Here is an interesting quote relating to this topic:

“In considering the issue of mental experiences in animals, we have begun to wonder if the implicit assumption that humans are almost wholly conscious and aware (and hence fully competent to evaluate our cognitively less sophisticated animal brethren) is correct. Could it be that the degree to which conscious thinking is involved in the everyday lives of most people is greatly overestimated? We know already that much of our learned behavior becomes hardwired: despite the painfully difficult process of learning the task originally, who has to concentrate consciously as an adult on how to walk or swim, tie a shoe, write words, or even drive a car along a familiar route? Certain linguistic behavior, too, falls into such patterns. Michael Gazzaniga, for instance, tells the story of a former physician who suffered from a left (linguistic) hemisphere lesion so serious that he could not form even simple three-word sentences. And yet, when a certain highly touted but ineffective patent medicine was mentioned, he would launch into a well-worn and perfectly grammatical five-minute tirade on its evils. This set piece had been stored on the undamaged right side (along with the usual collections of songs, poetry, and epigrams) as a motor tape requiring no conscious linguistic manipulation to deliver.

…

Indeed, what evidence is there that those sublime intellectual events known as “inspiration” involve any conscious thought? Most often our best ideas are served up to us out of our unconscious while we are thinking or doing something perfectly irrelevant. Inspiration probably depends on some sort of repetitive and time-consuming pattern-matching program which runs imperceptibly below the level of consciousness searching for plausible matches.

It strikes us that a skeptical and dispassionate extraterrestrial ethologist studying our unendearing species might reasonably conclude that Homo sapiens are, for the most part, automatons with overactive and highly verbal public relations departments to apologize for and cover up our foibles.”


“The Insect Mind: Physics or Metaphysics?”
J. L. and C. J. Gould