Other People's Thoughts in Your Brain

Rebecca Saxe
Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Human adults conceive of one another as beings with minds, and  
attribute to one another mental states like perceptions, desires and  
beliefs. That is, we understand other people using a "Theory of  
Mind". My talk will discuss recent evidence suggesting that distinct  
human brain regions are recruited just when we reason about other  
minds in this way, and will discuss the implications of these results  
for theories about the cognitive bases of such "mind-reading".