mind

The mind refers to the set of cognitive faculties that enable conscious experience, perception, thought, memory, emotion, imagination, language, and agency. It is often described as distinct from the physical brain, though many views treat the mind as an emergent property of neural activity rather than a separate substance.

Core mental processes include perception, attention, learning, memory encoding and retrieval, reasoning, problem solving, language, and emotion. Conscious experience is the subjective aspect of these processes, while much of mental life operates implicitly through unconscious processing. The mind supports processes such as decision making, planning, self-awareness, and creativity.

The study of the mind spans philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, cognitive science, linguistics, and artificial intelligence. The brain mediates mental states, with regions such as the prefrontal cortex, hippocampus, and amygdala contributing to planning, memory, and emotion. Theories about the mind range from dualism, which posits distinct mental and physical substances, to physicalism or materialism, which equate mental states with brain states or their causal roles, and functionalism, which emphasizes the organizing principles of mental processes.

Evolutionary perspectives view the mind as adapted for navigating social environments, predicting outcomes, and guiding behavior. This includes perception, learning from experience, language, and cultural transmission. Research seeks to model mental processes computationally, explain mental disorders, and understand how cognition supports behavior.

In artificial intelligence discourse, the term mind is used to describe intelligent functioning, prompting questions about machine consciousness versus simulated intelligence and the differences between weak and strong AI.