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Context is crucial ! 
Our Fascinating Brain
I mentioned, above, that our brain may be in 'automatic gear,' so to speak. I should take a moment, regarding this comment, in case you're interested.
The Human brain functions according to an interesting principle, often referred to as "the principle of economy," or "the principle of least effort."
No, the brain is not necessarily lazy! 
... What happens is that, as the brain has some limitations to cope with, it makes sense that the brain prefers to save its energies and resources for situations that require creativity or analysis – such as analyzing whatever new we come across, in order to understand it and deal with it properly.
... What happens is that, as the brain has some limitations to cope with, it makes sense that the brain prefers to save its energies and resources for situations that require creativity or analysis – such as analyzing whatever new we come across, in order to understand it and deal with it properly. This may well be deeply wired in our instinct of survival, since getting a sense of how to cope with the unknown might mean the difference between life and death, in certain situations.
At any rate, the brain leaves, as a rule, all that is expected and expectable, under the care of our automatically triggered systems and reactions.
Though I do not favor thinking of the brain as a computer (as this sort of analogy often limits the brain most unfairily), I agree that using the computer as a metaphor comes in handy, now and then. Let us just keep in mind that the creativity, the capacity for improvisation, the capacity to function intuitively, just to mention a few of our brain's marvelous assets, can never be fairly dealt with if we equate the human brain with the functioning or structure of a computer. This being said, we can now safely proceed.
Using a computer metaphor, we could express the above the following way: the brain leaves as much free RAM and CPU resources, so to speak, for creative and analytical activities.
Above, I briefly mentioned that there are limitations inherent to the functioning of our brains. Certainly the brain cannot do the type of heavy-duty work that a computer easily handles nowadays. But there are more interesting limitations.
One of these was first noticed by George Miller (a renowned experimental psychologist), a few decades ago, by now. The limitation he discovered is that our brain can handle focusing attention on up to seven symultaneous items, approximately (seven plus or minus two, as he put it, i.e., from five to nine).
As a result of this limitation, we have of course developed a number of strategies that aim at making up for what we would not be able to achieve, otherwise.
For example, have you ever wondered why is it that we always memorize telephone numbers in chunks of numbers, instead of one digit by one? This is one of the ways the brain bypasses, so to speak, the limitation Miller found us all to carry in our brains. The minute we associate a group of numbers in a chunk, then the brain is ready to cope with that chunk as if it were a single unit, and so on.
In fact, for no other reason, I believe tree structures (such as the one you see on the Menu, to your left) have become so popular with computer programs, once TreePad first came out with a program that associated a tree structure on the left, with a writing pad on the right, way back in the early nineties.
For tree structures are natural! They are pretty much the way our brain manages to handle large amounts of data at once, as just illustrated above with the simple example of the telephone numbers.
(This is, in fact, one of the many reasons I quickly grew so fond of TreePad, a decade ago, or so – i.e., its innovative coherence with the way the brain handles data – now so widely seen in the software context. But let's get back to the brain.)
Now that we have seen that the brain is interested in being economical, so it can function optimally, let us make our way back to the comment I made in the previous section.
All routines we have learned, are pretty much handled with the brain's "automatic pilot" on, so as to leave room and resources for creative and analytical activity, we have seen.
When you are first learning to drive, driving is a conscious activity, and it does make direct use of your brain's resources. Once you have become an experienced driver, driving is done in "automatic pilot mode," unless you suddenly face trying or rather unusual driving conditions.
In the red traffic light example I used, when we see that the light is red, yet traffic continues rolling, it is necessary that we process the new information contained in that out-of-the-usual situation. We need to analyze the situation so we can make sense out of it – as it is contrary to expectation.
So, we immediately come out of "automatic pilot mode," notice the traffic Officer waving cars by, and acess the situation. This is how we conclude that the second traffic light, in my example, is our of order.
Finally, let us not forget that, acessing the situation necessarily means making use of contextual information available, in order to make sense (i.e., derive plausible meaning) out of a situation that is out of the ordinary.
The brain makes use of context all the time! Just we are not aware of it, as we are not aware of many other processes that we make use of by default, so to speak.
We are not aware of how we piece together what we want to say, when we communicate, for example. We are not aware of our own consciousness, either. Nor are we aware of time, though we use time just about as often as we use oxigen. Like context, all of these are right under our noses, yet we fail to be aware of them!
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