This article at Salon.com I thought presented an amusing alleged implication of the structure of our brains:
We have multiple streams of visual information input, and a proof of this is in the phenomenon of blind sight, whereby whatever the normal pathway is that makes it all the way to the speech center and/or consciousness (however that arises) has been damaged, yet the brain-damaged individual can still answer questions accurately about what he saw: he just thinks he's guessing. One interpretation of this phenomena is that such a stream goes "straight to the subconscious," though I don't think the model that describes (of separate streams, one of which accounts for ordinary consciousness and the other of which enables blind sight recognition, running in parallel, the former of which has now been cut) captures the complexity that neurophysiologists are already aware of.
You're welcome to research that and learn the names of all the brain areas involved: my amusement here is at the strange claim in the article that having information go "right to the subconscious" somehow makes it impossible to appreciate or enjoy works of art that are not "deep," i.e. if they aren't deep, they don't go to the subconscious, and the guy the article describes has had much of his ordinary consciousness wiped away, so apparently the only kind of art he's "capable of producing" is that which is deep, i.e. which serves up an insightful characterization of the human condition. So were we to shed our conscious selves and leave only our reptilian natures, we'd have much more Nabokov and less Entertainment Tonight. Hmmmmm.
-Mark Linsenmayer
Well, that oughta be a textbook example of pop-science mangling real science. Start with a misapprehension of a contentious hypothesis explaining a poorly described phenomenon, and utilize that to make broad assertions about art and meaning in human nature. On the upside, “deep” ain’t exactly the most truth-conditional word in the art theory lexicon, so perhaps they’re saying nothing at all. Fantastic.