What Is the Mind?

Welcome to the course! Throughout the next few weeks, we will be discussing one of the most interesting areas in all of psychology—cognitive psychology. I hope you enjoy the topic as much as I do!

So what is cognitive psychology? The typical definition is as follows: the scientific study of the mind. While this simple definition captures the field of cognitive psychology, you may be asking yourself, what exactly is the mind? The mind encompasses all aspects of our neurological experience, and we will be covering many important topics related to it throughout the course. For example, cognition involves neuroscience, perception, attention, memory, knowledge, imagery language, problem solving, and reasoning and decision making. We will spend time looking at each of these topics in detail.

So let’s go back to the mind. What exactly is it? The mind controls mental functions, including the areas of cognition listed above. In order to do this, the mind must use a "code" to manipulate information. The mind must represent information in order to use, store, and manipulate this information. Much of cognitive psychology studies how the brain represents information. We can make an analogy with a computer. A computer stores and manipulates information in binary code (a series of 1s and 0s). Our brain does something similar. The brain must take information from the environment (like visual or auditory information) or from within our brain (thoughts and feelings) and transform the information into a format that the brain can use. Perception, attention, memory, imagery—basically every function our brain performs depends on how the brain is representing information. Cognitive psychology is interested with understanding how these systems work by examining how this information is represented. Cognitive psychology is a relatively new field in psychology, but the study of the mind has a long intellectual tradition.