title: Starch

text: Some cultivated plant varieties have pure amylopectin starch without amylose, known as "waxy starches". The most used is waxy maize, others are glutinous rice and waxy potato starch. Waxy starches undergo less retrogradation, resulting in a more stable paste. A maize cultivar with a relatively high proportion of amylose starch, amylomaize, is cultivated for the use of its gel strength and for use as a resistant starch (a starch that resists digestion) in food products.


title: Starch

text: Synthetic amylose made from cellulose has a well-controlled degree of polymerization. Therefore, it can be used as a potential drug deliver carrier.


title: Starch

text: When heated in abundant water, the granules of native starch swell and burst, the semi-crystalline structure is lost, and the smaller amylose molecules start leaching out of the granule, forming a network that holds water and increasing the mixture's viscosity. This process is called starch gelatinization. The gelatinization temperature of starch varies depending on starch cultivar, amylose/amylopectin content, and water content. Starch with water could experience complex multiphase transitions during differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) temperature scanning. For starch with excess water, a single gelatinisation endotherm can be usually observed in the low temperature range (54–73 °C). By reducing the water content (<64%) in starch, more endothermic transitions representing different structural changes can be seen because they become separated and they will move to higher temperatures. With limited water content, the swelling forces will be much less significant, and the process of gelatinization in a low moisture content environment could more accurately be defined as the "melting" of starch. Besides, the number of endotherms and enthalpies depended on amylose/amylopectin ratio, and the gelatinisation enthalpy of the amylopectin-rich starch was higher than that of the amylose-rich starch. Specifically, waxy and normal maize starches show a large gelatinization endotherm at about 70 °C; for normal maize starches, there was also a second endotherm at about 90 °C, considered as the phase transition within an amylose–lipid complex; In contrast, for high-amylose content starches (e.g. Gelose 50 and Gelose 80), there is a very broad endotherm in the temperature range between 65 and 115 °C, which is composed of the main gelatinization endotherm and the phase transition within an amylose–lipid complex.


title: Starch

text: During cooking, the starch becomes a paste and increases further in viscosity. During cooling or prolonged storage of the paste, the semi-crystalline structure partially recovers and the starch paste thickens, expelling water. This is mainly caused by retrogradation of the amylose. This process is responsible for the hardening of bread or staling, and for the water layer on top of a starch gel (syneresis).


title: Starch

text: Certain starches, when mixed with water, will produce a non-Newtonian fluid sometimes nicknamed "oobleck".


title: Starch

text: Starch can also be dissolved or undergo gelation in ionic liquids or metal chloride salt solutions. The thermal transition of starch is largely influenced by the ratio of ionic liquid/water. Aqueous ionic liquid with a certain ionic liquid/water ratio leads to the most effective structural disorganisation of some starches at significantly reduced temperature (even at room temperature). This phenomenon is very different from the dissolution of cellulose, as the latter occurs most efficiently in pure ionic liquids and any water contained in the ionic liquids will hinder the dissolution significantly. It is proposed that for starches with granule surface pores (e.g. millet, waxy maize, normal maize and wheat starches), the corrosion by the aqueous IL follows an inside-out pattern and the destruction to the granules is fast and even, whereas for starches with a relatively smooth surface (e.g. high-amylose maize, potato, purple yam and pea starches), the corrosion can only start from the surface and thus the change caused the aqueous IL is slow. Besides, starch, even high-amylose starch, can be fully dissolved by aqueous metal chloride salts (e.g. ZnCl, CaCl, and MgCl) at moderate temperature (≤50 °C), and starch nanoparticles can form during this dissolution process.


title: Starch

text: Alpha-amylases are found in plants and in animals. Human saliva is rich in amylase, and the pancreas also secretes the enzyme. Individuals from populations with a high-starch diet tend to have more amylase genes than those with low-starch diets;


title: Starch

text: Beta-amylase cuts starch into maltose units. This process is important in the digestion of starch and is also used in brewing, where amylase from the skin of seed grains is responsible for converting starch to maltose (Malting, Mashing).


title: Starch

text: Given a heat of combustion of glucose of whereas that of starch is per mole of glucose monomer, hydrolysis releases about per mole, or per gram of glucose product.


title: Starch

text: If starch is subjected to dry heat, it breaks down to form dextrins, also called "pyrodextrins" in this context. This break down process is known as dextrinization. (Pyro)dextrins are mainly yellow to brown in color and dextrinization is partially responsible for the browning of toasted bread.


title: Starch

text: A triiodide (I) solution formed by mixing iodine and iodide (usually from potassium iodide) is used to test for starch; a dark blue color indicates the presence of starch. The details of this reaction are not fully known, but recent scientific work using single crystal X-ray crystallography and comparative Raman spectroscopy suggests that the final starch-iodine complex is similar to an infinite polyiodide chain like one found in a pyrroloperylene-iodine complex. The strength of the resulting blue color depends on the amount of amylose present. Waxy starches with little or no amylose present will color red. Benedict's test and Fehling's test is also done to indicate the presence of starch.


title: Starch

text: Starch indicator solution consisting of water, starch and iodide is often used in redox titrations: in the presence of an oxidizing agent the solution turns blue, in the presence of reducing agent the blue color disappears because triiodide (I) ions break up into three iodide ions, disassembling the starch-iodine complex. Starch solution was used as indicator for visualizing the periodic formation and consumption of triiodide intermediate in the Briggs-Rauscher oscillating reaction. The starch, however, changes the kinetics of the reaction steps involving triiodide ion.


title: Starch

text: A 0.3% w/w solution is the standard concentration for a starch indicator. It is made by adding 3 grams of soluble starch to 1 liter of heated water; the solution is cooled before use (starch-iodine complex becomes unstable at temperatures above 35 °C).


title: Starch

text: Each species of plant has a unique type of starch granules in granular size, shape and crystallization pattern. Under the microscope, starch grains stained with iodine illuminated from behind with polarized light show a distinctive Maltese cross effect (also known as extinction cross and birefringence).


title: Starch

text: Starch is the most common carbohydrate in the human diet and is contained in many staple foods. The major sources of starch intake worldwide are the cereals (rice, wheat, and maize) and the root vegetables (potatoes and cassava). Many other starchy foods are grown, some only in specific climates, including acorns, arrowroot, arracacha, bananas, barley, breadfruit, buckwheat, canna, colocasia, katakuri, kudzu, malanga, millet, oats, oca, polynesian arrowroot, sago, sorghum, sweet potatoes, rye, taro, chestnuts, water chestnuts, arrowroot and yams, and many kinds of beans, such as favas, lentils, mung beans, peas, and chickpeas.


title: Starch

text: Before processed foods, people consumed large amounts of uncooked and unprocessed starch-containing plants, which contained high amounts of resistant starch. Microbes within the large intestine ferment or consume the starch, producing short-chain fatty acids, which are used as energy, and support the maintenance and growth of the microbes. Upon cooking, starch is transformed from an insoluble, difficult-to-digest granule into readily accessible glucose chains with very different nutritional and functional properties.


title: Starch

text: In current diets, highly processed foods are more easily digested and release more glucose in the small intestine—less starch reaches the large intestine and more energy is absorbed by the body. It is thought that this shift in energy delivery (as a result of eating more processed foods) may be one of the contributing factors to the development of metabolic disorders of modern life, including obesity and diabetes.


title: Starch

text: The amylose/amylopectin ratio, molecular weight and molecular fine structure influences the physicochemical properties as well as energy release of different types of starches. In addition, cooking and food processing significantly impacts starch digestibility and energy release. Starch has been classified as rapidly digestible starch, slowly digestible starch and resistant starch, depending upon its digestion profile. Raw starch granules resist digestion by human enzymes and do not break down into glucose in the small intestine - they reach the large intestine instead and function as prebiotic dietary fiber. When starch granules are fully gelatinized and cooked, the starch becomes easily digestible and releases glucose quickly within the small intestine. When starchy foods are cooked and cooled, some of the glucose chains re-crystallize and become resistant to digestion again. Slowly digestible starch can be found in raw cereals, where digestion is slow but relatively complete within the small intestine. Widely used prepared foods containing starch are bread, pancakes, cereals, noodles, pasta, porridge and tortilla.


title: Starch

text: During cooking with high heat, sugars released from starch can react with amino acids via the Maillard reaction, forming advanced glycation end-products, (AGEs), contributing aromas, flavors and texture to foods. One example of a dietary AGE is acrylamide. Recent evidence suggests that the intestinal fermentation of dietary AGEs may be associated with insulin resistance, atherosclerosis, diabetes and other inflammatory diseases. This may be due to the impact of AGEs on intestinal permeability.


title: Starch

text: Starch gelatinization during cake baking can be impaired by sugar competing for water, preventing gelatinization and improving texture.


title: Starch

text: The starch industry extracts and refines starches from seeds, roots and tubers, by wet grinding, washing, sieving and drying. Today, the main commercial refined starches are cornstarch, tapioca, arrowroot, and wheat, rice, and potato starches. To a lesser extent, sources of refined starch are sweet potato, sago and mung bean. To this day, starch is extracted from more than 50 types of plants.


title: Starch

text: Untreated starch requires heat to thicken or gelatinize. When a starch is pre-cooked, it can then be used to thicken instantly in cold water. This is referred to as a pregelatinized starch.


title: Starch

text: Starch can be hydrolyzed into simpler carbohydrates by acids, various enzymes, or a combination of the two. The resulting fragments are known as dextrins. The extent of conversion is typically quantified by dextrose equivalent (DE), which is roughly the fraction of the glycosidic bonds in starch that have been broken.


title: Starch

text: These starch sugars are by far the most common starch based food ingredient and are used as sweeteners in many drinks and foods. They include:


title: Starch

text: A modified starch is a starch that has been chemically modified to allow the starch to function properly under conditions frequently encountered during processing or storage, such as high heat, high shear, low pH, freeze/thaw and cooling.


title: Starch

text: The modified food starches are E coded according to European Food Safety Authority and INS coded Food Additives according to the Codex Alimentarius:


title: Starch

text: INS 1400, 1401, 1402, 1403 and 1405 are in the EU food ingredients without an E-number. Typical modified starches for technical applications are cationic starches, hydroxyethyl starch and carboxymethylated starches.


title: Starch

text: As an additive for food processing, food starches are typically used as thickeners and stabilizers in foods such as puddings, custards, soups, sauces, gravies, pie fillings, and salad dressings, and to make noodles and pastas. They function as thickeners, extenders, emulsion stabilizers and are exceptional binders in processed meats.


title: Starch

text: Gummed sweets such as jelly beans and wine gums are not manufactured using a mold in the conventional sense. A tray is filled with native starch and leveled. A positive mold is then pressed into the starch leaving an impression of 1,000 or so jelly beans. The jelly mix is then poured into the impressions and put onto a stove to set. This method greatly reduces the number of molds that must be manufactured.


title: Starch

text: In the pharmaceutical industry, starch is also used as an excipient, as tablet disintegrant, and as binder.


title: Starch

text: Resistant starch is starch that escapes digestion in the small intestine of healthy individuals. High-amylose starch from wheat or corn has a higher gelatinization temperature than other types of starch, and retains its resistant starch content through baking, mild extrusion and other food processing techniques. It is used as an insoluble dietary fiber in processed foods such as bread, pasta, cookies, crackers, pretzels and other low moisture foods. It is also utilized as a dietary supplement for its health benefits. Published studies have shown that resistant starch helps to improve insulin sensitivity, reduces pro-inflammatory biomarkers interleukin 6 and tumor necrosis factor alpha and improves markers of colonic function.


title: Starch

text: It has been suggested that resistant starch contributes to the health benefits of intact whole grains.


title: Starch

text: In 2021, researchers reported the world's first artificial synthesis of starch in the laboratory. A cell-free chemoenzymatic process was used to synthesize starch from CO and hydrogen. If the process is viable and can be scaled, it could substantially reduce land-, pesticide- and water-use as well as greenhouse gas emissions while increasing food security. The chemical pathway of 11 core reactions was drafted by computational pathway design and converts CO to starch at a rate that is ~8.5-fold higher than starch synthesis in maize.


title: Starch

text: Papermaking is the largest non-food application for starches globally, consuming many millions of metric tons annually. In a typical sheet of copy paper for instance, the starch content may be as high as 8%. Both chemically modified and unmodified starches are used in papermaking. In the wet part of the papermaking process, generally called the "wet-end", the starches used are cationic and have a positive charge bound to the starch polymer. These starch derivatives associate with the anionic or negatively charged paper fibers / cellulose and inorganic fillers. Cationic starches together with other retention and internal sizing agents help to give the necessary strength properties to the paper web formed in the papermaking process (wet strength), and to provide strength to the final paper sheet (dry strength).


title: Starch

text: In the dry end of the papermaking process, the paper web is rewetted with a starch based solution. The process is called surface sizing. Starches used have been chemically, or enzymatically depolymerized at the paper mill or by the starch industry (oxidized starch). The size/starch solutions are applied to the paper web by means of various mechanical presses (size presses). Together with surface sizing agents the surface starches impart additional strength to the paper web and additionally provide water hold out or "size" for superior printing properties. Starch is also used in paper coatings as one of the binders for the coating formulations which include a mixture of pigments, binders and thickeners. Coated paper has improved smoothness, hardness, whiteness and gloss and thus improves printing characteristics.


title: Starch

text: Corrugated board adhesives are the next largest application of non-food starches globally. Starch glues are mostly based on unmodified native starches, plus some additive such as borax and caustic soda. Part of the starch is gelatinized to carry the slurry of uncooked starches and prevent sedimentation. This opaque glue is called a SteinHall adhesive. The glue is applied on tips of the fluting. The fluted paper is pressed to paper called liner. This is then dried under high heat, which causes the rest of the uncooked starch in glue to swell/gelatinize. This gelatinizing makes the glue a fast and strong adhesive for corrugated board production.


title: Starch

text: Clothing or laundry starch is a liquid prepared by mixing a vegetable starch in water (unmodified starch only gels in water close to boiling point, while commercial products may not require heat), and is used in the laundering of clothes. Starch was widely used in Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries to stiffen the wide collars and ruffs of fine linen which surrounded the necks of the well-to-do. During the 19th and early 20th century it was stylish to stiffen the collars and sleeves of men's shirts and the ruffles of women's petticoats by starching them before the clean clothes were ironed. Starch gave clothing smooth, crisp edges, and had an additional practical purpose: dirt and sweat from a person's neck and wrists would stick to the starch rather than to the fibers of the clothing. The dirt would wash away along with the starch; after laundering, the starch would be reapplied. Starch is available in spray cans, in addition to the usual granules to mix with water.


title: Starch

text: Starch is an important natural polymer to make bioplastics. With water and plasticisers such as glycerol, starch can be processed into so-called "thermoplastic starch" using conventional polymer processing techniques such as extrusion, injection molding and compression molding. Since materials based on only native starch have poor processibility, mechanical properties and stability, more commonly modified starches (e.g. hydroxypropyl starch) are used and starch is combined with other polymers (preferably biodegradable polymers such as polycaprolactone), as some commercial products (e.g. PLANTIC™ HP and Mater-Bi) available on the market.


title: Starch

text: Another large non-food starch application is in the construction industry, where starch is used in the gypsum wall board manufacturing process. Chemically modified or unmodified starches are added to the stucco containing primarily gypsum. Top and bottom heavyweight sheets of paper are applied to the formulation, and the process is allowed to heat and cure to form the eventual rigid wall board. The starches act as a glue for the cured gypsum rock with the paper covering, and also provide rigidity to the board.


title: Starch

text: Starch is used in the manufacture of various adhesives or glues for book-binding, wallpaper adhesives, paper sack production, tube winding, gummed paper, envelope adhesives, school glues and bottle labeling. Starch derivatives, such as yellow dextrins, can be modified by addition of some chemicals to form a hard glue for paper work; some of those forms use borax or soda ash, which are mixed with the starch solution at to create a very good adhesive. Sodium silicate can be added to reinforce these formula.


title: Starch

text: In the US the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has set the legal limit (Permissible exposure limit) for starch exposure in the workplace as 15 mg/m total exposure and 5 mg/m respiratory exposure over an 8-hour workday. The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) has set a Recommended exposure limit (REL) of 10 mg/m total exposure and 5 mg/m respiratory exposure over an 8-hour workday.


title: Mind

text: The mind is the set of faculties responsible for all mental phenomena. Often the term is also identified with the phenomena themselves. These faculties include thought, imagination, memory, will, and sensation. They are responsible for various mental phenomena, like perception, pain experience, belief, desire, intention, and emotion. Various overlapping classifications of mental phenomena have been proposed. Important distinctions group them according to whether they are "sensory", "propositional", "intentional", "conscious", or "occurrent". Minds were traditionally understood as substances but it is more common in the contemporary perspective to conceive them as properties or capacities possessed by humans and higher animals. Various competing definitions of the exact nature of the mind or mentality have been proposed. "Epistemic definitions" focus on the privileged epistemic access the subject has to these states. "Consciousness-based approaches" give primacy to the conscious mind and allow unconscious mental phenomena as part of the mind only to the extent that they stand in the right relation to the conscious mind. According to "intentionality-based approaches", the power to refer to objects and to represent the world is the mark of the mental. For "behaviorism", whether an entity has a mind only depends on how it behaves in response to external stimuli while "functionalism" defines mental states in terms of the causal roles they play. Central questions for the study of mind, like whether other entities besides humans have minds or how the relation between body and mind is to be conceived, are strongly influenced by the choice of one's definition.


title: Mind

text: Mind or mentality is usually contrasted with body, matter or physicality. The issue of the nature of this contrast and specifically the relation between mind and brain is called the mind-body problem. Traditional viewpoints included dualism and idealism, which consider the mind to be non-physical. Modern views often center around physicalism and functionalism, which hold that the mind is roughly identical with the brain or reducible to physical phenomena such as neuronal activity though dualism and idealism continue to have many supporters. Another question concerns which types of beings are capable of having minds. For example, whether mind is exclusive to humans, possessed also by some or all animals, by all living things, whether it is a strictly definable characteristic at all, or whether mind can also be a property of some types of human-made machines. Different cultural and religious traditions often use different concepts of mind, resulting in different answers to these questions. Some see mind as a property exclusive to humans whereas others ascribe properties of mind to non-living entities (e.g. panpsychism and animism), to animals and to deities. Some of the earliest recorded speculations linked mind (sometimes described as identical with soul or spirit) to theories concerning both life after death, and cosmological and natural order, for example in the doctrines of Zoroaster, the Buddha, Plato, Aristotle, and other ancient Greek, Indian and, later, Islamic and medieval European philosophers.


title: Mind

text: Psychologists such as Freud and James, and computer scientists such as Turing developed influential theories about the nature of the mind. The possibility of nonbiological minds is explored in the field of artificial intelligence, which works closely in relation with cybernetics and information theory to understand the ways in which information processing by nonbiological machines is comparable or different to mental phenomena in the human mind. The mind is also sometimes portrayed as the stream of consciousness where sense impressions and mental phenomena are constantly changing.


title: Mind

text: The original meaning of Old English "gemynd" was the faculty of memory, not of thought in general. Hence "call to mind", "come to mind", "keep in mind", "to have mind of", etc. The word retains this sense in Scotland. Old English had other words to express "mind", such as "hyge" "mind, spirit".


title: Mind

text: The meaning of "memory" is shared with Old Norse, which has "munr". The word is originally from a PIE verbal root "", meaning "to think, remember", whence also Latin" mens" "mind", Sanskrit "" "mind" and Greek μένος "mind, courage, anger".


title: Mind

text: The generalization of "mind" to include all mental faculties, thought, volition, feeling and memory, gradually develops over the 14th and 15th centuries.


title: Mind

text: The mind is often understood as a faculty that manifests itself in mental phenomena like sensation, perception, thinking, reasoning, memory, belief, desire, emotion and motivation. Mind or mentality is usually contrasted with body, matter or physicality. Central to this contrast is the intuition that minds exhibit various features not found in and maybe even incompatible with the material universe as described by the natural sciences. On the traditionally dominant substantialist view associated with René Descartes, minds are defined as independent thinking substances. But it is more common in contemporary philosophy to conceive minds not as substances but as properties or capacities possessed by humans and higher animals.


title: Mind

text: Despite this agreement, there is still a lot of difference of opinion concerning what the exact nature of mind is and various competing definitions have been proposed. Philosophical definitions of mind usually proceed not just by listing various types of phenomena belonging to the mind but by searching the "mark of the mental": a feature that is shared by all mental states and only by mental states. "Epistemic approaches" define mental states in terms of the privileged epistemic access the subject has to these states. This is often combined with a "consciousness-based approach", which emphasizes the primacy of consciousness in relation to mind. "Intentionality-based approaches", on the other hand, see the power of minds to refer to objects and represent the world as being a certain way as the "mark of the mental". According to "behaviorism", whether an entity has a mind only depends on how it behaves in response to external stimuli while "functionalism" defines mental states in terms of the causal roles they play. The differences between these diverse approaches are substantial since they result in very different answers to questions like whether animals or computers have minds.


title: Mind

text: There is a great variety of mental states. They fall into categories like sensory and non-sensory or conscious and unconscious. Various of the definitions listed above excel for states from one category but struggle to account for why states from another category are also part of the mind. This has led some theorists to doubt that there is a "mark of the mental". So maybe the term "mind" just refers to a cluster of loosely related ideas that do not share one unifying feature. Some theorists have responded to this by narrowing their definitions of mind to "higher" intellectual faculties, like thinking, reasoning and memory. Others try to be as inclusive as possible regarding "lower" intellectual faculties, like sensing and emotion.


title: Mind

text: In popular usage, "mind" is frequently synonymous with "thought": the private conversation with ourselves that we carry on "inside our heads". Thus we "make up our minds", "change our minds" or are "of two minds" about something. One of the key attributes of the mind in this sense is that it is a private sphere to which no one but the owner has access. No one else can "know our mind". They can only interpret what we consciously or unconsciously communicate.


title: Mind

text: "Epistemic approaches" emphasize that the subject has privileged access to all or at least some of their mental states. It is sometimes claimed that this access is "direct", "private" and "infallible". "Direct access" refers to non-inferential knowledge. When someone is in pain, for example, they know directly that they are in pain, they do not need to infer it from other indicators like a body part being swollen or their tendency to scream when it is touched. But we arguably also have non-inferential knowledge of external objects, like trees or cats, through perception, which is why this criterion by itself is not sufficient. Another epistemic privilege often mentioned is that mental states are "private" in contrast to "public" external facts. For example, the fallen tree lying on a person's leg is directly open to perception by the bystanders while the victim's pain is private: only they know it directly while the bystanders have to infer it from their screams. It was traditionally often claimed that we have infallible knowledge of our own mental states, i.e. that we cannot be wrong about them when we have them. So when someone has an itching sensation, for example, they cannot be wrong about having this sensation. They can only be wrong about the non-mental causes, e.g. whether it is the consequence of bug bites or of a fungal infection. But various counterexamples have been presented to claims of infallibility, which is why this criterion is usually not accepted in contemporary philosophy. One problem for all "epistemic approaches" to the "mark of the mental" is that they focus mainly on conscious states but exclude unconscious states. A repressed desire, for example, is a mental state to which the subject lacks the forms of privileged epistemic access mentioned.


title: Mind

text: One way to respond to this worry is to ascribe a privileged status to conscious mental states. On such a "consciousness-based approach", conscious mental states are non-derivative constituents of the mind while unconscious states somehow depend on their conscious counterparts for their existence. An influential example of this position is due to John Searle, who holds that unconscious mental states have to be accessible to consciousness to count as "mental" at all. They can be understood as dispositions to bring about conscious states. This position denies that the so-called "deep unconscious", i.e. mental contents inaccessible to consciousness, exists. Another problem for "consciousness-based approaches", besides the issue of accounting for the unconscious mind, is to elucidate the nature of consciousness itself. Consciousness-based approaches are usually interested in "phenomenal consciousness", i.e. in qualitative experience, rather than "access consciousness", which refers to information being available for reasoning and guiding behavior. Conscious mental states are normally characterized as qualitative and subjective, i.e. that there is something it is like for a subject to be in these states. Opponents of consciousness-based approaches often point out that despite these attempts, it is still very unclear what the term "phenomenal consciousness" is supposed to mean. This is important because not much would be gained theoretically by defining one ill-understood term in terms of another. Another objection to this type of approach is to deny that the conscious mind has a privileged status in relation to the unconscious mind, for example, by insisting that the deep unconscious exists.


title: Mind

text: "Intentionality-based approaches" see intentionality as the "mark of the mental". The originator of this approach is Franz Brentano, who defined intentionality as the characteristic of mental states to refer to or be about objects. One central idea for this approach is that minds represent the world around them, which is not the case for regular physical objects. So a person who believes that there is ice cream in the fridge represents the world as being a certain way. The ice cream can be represented but it does not itself represent the world. This is why a mind is ascribed to the person but not to the ice cream, according to the intentional approach. One advantage of it in comparison to the "epistemic approach" is that it has no problems to account for unconscious mental states: they can be intentional just like conscious mental states and thereby qualify as constituents of the mind. But a problem for this approach is that there are also some non-mental entities that have intentionality, like maps or linguistic expressions. One response to this problem is to hold that the intentionality of non-mental entities is somehow derivative in relation to the intentionality of mental entities. For example, a map of Addis Ababa may be said to represent Addis Ababa not intrinsically but only extrinsically because people "interpret" it as a representation. Another difficulty is that not all mental states seem to be intentional. So while beliefs and desires are forms of representation, this seems not to be the case for pains and itches, which may "indicate" a problem without "representing" it. But some theorists have argued that even these apparent counterexamples should be considered intentional when properly understood.


title: Mind

text: "Behaviorist" definitions characterize mental states as dispositions to engage in certain publicly observable behavior as a reaction to particular external stimuli. On this view, to ascribe a belief to someone is to describe the tendency of this person to behave in certain ways. Such an ascription does not involve any claims about the internal states of this person, it only talks about behavioral tendencies. A strong motivation for such a position comes from empiricist considerations stressing the importance of observation and the lack thereof in the case of private internal mental states. This is sometimes combined with the thesis that we could not even learn how to use mental terms without reference to the behavior associated with them. One problem for behaviorism is that the same entity often behaves differently despite being in the same situation as before. This suggests that explanation needs to make reference to the internal states of the entity that mediate the link between stimulus and response. This problem is avoided by functionalist approaches, which define mental states through their causal roles but allow both external and internal events in their causal network. On this view, the definition of pain-state may include aspects such as being in a state that "tends to be caused by bodily injury, to produce the belief that something is wrong with the body and ... to cause wincing or moaning".


title: Mind

text: One important aspect of both behaviorist and functionalist approaches is that, according to them, the mind is "multiply realizable". This means that it does not depend on the exact constitution of an entity for whether it has a mind or not. Instead, only its behavioral dispositions or its role in the causal network matter. The entity in question may be a human, an animal, a silicon-based alien or a robot. Functionalists sometimes draw an analogy to the software-hardware distinction where the mind is likened to a certain type of software that can be installed on different forms of hardware. Closely linked to this analogy is the thesis of computationalism, which defines the mind as an information processing system that is physically implemented by the neural activity of the brain.


title: Mind

text: One problem for all of these views is that they seem to be unable to account for the phenomenal consciousness of the mind emphasized by "consciousness-based approaches". It may be true that pains are caused by bodily injuries and themselves produce certain beliefs and moaning behavior. But the causal profile of pain remains silent on the intrinsic unpleasantness of the painful experience itself. Some states that are not painful to the subject at all may even fit these characterizations.


title: Mind

text: Broadly speaking, mental faculties are the various functions of the mind, or things the mind can "do".


title: Mind

text: Thought is a mental act that allows humans to make sense of things in the world, and to represent and interpret them in ways that are significant, or which accord with their needs, attachments, goals, commitments, plans, ends, desires, etc. Thinking involves the symbolic or semiotic mediation of ideas or data, as when we form concepts, engage in problem solving, reasoning, and making decisions. Words that refer to similar concepts and processes include deliberation, cognition, ideation, discourse and imagination.


title: Mind

text: Thinking is sometimes described as a "higher" cognitive function and the analysis of thinking processes is a part of cognitive psychology. It is also deeply connected with our capacity to make and use tools; to understand cause and effect; to recognize patterns of significance; to comprehend and disclose unique contexts of experience or activity; and to respond to the world in a meaningful way.


title: Mind

text: Memory is the ability to preserve, retain and subsequently recall knowledge, information, or experience. Although memory has traditionally been a persistent theme in philosophy, the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries also saw the study of memory emerge as a subject of inquiry within the paradigms of cognitive psychology. In recent decades, it has become one of the pillars of a new branch of science called cognitive neuroscience, a marriage between cognitive psychology and neuroscience.


title: Mind

text: Imagination is the activity of generating or evoking novel situations, images, ideas or other qualia in the mind. It is a characteristically subjective "activity", rather than a direct or passive experience. The term is technically used in psychology for the process of reviving in the mind percepts of objects formerly given in sense perception. Since this use of the term conflicts with that of ordinary language, some psychologists have preferred to describe this process as "imaging" or "imagery" or to speak of it as "reproductive" as opposed to "productive" or "constructive" imagination. Things imagined are said to be seen in the "mind's eye". Among the many practical functions of imagination are the ability to project possible futures (or histories), to "see" things from another's perspective, and to change the way something is perceived, including to make decisions to respond to, or enact, what is imagined.


title: Mind

text: Consciousness in mammals (this includes humans) is an aspect of the mind generally thought to comprise qualities such as subjectivity, sentience, and the ability to perceive the relationship between oneself and one's environment. It is a subject of much research in philosophy of mind, psychology, neuroscience, and cognitive science. Some philosophers divide consciousness into phenomenal consciousness, which is subjective experience itself, and access consciousness, which refers to the global availability of information to processing systems in the brain. Phenomenal consciousness has many different experienced qualities, often referred to as qualia. Phenomenal consciousness is usually consciousness "of" something or "about" something, a property known as intentionality in philosophy of mind.


title: Mind

text: The mental phenomena brought about by the faculties of the mind have been categorized according to various distinctions. Important distinctions group mental phenomena together according to whether they are "sensory", "qualitative", "propositional", "intentional", "conscious", "occurrent" or "rational". These different distinctions result in overlapping categorizations. Some mental phenomena, like perception or bodily awareness, are "sensory", i.e. based on the senses. These phenomena are of special interest to empiricists, who hold that they are our only source of knowledge about the external world. They are contrasted with "non-sensory" phenomena like thoughts or beliefs, which do not involve sense impressions. Sensory states are closely related to "qualitative states", which have qualia and are therefore associated with a subjective feeling of what it is like to be in this state. Sensory and qualitative states are often contrasted with "propositional states", which are sometimes said to be non-sensory and non-qualitative. Propositional states involve attitudes, like belief or desire, which a subject has towards a proposition. One problem with this contrast is that some propositional attitudes may have a subjective feeling to them, which would make them qualitative phenomena. This is the case, for example, when actively desiring something. Another problem with this contrast is that some mental phenomena, like perceptions, are both sensory and propositional. Propositional attitudes are "intentional states", which have as their characteristic that they refer to or are about objects or states of affairs. Some philosophers see intentionality as the mark of the mental, i.e. as what is shared by all and only by mental phenomena. Opponents of this position have argued that there are various mental phenomena, like pains and itches, that lack the representational aspect associated with intentionality and therefore count as non-intentional. This claim is sometimes even extended to all sensory phenomena. It sometimes held that all intentional states are propositional. While this is true for the paradigmatic cases, it has been argued that there is a form of object-directed intentionality, like the fear of snakes, that does not involve propositional attitudes, like the fear that one will be bitten by snakes.


title: Mind

text: Another important distinction among mental states is whether they are "conscious" or not. Often two types of consciousness are distinguished: "phenomenal consciousness and access consciousness". "Phenomenal consciousness" refers to actual experience. A common view is that some states, like sensations or pains, are necessarily associated with phenomenal consciousness while other states, like beliefs and desires, can be present both with and without phenomenal consciousness. According to some views, conscious mental states are more basic while unconscious states only count as mental if they can arise in phenomenal consciousness. "Access consciousness", on the other hand, refers to mental states that are accessible: they carry information that is available for reasoning and guiding behavior. This notion is closely related to "occurrent mental states", which are not just accessible but also currently active or causally efficacious within the owner's mind. All phenomenally conscious mental states are occurrent but there may also be unconscious occurrent states, like repressed desires, that influence our behavior. Occurrent mental states contrast with "standing" or "dispositional mental states", which are part of the subject's mind even though they currently play no role in it. Mental phenomena are "rational" if they are well justified or obey the norms of rationality. "Irrational mental phenomena", on the other hand, violate these norms. But not all mental phenomena are rationally evaluable: some are "arational" and exist outside the domain of rationality. They include urges, dizziness or hunger while beliefs and intentions are the paradigmatic examples of rationally evaluable states. Some hold that rationality depends only on structural principles that govern how different mental states should relate to each other while others define rationality in terms of responding correctly to reasons.


title: Mind

text: Mental contents are those items that are thought of as being "in" the mind, and capable of being formed and manipulated by mental processes and faculties. Examples include thoughts, concepts, memories, emotions, percepts and intentions. Philosophical theories of mental content include internalism, externalism, representationalism and intentionality.


title: Mind

text: Memetics is a theory of mental content based on an analogy with Darwinian evolution, which was originated by Richard Dawkins and Douglas Hofstadter in the 1980s. It is an evolutionary model of cultural information transfer. A meme, analogous to a gene, is an idea, belief, pattern of behaviour (etc.) "hosted" in one or more individual minds, and can reproduce itself from mind to mind. Thus what would otherwise be regarded as one individual influencing another to adopt a belief, is seen memetically as a meme reproducing itself.


title: Mind

text: In animals, the brain, or "encephalon" (Greek for "in the head"), is the control center of the central nervous system, responsible for thought. In most animals, the brain is located in the head, protected by the skull and close to the primary sensory apparatus of vision, hearing, equilibrioception, taste and olfaction. While all vertebrates have a brain, most invertebrates have either a centralized brain or collections of individual ganglia. Primitive animals such as sponges do not have a brain at all. Brains can be extremely complex. For example, the human brain contains around 86 billion neurons, each linked to as many as 10,000 others.


title: Mind

text: Understanding the relationship between the brain and the mind –the mind–body problem – is one of the central issues in the history of philosophy, a challenging problem both philosophically and scientifically. There are three major philosophical schools of thought concerning the answer: dualism, materialism, and idealism. Dualism holds that the mind exists independently of the brain; materialism holds that mental phenomena are identical to neuronal phenomena; and idealism holds that only mental phenomena exist.


title: Mind

text: Through most of history many philosophers found it inconceivable that cognition could be implemented by a physical substance such as brain tissue (that is neurons and synapses). Descartes, who thought extensively about mind-brain relationships, found it possible to explain reflexes and other simple behaviors in mechanistic terms, although he did not believe that complex thought, especially language, could be explained by reference to the physical brain alone.


title: Mind

text: The most straightforward scientific evidence of a strong relationship between the physical brain matter and the mind is the impact physical alterations to the brain have on the mind, such as with traumatic brain injury and psychoactive drug use. Philosopher Patricia Churchland notes that drug-mind interaction indicates an intimate connection between the brain and the mind.


title: Mind

text: In addition to the philosophical questions, the relationship between mind and brain involves a number of scientific questions, including understanding the relationship between mental activity and brain activity, the exact mechanisms by which drugs influence cognition, and the neural correlates of consciousness.


title: Mind

text: Theoretical approaches to explain how mind emerges from the brain include connectionism, computationalism and Bayesian brain.


title: Mind

text: The evolution of human intelligence refers to several theories that aim to describe how human intelligence has evolved in relation to the evolution of the human brain and the origin of language.


title: Mind

text: The timeline of human evolution spans some 7 million years, from the separation of the genus "Pan" until the emergence of behavioral modernity by 50,000 years ago. Of this timeline, the first 3 million years concern "Sahelanthropus", the following 2 million concern "Australopithecus", while the final 2 million span the history of actual "Homo" species (the Paleolithic).


title: Mind

text: Many traits of human intelligence, such as empathy, theory of mind, mourning, ritual, and the use of symbols and tools, are already apparent in great apes although in lesser sophistication than in humans.


title: Mind

text: There is a debate between supporters of the idea of a sudden emergence of intelligence, or "Great leap forward" and those of a gradual or continuum hypothesis.


title: Mind

text: Philosophy of mind is the branch of philosophy that studies the nature of the mind, mental events, mental functions, mental properties, consciousness and their relationship to the physical body. The "mind–body problem", i.e. the relationship of the mind to the body, is commonly seen as the central issue in philosophy of mind, although there are other issues concerning the nature of the mind that do not involve its relation to the physical body. José Manuel Rodriguez Delgado writes, "In present popular usage, soul and mind are not clearly differentiated and some people, more or less consciously, still feel that the soul, and perhaps the mind, may enter or leave the body as independent entities."


title: Mind

text: "Dualism" and "monism" are the two major schools of thought that attempt to resolve the mind–body problem. Dualism is the position that mind and body are in some way separate from each other. It can be traced back to Plato, Aristotle and the Nyaya, Samkhya and Yoga schools of Hindu philosophy, but it was most precisely formulated by René Descartes in the 17th century. "Substance dualists" argue that the mind is an independently existing substance, whereas "Property dualists" maintain that the mind is a group of independent properties that emerge from and cannot be reduced to the brain, but that it is not a distinct substance.


title: Mind

text: The 20th century philosopher Martin Heidegger suggested that subjective experience and activity (i.e. the "mind") cannot be made sense of in terms of Cartesian "substances" that bear "properties" at all (whether the mind itself is thought of as a distinct, separate kind of substance or not). This is because the nature of subjective, "qualitative" experience is incoherent in terms of – or semantically incommensurable with the concept of – substances that bear properties. This is a fundamentally ontological argument.


title: Mind

text: The philosopher of cognitive science Daniel Dennett, for example, argues there is no such thing as a narrative center called the "mind", but that instead there is simply a collection of sensory inputs and outputs: different kinds of "software" running in parallel. Psychologist B.F. Skinner argued that the mind is an explanatory fiction that diverts attention from environmental causes of behavior; he considered the mind a "black box" and thought that mental processes may be better conceived of as forms of covert verbal behavior.


title: Mind

text: Philosopher David Chalmers has argued that the third person approach to uncovering mind and consciousness is not effective, such as looking into other's brains or observing human conduct, but that a first person approach is necessary. Such a first person perspective indicates that the mind must be conceptualized as something distinct from the brain.


title: Mind

text: The mind has also been described as manifesting from moment to moment, one thought moment at a time as a fast flowing stream, where sense impressions and mental phenomena are constantly changing.


title: Mind

text: "Monism" is the position that mind and body are not physiologically and ontologically distinct kinds of entities. This view was first advocated in Western Philosophy by Parmenides in the 5th Century BC and was later espoused by the 17th Century rationalist Baruch Spinoza. According to Spinoza's dual-aspect theory, mind and body are two aspects of an underlying reality which he variously described as "Nature" or "God".


title: Mind

text: The most common monisms in the 20th and 21st centuries have all been variations of physicalism; these positions include behaviorism, the type identity theory, anomalous monism and functionalism.


title: Mind

text: Many modern philosophers of mind adopt either a "reductive" or "non-reductive physicalist" position, maintaining in their different ways that the mind is not something separate from the body. These approaches have been particularly influential in the sciences, e.g. in the fields of sociobiology, computer science, evolutionary psychology and the various neurosciences. Other philosophers, however, adopt a non-physicalist position which challenges the notion that the mind is a purely physical construct.


title: Mind

text: Continued progress in neuroscience has helped to clarify many of these issues, and its findings have been taken by many to support physicalists' assertions. Nevertheless, our knowledge is incomplete, and modern philosophers of mind continue to discuss how subjective qualia and the intentional mental states can be naturally explained. There is also the problem of Quantum Mechanics, whose Copenhagen interpretation can be understood as a form of perspectivism. As the Copenhagen interpretation is not universally accepted, an exact mechanism of the collapse of the wavefunction remains elusive, and the role of mind in fundamental physical theory is unclear.


title: Mind

text: Neuroscience studies the nervous system, the physical basis of the mind. At the systems level, neuroscientists investigate how biological neural networks form and physiologically interact to produce mental functions and content such as reflexes, multisensory integration, motor coordination, circadian rhythms, emotional responses, learning, and memory. The underlying physical basis of learning and memory is likely dynamic changes in gene expression that occur in brain neurons. Such expression changes are introduced by epigenetic mechanisms. Epigenetic regulation of gene expression ordinarily involves chemical modification of DNA or DNA-associated histone proteins. Such chemical modifications can cause long-lasting changes in gene expression. Epigenetic mechanisms employed in learning and memory include the DNMT3A promoted methylation and TET promoted demethylation of neuronal DNA as well as methylation, acetylation and deacetylation of neuronal histone proteins. Also, long term excitation of neural pathways and subsequent endocrinal signaling, can provide a capacity for structural activation of gene expression in the histone code; allowing a potential mechanism of throughput epigenetic interaction with the nervous system.


title: Mind

text: At a larger scale, efforts in computational neuroscience have developed large-scale models that simulate simple, functioning brains. As of 2012, such models include the thalamus, basal ganglia, prefrontal cortex, motor cortex, and occipital cortex, and consequentially simulated brains can learn, respond to visual stimuli, coordinate motor responses, form short-term memories, and learn to respond to patterns. Currently, researchers aim to program the hippocampus and limbic system, hypothetically imbuing the simulated mind with long-term memory and crude emotions.


title: Mind

text: By contrast, affective neuroscience studies the neural mechanisms of personality, emotion, and mood primarily through experimental tasks.


title: Mind

text: Cognitive science examines the mental functions that give rise to information processing, termed cognition. These include perception, attention, working memory, long-term memory, producing and understanding language, learning, reasoning, problem solving, and decision making. Cognitive science seeks to understand thinking "in terms of representational structures in the mind and computational procedures that operate on those structures".


title: Mind

text: At the birth of cognitive science in the 1960s and 1970s, the paradigm of the computational theory of mind was widely adopted. This paradigm holds that the mind is essentially a computational system, and its explanation needs to be provided in terms of a "computational description". More recently, rival paradigms gained ground within cognitive science, namely the "neurophysical description" and the "intentional description".


title: Mind

text: Though the interface between neuroscience and an exact model of cognition is not yet made, progress in biological neuron models help to mathematically quantify cognitive neuroscience; and elaborate a theory of mind that can be provable. However a theoretically fundamental synthesis in psychology, cognitive science, neuroscience, and biophysics must be made; for the problem of mind and its faculties to gain tractable scientific ground.


title: Mind

text: Over the past years, research in cognitive sciences has highlighted the importance of the body for cognition. Proponents of the embodied cognition theory of mind hold that cognition (and mental phenomena) is the product of active interactions between individuals and their surrounding environment.


title: Mind

text: Psychology is the scientific study of human behavior, mental functioning, and experience. As both an academic and applied discipline, Psychology involves the scientific study of mental processes such as perception, cognition, emotion, personality, as well as environmental influences, such as social and cultural influences, and interpersonal relationships, in order to devise theories of human behavior. Psychological patterns can be understood as low cost ways of information processing. Psychology also refers to the application of such knowledge to various spheres of human activity, including problems of individuals' daily lives and the treatment of mental health problems.


title: Mind

text: Psychology differs from the other social sciences (e.g. anthropology, economics, political science, and sociology) due to its focus on experimentation at the scale of the individual, or individuals in small groups as opposed to large groups, institutions or societies. Historically, psychology differed from biology and neuroscience in that it was primarily concerned with mind rather than brain. Modern psychological science incorporates physiological and neurological processes into its conceptions of perception, cognition, behaviour, and mental disorders.


title: Mind

text: Psychiatry, Neurology and Neurosurgery are the specialties within the field of Medicine that are devoted to the study of the mind and to the treatment of humans with mental disorders and other medical conditions affecting the mind and nervous system. Psychiatrists, Neurologists and Neurosurgeons conduct research in clinical, academic and industry settings.


title: Mind

text: By analogy with the health of the body, one can speak metaphorically of a state of health of the mind, or mental health. Merriam-Webster defines mental health as "a state of emotional and psychological well-being in which an individual is able to use his or her cognitive and emotional capabilities, function in society, and meet the ordinary demands of everyday life". According to the World Health Organization (WHO), there is no one "official" definition of mental health. Cultural differences, subjective assessments, and competing professional theories all affect how "mental health" is defined. In general, most experts agree that "mental health" and "mental disorder" are not opposites. In other words, the absence of a recognized mental disorder is not necessarily an indicator of mental health.


title: Mind

text: One way to think about mental health is by looking at how effectively and successfully a person functions. Feeling capable and competent; being able to handle normal levels of stress, maintaining satisfying relationships, and leading an independent life; and being able to "bounce back" or recover from difficult situations, are all signs of mental health.


title: Mind

text: Psychotherapy is an interpersonal, relational intervention used by trained psychotherapists to aid clients in problems of living. This usually includes increasing individual sense of well-being and reducing subjective discomforting experience. Psychotherapists employ a range of techniques based on experiential relationship building, dialogue, communication and behavior change and that are designed to improve the mental health of a client or patient, or to improve group relationships (such as in a family). Most forms of psychotherapy use only spoken conversation, though some also use various other forms of communication such as the written word, art, drama, narrative story, or therapeutic touch. Psychotherapy occurs within a structured encounter between a trained therapist and client(s). Purposeful, theoretically based psychotherapy began in the 19th century with psychoanalysis; since then, scores of other approaches have been developed and continue to be created.


title: Mind

text: Animal cognition, or cognitive ethology, is the title given to a modern approach to the mental capacities of animals. It has developed out of comparative psychology, but has also been strongly influenced by the approach of ethology, behavioral ecology, and evolutionary psychology. Much of what used to be considered under the title of "animal intelligence" is now thought of under this heading. Animal language acquisition, attempting to discern or understand the degree to which animal cognition can be revealed by linguistics-related study, has been controversial among cognitive linguists.


title: Mind

text: In 1950 Alan M. Turing published "Computing machinery and intelligence" in "Mind", in which he proposed that machines could be tested for intelligence using questions and answers. This process is now named the Turing Test. The term Artificial Intelligence (AI) was first used by John McCarthy who considered it to mean "the science and engineering of making intelligent machines". It can also refer to intelligence as exhibited by an artificial ("man-made", "non-natural", "manufactured") entity. AI is studied in overlapping fields of computer science, psychology, neuroscience and engineering, dealing with intelligent behavior, learning and adaptation and usually developed using customized machines or computers.


title: Mind

text: Research in AI is concerned with producing machines to automate tasks requiring intelligent behavior. Examples include control, planning and scheduling, the ability to answer diagnostic and consumer questions, handwriting, natural language, speech and facial recognition. As such, the study of AI has also become an engineering discipline, focused on providing solutions to real life problems, knowledge mining, software applications, strategy games like computer chess and other video games. One of the biggest limitations of AI is in the domain of actual machine comprehension. Consequentially natural-language understanding and connectionism (where behavior of neural networks is investigated) are areas of active research and development.


title: Mind

text: The debate about the nature of the mind is relevant to the development of artificial intelligence. If the mind is indeed a thing separate from or higher than the functioning of the brain, then hypothetically it would be much more difficult to recreate within a machine, if it were possible at all. If, on the other hand, the mind is no more than the aggregated functions of the brain, then it will be possible to create a machine with a recognisable mind (though possibly only with computers much different from today's), by simple virtue of the fact that such a machine already exists in the form of the human brain.


title: Mind

text: Many religions associate spiritual qualities to the human mind. These are often tightly connected to their mythology and ideas of afterlife.


title: Mind

text: The Indian philosopher-sage Sri Aurobindo attempted to unite the Eastern and Western psychological traditions with his integral psychology, as have many philosophers and New religious movements. Judaism teaches that "moach shalit al halev", the mind rules the heart; humans can approach the Divine intellectually, through learning and behaving according to the Divine Will as enclothed in the Torah, and use that deep logical understanding to elicit and guide emotional arousal during prayer. Christianity has tended to see the mind (Greek "nous") as distinct from the soul (Greek "psuche") and sometimes further distinguished the spirit (Greek "pneuma"). Western esoteric traditions sometimes refer to a mental body that exists on a plane other than the physical. Hinduism's various philosophical schools have debated whether the human soul (Sanskrit "atman") is distinct from, or identical to, "Brahman", the divine reality. Taoism sees the human being as contiguous with natural forces, and the mind as not separate from the body. Confucianism sees the mind, like the body, as inherently perfectible.


title: Mind

text: Buddhist teachings explain the moment-to-moment manifestation of the mind-stream. The components that make up the mind are known as the five aggregates (i.e., material form, feelings, perception, volition, and sensory consciousness), which arise and pass away continuously. The arising and passing of these aggregates in the present moment is described as being influenced by five causal laws: biological laws, psychological laws, physical laws, volitional laws, and universal laws. The Buddhist practice of mindfulness involves attending to this constantly changing mind-stream.


title: Mind

text: According to Buddhist philosopher Dharmakirti, the mind has two fundamental qualities: "clarity and cognizes". If something is not those two qualities, it cannot validly be called mind. "Clarity" refers to the fact that mind has no color, shape, size, location, weight, or any other physical characteristic, and "cognizes" that it functions to know or perceive objects. "Knowing" refers to the fact that mind is aware of the contents of experience, and that, in order to exist, mind must be cognizing an object. You cannot have a mind – whose function is to cognize an object – existing without cognizing an object.


title: Mind

text: Mind, in Buddhism, is also described as being "space-like" and "illusion-like". Mind is space-like in the sense that it is not physically obstructive. It has no qualities which would prevent it from existing. In Mahayana Buddhism, mind is illusion-like in the sense that it is empty of inherent existence. This does not mean it does not exist, it means that it exists in a manner that is counter to our ordinary way of misperceiving how phenomena exist, according to Buddhism. When the mind is itself cognized properly, without misperceiving its mode of existence, it appears to exist like an illusion. There is a big difference however between being "space and illusion" and being "space-like" and "illusion-like". Mind is not composed of space, it just shares some descriptive similarities to space. Mind is not an illusion, it just shares some descriptive qualities with illusions.


title: Mind

text: Buddhism posits that there is no inherent, unchanging identity (Inherent I, Inherent Me) or phenomena (Ultimate self, inherent self, Atman, Soul, Self-essence, Jiva, Ishvara, humanness essence, etc.) which is the experiencer of our experiences and the agent of our actions. In other words, human beings consist of merely a body and a mind, and nothing extra. Within the body there is no part or set of parts which is – by itself or themselves – the person. Similarly, within the mind there is no part or set of parts which are themselves "the person". A human being merely consists of five aggregates, or "skandhas" and nothing else.


title: Mind

text: In the same way, "mind" is what can be validly conceptually labelled onto our mere experience of clarity and knowing. There is something separate and apart from clarity and knowing which is "Awareness", in Buddhism. "Mind" is that part of experience the sixth sense door, which can be validly referred to as mind by the concept-term "mind". There is also not "objects out there, mind in here, and experience somewhere in-between". There is a third thing called "awareness" which exists being aware of the contents of mind and what mind cognizes. There are five senses (arising of mere experience: shapes, colors, the components of smell, components of taste, components of sound, components of touch) and mind as the sixth institution; this means, expressly, that there can be a third thing called "awareness" and a third thing called "experiencer who is aware of the experience". This awareness is deeply related to "no-self" because it does not judge the experience with craving or aversion.


title: Mind

text: Clearly, the experience arises and is known by mind, but there is a third thing calls Sati what is the "real experiencer of the experience" that sits apart from the experience and which can be aware of the experience in 4 levels. (Maha Sathipatthana Sutta.)


title: Mind

text: To be aware of these four levels one needs to cultivate equanimity toward Craving and Aversion. This is Called Vipassana which is different from the way of reacting with Craving and Aversion. This is the state of being aware and equanimous to the complete experience of here and now. This is the way of Buddhism, with regards to mind and the ultimate nature of minds (and persons).


title: Mind

text: Due to the mind–body problem, a lot of interest and debate surrounds the question of what happens to one's conscious mind as one's body dies. During brain death all brain function permanently ceases. According to some neuroscientific views which see these processes as the physical basis of mental phenomena, the mind fails to survive brain death and ceases to exist. This permanent loss of consciousness after death is sometimes called "eternal oblivion". The belief that some spiritual or incorporeal component (soul) exists and that it is preserved after death is described by the term "afterlife".


title: Mind

text: Parapsychology is the study of certain types of paranormal phenomena, or of phenomena which appear to be paranormal or not have any scientific basis, such as precognition, telekinesis and telepathy.


title: Mind

text: The term is based on the Greek "para" ('beside, beyond'), "psyche" ('soul, mind'), and "logos" ('account, explanation') and was coined by psychologist Max Dessoir in or before 1889. J.B. Rhine tried to popularize "parapsychology" using fraudulent techniques as a replacement for the earlier term "psychical research", during a shift in methodologies which brought experimental methods to the study of psychic phenomena. Parapsychology is not accepted among the scientific community as science, as psychic abilities have not been demonstrated to exist. The status of parapsychology as a science has also been disputed, with many scientists regarding the discipline as pseudoscience.


title: Francia

text: Francia, also called the Kingdom of the Franks (), Frankish Kingdom, Frankland or Frankish Empire (), was the largest post-Roman barbarian kingdom in Western Europe. It was ruled by the Franks during late antiquity and the Early Middle Ages. After the Treaty of Verdun in 843, West Francia became the predecessor of France, and East Francia became that of Germany. Francia was among the last surviving Germanic kingdoms from the Migration Period era before its partition in 843.


title: Francia

text: The core Frankish territories inside the former Western Roman Empire were close to the Rhine and Meuse rivers in the north. After a period where small kingdoms interacted with the remaining Gallo-Roman institutions to their south, a single kingdom uniting them was founded by Clovis I who was crowned King of the Franks in 496. His dynasty, the Merovingian dynasty, was eventually replaced by the Carolingian dynasty. Under the nearly continuous campaigns of Pepin of Herstal, Charles Martel, Pepin the Short, Charlemagne, and Louis the Pious—father, son, grandson, great-grandson and great-great-grandson—the greatest expansion of the Frankish empire was secured by the early 9th century, and was by this point dubbed the Carolingian Empire.


title: Francia

text: During the Merovingian and Carolingian dynasties the Frankish realm was one large polity subdivided into several smaller kingdoms, often effectively independent. The geography and number of subkingdoms varied over time, but a basic split between eastern and western domains persisted. The eastern kingdom was initially called Austrasia, centred on the Rhine and Meuse, and expanding eastwards into central Europe. Following the Treaty of Verdun in 843, the Frankish Realm was divided into three separate kingdoms: West Francia, Middle Francia and East Francia. In 870, Middle Francia was partitioned again, with most of its territory being divided among West and East Francia, which would hence form the nuclei of the future Kingdom of France and the Holy Roman Empire respectively, with West Francia (France) eventually retaining the choronym.


title: Francia

text: The term "Franks" emerged in the 3rd century AD, covering Germanic tribes who settled on the northern Rhine frontier of the Roman Empire, including the Bructeri, Ampsivarii, Chamavi, Chattuarii and Salians. While all of them had a tradition of participating in the Roman military, the Salians were allowed to settle within the Roman Empire. In 358, having already been living in the "civitas" of Batavia for some time, Emperor Julian defeated the Chamavi and Salians, allowing the latter to settle further away from the border, in Toxandria.


title: Francia

text: Some of the early Frankish leaders, such as Flavius Bauto and Arbogast, were committed to the cause of the Romans, but other Frankish rulers, such as Mallobaudes, were active on Roman soil for other reasons. After the fall of Arbogastes, his son Arigius succeeded in establishing a hereditary countship at Trier and after the fall of the usurper Constantine III some Franks supported the usurper Jovinus (411). Jovinus was dead by 413, but the Romans found it increasingly difficult to manage the Franks within their borders.


title: Francia

text: Around 428, the king Chlodio, whose kingdom may have been in the "civitas Tungrorum" (with its capital in Tongeren), launched an attack on Roman territory and extended his realm as far as "Camaracum" (Cambrai) and the Somme. Though Sidonius Apollinaris relates that Flavius Aetius defeated a wedding party of his people (c. 431), this period marks the beginning of a situation that would endure for many centuries: the Germanic Franks ruled over an increasing number of Gallo-Roman subjects.


title: Francia

text: The Merovingians, reputed to be relatives of Chlodio, arose from within the Gallo-Roman military, with Childeric and his son Clovis being called "King of the Franks" in the Gallo-Roman military, even before having any Frankish territorial kingdom. Once Clovis defeated his Roman competitor for power in northern Gaul, Syagrius, he turned to the kings of the Franks to the north and east, as well as other post-Roman kingdoms already existing in Gaul: Visigoths, Burgundians, and Alemanni.


title: Francia

text: The original core territory of the Frankish kingdom later came to be known as Austrasia (the "eastern lands"), while the large Romanised Frankish kingdom in northern Gaul came to be known as Neustria.


title: Francia

text: Chlodio's successors are obscure figures, but what can be certain is that Childeric I, possibly his grandson, ruled a Salian kingdom from Tournai as a "foederatus" of the Romans. Childeric is chiefly important to history for bequeathing the Franks to his son Clovis, who began an effort to extend his authority over the other Frankish tribes and to expand their "territorium" south and west into Gaul. Clovis converted to Christianity and put himself on good terms with the powerful Church and with his Gallo-Roman subjects.


title: Francia

text: In a thirty-year reign (481–511) Clovis defeated the Roman general Syagrius and conquered the Kingdom of Soissons, defeated the Alemanni (Battle of Tolbiac, 496) and established Frankish hegemony over them. Clovis defeated the Visigoths (Battle of Vouillé, 507) and conquered all of their territory north of the Pyrenees save Septimania, and conquered the Bretons (according to Gregory of Tours) and made them vassals of Francia. He conquered most or all of the neighbouring Frankish tribes along the Rhine and incorporated them into his kingdom.


title: Francia

text: He also incorporated the various Roman military settlements ("laeti") scattered over Gaul: the Saxons of Bessin, the Britons and the Alans of Armorica and Loire valley or the Taifals of Poitou to name a few prominent ones. By the end of his life, Clovis ruled all of Gaul save the Gothic province of Septimania and the Burgundian kingdom in the southeast.


title: Francia

text: The Merovingians were a hereditary monarchy. The Frankish kings adhered to the practice of partible inheritance: dividing their lands among their sons. Even when multiple Merovingian kings ruled, the kingdom—not unlike the late Roman Empire—was conceived of as a single realm ruled collectively by several kings and the turn of events could result in the reunification of the whole realm under a single king. The Merovingian kings ruled by divine right and their kingship was symbolised daily by their long hair and initially by their acclamation, which was carried out by raising the king on a shield in accordance with the ancient Germanic practice of electing a war-leader at an assembly of the warriors.


title: Francia

text: At the death of Clovis, his kingdom was divided territorially by his four adult sons in such a way that each son was granted a comparable portion of fiscal land, which was probably land once part of the Roman fisc, now seized by the Frankish government.


title: Francia

text: Clovis's sons made their capitals near the Frankish heartland in northeastern Gaul. Theuderic I made his capital at Reims, Chlodomer at Orléans, Childebert I at Paris, and Chlothar I at Soissons. During their reigns, the Thuringii (532), Burgundes (534), and Saxons and Frisians (c. 560) were incorporated into the Frankish kingdom. The outlying trans-Rhenish tribes were loosely attached to Frankish sovereignty, and though they could be forced to contribute to Frankish military efforts, in times of weak kings they were uncontrollable and liable to attempt independence. The Romanised Burgundian kingdom, however, was preserved in its territoriality by the Franks and converted into one of their primary divisions, incorporating the central Gallic heartland of Chlodomer's realm with its capital at Orléans.


title: Francia

text: The fraternal kings showed only intermittent signs of friendship and were often in rivalry. On the early death of Chlodomer, his brother Chlothar had his young sons murdered in order to take a share of his kingdom, which was, in accordance with custom, divided between the surviving brothers. Theuderic died in 534, but his adult son Theudebert I was capable of defending his inheritance, which formed the largest of the Frankish subkingdoms and the kernel of the later kingdom of Austrasia.


title: Francia

text: Theudebert was the first Frankish king to formally sever his ties to the Byzantine Empire by striking gold coins with his own image on them and calling himself "magnus rex" (great king) because of his supposed suzerainty over peoples as far away as Pannonia. Theudebert interfered in the Gothic War on the side of the Gepids and Lombards against the Ostrogoths, receiving the provinces of Raetia, Noricum, and part of Veneto.


title: Francia

text: His son and successor, Theudebald, was unable to retain them and on his death all of his vast kingdom passed to Chlothar, under whom, with the death of Childebert in 558, the entire Frankish realm was reunited under the rule of one king.


title: Francia

text: In 561 Chlothar died and his realm was divided, in a replay of the events of fifty years prior, between his four sons, with the chief cities remaining the same. The eldest son, Charibert I, inherited the kingdom with its capital at Paris and ruled all of western Gaul. The second eldest, Guntram, inherited the old kingdom of the Burgundians, augmented by the lands of central France around the old capital of Orléans, which became his chief city, and most of Provence.


title: Francia

text: The rest of Provence, the Auvergne, and eastern Aquitaine were assigned to the third son, Sigebert I, who also inherited Austrasia with its chief cities of Reims and Metz. The smallest kingdom was that of Soissons, which went to the youngest son, Chilperic I. The kingdom Chilperic ruled at his death (584) became the nucleus of later Neustria.


title: Francia

text: This second fourfold division was quickly ruined by fratricidal wars, waged largely over the murder of Galswintha, the wife of Chilperic, allegedly by his mistress (and second wife) Fredegund. Galswintha's sister, the wife of Sigebert, Brunhilda, incited her husband to war and the conflict between the two queens continued to plague relations until the next century. Guntram sought to keep the peace, though he also attempted twice (585 and 589) to conquer Septimania from the Goths, but was defeated both times.


title: Francia

text: All the surviving brothers benefited at the death of Charibert, but Chilperic was also able to extend his authority during the period of war by bringing the Bretons to heel again. After his death, Guntram had to again force the Bretons to submit. In 587, the Treaty of Andelot—the text of which explicitly refers to the entire Frankish realm as "Francia"—between Brunhilda and Guntram secured his protection of her young son Childebert II, who had succeeded the assassinated Sigebert (575). Together the territory of Guntram and Childebert was well over thrice as large as the small realm of Chilperic's successor, Chlothar II. During this period Francia took on the tripartite character it was to have throughout the rest of its history, being composed of Neustria, Austrasia, and Burgundy.


title: Francia

text: When Guntram died in 592, Burgundy went to Childebert in its entirety, but he died in 595. His two sons divided the kingdom, with the elder Theudebert II taking Austrasia plus Childebert's portion of Aquitaine, while his younger brother Theuderic II inherited Burgundy and Guntram's Aquitaine. United, the brothers sought to remove their father's cousin Chlothar II from power and they did succeed in conquering most of his kingdom, reducing him to only a few cities, but they failed to capture him.


title: Francia

text: In 599 they routed his forces at Dormelles and seized the Dentelin, but they then fell foul of each other and the remainder of their time on the thrones was spent in infighting, often incited by their grandmother Brunhilda, who, angered over her expulsion from Theudebert's court, convinced Theuderic to unseat him and kill him. In 612 he did and the whole realm of his father Childebert was once again ruled by one man. This was short-lived, however, as he died on the eve of preparing an expedition against Chlothar in 613, leaving a young son named Sigebert II.


title: Francia

text: During their reigns, Theudebert and Theuderic campaigned successfully in Gascony, where they had established the Duchy of Gascony and brought the Basques to submission (602). This original Gascon conquest included lands south of the Pyrenees, namely Biscay and Gipuzkoa, but these were lost to the Visigoths in 612.


title: Francia

text: On the opposite end of his realm, the Alemanni had defeated Theuderic in a rebellion and the Franks were losing their hold on the trans-Rhenish tribes. In 610 Theudebert had extorted the Duchy of Alsace from Theuderic, beginning a long period of conflict over which kingdom was to have the region of Alsace, Burgundy or Austrasia, which was only terminated in the late seventh century.


title: Francia

text: During the brief minority of Sigebert II, the office of the Mayor of the Palace, which had for sometime been visible in the kingdoms of the Franks, came to the fore in its internal politics, with a faction of nobles coalescing around the persons of Warnachar II, Rado, and Pepin of Landen, to give the kingdom over to Chlothar in order to remove Brunhilda, the young king's regent, from power. Warnachar was himself already the mayor of the palace of Austrasia, while Rado and Pepin were to find themselves rewarded with mayoral offices after Chlothar's coup succeeded and Brunhilda and the ten-year-old king were killed.


title: Francia

text: Immediately after his victory, Chlothar II promulgated the Edict of Paris (614), which has generally been viewed as a concession to the nobility, though this view has come under recent criticism. The Edict primarily sought to guarantee justice and end corruption in government, but it also entrenched the regional differences between the three kingdoms of Francia and probably granted the nobles more control over judicial appointments.


title: Francia

text: By 623 the Austrasians had begun to clamour for a king of their own, since Chlothar was so often absent from the kingdom and, because of his upbringing and previous rule in the Seine basin, was more or less an outsider there. Chlothar thus granted that his son Dagobert I would be their king and he was duly acclaimed by the Austrasian warriors in the traditional fashion. Nonetheless, though Dagobert exercised true authority in his realm, Chlothar maintained ultimate control over the whole Frankish kingdom.


title: Francia

text: During the joint reign of Chlothar and Dagobert, who have been called "the last ruling Merovingians", the Saxons, who had been loosely attached to Francia since the late 550s, rebelled under Berthoald, Duke of Saxony, and were defeated and reincorporated into the kingdom by the joint action of father and son. When Chlothar died in 628, Dagobert, in accordance with his father's wishes, granted a subkingdom to his younger brother Charibert II. This subkingdom, commonly called Aquitaine, was a new creation.


title: Francia

text: Dagobert, in his dealings with the Saxons, Alemans, and Thuringii, as well as the Slavs beyond the borders of Francia, upon whom he tried to force tribute but who instead defeated him under their king Samo at the Battle of Wogastisburg in 631, made all the far eastern peoples subject to the court of Neustria and not of Austrasia. This, first and foremost, incited the Austrasians to request a king of their own from the royal household.


title: Francia

text: The subkingdom of Aquitaine corresponded to the southern half of the old Roman province of Aquitania and its capital was at Toulouse. The other cities of his kingdom were Cahors, Agen, Périgueux, Bordeaux, and Saintes; the duchy of Vasconia was also part of his allotment. Charibert campaigned successfully against the Basques, but after his death they revolted again (632). At the same time the Bretons rose up against Frankish suzerainty. The Breton leader Judicael relented and made peace with the Franks and paid tribute after Dagobert threatened to lead an army against him (635). That same year Dagobert sent an army to subdue the Basques, which it did.


title: Francia

text: Meanwhile, Dagobert had Charibert's infant successor Chilperic assassinated and reunited the entire Frankish realm again (632), though he was forced by the strong Austrasian aristocracy to grant his own son Sigebert III to them as a subking in 633. This act was precipitated largely by the Austrasians' desire to be self-governing at a time when Neustrians dominated at the royal court. Chlothar had been the king at Paris for decades before becoming the king at Metz as well and the Merovingian monarchy was ever after him to be a Neustrian monarchy first and foremost.


title: Francia

text: Indeed, it is in the 640s that "Neustria" first appears in writing, its late appearance relative to "Austrasia" probably due to the fact that Neustrians (who formed the bulk of the authors of the time) called their region simply "Francia". "Burgundia" too defined itself in opposition to Neustria at about this time. However, it was the Austrasians, who had been seen as a distinct people within the realm since the time of Gregory of Tours, who were to make the most strident moves for independence.


title: Francia

text: The young Sigebert was dominated during his minority by the mayor, Grimoald the Elder, who convinced the childless king to adopt his own Merovingian-named son Childebert as his son and heir. After Dagobert's death in 639, the duke of Thuringia, Radulf, rebelled and tried to make himself king. He defeated Sigebert in what was a serious reversal for the ruling dynasty (640).


title: Francia

text: The king lost the support of many magnates while on campaign and the weakness of the monarchic institutions by that time are evident in his inability to effectively make war without the support of the magnates; in fact, he could not even provide his own bodyguard without the loyal aid of Grimoald and Adalgisel. He is often regarded as the first "roi fainéant": "do-nothing king", not insofar as he "did nothing", but insofar as he accomplished little.


title: Francia

text: Clovis II, Dagobert's successor in Neustria and Burgundy, which were thereafter attached yet ruled separately, was a minor for almost the whole of his reign. He was dominated by his mother Nanthild and the mayor of the Neustrian palace, Erchinoald. Erchinoald's successor, Ebroin, dominated the kingdom for the next fifteen years of near-constant civil war. On his death (656), Sigbert's son was shipped off to Ireland, while Grimoald's son Childebert reigned in Austrasia.


title: Francia

text: Ebroin eventually reunited the entire Frankish kingdom for Clovis's successor Chlothar III by killing Grimoald and removing Childebert in 661. However, the Austrasians demanded a king of their own again and Chlothar installed his younger brother Childeric II. During Chlothar's reign, the Franks had made an attack on northwestern Italy, but were driven off by Grimoald, King of the Lombards, near Rivoli.


title: Francia

text: In 673, Chlothar III died and some Neustrian and Burgundian magnates invited Childeric to become king of the whole realm, but he soon upset some Neustrian magnates and he was assassinated (675).


title: Francia

text: Theuderic III succeeded his brother Chlothar III in Neustria in 673, but Childeric II of Austrasia displaced him soon thereafter—until he died in 675, and Theuderic III retook his throne. When Dagobert II died in 679, Theuderic received Austrasia as well and became king of the whole Frankish realm. Thoroughly Neustrian in outlook, he allied with his mayor Berchar and made war on the Austrasian who had installed Dagobert II, Sigebert III's son, in their kingdom (briefly in opposition to Clovis III).


title: Francia

text: In 687 he was defeated by Pepin of Herstal, the Arnulfing mayor of Austrasia and the real power in that kingdom, at the Battle of Tertry and was forced to accept Pepin as sole mayor and "dux et princeps Francorum": "Duke and Prince of the Franks", a title which signifies, to the author of the "Liber Historiae Francorum", the beginning of Pepin's "reign". Thereafter the Merovingian monarchs showed only sporadically, in our surviving records, any activities of a non-symbolic and self-willed nature.


title: Francia

text: During the period of confusion in the 670s and 680s, attempts had been made to re-assert Frankish suzerainty over the Frisians, but to no avail. In 689, however, Pepin launched a campaign of conquest in Western Frisia ("Frisia Citerior") and defeated the Frisian king Radbod near Dorestad, an important trading centre. All the land between the Scheldt and the Vlie was incorporated into Francia.


title: Francia

text: Then, circa 690, Pepin attacked central Frisia and took Utrecht. In 695 Pepin could even sponsor the foundation of the Archdiocese of Utrecht and the beginning of the conversion of the Frisians under Willibrord. However, Eastern Frisia ("Frisia Ulterior") remained outside of Frankish suzerainty.


title: Francia

text: Having achieved great successes against the Frisians, Pepin turned towards the Alemanni. In 709 he launched a war against Willehari, duke of the Ortenau, probably in an effort to force the succession of the young sons of the deceased Gotfrid on the ducal throne. This outside interference led to another war in 712 and the Alemanni were, for the time being, restored to the Frankish fold.


title: Francia

text: However, in southern Gaul, which was not under Arnulfing influence, the regions were pulling away from the royal court under leaders such as Savaric of Auxerre, Antenor of Provence, and Odo of Aquitaine. The reigns of Clovis IV and Childebert III from 691 until 711 have all the hallmarks of those of "rois fainéants", though Childebert is founding making royal judgements against the interests of his supposed masters, the Arnulfings.


title: Francia

text: When Pepin died in 714, however, the Frankish realm plunged into civil war and the dukes of the outlying provinces became "de facto" independent. Pepin's appointed successor, Theudoald, under his widow, Plectrude, initially opposed an attempt by the king, Dagobert III, to appoint Ragenfrid as mayor of the palace in all the realms, but soon there was a third candidate for the mayoralty of Austrasia in Pepin's illegitimate adult son, Charles Martel.


title: Francia

text: After the defeat of Plectrude and Theudoald by the king (now Chilperic II) and Ragenfrid, Charles briefly raised a king of his own, Chlothar IV, in opposition to Chilperic. Finally, at a battle near Soisson, Charles definitively defeated his rivals and forced them into hiding, eventually accepting the king back on the condition that he receive his father's positions (718). There were no more active Merovingian kings after that point and Charles and his Carolingian heirs ruled the Franks.


title: Francia

text: After 718 Charles Martel embarked on a series of wars intended to strengthen the Franks' hegemony in western Europe. In 718 he defeated the rebellious Saxons, in 719 he overran Western Frisia, in 723 he suppressed the Saxons again, and in 724 he defeated Ragenfrid and the rebellious Neustrians, ending the civil war phase of his rule. In 720, when Chilperic II died, he had appointed Theuderic IV king, but this last was a mere puppet of his. In 724 he forced his choice of Hugbert for the ducal succession upon the Bavarians and forced the Alemanni to assist him in his campaigns in Bavaria (725 and 726), where laws were promulgated in Theuderic's name. In 730 Alemannia had to be subjugated by the sword and its duke, Lantfrid, was killed. In 734 Charles fought against Eastern Frisia and finally subdued it.


title: Francia

text: In the 730s the Umayyad conquerors of Spain, who had also subjugated Septimania, began advancing northwards into central Francia and the Loire valley. It was at this time (circa 736) that Maurontus, the "dux" of Provence, called in the Umayyads to aid him in resisting the expanding influence of the Carolingians. However, Charles invaded the Rhône Valley with his brother Childebrand and a Lombard army and devastated the region. It was because of the alliance against the Arabs that Charles was unable to support Pope Gregory III against the Lombards.


title: Francia

text: In 732 or 737—modern scholars have debated over the date—Charles marched against an Arab army between Poitiers and Tours and defeated it in a watershed battle that turned back the tide of the Arab advance north of the Pyrenees. But Charles's real interests lay in the northeast, primarily with the Saxons, from whom he had to extort the tribute which for centuries they had paid to the Merovingians.


title: Francia

text: Shortly before his death in October 741, Charles divided the realm as if he were king between his two sons by his first wife, marginalising his younger son Grifo, who did receive a small portion (it is unknown exactly what). Though there had been no king since Theuderic's death in 737, Charles's sons Pepin the Younger and Carloman were still only mayors of the palaces. The Carolingians had assumed the regal status and practice, though not the regal title, of the Merovingians. The division of the kingdom gave Austrasia, Alemannia, and Thuringia to Carloman and Neustria, Provence, and Burgundy to Pepin. It is indicative of the "de facto" autonomy of the duchies of Aquitaine (under Hunoald) and Bavaria (under Odilo) that they were not included in the division of the "regnum".


title: Francia

text: After Charles Martel was buried, in the Abbey of Saint-Denis alongside the Merovingian kings, conflict immediately erupted between Pepin and Carloman on one side and Grifo their younger brother on the other. Though Carloman captured and imprisoned Grifo, it may have been enmity between the elder brothers that caused Pepin to release Grifo while Carloman was on a pilgrimage to Rome. Perhaps in an effort to neutralise his brother's ambitions, Carloman initiated the appointment of a new king, Childeric III, drawn from a monastery, in 743. Others have suggested that perhaps the position of the two brothers was weak or challenged, or perhaps there Carloman was merely acting for a loyalist or legitimist party in the kingdom.


title: Francia

text: In 743 Pepin campaigned against Odilo and forced him to submit to Frankish suzerainty. Carloman also campaigned against the Saxons and the two together defeated a rebellion led by Hunoald at the head of the Basques and another led by Alemanni, in which Liutfrid of Alsatia probably died, either fighting for or against the brothers. In 746, however, the Frankish armies were still, as Carloman was preparing to retire from politics and enter the monastery of Mount Soratte. Pepin's position was further stabilised and the path was laid for his assumption of the crown in 751.


title: Francia

text: Pepin reigned as an elected king. Although such elections happened infrequently, a general rule in Germanic law stated that the king relied on the support of his leading men. These men reserved the right to choose a new "kingworthy" leader out of the ruling clan if they felt that the old one could not lead them in profitable battle. While in later France the kingdom became hereditary, the kings of the later Holy Roman Empire proved unable to abolish the elective tradition and continued as elected rulers until the empire's formal end in 1806.


title: Francia

text: Pepin solidified his position in 754 by entering into an alliance with Pope Stephen II, who presented the king of the Franks a copy of the forged "Donation of Constantine" at Paris and in a magnificent ceremony at Saint-Denis anointed the king and his family and declared him "patricius Romanorum" ("protector of the Romans"). The following year Pepin fulfilled his promise to the pope and retrieved the Exarchate of Ravenna, recently fallen to the Lombards, and returned it to the Papacy.