Subliminal Stupidity

Sir Leigh Teabing, from the world-renowned Dan Brown blockbuster and best seller, the Da Vinci Code, calls our ignorance or the womanly figure in Da Vinci's classic "Last Supper" a kind of Scotoma where the mind sees what it wants to see.

Itching to get the closest definition of scotoma to the common man, I though of digging it up at Wikipedia. My efforts have delivered thus:

A scotoma (Greek for darkness; plural: "scotomas" or "scotomata") is an area or island of loss or impairment of visual acuity surrounded by a field of normal or relatively well-preserved vision.

The way I see it, this is what happens when a bright flash of light temporarily blinds us in a certain visual spot, or when a certain image is "burned" into our field of vision temporarily by light and opacity.

What then caused this guy to come up with these crazy, far-fetched "subliminal" messages apparently found in Disney Films? Take this video for example:




So he says Disney puts a lot of subliminal words such as "SEX" and "LIE" and what not. Honestly, I think this guy must be sexually repressed or something. Most of the words can't even be made out until he draws them with his "funny handwriting". Even when he does point them out, they are not definite. Other words such as SET, SEW and others can be argued to be the more visible representations.

Some of them "appear" for less than half of a second. Too little time to even be absorbed by even the greatest minds.

Another claim he has is that disney characters often flash diablo or horned beast signs, as popularized by rock icons such as Ronnie James Dio. He even flashes comparative photos of real life people flashing similar signs. Obviously, he does not know that the hand signal for "I LOVE YOU" is very much similar to that, with a minor difference: the thumb is not curled up with the middle and ring fingers.

Sure, there may have been slips such as the Little Mermaid erection scene, and we still don't know why that scene was there in the first place, but a lot of his claims are really just so far-fetched that you stop and ask: Does this guy ever leave his room?