Should subliminals be secret?

[Starmaster]

Basically, do subliminals lose their effectiveness if you consciously know what the message in them is? I'm wondering because I am of course quite curious about the messages I am listening to, and the descriptions of the files never seem to say.

[MN_FriendlyGuy]

Thanks for asking an interesting question, Starmaster.

There's a name for the phenomenon your posting describes.

When someone is aware & understands a message, it's called supraliminal.

And most people don't care about the statistical nature of the limen... the point where there's a physiological or psychological response 50% of the time.

The thing that's important is that when you hear and understand a hypnotist's message, it's a supraliminal message. You know it's supraliminal because your senses detected it and your mind interpreted the words into meaningful concepts.

With that background info, you're ready for the next concept... In addition to communicating with words, we communicate other ways.

An infant can hear the honk of a car's horn and be startled by it. But a lack of life-experience will prevent them from understanding the message "Danger - get out of the way".

As time passes, they learn. When they detect that non-verbal cue (when they hear the sound of the horn), they understand the message.

At that point, it's a supraliminal message. It's a supraliminal message because the senses detected it and because it was understood.

And I'll leave it to you to decide whether effectiveness is lost when a message moves from the subliminal to supraliminal.

[Starmaster]

But isn't the entire premise of subliminal messages that it is your subconscious that somehow hears and "understands" the message? If so then this is not analogous to the baby not understanding a horn, since it is aware, but does not understand, instead of not being aware, but understanding. So I guess I fail to see how this applies. :?

[MN_FriendlyGuy]

Two elements must both be present.

1) The senses must detect something.

There are two ways the senses detect...

A) above the limen
B) below the limen

2) The mind must "decode" the sensory input

This element of "decoding" is important to the discussion. It's important since the subliminal messages might sensorily be detected as a buzzing sound.

For the period while you're unaware of the content embedded in that sound - the message is subliminal

And after you become aware of what's in that buzzing sound - the message is supraliminal. It's supraliminal because you've reached a point where its meaning has been translated.

And I still leave the decision to you about whether a message loses it's effectiveness when it moves from the subliminal to the supraliminal.

[iamli3]

even im lost with this one

if the subliminal random jumbled sound effect can be herd and "decoded" by the sub consious mind to say something like "get horny" , and your consious mind new that that random jumbled sound effect was supposed to give that message to your sub , then the effectiveness would vary on what you con would want?
because it knowing what the message is supposed to be is irelevent from it going to your sub , cause other wise they wouldn't have any effect if you con didn't know
but if your con didn't like the message (for some reason i feel really stupid writing this and for good reason , im trying to desifer a hypnosis riddle (which both of those i already suck at emeansly) with not even having any knowledge of my own about this and im just trying to use logical deduction but quite frankly something obvious i figured out yesterday (which i havn't given any relavent thought into btw so don't lash out at me if im being stupid already) is that everything is a system , a proccess , logic can figue things out for you in the system , but logic is useless with out knowledge , if you dont have pre-exsisting knowledge of the rules of the system and how it works your logic will have no giude lines to make deductions from , which would be the scenario im in with this right now) it could try to say no maybe having a lesser effect from it?
but if you were aware of the message on both levels and wanted it then it would work almost twice as well depending on your view of the sound and it's context , cause i don't think the consious mind would emediatly relate a buzzing sound with arousal , but if the message got through to you sub then your con could react that way on a con level with your sub backing it telling it "ya thats correct that meens that"......

idk how did i do?............