How do we think of other's thoughts?

 

 "I know you think you understand what you thought I said, but I'm not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant."

                                       Alan Greenspan

 

 

Recently I watched a very interesting Ted talk about the ability of our brain to read, understand and judge others’ minds. Rebecca Saxe is a researcher and a teacher in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Saxe (2009) presents her research on the discovery of special brain region for thinking about other people’s thoughts. She explains that some of the differences between people, in how we judge others, can be explained by differences in their brain system. She assumes that all people have mind and are interested to know what others want or believe. It reminded me about an American romantic comedy “What women want” directed by Nancy Meyer, Helen Hunt and Mel Gibson. In reality we are not able to hear the thoughts of other people as Mel Gibson does; therefore we try to understand them by moral judgment.

According to Saxe our brain is made up of pieces, brain cells that we share with all other animals, with monkeys, mice, etc. While putting them together in a particular network we get the capacity of the brain to think about minds which is called Right Temporo-Parietal Junction (Right TPJ). It is above and behind our right ear and it is not used for solving any other kinds of logical problems. So, the job of Saxe’s field of cognitive neuroscience is to try to understand how you can put together simple units, simple messages over space and time, in a network, and get that amazing capacity to think about minds. Saxe also notes that although human adults are really good at understanding others’ minds, we weren't always that way; it takes children a long time to reach to that level. Saxe presents her interview made with three to seven year old children and adults showing that children think differently while using Right TPJ. Then she put children into the brain scanner and observed what is going on in their brain as they develop this ability to think about other people's thoughts. So the first thing they saw in children was that the same brain region, the Right TPJ, is being used while children are thinking about other people, but it's not quite like the adult brain, whereas, this brain region is almost completely specialized in the adults.  But of course, people differ from one another in how good they are at thinking of others’ minds, how often they do it and how accurately.

 

So the question was, could differences among adults in how they think about other people's thoughts be explained in terms of differences in this brain region? And Saxe explains that over the course of childhood and even into adolescence, both the cognitive system, our mind's ability to think about other minds, and the brain system that supports it are continuing, slowly, to develop.

Saxe’s research was quite interesting and on point when it comes to other peoples thoughts and brain differences. For me the most amazing part of the speech was the notion of morality in the three to seven year old child during the interview. I noticed two interesting things: First, the event must have a cause and next, one needs a hypothesis to explain the event or the nature of the cause, no matter how irrational that hypothesis is.