A noise you hardly notice may enter your mind sometimes and, in a strange transformed way, become part of your thoughts. An experiment exploring this phenomenon was completed for the U.S. Public Health Service recently by Dr. Fred Pine, a New York University psychologist His results could shed some light on subliminal advertising, the technique in which a slogan is flashed on a screen so quickly you do not realize you see it. When this technique first received public notice, it was assumed that if, for example, the slogan "See Your Dentist Twice a Year" were flashed, the unsuspecting audience would tend to do just that. But Dr. Pine's experiment indicates it is not that simple. The slogan or noise seems to enter your mind. But it does not come out in conscious thoughts just the way it entered. In fact, images may pop up so different from the slogan or noise that only a psychologist could tell they were related. This would not do an advertiser much good. In the case of the dentist slogan, flashing it would probably not send anyone off to have his teeth examined. But it might cause some one in the audience to dream later that his is a lion tamer staring at the gaping jaws of his animal...

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