Priming the conscious and subconscious mind with concepts, attitudes, and mental “settings” through targeted exposure to specific kinds of information is one of the most widely used influence techniques. A striking illustration of its power is an experiment associated with John Bargh at New York University. Because it is highly demonstrative of how subliminal suggestions can affect our feelings and behavior, I’ll outline it briefly.

Two groups of students were asked to form four-word sentences out of sets of five words. For one group, some of the words were associated with old age—“gray,” “forgetful,” “bald,” “wrinkle,” and so on. For the other group, the word sets did not include old-age associations.

After completing the task, the students had to walk down a long corridor to reach another room where the test would supposedly continue. But the real test was the walk itself. Researchers measured how long it took each student to traverse the corridor. Students who had been exposed to the “old age” words walked noticeably more slowly than those in the other group.

The experiment suggests that words and concepts activate associations in us that can influence us at a subconscious level. As the students were “loaded” with words linked to old age and older people, they—without noticing—began to feel older in some subtle way, and this affected their automatic, non-voluntary behavior.

“So a word doesn’t make a hole?” Really?

You can reflect on that later—over a bowl of delicious, warm, fragrant chicken soup.

Did I make you hungry?

But if it isn’t time for your meal, perhaps I should invite you to think about it over a cup of “corpse tea”—as the vegetarian Adolf Hitler allegedly called meat broths and soups.

In both cases, it’s the same soup.

If that phrase—“corpse tea”—made you uncomfortable, would you throw up if I offered you an apple right now? No appetite? Then let me mention something from early childhood: in first or second grade, it often happened that while one child was eating a sandwich, another would ask whether it was filled with “camel spit with garlic.”

I’m using language like this simply to demonstrate the strength of association in the human brain. Words like “corpse” and “vomit” can trigger a cascade of memories, images, associations, and likely unpleasant emotions. For a moment—even if briefly—you’re tuned to a certain “frequency” that nudges you to think and feel in a particular way: apples may get mentally linked with nausea, and suddenly neither tea nor soup sounds appealing. And because of the associative way the brain works, food-related words—and possibly “gross” things—will now come to mind more easily than unrelated topics.

And that was a very simple example.

How is this used in psychological influence?

The most straightforward version is through personal attacks. By directing either direct insults at you—or veiled insinuations (which are far more effective)—manipulators tune you to a certain emotional “wavelength,” provoking specific feelings, attitudes, and reactions. More importantly, they can affect your self-assessment at a subconscious level.

And it isn’t only traits that can be suggested. Ideas and attitudes can be suggested too. Let’s pause on attitudes.

Money.
Difficulty.

These are two of the most frequently used words and concepts. Everyone thinks about money, and experiments have shown that merely mentioning money in certain contexts (or showing images of money) can influence people in predictable ways: they become more independent and persistent, less willing to help, and more socially distant—because money is linked to survival.

And because most people experience many situations they label as “difficult,” the word difficult can tune people toward a demotivating, negative mindset.

Think back to the phrase “Money is hard to earn,” from the chapter on myths and illusions. If you carry that attitude, can you easily earn money and stay ambitious? Would you allow yourself a purchase—or would you prefer to save, because life is hard?

As for implanting ideas: in most cases it isn’t done directly. Instead, the mind is fed “raw materials” from which it constructs the desired idea—one that may later produce the desired reaction. This is possible because the brain operates associatively. For example, showing images of suitcases can trigger the idea of travel under the right conditions. When the brain is “loaded” with certain concepts, it becomes tuned to their wavelength—so the ideas it forms and the decisions it makes are more likely to be derived from those inputs. The more spontaneous the decisions, the more likely they are to result from the brain’s “economical” mode: quickly linking available cues with minimal conscious, deliberate participation. The person then experiences the thought as “just spontaneous.”

In an episode of Brain Games, the host walks on stage holding a guitar. A participant, also holding a guitar, is asked to improvise something. The participant plays a short melody, and the host asks him to name it—quickly, spontaneously, saying the first fitting name that comes to mind. The participant says “Iguana.” The host asks why, and the participant offers some reasons (which I no longer recall). Then the host turns his own guitar around: on the back of it, the word “Iguana” is written. The explanation is that the participant had seen the word earlier—briefly, without conscious awareness—so it entered his subconscious and later surfaced as a “spontaneous” choice.

I don’t know whether that moment was fully authentic or partly staged, but either way it’s a very good illustration of how intuition can work (if not always, then often): it grabs what is “on hand” and assembles an idea.

Slow, logical thinking is different. In that mode, the brain operates under a different regime: intuitive hints give way to deliberation and the weighing of arguments. Do you think that if the participant in Brain Games had been asked not to rush, but to carefully consider the title of the piece, he would still have chosen the same name? In my view, that would be unlikely.