Perhaps you will enjoy this passage, but perhaps you will find it disturbing. Here is one of my favorite passages on the fact that we are not ultimately (in any meaningful way) the conscious authors of what we do. The passage is from Johnson/Lakoff, Philosophy in the Flesh:

Consider, for example, all that is going on below the level of conscious awareness when you are in a conversation. Here is only a small part of what you are doing, second by second:

• • Accessing memories relevant to what is being said.
  • Comprehending a stream of sound as being language, dividing it into distinctive phonetic features and segments, identifying phonemes, and grouping them into morphemes
  • Assigning a structure to the sentence in accord with the vast number of grammatical constructions in your native language
  • Picking out words and giving them meanings appropriate the context
  • Making semantic and pragmatic sense of the sentences as a whole
  • Framing what is said in terms relevant to the discussion
  • Performing inferences relevant to what is being discussed
  • Constructing mental images where relevant and inspecting them
  • Filling in gaps in the discourse
  • Noticing and interpreting your interlocutor’s body language
  • Anticipating where the conversation is going
  • Planning what to say in response

Cognitive scientists have shown experimentally that to understand even the simplest utterance, we must perform these and other incredibly complex forms of thought automatically and without noticeable effort below the level of consciousness. It is not merely that we occasionally do not notice these processes; rather; they are inaccessible to conscious awareness and control.

The above passage should severely reduce our confidence in introspection as a tool for what is going inside of us, as part of “cognition.” And, in fact, the work of Johnson and Lakoff requires us to expand the geography of “cognition” to include far more than the brain.  It needs to include the entire human body:

As is the practice in cognitive science, we will use the term cognitive in the richest possible sense to describe any mental operations and structures that are involved in language, meaning, perception, conceptual systems, and reason. Because our conceptual systems and our reason arise from our bodies, we will also use the term cognitive for aspects of our sensory-motor system that contribute to our abilities to conceptualize and to reason, Since cognitive operations are largely unconscious, the term cognitive unconscious accurately describes all unconscious mental operations concerned with conceptual systems, meaning, inference, and language.