Our beliefs are a map of our world. They shape our hopes, direct our desires and intentions, and structure our values. They are as multifarious as their propositional contents, but their objects are not limited to propositions.  They may be directly about the world of our experience—thus causally connected with external objects—or, directly or indirectly, they may concern elements internal to the mind.  Beliefs also differ psychologically: in strength, depth, influence on behavior, and accessibility to consciousness.  They differ normatively in how well-grounded they are and hence in rationality and in justifiedness. Philosophers have written widely and informatively about belief, but there remains an aspect of the topic that needs further analysis.  It concerns the conditions under which an information-bearing state—say a perception or the recalling of some past event—yields belief.  This paper opens with a distinction between belief and a psychological condition easily conflated with belief, illustrates the tendency of philosophers to overlook this distinction, and offers a positive conception of the mind’s information-responsiveness that does not require as much belief-formation—doxastic uptake, if you like—as has been commonly supposed to be produced by perception and other experiences.  This conception is clarified by a partial sketch of the natural economy of mind.  The paper then considers whether the economical view proposed requires abandoning the venerable belief-desire conception of intentional action, and, in the concluding section, suggests some ways in which intellectual responsibility is both clarified and extended by the overall work of the paper.