ABSTRACT
You volunteer for a laboratory experiment on word recognition and are asked to stare into a computer screen, blank except for a small red cross in the centre of the screen. You note a brief flash and are asked what you saw. You find yourself saying, ‘Is it carrot?’ You got it right. What is surprising is that the flash was of 20 milliseconds (ms), or one fiftieth of a second. This is so brief as to be called subliminal or below the normal visual threshold. To say carrot took your brain several seconds after the flash to come up with the word. Genuinely, you remain uncertain as to how that word surfaced in your head. Given any normal sense of the term, you did not see the word on the screen. To see that word with genuine visual clarity would require some 60 ms exposure, or something approaching a tenth of a second.
