Non-conscious parts of human brains are surprisingly capable

Discover Magazine - Could an Inner Zombie Be Controlling Your Brain?

This article is a popular review of a variety of psychological and neuroscience studies that have begun to develop the theory that unconscious processes in the human brain can complete daily tasks skillfully. The provocative hypothesis of zombie-brains controlling your actions isn't proved: instead it appears that tasks that rely highly on memory, spatial orientation, some amounts of pattern recognition, and simple visual cues can be completed very well without human consciousness. In fact, sometimes asking the conscious mind to come up with the answer can inhibit what the 'zombie' is already to get right. In other cases, when asked to complete a task consciously, the areas commonly associated with higher-level conscious thought seem to switch off the unconscious parts, and the opposite happens when scientists structure experiments that try to only rely on unconscious skills.