TED Talk: How we read each other’s minds

I chose to watch Rebecca Saxe’s talk because the title just caught my attention. I assumed her lecture would be about how we as people can assume how other people are feeling just by looking at their body language. My assumption wasn’t completely wrong, but it wasn’t quite right either.
Saxe’s lecture begins with the question of how are we able to think of other peoples’ thoughts. She introduces a module of the brain named the right tempero-parietal junction, which is what allows us to think about what others are thinking about. She explains that just like most other parts of the brain, this one is no different when it comes to how long it takes to develop. Saxe presents us videos of children ranging from ages three to seven doing a false belief test, showing that it takes time for children to develop the ability of children to recognize that other people can have false beliefs. She moves on to explain that adults are not equal in this ability either. She points this out by giving an experiment similar to the one she gave the kids. And showing that people disagree about how much a person should be blamed for doing something wrong on purpose or by accident. Saxe even found out that you can change the way this part of your brain functions by using a magnetic pulse to confuse the neurons in charge of this type of thinking. When applied to someone making a moral judgment, people decided that accidents are not as blameless and something done with harmful intentions is more blameless. In a short Q&A after her talk, Rebecca speaks about how there is no danger with this technology yet and hopefully this research will impact education further down the road.
The most interesting part of this talk was that we have a specific part of the brain just for thinking about other peoples’ thoughts. I think it shows just how much of social creatures we are and how important it is for us to understand what’s happening inside someone else’s mind.
After reading Saxe’s profile, I think she is trustworthy. She’s a Cognitive Neuroscientist and made these discoveries while she was in graduate school and continues to do research at MIT.
If I were to do research on this information, I would like to set up a cross-cultural analysis in order to see how this part of the brain functions in cultures all over the world and how they would place blame on accidental and intentional harm. I would basically come up with tests similar to the ones shown in the video, except I would work very hard to make them relevant to the society in which I am testing. I would then compare my results with the one’s that Saxe has produced.