I heard from my psychology professor that:
- we do not learn during sleep. take for instance self help tapes, that you listen while sleeping. they are, he says, a placebo effect.
and
- subliminal messages do not effect us as much as most people tend to think. I think he said that at most they can have an emotional influence, and that you might recognize something later (maybe like deja vu?), but not realize where you have encountered it before (the first encounter was subliminal).
So I wonder if TV’s really can have a negative subliminal influence. The plot of my dreams have certainly been affected by televisions on in the same room, though I wonder if that counts as subliminal, and what kind of negative effects it could have.