Consciousness is a convenient fiction for giving cohesion to the multitude of agents that together decide what a human does. Researchers at Columbia University are kicking that illusion in the teeth — they’re hooking up the human visual system to a computer which detects the a-ha moment of visual recognition before the attached human is fully aware they’ve seen something. Basically, humans are faster at visual recognition than computers, but only if that darn consciousness doesn’t get in the way.