The mind is what thinks, feels, perceives, imagines, remembers, and wills, encompassing the totality of mental phenomena. It includes both conscious processes, through which an individual is aware of external and internal circumstances, and unconscious processes, which can influence an individual without intention or awareness. Traditionally, minds were often conceived as separate entities that can exist on their own but are more commonly understood as features or capacities of other entities in the contemporary discourse. The mind plays a central role in most aspects of human life but its exact nature is disputed; some theorists suggest that all mental phenomena are private and directly knowable, transform information, have the ability to refer to and represent other entities, or are dispositions to engage in behavior.

It is widely accepted that animals have some form of mind, but it is controversial to which animals this applies. The topic of artificial minds poses similar challenges, with theorists discussing the possibility and consequences of creating them using computers.

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The main fields of inquiry studying the mind include psychology, neuroscience, cognitive science, and philosophy. They tend to focus on different aspects of the mind and employ different methods of investigation, ranging from empirical observation and neuroimaging to conceptual analysis and thought experiments. The mind is relevant to many other fields, including epistemology, anthropology, religion, and education.

The mind is the totality of psychological phenomena and capacities, encompassing consciousness, thought, perception, sensation, feeling, mood, motivation, behavior, memory, and learning.[1] The term is sometimes used in a more narrow sense to refer only to higher or more abstract cognitive functions associated with reasoning and awareness.[2] Minds were traditionally conceived as immaterial substances or independent entities and contrasted with matter and body. In the contemporary discourse, they are more commonly seen as features of other entities and are often understood as capacities of material brains.[3] The precise definition of mind is disputed and while it is generally accepted that some non-human animals also have mind, there is no agreement on where exactly the boundary lies.[4] 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.[5] Various fields of inquiry study the mind; the main ones include psychology, cognitive science, neuroscience, and philosophy.[6]

The words psyche and mentality are usually used as synonyms of mind.[7] They are often employed in overlapping ways with the terms soul, spirit, cognition, intellect, intelligence, and brain but their meanings are not exactly the same. 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.[8] The word spirit has various additional meanings not directly associated with mind, such as a vital principle animating living beings or a supernatural being inhabiting objects or places.[9] Cognition encompasses certain types of mental processes in which knowledge is acquired and information processed.[10] The intellect is one mental capacity responsible for thought, reasoning, and understanding[11] and is closely related to intelligence as the ability to acquire, understand, and apply knowledge.[12] The brain is the physical organ responsible for most or all mental functions.[13]

The mind encompasses many functions and processes, including perception, memory, thought, imagination, motivation, emotion, attention, learning, and consciousness.[15] Perception is the process of interpreting and organizing sensory information to become acquainted with the environment. This information is acquired through sense organs receptive to various types of physical stimuli, which correspond to different forms of perception, such as vision, sound, touch, smell, and taste. The sensory information received this way is a form of raw data that is filtered and processed to actively construct a representation of the world and the objects within it. This complex process underlying perceptual experience is shaped by many factors, including the individual's past experiences, cultural background, beliefs, and expectations.[16]

Memory is the mechanism of storing and retrieving information.[17] Episodic memory handles information about specific past events in one's life and makes this information available in the present. When a person remembers what they had for dinner yesterday, they employ episodic memory. Semantic memory handles general knowledge about the world that is not tied to any specific episodes. When a person recalls that the capital of Japan is Tokyo, they usually access this general information without recalling the specific instance when they learned it. Procedural memory is memory of how to do things, such as riding a bicycle or playing a musical instrument.[18] Another distinction is between short-term memory, which holds information for brief periods, usually with the purpose of completing specific cognitive tasks, and long-term memory, which can store information indefinitely.[19]

Thinking involves the processing of information and the manipulation of mental representations. It is a goal-oriented activity that often happens in response to experiences as a symbolic process aimed at making sense of them, organizing their information, and deciding how to respond.[20] Logical reasoning is a form of thinking that starts from a set of premises and aims to arrive at a conclusion supported by these premises. This is the case when deducing that "Socrates is mortal" from the premises "Socrates is a man" and "all men are mortal".[21] Problem-solving is a closely related process that consists of several steps, such as identifying a problem, developing a plan to address it, implementing the plan, and assessing whether it worked.[22] Thinking in the form of decision-making involves considering possible courses of action to assess which one is the most beneficial.[23] As a symbolic process, thinking is deeply intertwined with language and some theorists hold that all thought happens through the medium of language.[24]

Imagination is a creative process of internally generating mental images. Unlike perception, it does not directly depend on the stimulation of sensory organs. Similar to dreaming, these images are often derived from previous experiences but can include novel combinations and elements. Imagination happens during daydreaming and plays a key role in art and literature but can also be used to come up with novel solutions to real-world problems.[25]

Motivation is an internal state that propels individuals to initiate, continue, or terminate goal-directed behavior. It is responsible for the formation of intentions to perform actions and affects what goals someone pursues, how much effort they invest in the activity, and how long they engage in it.[26] Motivation is affected by emotions, which are temporary experiences of positive or negative feelings like joy or anger. They are directed at and evaluate specific events, persons, or situations. They usually come together with certain physiological and behavioral responses.[27]

Attention is an aspect of other mental processes in which mental resources like awareness are directed towards certain features of experience and away from others. This happens when a driver focuses on the traffic while ignoring billboards on the side of the road. Attention can be controlled voluntarily in the pursuit of specific goals but can also occur involuntarily when a strong stimulus captures a person's attention.[28] Attention is relevant to learning, which is the ability of the mind to acquire new information and permanently modify its understanding and behavioral patterns. Individuals learn by undergoing experiences, which helps them adapt to the environment.[29]

An influential distinction is between conscious and unconscious mental processes. Consciousness is the awareness of external and internal circumstances. It encompasses a wide variety of states, such as perception, thinking, fantasizing, dreaming, and altered states of consciousness.[30] In the case of phenomenal consciousness, the awareness involves a direct and qualitative experience of mental phenomena, like the auditory experience of attending a concert. Access consciousness, by contrast, refers to an awareness of information that is accessible to other mental processes but not necessarily part of current experience. For example, the information stored in a memory may be accessible when drawing conclusions or guiding actions even when the person is not explicitly thinking about it.[31]

Unconscious or nonconscious mental processes operate without the individual's awareness but can still influence mental phenomena on the level of thought, feeling, and action. Some theorists distinguish between preconscious, subconscious, and unconscious states depending on their accessibility to conscious awareness.[32] When applied to the overall state of a person rather than specific processes, the term unconscious implies that the person lacks any awareness of their environment and themselves, like during a coma.[33] The unconscious mind plays a central role in psychoanalysis as the part of the mind that contains thoughts, memories, and desires not accessible to conscious introspection. 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.[34] 152ee80cbc

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