The Known Map of the Human Mind
This article represents my up-to-the-moment, best map or layout of the human mind: the various parts that make it up, how they relate to each other, where their boundaries lie, and what each of these areas can do, is responsible for, and what their general limitations are. This will be an ongoing edit as I (and we) learn more and adjust. If you come back to this article in two weeks, it may have changed, as there is still very much left to explore.
A note on terminology. Some of these areas are, obviously, concepts or areas that have been explored before by others - eminent psychologist and philosophers alike - and some have chosen to give these areas names in their discussions thereof. I am choosing to rename some of these areas, not only because I believe the names chosen previously are either misleading or highlight superfluous data, but also because those names and their mental associations may serve to confuse the issue more than elucidate it. Much like France and Gaul both may generally describe roughly the same area geographically yet are technically different and have differing boundaries and contexts and connotations; so too, these older psychological terms are not quite as precise as I would prefer, and I fear the reader bringing with them certain assumptions or mischaracterizations that would only serve to muddy the waters. So, with great respect and caution, I am proposing and adopting these new terms that I feel better reflect the proper mapping as I now understand it.
It should also be noted that this mapping is strictly from an internal perspective - more psychology than psychiatry, and well away from physiology. I am making this map from the perspective where you sit inside yourself. It is concerned with function and role, rather than the biology or medical geography. In this, I distinguish the “mind” from the “brain.”
The Operative Mind
For most, the Operative Mind is the part of your mind that you likely think of as “you.” Technically that’s an incorrect perception, as all parts of your mind are you. But it’s easy to understand why we tend to see it this way, as the Operative Mind is the area that is the most “visible” and over which you have the most direct, immediate control. As its name implies, the Operative Mind is where you operate your self. It is the control center where you sit and “think about” things, where you make your decisions, where you receive signals from your senses about the outside world, and where you make your choices to send signals back to your body about movement (although, interestingly, not necessarily where you decide exactly which muscles to move). It is where emotions are registered (though not originated) and where you receive results from your Cognizant Mind, which you might recognize as “gut feelings” or “intuition”. You could think of the Operative Mind as a wide control panel behind which you sit and make your moment-by-moment decisions, with all of its mysterious gauges and dials which are known and understood only by you. It is where your inner monologue lives if you have one. It is the final arbiter and judge and president of your mind. Nothing comes in from the outside world, or leaves the front door back out into the world, except with the express sign-off from your Operative Mind (This can sound incorrect, because some Operative Minds are not trained/organized very well, and as such will sign off on things without actually considering them, but technically, sign-off is still required at a mechanical level, even if it is sometimes pro forma). In short, the Operative mind is the captain of the ship “S.S. You,” and it performs its duties with the help and consideration of the other parts that make up your mind.
An important characteristic of the Operative Mind is that it has a limited work space. It can only think about so many things at once. And while some people appear to have more capacity than others in this regard (think people who can multitask or juggle high numbers of concerns well), it is nonetheless a finite amount of things we can keep track of at any given time. Accordingly, we have, each of us, built up a series of procedures and routines to prioritize which items are kept “on the desktop” as things we are currently aware of, and throughout any given day we pull things out and put them away in order to keep at hand the items deemed most necessary for making decisions about our most pressing concerns. This limitation, however, means that the Operative Mind is always working with a limited subset of “everything you know,” and while - depending on how well your organize your mind - it may be a very good and representative subset for the problem you are currently working on, it is nevertheless at all times an imperfect model.
The Cognizant Mind
The Cognizant Mind then, is the part of your mind that is designed to overcome or at least supplement the limitations of the Operative Mind. It can be useful to think of the Cognizant Mind as a supercomputer located on a completely different floor from your executive office. And at your control panel, you have a simple teletype terminal where you can feed information to the supercomputer, and get simple answers back. You don’t get to watch the process or logic of how it arrived at that conclusion, only the output. This is because your Cognizant Mind is vastly more powerful in both scope and computing power than your Operative Mind is. Answers that your Cognizant Mind can come up with in minutes would take your Operative Mind days of exhausting mental work involving spreadsheets, whiteboards, and copious amounts of caffeine. Your Cognizant Mind is always working with the full dataset of everything you have ever known, and takes into account factors that your Operative Mind cannot keep track of - things that might seem irrelevant, but actually contribute significantly to the situation in subtle ways. In essence, your Cognizant mind is cognizant of all the data, not just the curated subset that the Operative Mind works on. The results produced by the Cognizant Mind can almost seem like magic or clairvoyance, but it is really just a tremendously powerful mind thinking through all the factors, not just the most obvious ones.
We experience the output of the Cognizant Mind intuitively. It might manifest as “just knowing” that something is the right answer, even when you cannot explain why, or because it “feels right.” This facet of the human mind is heavily used by artists of all mediums. It would be impossible for a Graphic Artist to calculate or explain the full collection of nostalgia, prejudices, implications, experiences (and especially the conglomeration and average of these facets across all members of an entire culture) that combine to make one font express whimsy and another to express serious expertise, but the Cognizant Mind performs all of those calculations in mere seconds and tells you one font is the right choice and another is wrong., or that one color pallet will attract the right sort of customer, and another will repel them. A song-writer “just knows” that a certain chord or progression is exactly the right sequence of notes to cause our emotions to swell or to subvert our expectations. And while a dancer may follow choreography, the exact flair and arc that their limbs make through the air is all the result of instantaneous decisions at a level that could never be calculated by the Operative Mind. Of course the Operative Mind can contribute, and the most successful people (of all vocations) are the ones who effectively intertwine the two parts of their mind to cooperate and play to each mind’s respective strengths to achieve the end goal. The fact that we all do this without most of us even knowing that there are two minds at play is nothing short of astounding.
The primary limitations of the Cognizant Mind, however, is that it is completely blind to the outside world. It only knows what the Operative Mind tells it, and it accepts those statements as gospel truth. There is no mechanism for cynicism or mistrust directionally from your Operative Mind to your Cognizant Mind. If you Op Mind tell your Cog Mind that the house is on fire, it will tell you to get out, even if there is no actual fire. It is wholly dependent on the Operative Mind to provide it with the facts that it considers and uses to reach its conclusions. And similarly, the Cognizant Mind has no access to affect the outside world. It has no ability to move your limbs or use your voice. It is relegated to submitting “requests for action” to your Operative Mind, who “takes it under advisement.” This means that your Operative Mind is the one who controls the Cog Mind’s access to the outside world in both directions. So while your Operative Mind doesn’t have much oversight over the Cognizant Mind’s functions (in many ways, it acts like an independent thinker living inside your own head) the Operative Mind nonetheless is responsible for feeding the Cognizant Mind all the data it needs to make its decisions, and for approving or rejecting the conclusions, including requests for action that the Cognizant Mind offers. For most of us, this whole process is done subconsciously or at least intuitively, though you can learn to do it intentionally and with purpose - for good or ill effect.
Identity Center
Your Identity Center is a highly specialized sub-function of the brain whose sole but critical purpose is keeping you from killing yourself. In this, it is good that it is simple and has the fewest moving parts to fail, but it does make limited to the most basic forms of logic. In function, it is the place where you store your internalized vision of who you are as a person. Because of the importance of its purpose, the Identity Center is very narrowly focused, which is to say, it doesn’t care about anything else. This is its primary limitation. It is dogmatic in purpose, and it doesn’t care (or have the ability to comprehend) subtlety or nuance or to balance multiple factors. For most of your waking hours, your Identity Center lies dormant, content that your Identity is not being threatened. When your identity is threatened (e.g. when someone you trust implies something about yourself that conflicts with the Identity Center’s vision), it wakes and screams like a banshee and makes a wholesale nuisance of itself until it is placated. And since the Identity Center is so myopic in nature, this can lead to some pretty irrational logic. This is why it is so important to successfully manage your identity as a purposeful activity and make sure it lines up with reality, so your Identity Center stays dormant and doesn’t fuck up the rest of your life.
Emotional Center
The Emotional Center is in charge of letting your Operative Mind know when certain noteworthy conditions are met. This is the purpose of your emotions. They are signals sent from deeper in your mind up to the surface, to let you know when there’s a threat, when someone is blocking a goal, when things are going well, and when they’re not, among others. They are dashboard lights or gauges that provide you with useful information.
The limitations of the Emotional Center is mostly that it is often misused. The information it provides is information only. It gives you data that you can further use to inform your decisions. However, many people use Pre-wired Decisions (see below) and wire them directly to a particular emotion. This results in the body or mind taking action the instant an emotion occurs, which, to the uninitiated, can look an awful lot like the emotion is causing the action. This erroneous conclusion leads to people not taking responsibility for their actions, which leads to a whole host of problems both for them and for those around them. The key is to remember that your emotions tell you something that’s true about you, nothing more.
The Knowledge Base
The Knowledge Base is simply the filing cabinet of things that you know (as distinguished from things you believe. See below). Anything you memorize or things people have told you live in this Knowledge base. The Knowledge Base is the primary work area of the Operative Mind. It is where you keep your multiplication tables and the names of all your cousins, and where you keep how many watermelons Brian has when you’re working out a math problem. It is also where you keep some summary statements, like “Joe is kinda bossy” or “I like ice cream,” as well as scheduling details like “I have a meeting with Cathy at 2 today.”
Unfortunately, space in this filing cabinet is limited, and as other stuff is constantly shoved into it, some other stuff must be removed. When that happens, we forget something we previously knew. And it appears that the order of stuff that gets removed is based on the oldest items, as evaluated by when they were last used. You remember your birthday, even though it is one of the oldest facts you know, because you reference it every time you fill out a medical form. But the name of your best friend from middle school can escape you if you haven’t thought about them in years. This can sometimes be blamed on old age, but I believe that phenomenon is merely a function of the fact that as a person matures and more fully develops their life, the sheer amount of stuff that demands space in our Knowledge base is increased dramatically, not just because we are storing many years worth of memories, but also because we grow to be more effective at absorbing and processing more data, and thus have more to store on a yearly basis. When you’re a teenager, and all you need to remember is your class schedule and extracurricular activities, you have plenty of extra space in that filing cabinet for who is dating who, and exhaustive details about whatever hobby is interesting you at the time. When you are in your fifth or sixth decade, however, there are so many more important things to think about and remember, that your mind must be more judicious about what it stores and what details it hangs onto. This can feel like you have lost an ability to remember, but it is really more a matter of your natural capacity having been reached and a prioritization function kicking in.
It’s also worth mentioning that in some cases, it is possible to pull memories from your Belief System, even when your Knowledge Base has discarded the information. This is characterized by the feeling of “Oh, what was her name? That woman who helped us at the supermarket that one time that was related to Bob’s friend? What was it…..? Martha!” This is your Knowledge Base not having the information, and submitting a request to the Cognizant Mind, which eventually delivers an answer. Though whether that answer comes in a few seconds or in the middle of a completely different conversation a week later is up to the Cognizant Mind, and there is no rushing it.
The Belief System
The Belief System is a vast internal warehouse where you store the things you believe, about anything. This is distinguished from the Knowledge Base primarily just because they are two different storage locations internally in your brain. But in purpose they are very similar. The important difference being that the Knowledge Base is the primary storage mechanism accessed and used by the Operative Mind, the Belief System is the storage system used by the Cognizant Mind.
These two locations can be hard to distinguish internally until you become more familiar with your internal mental geography. We are not born with the innate knowledge of how to tell the two locations apart. In fact, if anything, we intuitively pull from either one, depending on what we need, without bothering to notice which storage location it came from. Perhaps the best way to learn to tell the difference is by paying attention to the names. The Knowledge Base is for things you know “in your head.” Whereas the Belief system are for things you believe “in your heart.[^1].” Another identifying characteristic is that beliefs in your Belief system can often seemingly be unsupported by logic. “I hear what you’re saying, and it makes sense that he would betray me, but somehow I just feel like he won’t.” Neither of these are fail-proof litmus tests, but if you pay attention to them, eventually, you will be able to start discerning the difference in your own mind, that information from the Knowledge Base feels like this and information from the Belief System feels like that.
An critically important feature of the Belief system is that, due to the vast scope of everything that is stored in there, it is impossible to perform a regular audit to make sure that everything in there is true or even makes logical sense with other entries that you also believe. At any given time, it is unavoidably true that there are things you believe that are not actually true. It is even possible under certain circumstances for you to believe two things that are impossible to both be true at the same time. Once an item is stored in the Belief System, there is no easy way of knowing whether that thing is actually true or false. They are stored in identical boxes with identical labels. Similar to how a piece of art that has been hanging in the same spot in your house for years becomes invisible to you, a belief that you have had for years, even if it is patently ridiculous, will look perfectly rational inside your own head. The only way to know if you believe something that isn’t true is to actively and purposely pull it out and reexamine it as if for the first time. And this usually requires some sort of impetus or triggering event for us to do so - such as when it comes up in organic conversation, we speak it out loud and a trusted loved one says, “uh….what did you just say?” This can cause us to reexamine the belief and only then will we say (to ourselves or them) “Holy crap, that’s stupid! How did I ever come to think that?”
Pre-wired Decision Mechanism
Sometimes you know what we’re going to do in a certain situation, even before that thing happens, either because you’ve faced it before and whatever you did the first time worked, or because you’ve thought through and imagined the scenario and pre-decided what you would do in that situation. When you do that - when you decide what you’re going to do as opposed to just considering your options - that gets filed away in a special part of your mind that keeps track of exactly these types of decisions and sets them in motion automatically once the triggering conditions are met. This is all fairly straightforward and intuitive. Even if you haven’t thought of this mechanism before, you are probably already aware of its existence on some level. The first time I became aware of this mechanism was when I was waiting for my wife to unlock the car doors so I could open mine. I play a little game with myself to pull open the door handle as quickly as possible after but only after the door has been unlocked so as to avoid pulling too early and disallowing the automatic door locks from unlocking. (I think we’ve all been in that embarrassing situation.) What I noticed is that my hand was pulling up on the handle even before I (or more accurately, my Operative Mind) was fully aware that the door had been unlocked. It felt like some sort of unnatural precognitive prediction. Like I had some kind of Spidey Sense as to when the door was going to be unlocked. The reality, though is that I was just using this Pre-wired Decision Mechanism. I told my mind and my body, “As soon as you hear the door-unlock sound, pull up on the door handle. Don’t think, just do it.” I was purely focused on the event and my body was pre-tensioned to perform the action. This pre-wired decision skips the Operative Mind in the process. As soon as the triggering conditions are met, the mind and body automatically do what they’ve been previously told to do, without waiting for confirmation.
Of course, this mechanism isn’t used just for opening car doors. Athletes use the same mechanism - hundreds of them, actually - whenever they are responding to events as they unfold on the field. Changing their defense based on something their opponent did just milliseconds before. The best athletes spend their off-hours thinking through and practicing scenarios of what their opponent could do, and pre-wiring their decisions as to what how to respond in the moment of the game. This mechanism isn’t relegated to just physical responses, either. Many of us have pre-wired decisions hooked up to emotional stimulus. For example, lashing out and saying hurtful things when we’re angry, or pulling in and making ourselves small when we are afraid. In fact, it is possible for both of those two examples to exist in the same person, which is why you will sometimes see someone pull in and be timid, only to suddenly lash out and grow big once (internally) the anger emotion outweighs the fear emotion.
You likely have pre-wired social decisions as well, such as saying “Bless you.” when someone sneezes or whatever your pre-wired response is when someone asks “How’s it going?” or similar. We have these pre-wired decisions littered throughout our daily life. Some people design their whole response to the outside world using only pre-wired decisions. These people will respond with a panicked deer-in-the-headlights response whenever they encounter a scenario they haven’t previously considered, because they rely so heavily on their Pre-wired Decision Mechanism that they haven’t developed any skills to evaluate and decide on the fly, in the moment.
What you may not have considered however, is how that can play out in the triggering scenario, and what it can look like if you are not purposeful in evaluating the results. Specifically, these pre-wired decisions are still your decisions. You just made them on a different timetable. This is important, because if you’re not careful, you can watch yourself make a bad decision or exhibit bad behavior in the moment, and you can pass off blame for that decision - “I don’t know why I did that. It just happened. I didn’t even decide to do it.” Yes, you did. You just decided much earlier than at the time of action, so if you’re not aware of the mechanism it can look instantaneous or like it’s being made without your say-so. Don’t fall for that.
The Antechamber
The Antechamber is where incoming thoughts reside temporarily until we decide what we are going to do with them. These thoughts can either be thoughts that have been communicated to us by other people in the form of suppositions or their own opinion or witness. Or they can be thoughts that “occur” to us. In addition, there are those that are labeled “intrusive thoughts,” whether these are the result of psychological disorders or when the Deceiver inserts thoughts or ideas directly into our minds. This is his primary (quite possibly only) mechanism for injecting his lies into our belief system.
The important distinction, however, is that the Antechamber is a separate location in our own mind from either the Knowledge Base or the Belief System. It is a small storage location that anyone who is not you may introduce thoughts into, but crucially, they may not force them any farther inside. Only you may choose whether to accept or reject thoughts that are in the antechamber. And this privilege is your most powerful mechanism for controlling your Cognizant Mind. Since you (or rather your Operative Mind) cannot see, or thereby predict the processing path of the Cognizant Mind, your only control over this part of your mind is to make sure that every piece of information that makes it into your Cog Mind’s storage mechanism - the Belief System - is as true as you can possibly evaluate. Let nothing in that you are not sure is true, and trust that your Cog Mind will follow the logic correctly. This Antechamber maintenance chore is so amazingly critical, yet it is a function many of us relegate to habit or just lazy half-hearted sorting.
The Memory Buffer
The Memory Buffer is an interesting mental storage location that is different from all the others mentioned. Specifically, it is the short-term storage of everything your senses recorded. You may find yourself, in all truthfulness, telling someone in an argument “You said you would be there by 10,” to which they may reply “No, I said ‘I wouldn’t be late,’ but I thought it started at 10:30.” At that exact moment, when you replay the tapes to see what they actually said, you are accessing the Memory Buffer. What is interesting is that when you accused them of promising to be there by 10, you were pulling that information from the Knowledge Base. But you had made an error in originally transferring it from the Memory Buffer to the Knowledge Base, so those two memory storage locations did not agree. When you double-check the Memory Buffer and find it lines up with your friend’s defense, you will likely reply “Oh, you’re right. I’m sorry.” You weren’t lying at first. That is truly what you thought they had committed to. You just had conflicting information in two different mental storage locations.
This Memory Buffer is limited in capacity, however, and only stores the most recent information. Anything that you remember that’s older than a few days at most, is accessing your stored records in the Knowledge Base.
Biological Functions
It is worth mentioning that there are a host of other functions that are regulated or managed by the brain, (and/or the nervous system) but which I wouldn’t consider part of the mind. These are things like the beating of the heart, fighting illness, digesting food, sleeping, etc. Even the contraction of specific muscles or muscle fibers in order to execute your generalized orders to move your head left. These almost certainly take place at least partially in the brain[^2]. But since, to my level of knowledge at least, the Operative Mind does not have direct access to control these functions, I am not including them in this list. This falls into the area I consider to be biological or physiological, rather than mental, for whatever worth that distinction is.
[^1:] This is colloquial usage. Knowledge is not actually stored in your heart, obviously. However, when accessing your belief system, it does have a subtle physical sensation that your brain interprets as coming from inside your torso somewhere behind your sternum. So it’s not hard to imagine how early physiologists might have assumed that the heart was the organ where such functions were performed.
[^2:] I am claiming ignorance of, not disagreement with the established truth.