Why it works
Your subconscious repeats what it has heard most often.
Your subconscious is the part of your mind that works without you thinking about it. It does not weigh the evidence and decide what is true. It tends to repeat whatever it has heard most often. Tell a child often enough that they never finish anything, and they will believe it. Tell the same child that they notice details other people miss, and they will believe that, too. Neither sentence has to be true to shape the adult that child becomes. It only has to be repeated.
The best way to replace a repeated thought is with another repeated thought.
A belief is simply a sentence that has been repeated enough times. SOMOTE shows your phrases and photos on your screen hundreds of times a day, overlaid on whatever you are doing, until your core beliefs are the ones you chose.
Read the full essay →On manifestation
SOMOTE does not require a new daily ritual.
Manifestation is the idea that focusing your thoughts on what you want helps bring it into your life. Every manifestation practice works the same way: a sentence is repeated until it feels true. That part works. What usually fails is how long you can keep up a new ritual, because any practice that depends on remembering it and making time for it has to compete with all the other important things in your day.
Some people call this Robotic Affirming, and others call it spamming your brain. Whatever you call it, SOMOTE does the repeating for you while you work and play.
Fifty years of research point to the same conclusion.
Repeating a statement makes it feel more true, even to people who know it is false.
In controlled studies, repetition raised belief in statements participants could factually disprove. Neither education nor intelligence protected people from the effect. Researchers call it the illusory truth effect, and it is driven by familiarity.
Hasher, Goldstein & Toppino, 1977 · Fazio, Brashier, Payne & Marsh, 2015, J. Experimental Psychology: General
Words flashed too quickly to read improved physical function in older adults.
Four brief sessions of subliminal positive words improved how older adults saw themselves and then improved their physical function. The gains were still measurable three weeks after the last session, and they were larger than the gains from direct instruction.
Levy, Pilver, Chung & Slade, 2014, Psychological Science (Yale)
People tend to prefer what they see most often.
Across hundreds of experiments, simply seeing something again and again made people like it more, even though no one argued for it or tried to persuade them. Researchers call this the mere exposure effect. It is one of the most often repeated and confirmed findings in psychology.
Zajonc, 1968 · Bornstein, 1989 meta-analysis of 208 studies
About 43% of daily actions are habits.
Roughly 43% of daily actions are habits, prompted by context rather than by a decision. SOMOTE lets you choose which thoughts become habits.
Wood, Quinn & Kashy, 2002, J. Personality & Social Psychology
Why each setting works the way it does.
Each of the settings below is based on published research, and you can adjust every one of them yourself.
Milliseconds
A word shown for about 17 ms usually goes unnoticed. At 30 to 50 ms, it reliably influences what follows.
A single frame (about 17 ms) is usually not consciously seen, while longer masked flashes measurably affect the response that follows. The Flash length dial covers that whole range.
Holcomb & Grainger, 2007, Brain Research
Opacity
Exposure you don't notice can have a larger effect.
Opacity is how solid or see-through something is. In a review of 208 experiments, things that people saw without noticing had a larger effect than things they did notice. That's the reason for the 1 to 5 percent opacity range: your phrases are on the screen every time you glance at it, but they can be faint enough that you don't notice them.
Bornstein, 1989 · Bornstein & D'Agostino, 1992
Position
Words have the most effect where you are already looking.
Priming studies place the word at the point of fixation, where a brief word is processed most fully. That is why phrases appear in the middle of the screen, where you are looking, rather than in a corner you have learned to ignore.
Pernet et al., 2007 · standard practice across the masked-priming literature
Frequency & rotation
The effect peaks after 10 to 20 exposures, and then variety helps.
Liking increases over the first 10 to 20 repetitions and then levels off, and rotating several messages works better than repeating one. That is why SOMOTE has playlists, shuffle and a frequency dial.
Bornstein, 1989 · Berlyne's two-factor model · Montoya et al., 2017
These studies didn't use SOMOTE, but what they establish is the mechanism SOMOTE automates: repetition changes what we like, what we believe, and what we experience.
