Subliminal Messages

SUBCONSCIOUS MIND

There is a common misconception that the subconscious mind is the 90% of the brain that we don't use, as popularized in the movie Lucy. While we do use most of its capacity, the actual fact is that we don't have conscious access to 90% of the processes that occur in our brains.

Let's have a computer, to illustrate. When you read this article, you are consciously doing two things: looking at it and reading it. Meanwhile, your brain is continuously running dozens of processes in the background, allowing your body and mind to function effectively and support your main focus - reading - at the highest level of efficiency.

The subconscious mind is that background operating system, with a big sieve at the bottom. It processes all the incoming information and sifts out unnecessary data to optimize conscious awareness.

Thanks to this, we can fully concentrate and not be overwhelmed by the billions of stimuli that reach our senses every second, such as background noise, smells, body position, things you see at the border of your vision, etc. Meanwhile, we can still remain aware and operational in the event of an emergency - instead of utterly absorbed to the conscious task.

/ once the barrier between the conscious and subconscious mind is altered, our conscious perception and background processes become indistinguishable - exactly what people experience under high doses of psychedelics.

Conscious-subconscious dependence

Subliminals belong to a broad field that combines both psychology and biology. They're mental processes or stimuli undertaken and processed by the subconscious mind, without the active engagement of its conscious awareness.

Imagine you're trying to solve a complex puzzle or problem at work, but with no success. Later, while doing something unrelated, an idea pops into your head - a new approach or connection you hadn't considered before - hit the bull's eye. Sounds familiar? How about a sudden urge to leave the room before an unfavorable event occurs? A profound dream that later came true? A need to pay attention to a random flyer in the waiting room? A thought about reaching out to a friend you spoke with 3 years ago? To look in the rearview mirror and see an ambulance coming, even though you didn't hear or see it? Here we are.

When some information repeatedly reaches the subconscious mind and/or induces a high-stress response (so including audible affirmations, mantras, or subliminal messages), it becomes highly profound, as a result forcing the body to trigger a whole cascade of processes depending upon the exact information processed, to deal with it or respond correspondingly, inducing a short and longer-term impact - "subliminal response." This involves not only mental processes, but also physical signaling, anything from heart rate to gene expression.

Your subconscious has always been working behind the scenes, processing information and connecting the dots without your conscious awareness. Even if you think that you can't effectively multitask, your subconscious mind is a master at it - silently yet firmly, steering the entire organism, defining all thoughts and actions within our conscious awareness, storing every stimulus, experience, thought, and belief, along with millions of pieces of information we're not even aware of - both positive and negative.

SUBLIMINAL MESSAGING

By listening to auditory subliminals / subliminal messages, we understand messages (e.g., affirmations) perceived below the absolute threshold level (ATL) of conscious awareness. When subliminal messages are reach our subconscious awareness repeatedly, they will first begin to affect subconsciousness, then indirectly conscious perception and finally induce various mental and physiological changes.

Subliminal messages have a vast potential to rewire the brain. Back to the computer example - even a slight modification in the background processes impacts the entire functionality of the computer. Here even the saying "lie that is repeated a thousand times becomes truth" materializes; there is no objective truth. A few days of exposure to subliminal stimuli is sufficient to perceive significant differentiations in thinking patterns and behavior of the body, including gene signaling. Numerous controlled studies and analysis have proven their influence on functions of the human body (most popular: Spence 1967; Kaser 1986; Dijksterhuis 2005; Kouider & Dehaene 2007; Kiran et al., 2013; Florea 2016; Karam et al., 2017; Sutin-Martin & Rienda-Gómez 2020; Riasaty et al., 2023). No wonder, this phenomenon was being researched in depth during the Cold War in both the Soviet Union and the United States (e.g., the famous MKULTRA subproject of the CIA). Interestingly, the use of subliminal messages in, i.a., commercials is strictly prohibited in many countries around the World.

At this point, I'm going to merge two subjects: affirmations and subliminals. Did you know that both are widely used in professional sports? You may have watched the recent Olympics and noticed how many athletes used to quietly speak to themselves right before attempting, e.g., a high jump. The same thing does coaches to their proteges. Does this remind you of the use of affirmations? Let's take another example. Statistically, football teams perform much better when playing in front of an audience that is cheering them. On the other hand, teams perform worse when the crowd whistles at them, even though while playing, the players don't consciously notice what's going in the stands, and are fully concentrated on the game.

Sooner or later, athletes reach a natural genetic limit of their body. At this point, they must intensely focus on performing one of the most challenging workouts - exercise with a psychologist - training of the conscious and subconscious mind (example - Eddie Hall and his road to 500kg in deadlift). Without going into the details of psychophysiology, I want to introduce you to an exciting mechanism that can be greatly affected by affirmations, which many of you most likely haven't heard of before:

The body consists of an organ called the Golgi tendon organ. One of its primary functions in muscles is to regulate muscle stiffness and prevent muscle from being damaged and torn. The more an athlete trains, the less the Golgi tendon limits muscles, allowing one to engage more muscle units with higher efficiency. Amateurs typically use only 20-25% of their muscular capacity during resistance training. Well-trained athletes can exceed this limit up to 40-60%. What about the rest of the spare potential? Whenever the CNS (central nervous system) becomes strongly stimulated by, e.g., a stressful event, through triggering the fight-or-flight response, the activity of the Golgi tendon becomes reduced, allowing a person to use maximum muscles potential (e.g., life-threatening events). While the brain modulates the functions of CNS, you can "trick" your brain t into producing a particular bodily response by, e.g., believing/imagining certain things and actions (think hypnosis, rising body temperature using visualization, placebo and nocebo effect, etc.). That's where affirmations and subliminal messages get into action.

Finally, subliminal messages are directly connected to the so-called "law of attraction," despite its "new age" connotations, a scientifically recognized and well-understood phenomenon, conclusively described by JN Williams or LJ Dixon and fellow researches. The subconscious mind has a hundredfold higher processing capacity than the conscious counterpart. Research in cognitive psychology and neuroscience shows that people who make decisions without engaging their conscious mind have an 80% less probability of making mistakes in stressful situations (note the training of the military special forces). Since affirmations can program the subconscious mind (through repetitive messaging), as a result, they can program the mind-body to process all the necessary data essential to achieve your goal, sort it and manifest through your everyday conscious and unconscious choices - modify the sieve I mentioned in the beginning of this article, and push you toward fulfilling your purposes and "attracting coincidences" - non-randomized.