Reverse speech is a hypothesis first put forward by David John Oates. It was widely publicized on Art Bell's nightly Coast2Coast A.M. radio talk show.

Oates' claim is that on average, once in every 15-20 seconds of casual conversation, a person produces two related sentences rather than just one. It is only the forward-spoken message that we can hear consciously. The second message is unconsciously embedded backwards into the person's speech. Backward messages in rehearsed and public speech tend to occur at the less frequent rate of once every 60-90 seconds.

These two modes of speech, forward and backward, are dependent upon each other and form an integral part of human communication. One mode cannot be fully understood without the other. In the dynamics of interpersonal communication both modes of speech combine to communicate the total psyche of the person, conscious as well as unconscious.¹

This would mean that if a large enough sample of a person's impromptu conversation were recorded and played backwards, the speaker's unconscious thoughts could be heard. The most famous recording that allegedly demonstrates this is the speech given by Neil Armstrong at the time of the first manned Lunar landing on 20 July 1969. If played backwards, the words "small step for man" sound somewhat like "Man will space walk."²

A simple and well-published explanation for this phenomenon is that the human brain automatically tries to make sense out of any noise as soon as it expects that noise to be a spoken language. The power of suggestion is then used to nudge the listener to hear what the presenter wants them to hear - David John Oates, for example, almost always tells the listener in advance what they should expect to hear, thereby planting a suggestion that would make the listener more likely to actually "hear" that phrase. A study has shown that when listening to the same clips without being told in advance what to expect, the results have a higher variation.³

References

External links

• David Oates website
• The Demon-Haunted Sentence: A Skeptical Analysis of Reverse Speech
• reverse speech from the Skeptic's Dictionary

Wikipedia content modification information:

• This page was last modified on 18 November 2008, at 03:04.

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