Poets have always known the limitations of conscious deliberate thinking and have sought to cultivate these slower mistier ways of knowing Philosophers have written about the realms of the mind that lie beyond and beneath the conscious intellect It is only recently however that scientists have started to explore directly the slower less deliberate ways of knowing The hybrid discipline of cognitive science is revealing that the unconscious realms of the human mind will successfully accomplish a number of unusual interesting and important tasks if they are given the time They will learn patterns of a degree of subtlety which normal consciousness cannot even see make sense out of situations that are too complex to analyse and get to the bottom of certain difficult issues much more successfully than the questing intellect