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High-Tech Glasses Help Improve Memory
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.
Imagine hacking someones glasses to say "Kill your boss....kill your boss" Or, Kill yourself". Of course, you could have it the other way to say positive things that would help you out Psychologically .
Life is not for the lazy.
You can't. The glasses won't let you.
In other news, beer glasses have been found to reduce your memory retention by more than 50%...
If I point out that you are incorrect, making me a foe does not make you any more correct.
Drat, i cant find a good link about about these glasses, i saw them before at skool and they help you remember what people said!
Er, well, no.
:)
"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.
It looks like the text flashed onto the eye quickly is used as a primer to get you thinking about a certain thing and thus a memory aid.
From a Psych 101 example:
Whats a popular laundry detergent? Answer after you have read this list:
- Moon
- Ocean
- Water
- Ebb
- Beach
If you answered Tide detergent, congradulations, you may have been "primed" into answering that. Admitedly Tide has a good market share in the laundry detergent but the priming effect can be demonstrated with other non-local examples. (I belive this works best if you live in Canada)
I was under the impression that flashing text quickly so that your eye doesn't notice it was just another form of subliminal messaging...
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.
More than that, if TV's or some permutation of a TV in the future can do this, whats to stop companies from flashing "BUY COKE" every 180th frame.
Killer app: once RFID tags are in garments in stores, this could indicate all the ones that would fit you. Shoppers at sales would love this.
i'm one of the authors on the paper, and you should check out the section on "miscues" for why this doesn't work.
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.