The brain does not like to work. It's a lot of work to have a true picture of the world live inside the brain. So the brain doesn't do that as much as you (it) thinks.
Some of the ways the brain avoids work may give help to people who show computers how to do the work computers do. Here are the ways I will talk about:
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Have lots of little boxes of work. Each box looks for just one thing and knows how to do just one thing. It knows just enough to see the one thing and make the thing it knows how to do happen.
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Many boxes are looking at the same time. The brain is always ready to do something else.
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If two boxes both know the same thing or two, you can make another box to hold what's shared. But you only do that if it makes there be less work. Do that enough and you may get a true picture of part of the world. But most of the time you don't.
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Some of the little boxes turn other boxes on or off, or they tell other boxes to slow down or go faster. Or they say Stop! But that's all they tell the other boxes. They do not – most of the time – share the things they know.
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Your ideas about a thing are tied to knowing what you can do with that thing. Take a wide, long floor-like thing made of wood. It's higher at one end than the other. Take a baby that moves only on hands and knees. She will start out not knowing when the high end is too high, so she will end up slipping down the wood on her stomach. But then she will learn when the high end is too high. Later, she will learn to walk. But she will try to walk down wood with a high end that is too high and fall (except that someone catches her). What she knew about too-high-on-hands-and-knees does not help her know about too-high-for-walking.
What her brain cares about is not what's true about a piece of wood, but what's true of it and the body and the wood and the one thing the body is doing now.
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The brain is good at moving things in the world to make it have less work to do. There is a game where you make words from pieces with letters on them. You have seven pieces. When you get new pieces, you put them together with old pieces to make parts of words. That makes it easier for the brain to see whole words. And in a game where you put pieces together to form a picture, you turn pieces around to see if they will fit or group pieces with other pieces like them. All of this pushes work out into the world.
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You can also move things around so that you don't have to plan. Instead of knowing all steps at the start, you make each step leave something in the world that will make one of those boxes (remember the boxes?) do the next thing. That's less work than remembering all the steps and remembering what to do if the step didn't work.
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But sometimes plans are less work. That's when it's too easy for the brain to go "Look! tree-climbing-animal-that-dogs-like-to-chase!" instead of just getting the job done.
Those are some of the things I will talk about, but using bigger words.