How the Mind Works

Mind is the conscious thought of individuals processed by the brain in the charge of mental activities like memory, perception, reasoning, imagination, et. al.. When an individual gets stimuli from the outside world, mind empowers the individual to process the external input and to deal with it according to one's own will.
Mind’s working process begins from perceiving something. Inputs from the outside world trigger the mind's awareness. Some “Action” takes place in “The external world” and we perceive it through one or more of the bodily senses, which enables us to see, to hear and to feel. Then the stimuli get processed and sent into the working memory and long-term memory part of the mind for discrimination.
For example, when we are reading books, we pay attention to the words and the sensory system sends the information to the working memory in our brain. While information is stored there, we search in the long-term memory for the match between the incoming information and what inside our memory, which contains all the linguistic knowledge we have already had. If these two match, the outcome is sent to the working memory and we are able to recognize the words and then further able to read them out or explain them to others.
The inputs just mentioned that trigger the mental activities are something in the external world. This is a “bottom-up” information processing. However, the inputs can also be something from the “inside”, such as the inner thought or memory of one’s own. In this way, the human understanding is not guided by the external materials, but by the knowledge that has been stored in the memory or the brain. For example, if you have a blueprint of an electricity-supplying system, as a person without any professional knowledge, you might need to rely heavily on the picture to identify what the various patterns stand for. But if you are an experienced engineer, with much professional knowledge equipped in mind, you can identify the function of the blueprint at once without much searching in your brain. Therefore, the information processing is a “top-down” way.
It seems interesting that sometimes we are not aware of our mental activities. For instance, when we see words like “bed” and “book”, we recognize them immediately and think they are too easy and we do not need to think about them. And when we are walking, we are not aware that we are using the mind to guide the motor system to function. Yet in other times, if we have a troublesome issue in mind, we are fully conscious that “We are thinking about it”. When the information we are processing is so familiar for us, we need little mental resource for deal with it, and it will fall under the automatic control of the mind. When the information needs much mental resource to be processed, we would be conscious that we are “using the mind” to deal with it and thus it is under “conscious control”. It seems that at one time, only one conscious process can occur in our mind, otherwise the information will interfere with each other.