The brain emits a signal as soon as it sees something interesting, and that "aha" signal can be detected by an electroencephalogram, or EEG cap. While users sift through streaming images or video footage, the technology tags the images that elicit a signal, and ranks them in order of the strength of the neural signatures. Afterwards, the user can examine only the information that their brains identified as important, instead of wading through thousands of images.

So a conscious mind is still in the loop (although it doesn't have to be the same mind as the one doing the initial sort). What this suggests to me is that consciousness has a specific role in cognition; hitherto our computing apps have jammed everything into that one box, because we haven't had good interfaces to the unconscious parts of the brain. So, many of our applications are very slow and cumbersome, squeezed through an inappropriate part of the cognitive system as they are.

Future computing applications will present to consciousness those problems and summaries that it is optimized for. Other tasks--like sorting through massive sets of visual images--will be offloaded onto those cognitive modules that can do the job faster than consciousness.

I've talked about the implications of this before; suffice it to say that the notion of embodiment I'm talking about in this blog includes the idea that consciousness is neither the pinnacle of creation nor a useless epiphenomenon. It has its place, both in our lives and in our work--and knowing its relative strengths and where it is appropriate, and inappropriate, to use it will be immeasurably valuable to us.

We also have the opportunity now to "own" our unconscious selves and those processes that connect these selves into the equally unconscious environment. Owning our unconscious side is essential to end the "bad consciousness" of the Cartesian split of mind vs. body. As the DARPA-funded Columbia U project shows, such an opportunity is creeping up on us much faster than we might have expected.

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