For decades we have heard about how elevator music and music in the large department stores are giving out subliminal messages that hypnotize us into purchasing certain items. Can students actually put headphones on when they go to bed and wake up in the morning knowing all the answers?
Many have been convinced for years that listening to certain music (especially if played backwards) projects mind-controlling messages that can hypnotize you. Is there any truth to any of this?
Subliminal learning allows us to learn without our being conscious of it by exposing us to stimulus that we are not aware of. It can be done by images that flash on the screen for barely fractions of a moment, words repeated again and again at a volume just above our hearing threshold, or other kinds of stimulus. Many scientists have been aroused by this method due to its potential to accelerate learning and making the process simple and painless as possible.
The United States and the UK have outlawed subliminal messaging in advertising for fear of influencing people to do or buy something they may not have normally. You can, however, use them in your personal life in order to build your confidence, or for self-improvement. The concept there is that you have already instilled in your subconscious the idea that you want to improve, so the messaging is already halfway there.
The usual mode of conscious learning 
and memorizing is through repetition and practice. Through this conscious method information memories can be unconsciously stored deeply in your brain for future retrieval. That is how we came to learn to ride a bicycle, learn math concepts, and develop our own set of self-beliefs and confidence. Subliminal learning will bypass the conscious learning process of repetition and practice and move on directly to the unconscious mind.
Imagine being able to learn new things without having to buckle down! The fact is, higher learning activities, such as languages and math (high-process skills) still requires our full attention in order to process. Smaller scale skills, like words, numbers and easy visual data can be learned through subliminal processing, and learning skills and behavior modification can be greatly helped. High-process skills can use learning tools like subliminal processing, but only as an aid to learning and not as a singular and only tool.
It may seem crazy at first, but if you understand the theories of learning, and the potential as well as limitations of subliminal learning, you may find there are actually things you do every day that you learn even if you don’t expend any conscious effort to do so – like the song that gets stuck in your head, or the word that pops into your vocabulary that you can’t remember memorizing. You probably heard them somewhere in the background of a television show or in a crowd and it just stuck. Basically, that’s subliminal learning – you have unconsciously processed that information into your memory. Suppose you push the envelope and take advantage of this particular quirk in the learning process to somehow “accelerate” the rate of learning? Hence was born the wonders of subliminal learning.
Scientists have been researching intently on the subject of subliminal learning. Although it is theoretically possible to have such techniques do much for accelerated learning, there are always those skeptics who need empirical evidence from scientific studies before even considering subliminal learning. Little by little, however, scientists have come to learn more about how we process and store knowledge, and are receiving heartening results from their studies on subliminal learning.
This article was shared by Two-time USA Memory Champion, memory training expert and memory keynote speaker Ron White
Sources:
Science Daily – Subliminal Learning Demonstrated In Human Brain: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/08/080827163810.htm
Real Subliminal – How subliminal learning works:http://www.realsubliminal.com/how-subliminal-learning-works