The Importance of Consciousness

I would have thought that input is needed to keep thinking. So for example, in Antonio de Masio's book, Descartes' Era, there's a thing where if you disconnect the emotional centre of the brain, you then become unable to make choices. Or rather, it takes a very long time. It takes ten minutes to decide what colour pen to use or an hour to decide where to have lunch. I think these are parochial facts that have nothing to do with how consciousness works or how thinking works.