I think it's quite amusing to learn that it's an intentional strategy.

Consciousness is often lauded as the most important feature of humanity, especially because it is "us", but it gets in the way incredibly often.

Generally speaking, we perform more poorly on most tasks when we have greater awareness of what we're doing. Anybody who has played an instrument knows what it's like to suddenly become aware of what your fingers are doing and miraculously losing the ability to play. Stepping in front of a group to read a well-rehearsed essay only to forget the words, finding yourself inexplicably "manually walking" past your crush in an empty hallway, so on.

Inversely, we're capable of grand feats of intuitive functionality when we're not paying attention ranging from spontaneous mathematical solutions, motor control, recollection, and problem solving. There's endless examples to choose from, each suggesting that the conscious self isn't often even "doing the work" at all, merely taking credit for answers that were performed elsewhere with a wink, like a student being passed notes during a quiz.

Whenever "we" try to do those things consciously - manually - we find ourselves performing poorly, even ineptly. We often think about our conscious selves as the driver behind the wheel, but we're more like the person in the passenger seat. We can reach over to grab the wheel to steer the car, but we're not going to do it well. We can change the radio station, but when we look away it'll often be tuned to a different station again.

When we look at one of our closest evolutionary ancestors, we even see that they outperform us cognitively in various ways. There's videos of infant chimpanzees kicking the dogcrap out of adult humans in memorization games, for example. When humans are performing with that kind of grace, we're doing it subconsciously or from within a flow state (and those are quite similar, in a sense). That's where the chimp always is.

What's consciousness good at? Managing concepts and abstractions, and overriding conflicting motor impulses. This ability is what allows us to make fire, a task that seems fruitless and painful for many minutes until smoke begins to rise. It's also what allows us to grasp onto a hot bowl of soup rather than dropping it on the floor, an instinct we subvert in favor of avoiding a mess that would also ruin our meal. Looking at our chimp friend, this is precisely where we leave them in the dust.

But when it comes down to just about everything else, other parts of our brains are carrying the load and we're just taking credit for it, often retroactively. This is why we're often so much better at things we're not trying to do, why we suddenly suck at a video game the moment we're showing a friend our skills, and why a moment of high intensity can turn an expert into an apparent novice.

It's no surprise that expert archers have learned to utilize surprise release mechanisms. It's a lesson we can all apply to our own lives, in fact. Whenever I find myself hesitating, I recollect or withdraw because the outcome would have been in conscious hands - and conscious hands aren't good hands except when making a decision to act or not.

I'm not a fan of the movies by any means, but this is probably what Yoda meant when he said "Do or do not do. There is no try."

Trying fails where doing doesn't.