-Caveat Lector-
The evil eye...the unaceptable face of TV
G L Playfair
5
CONFUSED?
We all take in far more visual information than we need, and we keep all of
it whether it seems useful or not. In fact, we cannot get rid of it even if
we would like to do so. True, we forget things, but this is due to retrieval
malfunction rather than actual loss of an item in the memory store. Indeed,
to get rid of traumas, those emotional shocks usually from childhood that
affect mental stability later in life, prolonged psychiatric treatment may
be necessary. Our natural instinct is to register whatever information the
environment throws at us, process what we need at the time and tuck the rest
away, just as we fill our attics with things that will 'come in useful one
day'. There is no known limit to the storage capacity of our memory attics.
The brain, however, can become overloaded during the
information-collecting process, and when this happens it resorts to a rather
curious defence mechanism. Here is an example of information overloading:
Your right arm is becoming heavier. At the same time your left arm feels
lighter and the right foot feels numb. Now your right arm feels lighter
still while the left is becoming heavier and begins to fall.
The left hand is also feeling numb and cold.
At the same time you notice how warm your left foot is getting, while your
right arm is becoming so heavy that you cannot lift it without considerable
effort.
All the while, your left hand continues to feel warmer and warmer and as it
does so it
gets lighter and lighter and begins to lift into the air.
Confused? You should be, because this piece of apparent nonsense
from one of the standard textbooks on medical hypnotism illustrates what is
known in the trade as the Confusion Technique, used to induce hypnosis in
difficult subjects. If contradictory and thoroughly confusing state-ments
like the above are made for five or ten minutes, this is what should happen
next:
'The effort of trying to adopt a critical attitude towards all of
the conflicting suggestions proves too much, so that eventually the line of
least resistance is adopted and criticism is suspended.' The patient is then
'resigned to accepting the suggestion which is really desired'.'
Desired by the hypnotist, that is.
Our brains also react in a predictable way when they are confronted
not by too much information but by too little. Here is hypnotist, James
Braid, describing the conclusion he reached after numerous experiments on
his patients:
It is a law in the animal economy that by a continued fixation of the mental
and visual eye on any object which is not of itself of an exciting nature,
with absolute repose of body and general quietude, they become wearied; and
provided the patients rather favour than resist the feeling of stupor of
which they will soon experience the tenden-cy to creep upon them during such
experiments, a state of somnolency is induced . . which renders the patient
liable to be affected so as to exhibit the hypnotic phenomena.2
Braid, writing in 1843, had rediscovered what eastern meditators had
known for centuries: concentration on a single object can lead to an altered
state of consciousness. His important discovery was that this state could be
used together with spoken suggestion to help the sick get better, and so
medical hypnotism as still practised today evolved from mesmerism with its
unspoken indirect suggestion
(which could be just as effective). Braid found that any object would do
provided patients kept their eyes fixed on it. Bright ones were best, and he
normally used his shiny metal lancet-case held in front of the patient's
eyes. 'The patient must be made to understand', he wrote, 'that he is to
keep the eyes steadily fixed on the object, and the mind riveted on the idea
of that one object.'3
Now, what do we do when we watch television? We fix our eyes on a
not very exciting object as we slump in absolute repose. We definitely
favour the feeling that creeps upon us, so much so that we go favouring it
indefinitely or until the weather forecast reminds us that it is bedtime.
All the while we are being submitted to prolonged application of Confusion
Technique (in the modern form of what Mander calls 'techno-dazzle') with
images hurtling at us one after the other at a rate of at least ten a
minute, hour after hour. While watching television we are thus hypno-tised
in two ways at once.
Being hypnotised does not, as some believe, mean that we are out
cold. Even in the deepest of trances information reaches the mind, while in
light hypnosis we remain fully aware of everything around us. So the images
absorbed by the television viewer, though they may be consciously for-gotten
(as they often are) will remain in the memory store. What they do with
themselves in there and when they will pop out into consciousness, sometimes
altering behaviour in the process, is entirely beyond our conscious control.
At the 1988 conference of the Market Research Society, Roy Langmaid
and Wendy Gordon provided evidence to suggest the existence of something
called Shoppers' Trance. They tested a group of volunteer supermarket
shoppers for 'brand awareness' (buying one item in preference to a similar
one made by another company) and then hypnotised them and gave them the same
test. The researchers found that brand awareness was considerably better
under hypnosis, and they also reported that from their own observations they
reckoned 'lots of people shop in trance', largely as a result of the
relaxation induced by Muzak. 'Could it be', they asked
, 'that in the absent-minded trance-like state which we observed in
the supermarket aisles, people replay snippets of the commercials, the
branding and atmosphere they experience at home in a similar state while
glued to the box, swaying rhythmically while doing the ironing, feeding the
cat or cooking the evening meal?'4
I am not sure that Shoppers' Trance works quite like this (do people
sway while feeding the cat, or cooking?), but this is an example of the kind
of first-hand research of which there should be a good deal more. It seems
to provide clear evidence that people buy things for reasons they cannot
explain, and if they do that what else might they be doing without knowing
why?
Another example of a very under-researched aspect of television is
the experimental study of viewers' brain waves carried out by biofeedback
specialist Thomas Mulholland in the early '70s. Even if it is an
exaggeration to say that watching TV turns the brain to mush, we certainly
know now that it does alter brain functioning quite dramatically. Mulholland
discovered this when he wired ten young people to electroencephalograph
(EEG) machines and sat them down in front of TV sets to watch one of their
favourite programmes.
He expected to see plenty of fast beta wave activity (13 to 50
cycles per second) on the
EEG, indicating that his subjects were actively responding to something they
enjoyed. Instead, all he could see on the paper were the slower alpha waves
(about 7 to 13 cycles per second) of the kind associated with relaxation,
meditation and other wholly passive states in which the subject is not
interacting with the outside world at all.
Mulholland then fixed his apparatus so that the TV sets would switch
themselves off automatically when the EEG showed a predominance of alpha. In
other words, if the children did not generate any higher (beta) waves of the
kind produced during conversation or reading, in which the speaker or reader
is actively interacting with the other speaker or the book, the switching
off of the set would prove that the children had not been interacting with
the imagery. Mulholland found that while most children learned with practice
to keep their sets on, they were not very good at it to begin with; only one
or two could keep them on for more than half a minute at a time.
#
'Viewing TV is rather odd in terms of attention,' Mul-holland
concluded. 'Children watching TV often drop to a rather low level of
arousal, with plenty of alpha.' This, he
said, led him to speculate that 'children may be spending a huge amount of
time learning how to be inattentive.' Home television viewing was in effect
conditioning them to 'operate at a low level of attention'. He wondered how
this might be affecting their school performance. 'More research is surely
indicated here, since children spend a huge amount of time watching TV
before they start school.'5
More research into TV and brain waves was in fact being done at
about the same time by Herbert Krugman, manager of corporate public opinion
research at General Electric. He was interested in comparing the ways in
which people respond to print and imagery, and his findings fully supported
those mentioned above. He took his subject, a twenty-two-year-old secretary,
into a specially prepared room in the Neuropsychological Laboratory of New
York Medical School, and told her to make herself comfortable, relax and
look at the magazines provided. From time to time the TV set in the corner
would show a series of three contrasting commercials, repeating them a few
times. Two were quiet, low-key advertisements - one for a heart pace-maker,
the other for a hair conditioner - while the third was a 'very explosive'
one in which a baseball star hurled balls at a sheet of unbreakable
artificial glass.
Wired to the EEG, the woman browsed through the magazines for a
quarter of an hour, showing special interest in an advertisement for Max
Factor make-up. Her brain-wave ratio at this point was 5:16:28 - that is,
five seconds of slow waves in the delta and theta bands associated with
sleep and totally passive states, sixteen of the 'neutral' alpha, and
twenty-eight of the faster beta. Then, in Krugman's own words, 'As the first
commercial came on, the subject looked up and an entirely new pattern or mix
appeared.'
The ratio switched almost instantly to 21:18:15. Alpha had remained much the
same, but the proportion of slow and fast waves had done a complete
turnaround. A close study of the EEG tracing showed that 'the characteristic
mode of response' to the TV screen had fully developed in a mere thirty
seconds.
Krugman repeated each commercial twice, and noticed that the woman's
response to all three was not only almost identical in terms of brain-wave
performance, but with repetition her slow waves were increasing and her fast
ones decreasing. The ratio for her viewing of one of the repeats was
28:15:12, a tremendous predominance of very slow waves. 'It appears',
Krugman concluded, 'that this
subject's mode of response to television is very different from her response
to print. That is, the basic electrical response of the brain is more to the
media than to content differences within the TV commercials.' The response
to print was essentially active, while the response to television was
passive.
Herbert Krugman concluded his report with some reflec-tions of the
kind not often, heard from members of the TV industry, at least not in
public. 'Television as experience', he said, 'is deficient in that reality
is presented minus the feelings. [It] does not appear to be communication as
we have known it. Our subject was working to learn something from a print
ad, but was passive about television. [She] was no more trying to learn
something from television than she would be trying to learn something from a
park landscape while resting on a park bench.' He went so far as to add that
TV was 'a communication medium that may effort-lessly transmit into storage
huge quantities of information not thought about at the time of exposure,
but much of it capable of later activation.'6
The Shoppers' Trance effect mentioned above suggests that he was
right.
The alpha state is the one described here and in the previous
chapter as the state we enter when staring at fires, whether we are making
great scientific discoveries
or not, and when we stare at TV screens.
Perhaps it should be known as the slow state, because the replacement of
the fast waves by slow ones seems to be more important than the actual
amount of the alpha in between them. This seems to be a state provided by
nature to help us generate our own imagery by becoming deliberately passive,
switching off all the senses and turning inwards, ignoring what is going on
in the external world and clearing the mind for whatever might emerge from
within. This is also the state we enter when absorbed in a routine chore
that requires no intellec-tual effort, such as washing up or mowing the
lawn. In such slow states, as is well known, 'inspiration' often makes its
sudden and unexpected appearance.
Now, if a waking brain finds itself in the slow state while at the
same time being bombarded with imagery, it cannot function normally.
Evolution has not prepared it for any experience like this. So what does it
do? This question was studied at length by Fred and Merrelyn Emery of the
Australian National University at Canberra, who not only fully confirmed the
research of Mulholland and Krug-man but went further than anybody else in
providing an explanation of why television affects people in the ways it
does.
'Viewing', they reported, 'is at the conscious level of
somnambulism.'
They explained that when we look at something in our normal waking
state we are in fact look-ing at it in two ways. The right side of the brain
absorbs whatever images come in and whatever emotional associa-tions these
may have, but it is the left side that provides the logical analysis and
integration necessary if we are to make any sense out of the images and put
them to practical use. A special part of the left cortex called Area 39 has
the job of integrating what comes in and initiating any action that may be
appropriate. The right brain, on the other hand, just soaks up images like a
sponge.
It now appears that the left brain can be lulled into a sense of
security by a regularly repeated stimulus of any kind, especially a
flickering light. It then becomes 'habituated' and stops processing the
incoming stimulus because it does not seem important enough to put to any
use. This means that information taken in while watching TV goes straight
through customs and passport control, as it were, and most of it disappears
from consciousness altogether.
A survey was once carried out in the San Francisco area to discover
how much people remember of what they see on television. Two thousand people
were telephoned shortly after an evening news programme and asked to list as
many as they could of the news items they had just heard. The results were
astonishing: more than half of those who claimed to have watched the whole
programme could not remember even one.7
It is evidence of this kind that reinforces my conviction that
watching TV is a futile activity, and I am glad to see Fred and Merrelyn
Emery dealing with one of the most often repeated defences of television:
its educational and mind-broadening content. The very act of looking at it,
they explain, leads to 'unlearning for today's adults and non-learning for
the children'. All it teaches is 'do your own thing, without shame'.
Educational TV is a contra-diction in terms.*
This does not mean that imagery from the screen goes in one eye and
out the other. It goes in and stays in, piling up unsorted in some remote
area beyond the reach of Area 39.
Yet it does not necessarily stay there for ever. Erik Peper, an EEG expert
at San Francisco State University who collaborated with Thomas Muholland,
explains. 'The horror of television is that the information goes in but we
don't react to it. It goes right into our memory pool, and perhaps we react
to it later, but we don't know what we're reacting to. When you watch
television you are training yourself not to react, and so later on you're
doing things without knowing why you're doing them or where they came from.'
He reckons that the only kind of training television achieves is
that of making people into zombies and conditioning them not to react to
what they see. This is exactly what the TV executive quoted by Charles
Siepmann whom I mentioned in Chapter 3 said would happen.9
This brings us logically to the subject of post-hypnotic suggestion,
in which people also do things without know-ing why. A skilled hypnotist can
put an idea in a hypnotised subject's head and order it to be carried out
after the trance has ended. Stage hypnotists are fond of making their
subjects do something silly such as undressing on stage or kissing the
person next to them by short-term post-hypnotic suggestion.
Albert Moll was a distinguished Berlin doctor who car-ried out
numerous experiments in what he called 'deferred suggestion' during the
1880s. He was especially intrigued by the elaborate justifications his
subjects would produce to explain their actions:
I tell a hypnotised subject that when he wakes he is to take a flower-pot
from the window, wrap it in a cloth, put it on the sofa and bow to it three
times. All [of] which he does. When he is asked for his reasons he answers,
'You know, when I woke and saw the flower-pot there I thought that as it was
rather cold the flower-pot had better be warmed a little, or else the plant
would die. So I wrapped it in the cloth and then I thought that as the sofa
was near the fire I would put the flower-pot on it; and I bowed because I
was pleased with myself for having such a bright idea.' He added that he did
not consider the proceeding foolish.10
There were two ways in which people sought to explain actions of
this kind. They would either invent reasons for what they saw as a perfectly
logical thing to do, as in this case, or they would claim that they had been
impelled in some way. Now nothing upsets people more than the merest
suggestion that human free will may not be all we hold it to be, and even
Moll was unwilling to tackle this question head-on. He contented himself
with a quotation from Spinoza:
The illusion of free will is nothing but ignorance of the motives
for our choice.
Moll also admitted something hypnotists rarely admit nowadays although they
know it to be true: 'We can with certainty, by means of post-hypnotic
suggestion, compel many actions which the subject in normal consciousness
would refuse to perform.' Such actions, he added, could be considered
'compulsory'. He gives an example, which also illustrates long-term
sug-gestion at work. He told his subject to come to his house on the
sixteenth Tuesday counting from last Tuesday and to be rude to everybody
there. The subject did as he was told.
Moll was puzzled by the fact that subjects seemed to be in a
perfectly normal state of consciousness when they carried out long-term
suggestions of this kind. (This one cannot have been wandering about in a
trance for sixteen weeks!) He thought he might be 'ordering a new hypnosis
at a fixed moment', an idea that does not appeal to modern hypnotists who
reject authoritarian approaches. For what
post-hypnotic suggestion (long- or short-term) amounts to is nothing less
than the remote control of behaviour.
One of Moll's many ideas that were somewhat ahead of their time was
that a kind of post-hypnotic suggestion often occurred naturally. As he put
it: 'Some externally induced idea influences our actions, feelings, etc,
without our being able by any means to remember how the idea was, so to
speak, implanted in us. ' He gave an imaginary example of how
impressions from childhood could take effect later in life:
Let us suppose that a child two or three years old is often in the society
of A and B. A is kind and gentle, B hard and unkind, so that the child
gradually learns to like A and dislike B. Let us suppose that the child sees
neither for a long time; nevertheless when it does it will still like A and
dislike B. The child, who is now several years older, will not know its own
reasons; it will not remember the former conduct of A and Byet the effect of
the old impressions remains, and shows itself in the child's behaviour to A
and B.
This effect does not apply only to childhood: We are often influenced by
unimportant expressions we have heard, though later we cannot trace back the
effect to the cause. Our conduct with regard to persons, circumstances and
things is very often the effect of early unconscious impressions. l l
Freud carried this line of thought further by claiming that symptoms
of adult diseases could be traced back to long-repressed experiences of
childhood, usually involving rather weird sexual attitudes in both child and
parent. The subsequent emphasis on childhood traumas that dominated
psychiatry for a time, to the exclusion of almost everything else,
distracted attention from the fact that any experience at
all, trivial as well as traumatic, can have a profound effect on a child.
This is a very difficult area to research for the simple reason that people
cannot by definition remember repressed experience, though at least we know
in some detail what a soggy piece of cake did for Marcel Proust:
But when nothing subsists from an ancient past, after the death of beings
and the destruction of images, only smell and taste endure, frailer yet
livelier, more immaterial, more persistent, more faithful, like souls to
recollect, to await, to hope on the ruins of all the rest, to bear without
yielding on their almost impalpable droplets the immense edifice of
memory.12
And so on, for twelve volumes.
While I was researching a story on the American Food for Peace
programme in north-eastern Brazil, -1 learned from a nutritionist that
absolute priority went to children under seven, because if they were not
properly fed by then their bodies would never grow normally. I also learned
that malnutrition was caused by too much of the wrong food, usually maniac
flour in that region, as well as too little of the right kind. So it must
be, surely, with mental development? Can a child raised on a diet of mental
maniac, which satisfies hunger but provides almost no nutrition, be expected
to grow normally?
Images planted in the mind at an early age can go off like
time-bombs decades later, as Proust has shown us. When planted in immature
minds they can take the form of what Moll called 'deferred suggestions' that
make people do things they would not normally do, and leave no trace of
their origins. This process of image-implanting can be done deliberately or
it can ,happen by pure chance, and we can never be sure exactly what effect
any given image is going to have, especially if they are implanted
carelessly. A vivid illustration of this was given to me by Dr Stanley
Rose, a distinguished medical hypnotist who is strongly opposed to stage
performances of the art. A volunteer had been hypnotised on stage, the
trance being induced by a swinging pendulum held in front of his face. After
the show, as he was driving himself home, it began to rain. He switched on
his windscreen wipers, went straight back into trance, and drove into a
brick wall. He was very lucky not to have killed himself or somebody else.
This kind of thing, Dr Rose told me, happens far too often for his liking.
At the Birmingham mental hospital where he worked for many years he was
constantly having to pick up the pieces after a stage hypnotist had been in
town.
The differences between being hypnotised, by a stage performer or a
doctor, and watching television are fairly obvious. The similarities are
less so, yet just as real. The main difference is that a hypnotist normally
makes specific direct suggestions whereas television does not, except of
course in commercials. The main similarity only became evident in the late
1970s when researchers thought of examining the two halves of the brain
separately while people were being hypnotised and found that hypnosis was
what one of them called 'a right-hemisphere task'.
Dr Crisetta MacLeod-Morgan, the researcher in question, pointed out that
during hypnosis typical left-brain functions such as sense of time, critical
and analytical reasoning and perception of pain can be greatly reduced just
as typical right-brain functions - dreaming, visualising and generally
using the imagination - are much enhanced. She seems to have settled the
issue by making EEG studies that gave support to her predictions. 13
If we look at her work together with that of her cam-patriots Fred
and Merrelyn Emery, who described TV watching as a predominantly right-brain
activity, we have a new way of looking at the problem. What it amounts to is
that television watching induces a form of hypnotic trance in which any
image at all can take on the quality of a suggestion, and can be expected to
work its way into consciousness in its own time. It can then cause actions
that may be entirely out of character. The fact that the sugges-tion is
indirect (except in commercials) makes no difference. If anything, indirect
suggestion tends to be more effective than the direct kind for the simple
reason that there is less resistance to it. Moreover, it leaves no traces.
David Frost once asked a studio audience if any of them thought they
had ever been brainwashed by television into believing what they did not
really believe. Not surpris-ingly, no hands went up. 'How could they
possibly know?' Milton Shulman asks. 'Television's influence is much too
subtle to be detected by its victims.'14
The Emerys put it even more bluntly. 'Television as a simple,
constant, repetitive and ambiguous visual stimulus gradually closes down the
nervous system of man.'*5 No wonder the industry has got away with it for so
long.
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