I agree, Michael, although I do not have your training in meditation and have not yet read "The Happiness Hypothesis".
You raise the interesting issue of the relative speed of these two aspects of the mind. Is your thinking that the conscious is slower than the unconscious or the other way around?
My impression is that it is often the unconscious which is handling automatically the vast majority of interactions with the outside world; and it does so much more rapidly than the conscious is able to react.
Whether we are applying any skill (simple examples might include walking, catching a ball, reading, talking, typing, ... but most of us probably have tens of thousands of them), isn't most of the activity being handled automatically? This is sometimes referred to using terms such as "muscle memory", but aren't these simply habits?
When learning a new skill, it seems that we are trying to do everything with the conscious and failing most of the time; this continues until the skill becomes automatic, as the unconscious begins to learn the behaviour. So, while the unconscious seems to be capable of processing and reacting to inputs much faster than the conscious, it seems to be much slower at changing its "thinking".
Also, the unconscious is capable of doing many things at once, the conscious seems to be limited to doing one thing at a time. David's distinction between "multi-tasking" (by the conscious?) and "rapid refocussing" (by the unconscious?) is perhaps a clearer way of relating this to the handling of multiple actions leading to multiple objectives.
Maybe there are parallels with the distinction between left (conscious) and right (unconscious) brain activities. If so, this raises the another interesting distinction between rider and elephant: the left (conscious rider) does all the talking! However, I am not sure that it does all of the listening. Could this be a mechanism for the surprising benefits that are reported (and I have also found) from repeated listening to the In Conversation interviews (... and any other repeated vocal input/instruction/mantra ... [that is leading somewhere else!])? Maybe the conscious of David and the interviewee are communicating directly with the listeners subconscious.
Overall, I think that the elephant article is very interesting and is providing yet another view on this major subject area; perhaps its main contribution is in providing a great analogy which highlights aspects of the control and/or monitoring relationships between the two aspects of the mind.
Of course, it is highly probable that the professional neurologists understand much or all of this already!
