There are two ways in which psychologists assess unconscious processing. You are sitting in a theater watching a movie. If this sort of interruption actually occurred, you'd probably be upset, leave the theater, and demand your money back. When we ask the question this way, the answer is clearly no. In some ways, it is almost a shame that subliminal perception in this sense does not work.
Many people claim to have been helped by such tapes, and perhaps they have been.
What the students didn't know was that the labels on some of the tapes were switched so that some students who believed they were using the memory enhancement tapes were actually using the self-esteem tapes, and vice versa. Even so, more than a third of the participants in this experiment had the illusion of improvement that the tape's label promised. No, that's too strong a statement. Although messages directed only at your unconscious mind are not going to influence you to get up from your TV set and march down to the store to buy some new snack food, there is evidence that to some degree we may be sensitive to stimuli presented below our levels of immediate awareness. Here's one example of that sort of evidence.