What the process of the mind's basic associations have to do with subliminal messages

The mind associates certain images and thoughts with feelings and sounds. Any particular combination, particularly when greater emotions are involved, stimulate greater significance to memory, and has a greater impact on your neural nets and identity. Subliminal messages are merely an attempt to associate into your memory banks certain things without you having to consciously come to any sort of conclusions yourself. Your mind has to be perfectly capable of learning in this manner otherwise you would be unable to construct the complex set of neuro-associative combinations and connections required to build the representational system known as "language" to represent meaning in a way that allows communication. Having to have consciously learned language as a child would have been incredibly difficult, especially since awareness largely has to do with a set of information and data points to refer to in assessing where you are and what you are doing and what you are thinking and how to react in a given situation. Without the ability to communicate and associate it would be incredibly difficult to learn without an entirely different processing system than the conscious mind... But, although the typical tendency is for the brain to become less malleable as you age and learn more and rely on representational systems and memory to think rather than creating a whole new structure of associations and recognizing patterns, the process still very much exists and can be manipulated intentionally or not.

Humans must possess the ability to learn. Take for example learning to not touch a hot stove. They need to associate their fear of loud noises and screams and the word "No!" with danger as well as the memory must be associated pain or fear so that they avoid doing it again. Association must exist[1] and thus, that process must also be capable of what we learn, and how we construct our brain's ability to process data and what thoughts and emotions it comes up with regarding certain actions and behaviors. So when people talk about "subliminal messages", "hypnosis" "hypnotic programming" Mind manipulation" and how the television "program" is in fact a "program" for the mind, they really aren't explaining it in a way that people can really identify with since it's already such a natural and normal process while those terms sound so radical, crazy, and unnatural to the learning process. In reality, it's often just branching off learned neuroassociative behavior that the human mind tends to rely on in the first place.

The fact is that any mental manipulation technique merely uses what the brain already is capable of and has demonstrated countless times by the nature of how it operates over the course of a lifetime. So of course people don't "feel" like they are being "programmed" or "manipulated" it is something people would have experienced every day in one form or another regardless of whether or not this manipulation exists. It is not that these techniques "cause" your mind to behave differently, instead, it is just manipulating what input your mind receives, and as a result, effects the output by the natural process that your mind interprets the information it takes in.

The terms many use to describe the process sound so radical to so many that you are better off without using them at all. Those that use terms like "subliminal messages", "mind control", "covert mind manipulation", etc sounds like exactly the type of term that gets lumped in with the type of term used by the [crazy] "conspiracy theorists" which in the mind of the public tends to be this radical, insane fanatical group of emotionally and psychologically unstable individuals, and/or media sensationalists looking for attention. And in many ways, perhaps rightly so.

One cannot read chinesee to people that do not know the language and expect them to understand and to try to do so to someone you know doesn't speak the language is insane. In other words, trying to describe this process to people in a way without giving them the tools to understand what you are really saying isn't doing them any favors. For even if you do convince them, they have attached their understanding of the world to an external source, rather than their own inquisitiveness and reflection of things they know to be true and can derive an understanding from on their own and from observing the world around them.

Many people who profess to be "awake", are instead just manipulated by an alternative group of the sensationalist conspiracy theories and are not truly learning from their understandings of reality, but instead are either accepting or rejecting information, operating out of fear, and being influenced to be "sheep" that merely have decided to follow another shepherd, while professing that it's everyone else that is the "sheep". Both groups are headed to different slaughterhouses so to speak, and choosing to reverse direction and go in one or another is pointless. If you cannot learn to think for yourself, by yourself independent of information, you are not really "free". Merely having someone point you to one set of information rather than another has not liberated you in any way and they do not deserve your energy one bit. Certainly nor do cheap media ploys, fake "beef" between celebrities and controversies that are as staged as wrestling along with their side stories.

But I digress. Advertisers still spend billions on commercials, so the techniques that are used by them, must have at least some effect on your mind or they wouldn't use them. I mean everyone and their mother has already seen so many superbowl commercials advertising for the same 3 companies (among others) over and over again. Yet they continue year after year to advertise. You really think they are going to just make millions off of making maybe a few hundred extra people "aware" of their product that didn't already know about it when their product is low margin to begin with? Yes they might do so, but they also might remind people to buy products, and more importantly, continue to reframe your beliefs and pre-existing associations to get you to associate pleasure with their product, and pain with the alternative.

But it's more than that, they can kill two birds with one stone as a part of greater manipulation as well, many times the intend is veiled to the extremely limited few. Regardless, subliminal messages are just hijacking the brains natural process of association and learning to get you to "learn" or "conclude" certain things on our own as they want, but usually not immediately, and not directly.  The combined bombardment of associations on a daily basis combined with the "communion" of many other individuals who have been exposed to similar associations which will act to reinforce those beliefs (think of kids in junior high/middle school kids trying to fit in with the perceived "cool" paradigm and aligning themselves with similar beliefs, thoughts, ideas, and actions and even how they present themselves). Combine this with learning over many mediums over a long period of time and it's only a manner of time before you develop habits and patterns consistent with the consumptionism they intend on projecting you into, it is only a matter of time and "which product" and personality type / projected archetype you most align yourself with.


Clarification:
[1]I do not mean this is the only way one can operate, it is just how humans are wired and how they tend to use what they work with. Consciously learned association and memory need not be used if one has instinctual understanding which can use memories, but need not do so. Technically we can still have instinct on par with animals as opposed to associative memory, but the human mind behaves differently at times, and must simultaneously be able to abort past neural associations and just react (such as running, slamming on breaks, or avoiding a threat without thinking about how they are going to do so) as well as use the associative memory to avoid dangerous circumstances to begin with. Animals are more in tune with external cues that they can resonate with so they need not rely upon memory to travel from Mexico to Canada and on back like many flying species such as birds and insects.