Can Reversing Our Speech Reveal What We Really Mean?
Don’t be alarmed, but you can’t lie anymore. Your secret intentions; your private affairs; even that niggling feeling you have about your mother-in-law – your secrets can no longer be secret. Whether you like it or not, they’re being broadcasted in public, wherever you go. “But how?!”, you’re probably asking, “who on EARTH would have the audacity – let alone the ability – to study my secret intentions, private affairs and niggling feelings, publishing them for all the world to see?!”. The blame doesn’t lie with private investigators, evil social networking corporations or even the government tapping your phones – the perpetrator, I’m afraid, is you – and you can’t help it.
Or at least that’s what David Oates thinks. Oates , of reversespeech.com, believes that when we talk, we’re actually communicating two messages. The first is the one you consciously put out there and is consciously heard by others - that’s “talking”, to you and me – and the second is unconsciously said by you, and unconsciously understood by those who are listening. Oates says that, in order to consciously hear the second message, you simply have to record speech and then play it backwards. If you try this for yourself – and I strongly advise that you do, for fun – you may hear some word-like sounds in the evil-sounding gibberish that speech reversal produces. Oates says that these words are the secret messages you can’t help but communicate at the same time as talking. Furthermore, he says that these secret messages tend to reveal a person’s “unspoken thoughts”, which often reveal a secret or a lie held by the speaker. He believes his methods are pivotal for personal development (asking a client to speak, reversing the recording, and revealing the secret problems or traits they didn’t know they had) as well as court cases (simply reverse what they said, and you have a truthful testimony!) as well as other things.
Before going any further, maybe an example would make the theory clearer – and what better way to do it than by using a well-known conspiracy theory, heavily covered on Oates’s website – the 1969 moon landing.
An example of reverse speech on Oates’s website is taken from the famous “that’s one small step for man” quote, spoken by Neil Armstrong as he took his first steps on our moon. A fellow Reverse Speech supporter, Karina Kaiser, found that when reversing the clip, the resulting noise sounded eerily like the words “man will spacewalk”. Oates agrees with the reversal found by Kaiser, and says that it shows “Armstrong expressing hope for the future”. In other words, Armstrong is secretly communicating a message that he’s lying about walking on the moon, but one day, he hopes that “man will spacewalk”.
This kind of logic appears throughout the Reverse Speech theory – the reversed “speech” found often reveals the secret intention or feeling held by the speaker, and it often contradicts what the speaker is actually saying. With this in mind, Oates believes he’s found the key to unlocking all sorts of truths. A few examples are given on his website:
“Reverse speech analysis, when ethically and accurately applied, has…
· Revealed in a homicide investigation that a particular witness described herself… in her own ‘Reverse Speech’ words as “a real big liar” and that she very possibly had direct involvement in the death of the victim.
· Warned another CEO of a possible hacker or other criminal presence in a high level of his company… in the words of his own hidden voice channel, “an arch felon.”
If Oates has cracked it, and we really do communicate the truth when we lie, then that’s fantastic. The repercussions of courts, business success and personal development would be phenomenal. However, before getting caught up in the ins and outs of whether Oates is correct, the first question to ask ourselves is why we hear the words in the first place. There may be another explanation as to why we hear words in ambiguous sounds – especially in the context of the reverse speech website.
Simply put, your hearing of the words all depends on whether or not you’re told what to look out for. Cognitive psychologists generally accept the fact that when we interact with the world, we use our thoughts to understand new information we receive – essentially, your thoughts override your senses. This is called “top-down processing”, and we do it all the time. Say it’s your birthday, and you know your partner is making you a cake down in the kitchen. If their cooking skills aren’t great, you may smell burning at some point. Immediately, you’ll assume the cake is being burnt. However, you wouldn’t assume that toast, meat or anything else is burning. You already know there’s a cake being baked downstairs, so you immediately connect the sensory information (burning smell), to what you already know (someone is making a cake), and from this the event makes sense (your cake is being burnt). Applying this logic to the nature of reversespeech.com gives us another explanation as to why we hear words in nonsensical sounds.
The examples of reversals on the website are given to you along with a typed version of the words claimed to be audible. As you play the clip, your eyes skim across the words given to you, and you appear to hear the words you’re reading. As you can imagine, having the words in front of you really helps with picking words out of gibberish – without the words in front of you, it would be a lot harder. Top-down processing – the tendency to see what you expect to see – is “often crucial in determining exactly what is experienced in such [ambiguous] situations”, according to Christopher French (2001), head of the Anomalistic Psychology Research Unit at Goldsmiths College. As Oates says that we “readily understand” the reversed messages, even unconsciously, knowing what to look for beforehand shouldn’t affect your hearing of the phrases.
Hearing speech that matches what’s written down can also be explained in terms of another theory, called “confirmation bias”. We, as humans, love to be correct. It’s possibly down to the survival instincts we’ve evolved to have: strong people are often correct; strong people survive; being correct helps with survival. With this in mind, a person would probably want to hear what they’re being told has been heard before. If they didn’t hear what they expected to, then they’d probably feel inferior in some way. With this in mind, a person would want to agree with what the “big man” (Oates) is saying. Furthermore, Oates wants to agree with himself, which may well be the reason behind his perseverance of the theory, even in the face of scientists’ arguments against its feasibility.
In terms of conspiracy theories, if Oates finds a reversal which supports a conspiracy somewhat (like the moon landing example mentioned earlier), then a confirmation bias would mean the conspiracy theory supports his finding. Reverse Speech is similar to Electronic Voice Phenomena, or EVPs – a phenomenon based around the idea that you can turn on a tape recorder, ask a supposed “ghost” some questions, and then pick up on words that are apparent in the static noise. However, the questions themselves can act as a primer, so you may well hear a “yes” or a “no” to a yes or no question, and so on. Indeed, a study (Sohoglu et al, 2012) found that when participants were told to listen to fuzzy-sounding spoken words, it was much easier to pick words out when they were told what to hear beforehand. This probably supports the confirmation bias (as well as top-down attention). We’re very ready to be correct with everything, hearing what we believe we’re supposed to be hearing – we’re not so comfortable with whistleblowing. A famous study by Asch (1951) found a clear effect of group opinion on conformity – when a participant was given a question with a seemingly obvious answer, and the people surrounding him (stooges) gave a different answer, the participant shunned his own belief and copied theirs. With this in mind, if you were a person who really couldn’t hear anything in the static or gibberish, but you were told beforehand what to listen for, why would you argue? Why wouldn’t you trust the paranormal expert as a more knowledgeable other?
To properly judge recordings for yourself, it needs to be a completely individual experience. You need to review sounds without knowing any information beforehand. Unfortunately, the people perpetuating their recordings are so excited with what they’ve found (especially Oates when his finding supports a conspiracy theory), it’s near impossible to find any documentation without written words alongside the recordings, so an individual experience is highly unlikely.
So, what does this mean for your secrets? For now, don’t worry about it. As you now know, our senses are completely fallible by the knowledge we’re given beforehand, and wanting to be correct perpetuates this. So if you ever find yourself being recorded by someone suspicious of you, don’t be alarmed. What they find in their recordings may sound like words, but they’ll probably be nothing to do with you - or your secrets.