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Comment by digging | Hacker News Reader

Yes, it's a classic example of the power and skill of your "unconscious" mind - your consciousness is freed up to do novel work because the drive home is so routine that your unconscious mind can do almost all of the work. Should something change - a traffic jam, a detour, a pedestrian crossing the road - your conscious attention will be called back to the more urgent task which is making a decision about how to handle the driving situation.

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It seams interesting to me that what we refer to as the conscious mind is unconscious a third of each day and the part we call unconscious is active 24 by 7.

I'm out of my depth here, but a high-level response:

First, I don't think the "unconscious" part is a single process, but myriad processes, and I'd bet they wax and wane.

Second, the "conscious" part is the part that can reason about itself and think abstractly. I think it would be correct to say it's doing higher level computations. The important part is that this is more costly - it's not optimized because it has to be flexible, so it would make sense that it's resting as often as possible.

So, one high-performance, high-power, general-purpose processor to handle the foreground task, and a bunch of low-power processors for background tasks.

Looks like ARM got it right with its big.LITTLE architecture. :)

The low power processors are not general purpose, they are fpga's, they get trained and then are highly optimized at their task.

And they stay in the brain even when not used. You can ride a bike or play a piano years after stopping.

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