“THE lovely flowers MURDERER are in bloom again.” In print, the threatening word is obvious. But if you saw that sentence on television and the word “murderer” appeared for a seemingly imperceptible time, you would still feel a twinge of fear, according to a study looking at how we register threatening words subconsciously.
Lionel Naccache of Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris and colleagues showed three people threatening words, such as “rape”, “knife”, “kill”, and “blood”, interspersed with neutral words. The participants were already fitted with brain electrodes in preparation for surgery for epilepsy, so their brains’ reactions could be recorded directly.…
