--Original published at CatherinesCollegeBlog
I chose the TED talk “How we read each other’s minds” for this first impression post. I was drawn to the title of this video because I have always been curious of what others think, whether it’s what they think of me or what they think of other events and people in the world. The ability to read minds has been my go-to superpower to choose since I can remember.
Throughout the years, philosophy has wrestled with the problem of other minds: whether other people have minds and why it is hard to know or change what other people think. Rebecca Saxe, the speaker for this TED talk, introduces a new problem with other minds. She asks how is it so easy to know other minds, like when we are shown a picture of a mother holding her newborn and can instantly see thoughts of love. Saxe identifies the region of the brain responsible for thinking of other people’s thoughts, known as the right temporoparietal junction or the RTPJ. Saxe then suggests, could differences in how adults think about other people’s thoughts be explained by differences in the RTPJ that controls this? To find out, she performed a research study where a hypothetical “Grace” and her friend stop for coffee. The friend asks Grace to put sugar in her coffee for her, and when Grace goes to do so, she notices the white powder that looks like sugar is labeled “deadly poison.” Grace still decides to put the white powder in, which ends up having no effect on her friend after she consumes the coffee. People were asked about the blame they felt Grace should receive, and Saxe tracked their RTPJ activity as these people made their decisions. When there was little brain activity observed in the RTPJ region, people paid little attention to Grace’s belief that the sugar was really sugar and they said she deserved a lot of blame for any accident that could have resulted. When there was a lot of brain activity in that region, people paid more attention to her innocent belief and said she deserved less blame for an accident that could have occurred. The research participants were then exposed to a magnetic pulse that when sent to the RTPJ region would disable the person’s control of this area and create involuntary reactions. The magnetic pulse reversed people’s decisions about the amount of blame they thought Grace should receive, which suggests that it is possible to change people’s moral judgements.
What I found most interesting was the impact of the magnetic pulse on the research results. It is a bit alarming the control certain technologies, tools, and tests, like the magnetic pulse, can have over our behaviors and thoughts. It also makes me wonder the true significance of morality and just decisions when something seemingly unbreakable (depending on the person) can be so easily manipulated.
Rebecca Saxe seems like a relatively trustworthy speaker, as she is a professor of cognitive neuroscience at MIT. She also used a correlation graph to illustrate the relationship between RTPJ activity and the decision for the amount of blame to be given. She performed research not only for the study regarding sugar, but also with young children and their ability to recognize hypothetical thought processes of toys. Her studies cover a relatively wide age range which is also good.
My research idea would question whether the magnetic pulse can control our moral decisions, instead of just disabling them to cause the involuntary reactive decision. This would enable researchers to create desirable outcomes for their research participants involved in the study. Essentially, instead of the magnetic pulse simply changing our original moral decisions, it would control which decision we make. I would send different variations of the pulse to the RTPJ to test which pulse creates which reaction and perform the study with multiple people to ensure the replication of whatever reaction it creates.