Everyone knows that going on "autopilot" is very normal and part of being human. Although it is enticing to believe that people can always think consciously about what they do, it is not possible. The reason is that going on "autopilot" is part of our underlying evolutionary biology. In ancestral times when resources were a lot scarcer, we did many things in "autopilot" to save energy. It is a lower energy operating mode for the brain. This ability helped us survive and was passed on to our descendants. As such, we inherited a brain that deals reasonably well with pedestrian pace and limited hazardous energy. The problem is that modern life has become much faster with a lot of hazardous ener

Have you ever gone into your driveway and thought “what road did I take to get here?” Most of us have at some point. Driving is one of the riskiest things we do, yet we seem destined to do it in “autopilot”. Neuroscientists have estimated that more than 95% of what we do is subconscious. But what does that mean? Well, it means that most of what we do is “back of mind” rather than “front of mind”. A way to think about this is to consider what we think about when we drive, walk or brush our teeth. We are not always thinking about what we are doing. We need to realise that we do many things in the same way every day without much conscious thought because we have done them plenty of times before