High-Tech Glasses Help Improve Memory 272
unassimilatible writes "MIT will reportedly announce new high-tech glasses which they claim will improve memory by up to 50%. The spectacles are implanted with a CPU that sends messages in the form of light to a mini TV screen on the glasses. The messages - like someone's name, or a word like keys or medicine - flash before your eyes at 180th of a second. Pardon me, but I'll wait for the reviews, since I am still smarting from buying those X-ray glasses in the back of magazines." These "memory glasses" were also discussed at the recent International Symposium on Wearable Computers.
Was on nova months ago (Score:5, Informative)
Made by MicroOptical (Score:4, Informative)
"Failed Subliminal Programming" (Score:5, Informative)
"Flash Subliminal Programming", as you call it, isn't a completely failed research area - assuming you're talking about subliminal priming. Priming is the term used to refer to an experience or procedure that brings a particular concept to mind (see Kunda, 1999, Social Cognition).
There have been many studies which demonstrate the effects of subliminal priming - in a particularly nice one, subjects were shown either 0, 20, or 80% "hostile" prime words - each for 50 ms - followed by a line of Xs to mask the prime. A control group identified less than 1% of the words. Yet, when asked to rate the behavior of a character in a story, people who saw more Hostile Primes rated the actions as more hostile or aggressive (Bargh and Pietromonaco, 1982).
Mere Exposure experiments have been done (Bornstein and D'Agostino) with durations as little as 5 ms. Mere exposure is another interesting phenom - that familiarity breeds liking (see Bornstein 1989 or Zajonc 1968 for reviews).
I just thought I'd babble for a few.
I'd heard about this before... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Subliminal Messages? (Score:4, Informative)
The Science behind Priming (Score:5, Informative)
I was also under the impression that these types of subliminal messages don't work...
So can anyone sort this out? I must be confused about something.
Sure. What we have here in the glasses is exactly as you stated -- a prime. The idea behind priming is that if you flash a semantically related word right before certain kinds of decisions, the semantic links are strengthened, or "primed" so you are slightly more likely and slightly quicker to respond with a particular response.
If I recall correctly, 180 ms is not fast enough to be undetectable. It is, however, fast enough so that your eye won't be able to saccade over to it before it disappears. (A saccade takes approximately 200ms) This means that for all intents and purposes, you probably won't be fully aware of what it says, though you might be aware that something was flashed, if you were paying attention.
So the idea (as I understand it) is that if the glasses flash a person's name very briefly, you'll be more likely to respond with that name if you are put in a situation where you have to recall it, as the links to it have been strengthened.
As for your question about subliminal messages, I think what you're referring to is the infamous idea that if you flicker pictures of Coca Cola between the frames of a movie, people are more likely to go buy a coke. Well, it's true that this kind of strategy doesn't work -- there's a huge difference between having Coke semantically primed and carrying out the complex behavior of buying a coke (you have the time delay, first of all, which diminishes the activation, the planning required to buy a coke, etc...)
The priming effect is real, but very small, usually only detectable in terms of milliseconds or trends. All in all, recall is the type of task that priming can help in, so this may be very useful. But displaying "Buy Coke" or "kill your boss" really isn't going to do anything at all.
Re:Advertisers' Wet Dream Come True (Score:2, Informative)
sorry, advertisers can just keep dreaming (Score:5, Informative)
subliminal cueing works like this: let's say you teach somebody some name-and-face pairs -- "anne" and "becky". then you show them anne's face and subliminally cue with "anne", and you can improve the person's likelihood of remembering that name.
but let's say you "miscue" -- you show them anne's face but subliminally cue with the name "becky". they are *not* likelier to then type "becky" -- but they *are* likelier to correctly type "anne"! this is the really weird and interesting part of our findings.
we hypothesize that there is some of what psychologists call "spreading activation" taking place: the miscue helps you remember other things you learned in the context of the experiment, but doesn't interfere with the actual production of the correct answer.
anyway, this is why subliminal advertising doesn't work. if you see the word "coke" but what you want is "lemonade", maybe you are likelier to think about getting a drink, but you'll likely get yourself a lemonade rather than a coke.
we have some preliminary data showing that *overt* cues don't work that way. if we show the name "becky" with anne's face in a non-subliminal way, then subjects appear to type "becky" a lot of the time. this is probably why overt advertising actually does work, too.
Re:Was on nova months ago (Score:5, Informative)
No, all that was actually proven was that James Vicary, the guy who claimed to have improved popcorn and coke sales with subliminal images at a movie theater, was a liar. In reality, a "subliminal image" of a bag of popcorn on a movie screen has a very minimal effect on your desire for popcorn compared to the sight and smell of actual popcorn when you walk through the lobby. The notion was that the "subliminal image" had a disproportionately greater effect on your desire for the product than the magnitude of the stimulus could account for. This notion was a crock of shit.
Now these glasses, on the other hand, aren't trying to sell you popcorn. They're passing off information our brains are already looking for, which does work to some degree. The debunking of subliminal messages never addressed whether or not we could see and register the images, only that they had no effect on our desire to buy the product.