People who hear of subliminal messages often ask how something that isn't perceived consciously can be perceived subconsciously. This confused me at first too, but through my research I have come to realize that it is really quite simple. .
When you are in a room with 50 people that are talking, but you are only conversing with one person, you can still hear all 50 people. You consciously perceive one person's voice, but those other 49 people's voices don't just go in one ear and out the other. You may not realize that you are perceiving those other voices, but you really are. Those other voices would be subliminal. Another example of how something that isn't perceived consciously but can be perceived subconsciously, is if you were to sit down and just list everything that you've seen in the past hour. You would probably come to a large number, but you couldn't possibly list everything you've actually seen. You could just look outside and consciously perceive hundreds of things, but when you really think about it, you probably actually perceived millions if not billions of things. When you look at a car driving down the street, you don't just see the car, passengers, and the street. You also see every blade of grass lining the street, the little boy playing off in the distance, and the house across the street with the white shutters and shingled roof. Now that I've established that there is a conscious and subconscious mind, I will explain both. The conscious mind has the privilege of accepting, rejecting or modifying perceptions. .
For instance, if the conscious mind listens to someone say that they are stupid, it could accept, reject or modify it. However, if it is the subconscious mind that listens to this statement, then it just accepts it and believes that it is stupid. Ironically, however, the beliefs held in the subconscious are the source of why the conscious accepts, rejects, or modifies the statement.