University of Rochester researchers have found that roughly 80 percent of our cognitive power may be cranking away on tasks completely unknown to us, probably dedicated to subconsciously reprocessing our initial thoughts and experiences. The research, which has possible profound implications for our very basis of understanding reality, appears in this week’s issue of the journal Nature.

The research measured neural activity in adult ferrets as correlated with visual reality (in this case, the movie The Matrix). Once all visual inputs were gone, the neural activity still continued.

University of Rochester news release