Is the Romney campaign using subliminals in their ads?

Folks, this is genuinely weird. I received a message from a reader informing me that certain teevee ads for Mitt Romney contain mondo-bizarro "extras" that pass by at hummingbird speed. Be warned: This investigation gets into some very unsettling areas.

Look carefully at the ad embedded above. (Yes, I know that this may not be pleasant duty for some of you.) At the 1:01 mark, you can see -- if you are watching for it -- a strange flash. Following my reader's tip, I went through that shot frame by frame. (To do a frame-by-frame search using GOM Player, pause the video, then hit the 'f' key. If you use VLC Player, follow the directions here.) Here's what I found:


What the hell...? "Mommy and I are one"?

If you Google that phrase, you'll see that it was used in the only successful reported experiments in subliminal programming. In 1985, two researchers named Lloyd Silverman and Joel Weinberger published an article titled "Mommy and I are one: implications for psychotherapy," in the American Psychologist. From their abstract:

"Mommy and I are one: implications for psychotherapy" presents evidence to support the thesis that there are powerful unconscious wishes for a state of oneness with "the good mother of early childhood" and that gratification of these wishes can enhance adaptation. Data come from experiments that used the subliminal psychodynamic activation method with over 40 groups of Ss from varied populations, including schizophrenics, neurotics, and normal students...

This page summarizes how it all works:They were divided into three groups:

Group #1 received "Mommy and I are one"
Group #2 received "The Professor and I are one"
Group #3 received a neutral message

At the end of the course, the grading was as follows:

Group #1 got A's
Group #2 got high B's
Group #3 got low B's

And after four weeks, Group #1 and Group #2 remembered more of what they had learned than Group #3.

According to this book, the disturbing phrase "Destroy Mommy" tended to worsen symptoms in patients with such disorders as stuttering.

I went looking through other Romney ads in search of similar extras. Here's a Romney attack ad on Newt Gingrich:



At the 22 second mark, this flash was pretty obvious:


There may be more going on in these two videos; I haven't gone through the whole of either of them frame-by-frame. These are simply the flashes that stood out.

Here are a couple of other Romney videos you should check for subliminals:







In the final example (and I had to look extra hard for this one), you can see this flash just before the cut at the seven second mark:


The very next frame cuts to an image of Mrs. Romney. Sergei Eisenstein would no doubt have found this juxtaposition very droll.

Frankly, I think we should subject the ads of all the major candidates -- Republican and Democratic -- to very careful scrutiny. Something tells me that this practice may be widespread.