Understanding of the Mind and Its Processes Essay

Understanding of the Mind and Its Processes - Essay Example This paper illustrates that our vision is based upon a two-dimensional image despite the fact that it is attempting to perceive a three-dimensional world. As a result, we depend to a great extent upon our imaginations to fill in any missing elements of the visual puzzle we are confronted with, which may be accurate or inaccurate and it is up to other areas of our mind to decipher the truth. Perception, then, is what we first believe we have seen and then becomes adjusted as we begin to process this information through other areas of the mind based on information we remember or understand from previous experience. In addition to what we perceive through our fallible senses, we are also struggling to understand the world around us through what we can pay attention to, which has been proven to be limited, and what we are able to remember, which is limited by what we can imagine and further shaped by our perception of the event. As if this wasn’t enough information to try to juggl e around, how our perceptions are governed by our sensations and our memories and how these interact and combine to reshape our perceptions, there is another element that must be considered in cognitive science regarding what it means to be conscious and where the link is between the biological, material processes of the brain and the immaterial untraceable processes of the mind. Many people have made the connection between the brain and the computer and the mind and the software that runs the computer, but science has demonstrated that these processes are much more complex than the relationship between the newest Dell model and Windows Vista. While we attempt to define what it means to be conscious, we realize that we are only aware of ourselves as conscious because we can compare ourselves to something else – we are like something.