You get your dog back. You get your car back. You get your girl back.
David John Oates is a name that is probably new to you. It certainly was at LC HQ until a couple of weeks ago. Like all the other research we’ve been carrying out, one person can lead you down a very deep rabbit hole. We’ve been led to a great deal of other fantastic people through our investigations, as you’ll find out over the next few weeks/months/years.
Let’s crack on with Mr. Oates, shall we?
Reverse Speech is a system, devised by Oates, that “allows insight into the
subconscious mind.” Oates believes that by reversing speech you can access an encoded language that works in metaphor and allows the listener to interpret what the speaker is really saying.
As an experiement, watch the video below firstly with your eyes closed, and note any words you might hear in the reverse speech:
Now watch the video again, eyes open. Did your guesses match Oates’ observation?
Like all great conspiracists, Oates started small. He dropped his tape recorder into the toilet one day whilst shaving. He managed to fix the recorder, but discovered it would only plackback in reverse. Whilst listening to his reversed voice, Oates realised that he could hear very clear words on the tape. Reverse Speech was born.
In a Ground Zero radio show podcast, Oates talks about how, “...metaphors are the structures or the wiring diagrams of the subconscious.” His applied meanings are very subjective in their interpretation. It’s was difficult for us to hear the reverse words as clearly as Oates seems to - it’s very likely that what Oates is hearing can be contributed to a psychological phenomenon called Pareidolia.
Pareidolia is an illusion or misperception involving a vague or obscure stimulus being perceived as something clear and distinct. Under ordinary circumstances, pareidolia provides a psychological explanation for many delusions based upon sense perception. The same aural illusion is the scientific explanation for what is know as backmasking:
Oates published a book in 1987, entitled, “Beyond Backward Masking: Reverse Speech and the Power of the Inner Mind” and managed to get himself some TV and press attention in his native country, Australia.
In the early 90’s, things got a little weirder. Oates had emigrated to the US and continued to gather press attention. Oates claims that his worked had interested, “officials in Washington” but his discovery of a possible code word in a Dick Chaney speech put a halt to all that. A leaked memo emerged:
http://www.reversespeech.com/imgs/r_senate.gif
Oates had his first conspiracy on his hands. He also claims that a lot of his planned work dried up around this time. Had Oates cracked a sinister plot in the way the US Government spoke to its people?
Oates set about using his techniques as holistic therapy. His burgeoning list of metaphor meanings helped him to unravel throught processes of his patients through a system he calls, “Metaphor Restructuring”.
There’s little to no empirical evidence to back up Oates’ hypotheses. In their critique of Oates' theories, Newman and Curtain (1998) conducted a simple experiment in which subjects under various conditions attempted to detect examples of reverse speech from Oates's audiotapes. As expected, they found that subjects who were told what to listen for were much more successful in hearing the phrases than those not expecting what they would hear. This is analogous to seeing a certain image in a cloud formation only after another person has pointed it out.
Oates also makes some pretty rash claims when it comes to the development of reverse speech. He claims that infants learn to speak backwards, before they learn to speak forwards. If true, this is news to developmental psychologists. It also begs the question, what evolutionary benefit does it have? Obviously, we need to learn to speak to communicate our basic needs with others, our mothers for instance, during infancy for survival. But what function does reverse speech serve?
It’s difficult to find Oates’ work as utterly false, he claims that reverse speech messages "are very quick and fast and are often hidden in the high tones of speech. For this reason speech reversals are very easily missed by most researchers."
Of course, Oates has taken care of that problem for you. He has a whole plethora of courses, books and technology for you to become a bona fide reverse speechologist. You have to hand it to people like Oates. They’re really clever at finding their little niche and mining it for all it’s worth. Oates obviously makes great profit from his work. It’s this type of fuzzy science that fuels the conspiracy community.
“The very existence of reverse speech is ecologically invalid. "Backwards” language does not convey meaning to a listener-in other words it does not make any sense. This has been put to empirical test. Subjects who hear recordings of words played backwards are unable to report what words they heard.” (Vokey and Reid 1985)
Until next time,
Vive étrange!
Seth & Lola
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