As a part of the daily chores, we carry out a wide variety of tasks so effortlessly that we rarely recognize the complexity of the task. Let us consider a very simple example:

You’re walking on the road and suddenly your keychain slips out of your hand, you immediately bend down and catch it before it falls. Sounds simple enough, doesn’t it? Now consider the mental processing going on in the background while you do this simple task. As the object starts falling down, your brain is processing information about the speed of the falling object, trajectory of the path it is expected to follow etc. Before you bend to catch the object, you stop walking. This involves your brain sending signals to your muscles in order to stop walking. Almost simultaneously, your brain coordinates bending your legs at a certain angle and opening your fist in order to catch the object and immediately closing it as soon as the object falls into your hand. Before your muscles do the action, the brain calculates the angle of bending, the extent to which you open your fist depending on the size of the object.

Also, your reaction will be faster if the speed of the falling object is greater. Next, the dexterity with which you do that task also depends on the kind of object falling. If it is an expensive and breakable object like say a glass bowl, you will react faster as compared to say if a pencil falls from your hand in which case you may not even bother to catch it. This decision is being taken by your cognitive system which is also coordinating with your nervous system.

To make things worse, say you were also talking to a friend of yours while walking. As you catch the object, you neither stop speaking nor are distracted from the conversation and continue to do the above mention intense calculations while you are focusing on the topic in conversation.

In the process we form mental representations with semantic properties that help carry out all such tasks efficiently. Despite the above complexity of the task, we do it effortlessly because as we continue to do the same task routinely, it gets embedded in our subconscious mind and we get tuned to doing such a task easily. In fact, we get so accustomed to it, that it becomes almost like a reflex action for us.