Mind

[2] Despite these disputes, there is wide agreement that mind plays a central role in most aspects of human life as the seat of consciousness, emotions, thoughts, and sense of personal identity.

Some religions understand the soul as an independent entity that constitutes the immaterial essence of human beings, is of divine origin, survives bodily death, and is immortal.

This term gave rise to the Middle English words mind(e), münd(e), and mend(e), resulting in a slow expansion of meaning to cover all mental capacities.

Cognates include the Old High German gimunt, the Gothic gamunds, the ancient Greek μένος, the Latin mens, and the Sanskrit manas.

This information is acquired through sense organs receptive to various types of physical stimuli, which correspond to different forms of perception, such as vision, hearing, touch, smell, and taste.

When a person recalls that the capital of Japan is Tokyo, they usually employ semantic memory to access this general information without remembering the specific instance when they learned it.

According to Sigmund Freud, the psychological mechanism of repression keeps disturbing phenomena, like unacceptable sexual and aggressive impulses, from entering consciousness to protect the individual.

Psychoanalytic theory studies symptoms caused by this process and therapeutic methods to avoid them by making the repressed thoughts accessible to conscious awareness.

Mental states are irrational if they fail to adhere to these standards, such as beliefs caused by faulty reasoning, superstition, or cognitive biases, and decisions that give into temptations against one's best judgment.

There is controversy regarding which mental phenomena lie outside this domain; suggested examples include sensory impressions, feelings, desires, and involuntary responses.

[79] Reductive physicalists defend a less radical position: they say that mental states exist but can, at least in principle, be completely described by physics without the need for special sciences like psychology.

[83] One consequence of this view is that mind does not depend on brains but can also be realized by other systems that implement the corresponding functional roles, possibly also computers.

For instance, the consumption of psychoactive drugs, like caffeine, antidepressants, alcohol, and psychedelics, temporarily affects brain chemistry with diverse effects on the mind, ranging from increased attention to mood changes, impaired cognitive functions, and hallucinations.

[100] The evolution of mind is usually explained in terms of natural selection: genetic variations responsible for new or improved mental capacities, such as better perception or social dispositions, have an increased chance of being passed on to future generations if they are beneficial to survival and reproduction.

According to the ecological intelligence hypothesis, the main value of the increased mental capacities comes from their advantages in dealing with a complex physical environment through processes like behavioral flexibility, learning, and tool use.

Other suggested mechanisms include the effects of a changed diet with energy-rich food and general benefits from an increased speed and efficiency of information processing.

Called behavioral modernity, it is associated with the emergence of new or improved mental abilities, such as technological innovativeness, abstract thinking, the use of symbols, planning, and social coordination.

[112] Early childhood is marked by rapid developments as infants learn voluntary control over their bodies and interact with their environment on a basic level.

Some people experience the mid-life transition as a midlife crisis involving an inner conflict about personal identity, associated with anxiety, a sense of lack of accomplishments in life, or an awareness of mortality.

When understood in a very wide sense as the capacity to process information, the mind is present in all forms of life, including insects, plants, and individual cells.

Of particular importance are the questions of consciousness and sentience, that is, to what extent non-human animals have a subjective experience of the world and are capable of suffering and feeling joy.

Some theorists emphasize positive features such as the abilities of a person to realize their potential, express and modulate emotions, cope with adverse life situations, and fulfill their social role.

[142] Cognitive behavioral therapy focuses on conscious mental phenomena to identify and change irrational beliefs and negative thought patterns.

[163] The study of the nervous system began in the ancient period and evolved through the centuries, including anatomical insights through dissections and speculative theories about brain functions.

It aims to overcome the challenge of understanding something as complex as the mind by integrating research from diverse fields ranging from psychology and neuroscience to philosophy, linguistics, and artificial intelligence.

[173] Cognitive science emerged in the second half of the 20th century as researchers from various disciplines began to examine how mental processes represent the world and transform information.

[173] For example, perception retrieves sensory information from the environment and transforms it to extract meaningful patterns that can be used in other mental processes, such as planning and decision-making.

[178] Closely related to this problem is theory of mind in psychology, which is the ability to understand that other people possess beliefs, desires, intentions, and feelings that may differ from one's own.

They analyze the mind as a stream of constantly changing experiences characterized by five aspects or "aggregates": material form, feelings, perception, volition, and consciousness.

[186] Daoism and Confucianism use the concept of heart-mind as the center of cognitive and emotional life, encompassing thought, understanding, will, desire, and mood.

Diagram of a head with symbols for different mental capacities inside it
The mind is responsible for phenomena like perception , thought , feeling , and action .
Diagram of two horizontal lines with arrow-like components at their ends
In the Müller-Lyer illusion , the horizontal black lines have the same length but the top line appears longer. The illusion persists even after becoming aware of it because of the automatic functioning of mental modules responsible for low-level visual processing. [ 45 ]
Diagram of approaches to the mind–body problem. It shows dualism in the form of Cartesian dualism on the left side. It presents monism in the forms of physicalism, idealism, and neutral monism on the right side.
Different approaches toward resolving the mind–body problem [ 70 ]
Diagram of a side-view of the brain with the prefrontal cortex colored in orange
The cerebral cortex is divided into various areas with distinct functions, like the prefrontal cortex (shown in orange) responsible for executive functions . [ 92 ]
Diagram of a person receiving two written pages, one from a computer and one from a human
The Turing test aims to determine whether a computer can imitate human linguistic behavior to the degree that it is not possible to tell the difference between human and computer. [ 128 ]
Photo of hand washing
Obsessive–compulsive disorder is a mental disorder in which a person follows compulsive rituals , like excessive hand washing, to alleviate anxiety caused by intrusive thoughts . [ 134 ]
fMRI image showing the brain from a top view with active areas colored in orange
Functional magnetic resonance imaging is a neuroimaging technique to detect brain areas with increased neural activity (shown in orange). [ 162 ]
Diagram of a brain in a vat that is connected to a computer
The brain in a vat is a thought experiment to examine the nature of the mind and its relation to matter. It explores how a brain would experience reality if a supercomputer fed it the same electrical stimulation a normal brain receives. [ 168 ]
Phrenological diagram of the human head from the side. Different different areas are marked for distinct brain functions.
Phrenology was a pseudoscientific attempt to correlate mental functions to brain areas. [ 188 ]