The human brain is certainly designed to perform multiple operations simultaneously. However the functioning of the human mind cannot be reduced to mere parallel processing, since it possesses one more ability, which is currently unavailable to computers, either sequential or parallel. In human activity, every action may serve for many embracing activities simultaneously, and the same operation performed is a part of a number quite different actions. This “versatility” of every operation provides much faster processing speeds than mere parallel processing, since the latter just distributes the task among a number of processors establishing a kind of synchronization between them, with all the operations preserved—while the former drastically diminishes the number of operations required.

Human culture is based on that kind of universality, and technological development might quite often be considered as inventing new types of universal operations, or increasing the versatility of the old ones. Using the computer analogy, what formerly required a long sequence of commands becomes accessible via just a few keystrokes, or a single mouse click. Of course, this analogy suffers from incompleteness, being unable to convey the simultaneity of qualitatively different processes in the same operation. Thus, one can go somewhere with a few quite different businesses in the mind (say, to sign a contract, to do sightseeing, to get a gift for a friend and to see a lover). This looks as if a few persons co-existed within the same person, acting simultaneously.

This “multiplicity” is reflected in the functioning of the brain as well. No neural process can serve a single purpose, being a part of many simultaneously developing patterns of behavior. That is, there is no actual distribution of the task between the different parts of the brain, but rather every one of them is acting on itself, relatively independent of the others, though restricted by them. The brain (and any organism at all) is a symbiosis of lower-level organisms, rather than a rigidly built system; this is especially so for the organization of the mind, which originates from social interactions of the individuals and is largely dependent on culture.

The natural consequence is that every particular mental act is neurally represented by an ensemble of correlated neural processes, rather than a single process somehow localized in the brain. In other words, a mental activity corresponds to a pattern of neural processes, which can involve multiple individuals and/or multiple brains.

Since every brain structure simultaneously participates many mental activitites, different activities will either superimpose or interfere. Also, the dominance of a specific mental component is determined by the number of its links to the other processes, and the hierarchy of activities may refold with a different process put on the topmost level. Thus an operation that has been dependent on some higher-level actions may become an action itself, so that the former embedding actions would fold into its operations.