Rebecca Saxe: How we read each other’s minds

Rebecca Saxe: How we read each other’s minds. TED talk. More than 2 million views. 

Source: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/body/ape-teaches.html

Rebecca Saxe. Source: PBS

“Above and slightly behind your right ear, exists a part of your brain many scientists believe is specifically dedicated to thinking about other people’s thoughts – to predicting them, reading them, and empathizing with them. It’s called the temporoparietal junction, and this is the area cognitive neuroscientist Rebecca Saxe focuses on in her research.”

Q & A: Rebecca Saxe. From the MIT Technology Review. “To me, the signature of human social cognition is the same thing that makes good old-fashioned AI hard, which is its generativity. We can recognize and think about and reason through a literally infinite set of situations and goals and human minds. And yet we have a very particular and finite machinery to do that. So what are the right ingredients? If we know what those are, then we can try to understand how the combinations of those ingredients generate this massively productive, infinitely generalizable human capacity.”