When we make anything implicit—driving a stick shift, knitting, buttoning our shirt, playing the martyr—we do these things without the intervention of the conscious mind. We have wired those circuits to the cerebellum, and both the brain and the body have these tasks memorized almost like blinking, breathing, repairing cells, and secreting digestive enzymes. Once we have a conscious thought in our neocortex, an unconscious thought/associative memory/implicit memory fires in response to our environment, and causes us to think equal to this stimulus. This process is often referred to as priming:
...more
