For example we might be sitting reading something and then suddenly realize we were playing with a pen without having any active thought to play with that pen.
Or perhaps you might be doing something weird with your tongue whilst focusing hard on a task, or playing with your beard whilst watching a video, etc etc.
How do we do these things without putting any active thought into doing it and why?
In: Biology
A neuroscience answer: your cerebral cortex and thalamus simply work together to filter these things out. Your thalamus is a relay center for inputs, i.e. it decides what is important enough to be sent to the cerebral cortex for higher processing. When you initiate an action, obviously these inputs are important, but your neurons adapt, and eventually your thalamus “decides” to simply not let the cerebral cortex know, and other connections in the brain do the processing without conscious awareness.
Usually triggers cause a bodily reaction to form,and if you say,completed a task once with your tongue out (because it made you think critically) then subsequently your body will associate that bodily action with the mood or situation at hand.Like fiddling with your hands when you’re bored or crying when someone yells at you.
I think it’s a mix of habit, and not remembering that you started doing it, when you had the small craving to do so.
The brain has to process so much at a time, so things that you have done hundreds of times before become trivial and won’t be anything the brain pays a lot of attention to.
So while doing something else, you might get a craving to tap your leg, and you’ve done this thousands of times before, so the brain just does it without making you think about it. It’s almost the same with breathing, even though it’s essential, your brain makes your conscious focus stay where it is.
It becomes a habit.
When you do something without thinking about it, the same thought process that you go through when you do think about it still happens subconsciously.
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