![]() When Liane Young, one of Saxe’s former students, disrupted the rTPJ using magnetic fields, she found that people were more lenient towards the deliberate poisoner, as long as her friend survived. Intent matters, and we need the rTPJ to judge intent. Consider a woman who poisons her friend’s coffee-if she does so deliberately, we’d judge her more harshly than if she acted accidentally. If the area is stimulated by electric currents, people become better at taking someone else’s perspective.Īnd if the region is disrupted, it changes our ability to reason about morality. If the neurons within it are better-connected (and well-linked to other parts of the brain), people show less bias towards their own in-groups. If the rTPJ is bigger, people are more likely to behave altruistically. Many other studies have since expanded on those early results. Yet every group that sought to identify brain regions implicated in ToM got essentially the same answer and in study after study, we still do.” In those circumstances, neuroimaging is notoriously fickle, producing many false positives and false negatives. “Because there was almost no pre-existing neuroscience of theory of mind, researchers came to the topic with unusually few preconceptions about where to look in the brain. The consensus was striking, Saxe later wrote. This region, the duo wrote, helps people to think about thinking people.Īt the same time, many other neuroscientists were doing similar experiments and getting the same answers. This experiment showed that the TPJ is active specifically when people are “reasoning about the contents of another person’s minds”-the essence of theory of mind. In 2005, she and Nancy Kanwisher scanned people’s brains while they listened to stories in which protagonists made poor choices based on false beliefs. She was one of the first scientists to link the rTPJ to theory of mind-the ability to understand the mental states of other people. “For a long time, people have speculated that we use the same mechanisms to reason about other people as about our hypothetical selves,” says Rebecca Saxe from MIT. It’s Present You taking a hit to help out Future You. So think of self-control as a kind of temporal selflessness. Self-control is essentially the same skill, except that those other shoes belong to your future self-a removed and hypothetical entity who might as well be a different person. Empathy depends on your ability to overcome your own perspective, appreciate someone else’s, and step into their shoes. But Soutschek, by using magnetic fields to briefly shut down the rTPJ, has shown that it’s also involved in self-control. This area has long been linked to empathy and selflessness. ![]() You’re now pointing at your right temporoparietal junction (rTPJ). Press your right index finger to the top of your right ear, where it meets your head. But a new study by Alexander Soutschek at the University of Zurich suggests that self-control is also influenced by another brain region-and one that casts this ability in a different light. The kids have to tamp down their immediate desires and focus on long-term goals-an ability that correlates with their later health, wealth, and academic success, and that is supposedly controlled by the front part of the brain. ![]() This “ Marshmallow Test,” first conducted in the 1960s, perfectly illustrates the ongoing war between impulsivity and self-control. If they can resist eating it for 15 minutes, they’ll get two. You’ve likely seen the video before: a stream of kids, confronted with a single, alluring marshmallow. ![]()
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