Further to the question of conscious vs non-conscious action, here’s a recent RSA video presenting some evidence.

Nicholas Shea presents with Barry Smith riding shotgun. There’s a mention for one piece of research also mentioned by Di Nucci; preventing expert golfers from concentrating consciously on their shot actually improves their performance (it does the opposite for non-experts). There are two pieces of audience participation; one shows that subliminal prompts can (slightly) affect behaviour; the other shows that time to think and discuss can help where explicit reasoning is involved (though it doesn’t seem to help the RSA audience much).

Perhaps in the end consciousness is not essentially private after all, but social and co-operative?

Sign of the times to see two philosophers unashamedly dabbling in experiments. I think the RSA also has to win some kind of prize in the hotly-contested ‘unconvincing brain picture’ category for using purple and yellow cauliflower.