The very first thing I realized while brushing my teeth in the morning, was that every day I brush in exactly the same manner. The entire process from applying paste to the brush, to rinsing my mouth at the end is fixed and almost never varies. Starting off with cleaning the front teeth, I always move to the right side of my mouth, followed by the left, followed by the inner part of the teeth, and a final round for the frontal portion before rinsing my mouth. The second observation I made, was that I never really think about brushing my teeth while brushing my teeth. My thoughts are always on something other than the task at hand of brushing. Even when I paid special attention to it, for this assignment, I never thought about how was I doing it, my hands seemed to move by themselves.
The above two observations clearly indicate that there is some algorithm for brushing my teeth coded into my subconscious. It automatically gets executed instruction by instruction when I enter the bathroom in the morning. The role of vision in this process is actually pretty interesting. Vision is not necessary, in that I can brush my teeth equally well without looking in the mirror, but it does constitute to the smooth functioning of the algorithm. Closing my eyes while brushing makes me much more aware of the algorithm by which I do it, and makes me think about how am I doing it. Somehow the process moves from the subconscious to the conscious if the sensory input of vision is removed.
Obviously this algorithm was not in my subconscious at birth, so the question remains about how did I learn it? Say I have an ulcer on the left part of my mouth which hurts when I brush there, I have to make a conscious effort to skip brushing that part of the mouth. Even if this ulcer persists for a week, each time I would have to make a conscious effort to skip that step in the process. Probably if I keep skipping that step for a month, it would eventually move to my subconscious and I would not have to think about it anymore. Hence, I believe that learning this algorithm is actually a long and slow process of doing it consciously before it gets coded into the subconscious.