I did recently partake in a presentation about control of our own mind. He said much the same as you, but that the brain's subconsciness is pretty much an autopilot with insane processing power, much more than our conscious self. It preprocessed all data we receive, from visual to touch to hunger, even takes full control of a lot of inner organs functions, and then passes simplified and easy to process data to our conscious self, so we can make high level decisions or even reprogram the subconsciness if needed.

We can sometimes even turn off our consciousness and let the autopilot drive, like when you wake up and get ready for work and then suddenly are at you workplace, not remembering how you drove there.

Now interfacing with our subconsciousness or changing our habits can be difficult, as our subconsciness is driven by desire and has the intelligence of a baby who has not yet attained consciousness (or something like that).

Obviously I cannot compress the whole lesson into this comment, and neither can I remember it perfectly, but I find it wildly fascinating.