The Cognitive Nonconscious

The vast majority of cognition occurs in the dark. The biological brain parses the syntax of a sentence before the conscious mind registers its meaning, regulates heart rate and muscle coordination without awareness, constructs the perceptual world from raw sensory data through processes that never surface to consciousness. Consciousness is the tip of the cognitive iceberg—remarkable, rare, experientially rich, but not the form of cognition that does most of the cognitive work. N. Katherine Hayles drew a sharp and deliberate line between the nonconscious and the unconscious: the Freudian unconscious is a repository of repressed content that was once conscious; the cognitive nonconscious is processing that was never conscious, not amenable to becoming conscious, operating according to principles fundamentally unlike those of conscious thought. In Unthought (2017), she extended this concept beyond the biological brain to encompass the technical systems that process information alongside us—the algorithms that filter