Summary: What is mind? A central finding is that mind is a series of processes carried out by the brain. Mind is to the brain as walking is to legs—but it is infinitely more complex. The brain produces our every emotional, intellectual, and athletic act. It allows us to acquire new facts and skills and to remember them for as long as a lifetime. Mind emerges from brain activity, and specific mental functions are localized to different regions in the brain. Over the past few decades, we have found that memory exists in two major forms, each located in different brain regions. Explicit memory is for people, places, and objects. During the memorization process it requires a region deep in the brain called the hippocampus. We depend on our hippocampus to remember our first day in high school. In contrast, implicit memory serves perceptual and motor skills, such as dancing and swimming. It is distributed over multiple brain regions and circuits. In concert, these two memory systems help make us who we are.
