It's incredible to me how little insight our conscious selves have into what's going on in our subconscious. It seems like almost all the cognitive hard work go

It's incredible to me how little insight our conscious selves have into what's going on in our subconscious. It seems like almost all the cognitive hard work goes on in the back end systems and the front end we usually think of as being 'us' is just a thin veneer of awareness. Like a user interface between our unconscious selves and the rest of the world. So when I'm speaking the words just come out. I've got a vague sense of where I'm going and the point I'm about to make, but it's certainly not verbal at that stage. My wife has afantasia, which is not a condition or anything as such, it just means she has no inner monologue and hears no inner voice when e.g. reading a book. Conversely one of my daughters says she is consciously aware of what she is about to say in words several seconds in advance even while speaking rapidly. My mother is an amateur artist and says she has crystal clear visual imagination and photographic memory. There seems to be a significant variation in how our conscious and cognitive processes work between individuals, including some having varying levels of access to cognitive mechanisms that in others are completely subconscious. That's just one example of very significant differences between individuals in one family, even in direct lines of descent, so this doesn't seem to be entirely genetic. It leads me to suspect that there may we be similarly very significant variations in how all sorts of other cognitive functions operate between individuals. I'm sure there's an overall architecture to our brains and neurological machinery. Various brain areas are clearly specialised into particular cognitive functions, but it may well be that, within those areas, how our brains get to implement those functions might have quite a bit of variation.