

      Subliminal messaging does work on humans to an extent, but it’s not very powerful and certainly not powerful enough to make us do very much. A scientist once claimed that he had flashed the words “popcorn” and “drinks” on the screen during a film in a cinema too briefly for the naked eye to perceive but long enough so that the brain would process it unconsciously, he claimed that it increased the sales of popcorn and coca cola because the brain had been messaged subliminally. The only problem was he’d made it all up! He lied so that he could be famous but he was found out, now we know it has very little effect. Here’s an article on it: http://explorable.com/subliminal-messages

      Jen

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