The ability to think and reason about the mental states of others (Theory of Mind) is, together with other specific human abilities such as the "Mental Time Travel (mental time travel) or ability to infer intentions in the objects according to how they move in physical space ( biological motion), a group of cognitive tools that are developed pre-programmed into the human being and where anchor cultural developments such as religion.
Rebecca Saxe, who runs a group of researchers in the Department of Cognitive Science Brain and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , specializes in the study of Theory of Mind. Theory of Mind is a key to understanding how we may be able to automatically generate such vivid abstractions of events that are in principle inaccessible to perception: the mental states of others. Rebecca Saxe recently produced a summary that I found it quite full of developments in this field. The article is entitled Theory of Mind (Neural Basis) . In the introduction, says:
externally observable components of human actions involve only a small fraction of the information is important. Human observers are more interested in perceiving or inferring mental states - beliefs, desires and intentions - that underlie the observable exterior. If a person checks his watch Are you uncertain about when, late for an appointment, or bored by a conversation? If fire and wounded a friend in a hunting trip, he intended to seek revenge or just confused at his friend with a partridge?
The mechanism that people use to make inferences about mental states of others is known as Theory of Mind (ToM). One of the findings most outstanding recent human cognitive neuroscience is that there is a group of brain regions in the human cerebral cortex that underlie this selective and specific mechanism.
The importance of mental states for purposes of prediction of behavior is especially clear when the person performing the behavior is misinformed: that is, when the actor has a false belief. Therefore, false beliefs are strongly represented in studies of ToM. The original paradigm of false belief was designed to be used in children of preschool age. In the basic design, a child watches as a dummy place an object at location A. The doll leaves the scene and the object is transferred to location B. The doll is back and asks the child to predict where the puppet will look for the object. The three year olds answered that the doll will look in to location B, where the object actually is, the older children say that the doll will look at location A, where the doll was the object seen.
the tradition of developmental psychology many of the initial research on the neuroimaging theory of mind required that the subjects attributed false beliefs people into cartoons or caricatures. Most of these studies have used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure changes in cortical oxygenation.
Throughout these studies, a very consistent set of brain regions has been implicated in the condition of "false belief" for each study, including the temporo-parietal junction left and right (JTP), medial parietal cortex (including the posterior cingulate and precuneus) and the medial prefrontal cortex (MFPC). These same brain regions have been identified by converging methodologies, including studies of Theory of Mind in states with injury and transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS). This group of regions brain is sometimes collectively called the "Red Tom."
A critical issue that emerged from this work is whether the ToM network is a different domain-specific neural systems and to think about the mind. The alternative is that some or all of the ToM network regions are actually recruited to some other aspect that meet the test of false belief. There is more to the fact solve the test of false belief that the very concept of false belief, and there is more to the concept of belief that stand the test of false belief. In particular, attributing a false belief to another person depends heavily on two cognitive skills that are not specific a theory of mind: language and inhibitory control. Conceivably, the ToM network activation may reflect a combination of language processing and inhibitory control. This paper reviews first then the evidence for the relationship between ToM, language, and inhibitory control in the brain, then analyzed to further research on the neural bases of ToM.
As is clear from reading the essay, what actually happens when we theorize about the mental states of others is that we generate beliefs about desires, beliefs, feelings or intentions that might motivate the behavior of others. Theory of Mind (ToM) is then a process that has more to do with the formation of concepts and not to be confused with empathy. However, quite possibly the generation of beliefs about the mental states of others is biased beliefs to detect "true", that is, one often assumes that what the other believes it is mostly true. Remember that ToM is a "guide" to try to predict the actions of others. If, however, continuously we assume most of what others believe is false or misleading the social world would become very confusing. Saxe puts it as follows:
More generally, one might expect that the ToM attributions were used for both true and false belief: in our daily lives, we must expect that other people have mostly true beliefs, or their actions would become completely unpredictable.
While empathy makes use of one's own sensory-motor systems, the "red ToM" looks like an entirely different system. Empathy is more related to those brain regions of the generation depends subjective experience of self, for example the perception of feelings. Saxe concluded that despite what might appear at first glance, does not depend on ToM of these cortical systems we use to act (motor) or feeling (sensory):
Theory of Mind and Mirror NeuronsIn the area of \u200b\u200b"understanding human actions, is an intuitive distinction between actions own, and actions taken by others. The neural mechanisms required to implement their own actions toward a goal are quite specific, including sensory perception of the local environment, planning and motor control. Understanding the actions of someone else it might seem, in contrast, an achievement highly abstract, if not semimilagroso. However, recently many researchers have proposed that higher cognitive functions may be abstract sensorimotor foundations. That is, an observer can understand the actions of others using the same cognitive and neural mechanisms used to plan their own. This idea is sometimes called "motor theory of social cognition."
An advantage of the motor theory of social cognition is its parsimony. The action prediction and understanding can be achieved with the same cognitive and neural mechanisms that the viewer already uses for its own planning and execution, but does not need an extra system for ToM.
As described above, however, Recent neuroscientific evidence undermines this view. There are specific brain regions involved to attribute mental states, and these brain regions are not part of the observer's own motor system. ToM network is completely different, anatomically, of the brain regions involved in executive action or the action perception. Many neuroimaging studies have focused on activation during action redundant perceptual and executive action, the ventral premotor cortex, the inferior frontal gyrus and right inferior parietal cortex. In contrast, regions implicated in ToM have no known role in motor planning and executive control.
However, when reviewing the evidence that Saxe has theorized that some of "ToM network (the MFPC and medial parietal cortex) could be activated by other functions and thus be part of a" domain- general. " According to the author the right temporo-parietal junction, and perhaps the left is the only region (domain-specific) that seems to specialize in the generation of beliefs about the mental states of others. And is that during the activation of the ToM network come into play other cognitive skills: 1) the language, 2) inhibitory control. The generation of beliefs about the mind of others need simultaneous processing of language and cognitive inhibibitorio control, ie, there is the task of deciding between what "you know the physical environment" and that "one knows what the other thought on the physical environment." This requires the ability to inhibit one of two responses:
In general, fMRI and lesion evidence converge on three conclusions regarding the relationship between ToM and inhibitory control in the adult brain: (1) Performance successful in many kinds of tasks on the type of false belief is dependent on both a domain-general of inhibitory control and domain-specific mechanisms to represent mental states. (2) These contributions are supported by different neural mechanisms, which can be differentiated. (3) The domain-specific component of ToM depends at least in part, on the JTP.
A major open question has to do with the relative role of left and right JTP in ToM. The fMRI studies point to the right JTP, JTP while the left has been the focus of studies by injury. Future studies should use non-verbal tasks Apperly and colleagues developed by patients who have lesions in the right JTP.
Another approach to assess the extent to which the network performs functions ToM specific (generate beliefs about the beliefs of others) or general, is subject to certain tasks to individuals with acquired cortical damage (eg stroke) and is expressed with language difficulties (aphasia):
Ian Apperly and colleagues provided strong new evidence to the same scenario. PH, a young man who had a stroke left, was tested with a battery of tests for language and ToM. Although PH had great difficulty in testing syntax, specifically including embedded clauses syntax, showed no problems with non-verbal tests of ToM, including belief tasks falsas de primero y segundo orden (Lo que X piensa que Y piensa). En conjunto, estos estudios proporcionan clara evidencia, aún cuando existe discapacidad severa gramatical, que en la edad adulta las bases neurales de la toM y lenguaje son en gran parte distintas.
Así, para Saxe y colaboradores la Junción Temporo-Parietal derecha es principal candidato a ser el área específica que procesa la formación de creencias sobre los estados mentales de los demás. Incluyo un video en donde se observan descripciones gráficas y modelos anatómicos:
the end, the article raises the following conclusions and future directions in research on ToM:
In all recent studies are beginning to shed light on brain regions involved when adult humans reason about the minds other people - that is, in Theory of Mind. A surprising result in these early studies is that a particular group of complicated regions are consistently involved in the Theory of Mind, called "ToM network, including the temporo-parietal junction (TPJ) right and left prefrontal cortex medial (MPFC) and the Medial parietal cortex (PC). These brain regions involved in the Theory of Mind are remarkably robust. These regions can be identified in 90% of individual subjects, after just 20 minutes of scanning time, the same regions have been reported in laboratories in different continents, using different procedures and different stimuli. The same group of regions have been identified as relevant to ToM injury studies and TMS (transcranial magnetic stimulation). Activation patterns comparable reliability are routinely observed for perceptual mechanisms, such as sensory and motor cortices, but rarely for dimensions of cognition as abstract and complex as the Theory of Mind. The regions of the "theory of mind" thus offering a rare window into the mind brain.
Still, critical questions remain open: What are the specific roles of brain regions that make up the ToM network? How does the ToM network interact with other brain regions that underlie language, inhibitory control and perceptual action (eg mirror neuron system)? How do these brain regions develop? Are these brain mechanisms universal to all human beings? Are specifically human? There are many important research remains to be done.
is plausible that the ToM network into action even without physically being present no agent, that is, nothing prevents us to theorize about the mental states of creatures that no longer exist or exist in a remote physical space . From there it is only a small step to theorize about supernatural beings. It is then natural that no effort, as an extension of the ToM, we can reason about intentions, beliefs and desires that we assume are in the "mind of God", for example, assumptions about the degree of authoritarianism, benevolence or indifference.
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