Have you ever asked yourself if subliminal audiocassette tapes really work? These audiocassette tapes produce everything from quick weight loss to peace of mind. Well, Professor Philip M. Merikle of the University of Waterloo Ontario did a study on this exact topic. Professor Merikle noticed an increase of sales in commercially made audiocassettes, which haul's in now about $50 million annually. With this observation Professor Merikle stated that these tapes were produced with a subliminal message. Along with this statement he continued saying that commercially produced subliminal tapes can be detected in some way. First, he is going to check each cassette to see if it contains a "placebo" by using the spectrographic voice-analysis technique. Second, he is going to expose the tapes to human participants and ask if they heard a noise plus a message or if they just heard a noise alone. After this experiment Professor Merikle concluded that no information is perceived from these cassettes. Professor Merikle's studies have been the most quoted on the topic of subliminal messages on audiocassettes after doing this experiment.
             In response to this experiment Professor Eich, Hyman and Urban claim that you cannot make such claims that the subliminal audiocassettes are not effective for several reasons. The first reason is that Professor Merikle was generalizing from three studies of a few tapes, which in effect is grave danger from all of the other available subliminal audiocassettes available. Second, the research as it applies to contrasted masked messages, which is costly, technologically complex and is still in its early stages. Plus there was no evidence that these same tapes could be changed in the future to be more effective.
             Professor Eich, Hyman and Urban also found difficulties in Professor Merikle's study. First, Professor Merikle used commercially available audiocassettes, which he wasn't even sur...