To understand how the brain works let us take a  short tour of various part of the brain. You can take a video tour on our Video Page. 

Until recently, conventional wisdom held that our brains were intractable, hard-wired computers. It was believed that what we  were born with was all we got and that age wore down memory and the ability to understand, and few inter-ventions  could  reverse this  process.  But increasingly, evidence  suggests  that physical  and  mental  exercise  can  alter  specific  brain  regions,  making  radical improvements in cognitive function and that when you challenge the brain with new skills and new ways of doing things, it increases connections in the brain.  Within  the  brain,  the  pathways  and  regions  that  are  most  utilized  generally grow  and  become  stronger  while  other  parts  shrink. By  challenging  the  brain and  forcing  the  use  of  different  pathways,  brain  maps  can  be  altered. 

The cerebrum or cortex is the largest part of the human brain, asso-ciated with higher brain function such as thought and action. The cerebral cor-tex is  divided  into four  sections,  called  "lobes":  the frontal lobe,  parietal lobe, occipital lobe, and temporal lobe. The brain is like a tree with information entering from the roots (the spinal cord, eyes, ears, mouth, and nose) and meeting in the brain stem in the “centre for consciousness”. The information then passes up the middle of the brain to the two frontal lobes which  lie  directly  behind the forehead. Here, it is  organized,
and  then  sent  out  through  the  branches  to  the  other parts  of the  brain  which again process the information and send it back to the frontal lobes.  

We have a left frontal lobe and a right frontal lobe. Each is involved in planning activities, getting  things  in  the  right  sequence,  and  evaluating  possible  errors.  The  left frontal lobe helps us  with language. This is important because the majority of things that we do in our day-to-day life are language-related. 

The right frontal lobe  generally  involves  visual  organization. Together  their  primary  job  is  to allow us to think things through and determine how to use information that is located  elsewhere  in  the  brain.  They  are  involved  in  problem  solving,  spon-taneity,  memory,  language,  initiation,  judgment,  impulse  control,  and  social and  sexual  behavior. 

The  frontal  lobes  are  closely  linked  to  the  centers  for memory  and  emotion  in  the  Temporal  lobes  and  the  two  together  are  consi-dered  to  be  our  emotional  control  center  and  home  to  our  personality.  The Frontal  and  Parietal  lobes  are,  again,  closely  linked  and  are  together  consi-dered the center for cognition, language and behavior. 

The parietal lobes can be divided into two functional regions. The first function integrates sensory information to form a single perception (cognition) in colla-boration with the frontal lobe. The second function constructs a spatial coordi-nate system to represent the world around us. Cognition  is  a  complex  process  that  includes  inputs  from  processes  such  as
consciousness  or    awareness,  attention,  concentration,  memory,  perception, and  language,  and  sends  outputs  to    processes  such  reasoning,  abstraction
and judgment.  

Consciousness is the process of activation of the brain. Attention, the process of filtering out unwanted stimuli. Concentration focuses on certain stimuli let in by attention.  All three are controlled by the “centre for consciousness” in the brainstem that receive inputs from all the five senses  and give outputs to the
rest  of  the  brain. The  structured  Masonic  rituals  stimulate  attention  and  con-centration.
Attention  can  alter  the  layout  of  the  brain  as  powerfully  as  a  sculptor's  knife can alter a slab of stone. 

That  was  shown  dramatically  in  an  experiment  with monkeys  in  1993. Scien-tists  at  the  University  of  California,  San  Francisco,  rigged  up  a  device  that tapped monkeys' fingers  100 minutes  a  day  every  day. As  this  bizarre  dance was playing on their fingers, the monkeys heard sounds through headphones. Some  of  the monkeys  were  taught to ignore  the  sounds  and  pay  attention  to
what they feel on their fingers and were rewarded with a sip of juice when they indicated  the  change.  Other  monkeys  were  taught:  to  pay  attention  to  the sound, and were rewarded with juice when they indicated change in the sound.
After six weeks, the scientists compared the monkeys' brains. They found that in the monkeys that paid attention to the taps, the somatosensory region that
processes information from the fingers doubled or tripled. But in the monkeys that  paid  attention to  the  sounds,  there  was  no  such  expansion.  Instead,  the
region  of  their  auditory  cortex  that  processes  the  frequency  they  heard  in-creased.

Understanding Memory

Video tour of Brain and Mind