The mind is the set of cognitive faculties including consciousness, imagination, perception, thinking,
judgement, language and memory, which is housed in the brain (sometimes including the central
nervous system). It is usually defined as the faculty of an entity's thoughts and consciousness.[3] It holds
the power of imagination, recognition, and appreciation, and is responsible for processing feelings and
emotions, resulting in attitudes and actions.[citation needed]
There is a lengthy tradition in philosophy, religion, psychology, and cognitive science about what
constitutes a mind and what are its distinguishing properties.
One open question regarding the nature of the mind is the mind–body problem, which investigates the
relation of the mind to the physical brain and nervous system.[4] Older viewpoints included dualism and
idealism, which considered the mind somehow non-physical.[4] Modern views often center around
physicalism and functionalism, which hold that the mind is roughly identical with the brain or reducible
to physical phenomena such as neuronal activity[5][need quotation to verify], though dualism and
idealism continue to have many supporters. Another question concerns which types of beings are
capable of having minds (New Scientist 8 September 2018 p10).[citation needed] For example, whether
mind is exclusive to humans, possessed also by some or all animals, by all living things, whether it is a
strictly definable characteristic at all, or whether mind can also be a property of some types of human-
made machines.[citation needed]
Whatever its nature, it is generally agreed that mind is that which enables a being to have subjective
awareness and intentionality towards their environment, to perceive and respond to stimuli with some
kind of agency, and to have consciousness, including thinking and feeling.
A brain is an organ that serves as the center of the nervous system in all vertebrate and most
invertebrate animals. It is located in the head, usually close to the sensory organs for senses such as
vision. It is the most complex organ in a vertebrate's body. In a human, the cerebral cortex contains
approximately 14–16 billion neurons,[1] and the estimated number of neurons in the cerebellum is 55–
70 billion.[2] Each neuron is connected by synapses to several thousand other neurons. These neurons
communicate with one another by means of long protoplasmic fibers called axons, which carry trains of
signal pulses called action potentials to distant parts of the brain or body targeting specific recipient
cells.
Brain
Chimp Brain in a [Link]
A common chimpanzee brain
Identifiers
MeSH
D001921
NeuroNames
21
TA
A14.1.03.001
Anatomical terminology
[edit on Wikidata]
Physiologically, brains exert centralized control over a body's other organs. They act on the rest of the
body both by generating patterns of muscle activity and by driving the secretion of chemicals called
hormones. This centralized control allows rapid and coordinated responses to changes in the
environment. Some basic types of responsiveness such as reflexes can be mediated by the spinal cord or
peripheral ganglia, but sophisticated purposeful control of behavior based on complex sensory input
requires the information integrating capabilities of a centralized brain.
The operations of individual brain cells are now understood in considerable detail but the way they
cooperate in ensembles of millions is yet to be solved.[3] Recent models in modern neuroscience treat
the brain as a biological computer, very different in mechanism from an electronic computer, but similar
in the sense that it acquires information from the surrounding world, stores it, and processes it in a
variety of ways.
This article compares the properties of brains across the entire range of animal species, with the greatest
attention to vertebrates. It deals with the human brain insofar as it shares the properties of other brains.
The ways in which the human brain differs from other brains are covered in the human brain article.
Several topics that might be covered here are instead covered there because much more can be said
about them in a human context. The most important is brain disease and the effects of brain damage,
that are covered in the human brain article.
We now know, of course, that mind and brain are intimately connected. Injuries to the brain can alter
perceptual experience, cognitive abilities, and personality. Changes in brain chemistry can do the same.
There's no "mental substance" that appears along some phylogenetic branch of our evolutionary history,
nor a point in ontogeny during which we receive a non-physical infusion of mind-stuff. We've come a
long way from Ambrose Bierce's formulation of the mind in The Devil's Dictionary as "a mysterious form
of matter secreted by the brain."
In fact, it appears the mind is just the brain. Or perhaps, to quote Marvin Minsky, "the mind is what the
brain does." If we want to understand the mind, we should look to neuroscience and the brain for the
real answers.