Subconscious thought matches patterns, finding the best possible match…

Subconscious thought matches patterns, finding the best possible match of one's past experience to the current one. It proceeds rapidly and automatically, without effort.

— from The Mind in the Cockpit

In the book

The brain does not really function without expectations — it is, at bottom, an expectation machine, forever predicting what comes next and showing you the prediction. It runs mostly underground: the conscious mind you experience is a thin sliver riding on a vast subconscious that matches patterns and hands up answers before you know you asked. And it does not think in cold isolation, the way we like to imagine — thought and emotion cannot actually be separated; cognition gives us understanding while emotion supplies the value, and a mind with no feeling at all cannot even decide. — The Mind in the Cockpit

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