The ready availability of automatic brain action explains the blindness and stupidity of the masses that Hitler exploited (see self-awareness). Most daily brain action proceeds automatically to foregone conclusions. All animals manage the massive sensory input economically with automatic integration at an unconscious level to arrive at conscious perception. Similarly, all brains transform the conscious intent of action into the massive effort of coordinated movement at an unconscious automatic level. In his scheme of neuronal Darwinism, Geoffrey Edelman (1989) termed this automatic processing of sensory input and motor output as categorisation. It produces the bulk of brain action. How then does the relatively little of brain action that establishes what I am (ergo sum) come to mean so much in what I think (cogito)?
Two alternative methods of information processing by the brain, parallel or serial, provide a technical answer. The parallel information processing takes a relatively effortless path of automatic brain action, the speed and efficiency of which makes daily existence possible. It proceeds at a level unavailable to conscious introspection. Computers take a similar automatic programmed path to accumulate and process enormous amounts of data. The end product delivers the conscious content of brain action, meaningful perception and the complex coordination of movement. In contrast, consciously directed thought requires serial information processing, which demands far greater time and effort. The economy of the automatic unconscious processing that delivers the bulk of brain action effortlessly leaves the lion’s share for the effortful constructs of the comparatively small volume of conscious thought.
