Psychology and the Burroughs Scramble

From William Burroughs' (1970) Electronic Revolution (p. 19):

Research project: to find out to what extent scrambled messages are unscrambled, that is scanned out by experimental subjects. The simplest experiments consists in playing back a scrambled message to subject. Message could contain simple commands. Does the scrambled message have any command value comparable to posthypnotic suggestion? Is the actual content of the message received? What drugs, if any, increase ability to unscramble messages? Do subjects vary widely in this ability? Are scrambled messages in the subject’s own voice more effective than messages in other voices? Are messages scrambled in certain voices more easily unscrambled by specific subjects? Is the message more potent with both word and image scramble on video tape?

Makes you wonder if anyone has done these experiments. Two families of psychology studies come sort of close.

First, there's a group of experiments (like this one) contrasting scrambled sentences to organized narratives. They tend to support to the common-sense belief that a text's macrostructure and attention thereto are necessary for retaining the text's message. A typical test measures the number of "idea units" recalled by the separate test groups.

But the second group of experiments--still not exactly Burroughs' suggestion, but closer--documents the power of subconscious semantic priming. (Here, when scrambling happens, it's a vehicle for the main operation: the human unscrambles a sentence without explicitly processing the meaning.) The messages being transmitted here are both more powerful and more difficult to measure (not that I'm particularly happy with counting 'idea units').

"Old" words make you walk slower; "control" words help you keep your racism in check; washing your hands makes you feel morally cleaner. Like Wikipedia says, one study implies that priming has an effect even on amnesiacs who don't explicitly recall the words at all, let alone 'process' them. Another suggests that encountering words subconsciously facilitates priming better than actually thinking about them.

We confront the question: how complicated a message can the human unconscious unscramble? In Organs Without Bodies, Žižek criticizes contemporary cognitive psychology as "internalized behaviorism" because it attempts to reduce fundamentally symbolic processes in the unconscious to a stimulus-response model that has simply been localized. The question is, and I think some of the Burroughsian experiments could be done here: what are the limits to the size and nonlinearity of messages targeted at the unconscious?

Why not use this helpful machine to start experimenting on yourself?