The art of mindreading - empathy or rational inference?
Wednesday, May 5, 2010 - 05:10
in Psychology & Sociology
The ability to infer what another person is thinking is an essential tool for social interaction and is known by neuroscientists as 'Theory of Mind' (ToM), but how does the brain actually allow us to do this? We are able to rationally infer what someone knows, thinks, or intends, but we are also able to 'slip into their shoes' and infer how they feel, and it seems that the brain processes these different types of information in different ways, as confirmed by a new report in the June 2010 issue of Elsevier's Cortex (http://www.elsevier.com/locate/cortex)...