Rebecca Saxe speaks at TEDGlobal 2009. Photo: James Duncan Davidson

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.

Rebecca Saxe: How we read each other's mindsAt TEDGlobal 2009, Saxe delves into our amazing capacity to identify and predict others’ emotions and actions, and how this ability is learned throughout childhood. This skill serves an important function in human relationships – we learn how to fill in the unspoken blanks between what someone is thinking and how they are presenting themselves. This is what allows us to glance at a photo of someone and be able to know what she is feeling.

Saxe’s talk is this week’s featured idea for TED Weekends on the Huffington Post. Below, find essays all about our ability to, in a sense, read minds.

Rebecca Saxe: Learning to Read Someone Else’s Mind

My TED Talk, above, is about the process by which we learn to read each other. Here are five reasons that I study how human brains think about other minds.

(1) It is a hard, and awesome, problem. To me, the most breathtaking idea I’ve ever heard is that each thought a person ever has, every moment of experience, of insight, of reflection, of aspiration, is equivalent to a pattern of brain cells firing in space and time. How does a pattern of brain activity constitute a moral judgment? A moment of empathy for a fictional character? The idea for a sentence you’re about to write? Someday, scientists will be able to imagine, simultaneously, these abstract thoughts and how each corresponds to a specific pattern of brain activity. I don’t expect this understanding to arrive in my lifetime. But it’s thrilling to imagine that future, and to feel that my research might be a small step on the route that gets us there. Read the full essay »

Phillip M. Miner: The Neurology of Disgust

Growing up believing you are an abomination is strange. But, if you are gay and grew up in Kansas (or many other parts of the world) — like I did — it’s not all that uncommon. We’re told from a very young age that being gay is wrong and gross. The lesson that men who have sex with men are disgusting is repeated so frequently, your average kid quickly gets the message.

Sometimes the moral judgment is delivered directly — often times through someone with religious moral authority or family. Other times it comes more subtly through language cues. In my experience, the euphemisms for men who have sex with men seem to bleed together to form a powerful and often false identity, saying all men who have sex with men are feminine (“pansy”, “fairy”, “poof”), perverts (“pillow biter,” “corn holer,” “sword swallower”), and abominations (“queer,” “bent”).

There’s disagreement on the physical mechanisms for creating moral beliefs in the brain. Read the full essay»

Barbara Ficarra: Equipped for Empathy

“The great gift of human beings is that we have the power of empathy.” These are heartfelt words by award-winning actress Meryl Streep.

Do we all have the power of empathy? Are we hardwired to know what other people want? Is it easy to think about other people’s thoughts?

Rebecca Saxe’s enlightening TEDTalk ”How To Read Each Other’s Minds” asks: “Why is it so hard to know what somebody else wants or believes?” “Why is it so hard to change what somebody else wants or believes?” And “How is it so easy to know other minds?” Read the full essay »

Thomas Insel: Toward a new understanding of mental illness “These are just remarkable changes,” says Thomas Insel, Director of the National Institute of Mental Health, in today’s talk given at TEDxCaltech. “All of them boil down to understanding something about the disease that has allowed us to detect early and intervene early.”

Sadly though, Insel says, the news isn’t good across the board. The rate of suicide, he says, has not changed at all over the last three decades. About 90% of suicides are related to mental illness. And while 1 in 5 people will be affected by a psychiatric disorder, scientists still understand dangerously little about these diseases. In fact, says Insel, we don’t even know what to call them. The terms preferred at the moment – “mental disorders” and “behavioral disorders” — are misleading, because they point to symptoms rather than to the disease itself.

“Both of those terms which have been in play for a century or more are actually now impediments to progress,” says Insel. “What we need conceptually here is to rethink these disorders as ‘brain disorders.’”

In this talk, Insel reveals why he believes we are about to turn a corner in understanding the brain, which he calls an “organ of surreal complexity.” As scientists get a better understanding of its workings and development, they’ll start to understand the patterns of brain disorders. It’s possible that, as with heart disease, scientists will be able to identify risk factors. To hear how this could lead to early detection of brain disorders — and even interventions before a person so much as experiences or displays symptoms — watch this fascinating talk.

“The good news stories in medicine are early detection and early intervention,” explains Insel. “If we waited until the heart attack, we would be sacrificing 1.1 million lives every year in this country to heart disease. That’s precisely what we do when we decide that everyone with one of these brain disorders has a ‘behavioral disorder’ – we wait until the behavior becomes manifest.”

Insel’s talk reminds us of two powerful TED playlists.

First it reminds us of the list “All Kinds of Minds,” which features several TED Talks from people who’ve had the experience of living with a brain disorder. It begins with legal scholar Elyn Saks describing her own experience of schizophrenia, moves on to activist autism activist Temple Grandin describing how her mind works, and builds to Joshua Walters, who is bipolar, asking: What’s the balance between medicating craziness away and riding its creative edge?

Insel’s talk also reminds us of the playlist “How does my brain work?,” which brings together talks about incredible research that’s helping scientists better understand our minds. It begins with neuroscientist Daniel Wolport giving a fascinating theory on why the brain evolved, moves on to Allan Jones and his initiative to map of the brain, and ends with Michael Merzenich giving evidence of the brain’s plasticity.

Also very worth checking out: Thomas Insel’s blog, where he just last week wrote about CLARITY, the newest way scientists at Stanford University are looking at the brain »

Brain Games returns to the air next Monday, April 22, with the episode “Focus Pocus.” In the episode, TEDGlobal 2013 speaker Apollo Robbins, the “gentleman thief,” joins Silva and psychologist Brian Scholl, director of Yale University’s Perception and Cognition Lab, for a look at how the brain focuses on important details – or at least, those it thinks are important.

Below, watch Silva talk about how we focus — and over-extend our focus — in today’s media landscape:

And Robbins describes how he uses the brain’s tools of focus for sleight-of-hand and, in the process, makes a pen disappear:

Some staff picks of smart, funny, bizarre and cool stuff on the interwebs this week:

Super-duper useful mandatory homework: Get a secure password now. As xkcd explains, most people’s approach to secure passwords (a word bastardized with “random” capital letters and punctuation that’s difficult to remember) is wrong. Now go get yourself a good password. If you need to ask why this is important, watch our informative playlist all about hackers.

Scientists reveal a new technique called CLARITY that can render a brain nearly invisible — that is, rid the brain of light-scattering lipids that make it hard to look at in detail. [io9]

A must-watch Frontline documentary on the conflict in Syria, but not like you’ve seen before. A powerful human-interest piece. [PBS]

Markham Nolan: How to separate fact and fiction online

Read an eye-opening piece by Gina Kolata on the world of sham academic journals. It’s disturbing that even reputable academics get scammed. [NYTimes] It’s becoming increasingly difficult to parse what’s legitimate on the interwebs, as we learn from Markham Nolan’s talk on false Internet stories. Here’s a useful guide to some predatory open-access journals.

We’re a little late on this one, but The Invisible War is a harrowing, Academy Award-nominated documentary about rape in the U.S. military. (Did you know that 25 percent of U.S. servicewomen don’t report their rape because the person to report to is their rapist?) Watch the documentary »

Become a better thinker by applying Bayesian reasoning. [io9]

A riveting data visualization animation of all the drone attacks in Pakistan since 2004. [Pitch Interactive]

Sunni Brown: Doodlers, unite!

Download a neat illustrated guide to TED2013 drawn by TED alum and Ford Futurist Sheryl Connelly. Read about her notes or download them from WeTransfer. Sunni Brown, doodle advocate, would approve. Watch her talk on doodling.

A slightly odd story about Rami Abdul Rahman, basically the one-man team behind the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which produces the main casualty reports coming out of the Syrian conflict. [NYTimes]

Completely useless and untimely: The Useless Website generator »

Mapping the human brain is an endeavor several TED speakers have already begun embarking on. Here, a look at talks about how this mapping can take place — and why it’s a scientific priority.

Erin Schuman: How neurons reach out to each other
If we’re going to understand how our brains create us, we will need to know how our brains build themselves at the smallest levels. It’s no easy feat: each neuron can have 100,000 synapses. But using some of the same methods you could use to count the number of fish in a pond, Erin Schuman shows how neurons distribute the assembly work in a decentralized way — and how understanding those decentralized systems could further our understanding of all kinds of successful networks.

Ralph Adolphs: The social brain
We humans can’t help but attribute our social qualities our non-human companions. Anyone who’s yelled at their computer can attest to that. Ralph Adolphs studies that kind of social behavior, both when it’s normal and when it’s not. In this fascinating talk, he shares how we know which regions of our brains are essential to social interactions and sheds light on the behavioral loop in which our actions and feelings affect our perceptions of social situations as much as the realities of those situations.

Andres Lozano: Turning dials in the brain
Sometimes, when you want to learn how something works, you need poke it with an electrode. Andres Lozano does that to living brains, albeit with far more precision and control than you may think is possible — and he’s alleviated symptoms of crippling neurological disorders, like dystonia and Parkinson’s, along the way. Telling uplifting success stories, he shows you how he does it and previews his promising next steps — attempting to “turn the lights back on” in Alzheimer’s patients.

Miguel Nicolelis: A monkey that controls a robot with its thoughts. No, really.

“This is 100 brain cells firing,” says Nicolelis. “Everything that defines what human nature is comes from these storms that roll over the hills and valleys of our brains and define our memories, our beliefs, our feelings, our plans for the future.”

In this talk, given at TEDMed, Nicolelis describes how his team created what they call a “brain machine interface” which uses censors to listen to brainstorms, extract their motor messages, translate them into digital commands and send them to artificial device to reproduce movement. What does this mean? A monkey, named Aurora, whose brainwaves controlled, first, a robotic arm that played video games for her and, next, a human-like avatar six times her size on the other side of the world.

To hear more about how this works, and the implications it could have for those who’ve lost motor function — as well as for us all — watch this mind-bending talk. Here, more talks on monkeys and brain control.

Talks on monkeys:

1. Isabel Behncke: Evolution’s gift of play, from bonobo apes to humans
2. Laurie Santos: A monkey economy as irrational as ours
3. Lauren Brent: Watching monkeys make friends
4. Frans de Waal: Moral behavior in animals
5. Susan Savage-Rumbaugh: The gentle genius of bonobos
6. Spencer Wells builds a family tree for humanity
7. Jane Goodall helps humans and animals live together

Talks on mind control:

1. Tan Le: A headset that reads your brain waves
2. Ariel Garten: Know thyself, with a brain scanner
3. José del R. Millán: Mind-controlled machines
4. Daniel Wolpert: The real reason for brains
5. Rebecca Saxe: How brains make moral judgments
6. Kwabena Boahen on a computer that works like the brain
7. Ed Boyden: A light switch for neurons

Our brains: predictably irrational
We humans are amazing specimens of reason, but our brains are also remarkably buggy. We make absurd choices, behave inconsistently, and are constantly irrational. Watch 11 talks on just how fallible we can be.

What’s wrong with what we eat?
Are you eating the wrong stuff? What exactly is the junk you’re putting in your body? What about people who don’t even have enough to eat? 5 talks on our problematic eating habits.

One morning when she woke up, Jill Bolte Taylor felt pain behind her left eye similar to what she’d felt biting into an ice cream cone. Soon, her own appearance — from her hands to her reflection — felt utterly bizarre to her. Next she lost her balance and then her internal chatter simply stopped — years of thinking dissolving into silence. It was only when her right side became paralyzed that she, a neuroscientist, realized that she was having a stroke.

Jill Bolte Taylor's stroke of insightIn her classic talk from TED2006, watched more than 10 million times, Taylor explains what it felt like to have a stroke, and how the experience — from which it took her eight years to recover — gave her a deeply different understanding of who she is.

Today’s TED Weekends on the Huffington Post explores the theme “Resetting the brain,” digging into the ways our brains frame our lives, often in contradictory, unexplainable ways. Below, three of the essays from the site.

Jill Bolte Taylor: Does Our Planet Need a Stroke of Insight?

Before 2008, everything I did had something to do with mental health. I’m a neuroscientist, and I was all about understanding how we create our perception of reality, and understanding what’s going on in the brains of people who experience hallucination and delusion.

But then I gave a TEDTalk about my own experience with stroke. Within weeks of delivering that talk in 2008, my life changed and the repercussions still resonate loudly in my world. My book, My Stroke of Insight, has been translated into 30 languages. Time and Oprah’s Soul Series came calling. I’ve traveled to Europe, Asia, South America, Canada; I’ve crisscrossed the states. And in February 2012, I took a trip to Antarctica with Vice President Al Gore, 20 scientists, and 125 global leaders who care deeply about climate.

While I was traveling the globe, I still thought my core issue was mental health. But, perhaps spurred by that trip to Antarctica, I’ve come to understand that the two issues of mental health and global health are closely linked — if not one and the same.

Read the full essay >>

Ben Thomas: Some Songs Just Can’t Be Heard

The composer’s wife had died suddenly; violently. Here, at the premiere of his latest piece, the audience whispered that this new song must be a tribute to her memory. From the first notes, vast choruses of voices seemed to tear themselves from the strings of a single violin — gnashing in conflict, pleading for understanding; howling beyond the reach of words.

Despite the Chaconne‘s harrowing nakedness, none of us can know just how it felt to be Johann Sebastian Bach as the piece’s strains first poured from his pen. Although the composition conjures up, as the composer Brahms wrote, “a whole world of the deepest thoughts and most powerful feelings,” the original of that world belonged — and still belongs — to Bach alone. We can guess intuitively at his thoughts; try to feel how we imagine he felt — but no matter how closely we listen, we can never fully know how it felt to be him in those moments.

And after all the centuries since Chaconne, we’re still struggling to understand just why that is.

Read the full essay  >> 

Robert M. Bilder’s The Balancing Brain: Finding Harmony and Awareness

Jill Bolte Taylor’s TED talk and book — “My Stroke of Insight” — offer vivid and intensely personal recollections of her life-threatening brain hemorrhage. Her stroke shifts a delicate balance of complementary forces in her brain, generating a dramatic upheaval in her sense of self and the world around her. How can we best understand her experience, and what does this tell us about our own minds and brains?

In Dr. Bolte Taylor’s narrative, the hemispheres of the brain serve as a neuroanatomical metaphor for a duality of consciousness, the hosts of a dynamic tension between competing powers that exist within us all. She emphasizes contrasts between “parallel,” “holistic” and “nonverbal” processing of the right hemisphere, versus “serial,” “analytic” and “verbal” processing of the left hemisphere. Others have emphasized the role of the right hemisphere in dealing with novelty, while the left hemisphere designs and deploys rules, tactics and other “descriptive systems” (language, math, the rules of games). I like to view hemisphere differences from an evolutionary perspective, and particularly think about how the hemispheres contribute to the overall balance of stability and flexibility of brain activity. On one hand, we need to keep ourselves on track by stabilizing and then executing our plans for action. On the other hand, we need to flexibly adjust these plans as needed to match the exigencies of our changing world as we experience these through our sensorium. What happens when the scales are tipped?

Imbalance between brain systems is often the source of problems.

Read the full essay >>

Neuroscientist Molly Crockett has a secret to share: if you want to make better decisions, eat a grilled cheese sandwich.

In today’s talk, filmed at the TEDSalon in London, Crockett shares how she accidentally had a part in circulating this message. Several years ago, Crockett and her fellow researchers set out to study how serotonin would effect reactions when a person felt that they were treated unfairly. They manipulated serotonin in a study by giving participants a beverage designed to deplete the brain of the amino acid tryptophan, which gets converted into serotonin. The study found that, when tryptophan was low, people were more likely to seek revenge when they felt mistreated.

“That’s the study we did. And here are some of the headlines that came out afterwards,” says Crockett, revealing these doozies:

• “A cheese sandwich is all you need for strong decision making,” The Hindustan Times (June 6, 2008)
• “Eating cheese and meat may boost self-control,” Discover Magazine (June 6, 2008)
• “Official! Chocolate stops you being grumpy,” The West Australian (June 10, 2008)

“At this point you might be wondering, ‘Did I miss something? Cheese? Chocolate? Where did that come from?’” says Crockett. “I thought the same thing when these things came out, because our study had nothing to do with cheese or chocolate — we gave people a horrible-tasting drink. But it turns out that tryptophan also happens to be found in cheese and chocolate. And when science says that cheese and chocolate help you make better decisions, well that’s sure to grab people’s attention.”

This kind elision happens all the time as the press reports on neuroscience. From there, manufacturers latch on to overblown claims as they develop new products.

“Neuroscience is turning up more and more in marketing,” says Crockett. “Do you want to sell it? Put a brain on it.”

Crockett stresses that neuroscience is advancing quickly and leading to some truly amazing discoveries.

“I am more excited than most people for the potential of neuroscience to treat mental illness and even maybe make us better and smarter,” says Crockett. “But we’re not there yet … We have to be careful that we don’t let overblown claims detract the resources and attention away from the real science that’s playing a much longer game.”

For a primer on how to spot what Crockett calls “neuro-bunk,” “neuro-bullocks,” or “neuro-flapdoodle,” watch her engaging talk. And below, a selection of headlines that readers should be wary of. Note: Inclusion here doesn’t mean that the science behind a study is bad, or that a news source intentionally overstated a claim. It’s simply that these pieces give conclusive answers to concepts that scientists are only beginning to understand. As Crockett says, “The answers shouldn’t be simple because the brain isn’t simple.”

“You Love Your iPhone. Literally,” The New York Times (Sept. 30, 2011)

In her talk, Crockett debunks this op-ed, about a study in which 16 subjects were shown audio and video of a ringing iPhone while functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used to map their brain activity. The article notes a “flurry of activation in the insular cortex of the brain, which is associated with feelings of love and compassion.” Crockett says to be very skeptical of claims that a brain scan can show emotions or thoughts. Yes, there might be activity in the insular cortex — but this region is also associated with memory, language, attention, anger, disgust and pain. Says Crockett, “By the same logic, I could equally conclude, ‘You hate your iPhone.’ When you see activation in the insula, you can’t just pick and choose your favorite explanation off the list.”

“Study: ‘Love hormone’ roused by social media,” Fox News (July 12, 2012)

Oxytocin is often referred to as the “love molecule” or “moral molecule,” because it’s associated with trust, cooperation and bonding. But any articles that refer to it as such should be taken with a grain of salt, says Crockett. According to Crockett, studies on oxytocin “are scientifically valid and they have been replicated, but they’re not the full story.” She explains, “Other studies have shown that boosting oxytocin increases envy, it increases gloating. Oxytocin can bias people to favor their own group at the expense of other groups.”

“Hormone Oxytocin May Keep Men Faithful,” ABC News (Nov. 14, 2012)

Last month, a flurry of articles appeared based on a study in which male participants were given “a sniff” of oxytocin before being introduced to an “attractive” experimenter. The study found that men in monogamous relationships who received said sniff kept their distance from the researcher. The hormone didn’t appear to have an effect on single men. So what’s the problem with this study circulating in the press? That it is a very big leap to say that oxytocin might “keep men faithful.” Keeping physical distance from an attractive woman in a single situation is hardly a measure of fidelity.

“Neuro boosts minds, moods and more — A drink review,” Lifenut.com (Sept. 26, 2011)

Neuro is a brand of beverages that makes bold claims on its bottles. “Using the power of science, each Neuro enhances the body’s reaction to all the ways you live your life in color,” reads their website, “from providing the spark that ignites your passions and stimulates your mind, to the fuel for your dreams and inner peace.” Naturally, Crockett is skeptical about this brand and, with it, any positive reviews. “When this came up in my local shop, naturally I was curious about some of the research backing these claims. I went to the company’s website looking to find some controlled trials of their products — but I didn’t find any,” says Crockett. “Trial or no trial, these claims are front and center on their products.”

“Brain scans can detect lying,” PreventDisease.com (undated)

This article quotes research that could “put the lie detector machine out of business.” It shares the results of a study in which fMRI was used to scan students’ brains as they were asked to lie and tell the truth in a lab setting. And when they were lying, subjects showed increased brain activity. While this study is interesting, much more research needs to be done before this headline could be considered true. Jumping to this conclusion is dangerous, as the issue of whether to use brain scans as evidence courtrooms is currently being debated.

“Red wine and chocolate can boost your brain power,” The Telegraph (May 6, 2011)

As Crockett notes in her talk, the media flocks to science that says decadent food and beverages have benefits for the brain. The claims are usually overstated — or made through tangential facts — as happened with Crockett’s study that morphed pro-chocolate in the press. In general, headlines like these should always set off warning bells.

Below, a few other recent headlines which have us wary of neuro-bunk:

• “All that stress is shrinking your brain, new study finds,” NBC News (Nov. 26, 2012)
• “Internet pornography can make you lose your memory,” The Independent (Dec. 17, 2012)
• “Go take a hike — it’s good for your brain,” Chicago Tribune (Dec. 19, 2012)
• “Study: Sex can make you smarter,” CBS Local (Sept. 14, 2012)

And some more great reading on the bounds of extrapolating from neuroscience research:

• “Neuroscience Fiction: What neuroscience really teaches us and what it doesn’t,” The New Yorker (Dec. 2, 2012)
• “Winter of Discontent: Is the hot affair between neuroscience and science journalism cooling down?” Knight Science Journalism Tracker (Dec. 3, 2012)

Sebastian Seung is one of the most influential explorers of our time — and his terrain is the human brain. You may remember Seung’s talk from TEDGlobal 2010, in which he uses the relatively new term “connectome,” to describe the connections between each of the hundreds of millions of neurons in our brains that make us who we are. Seung and his lab at MIT work to map these connections in order to understand both our visual and motion perception. Because of the vast number of neurons firing in our brain, this is work that could take years to complete.

To expedite this research, Seung’s lab has created EyeWire, an online game where any player, err “citizen scientist,” can map the neurons of the brain — cubic millimeter by cubic millimeter. The game features cubes made up of sections of neurons that need to be pieced together. The player colors in matching pieces to do so.

Amy Robinson, who met Seung at TEDGlobal and now works in his lab, says that this game is far more productive than, say, Angry Birds or online shopping.

“The brain is, in my opinion, the greatest quest of our time. We don’t even know how many types of cells are in the retina, much less the entire brain. We land on Mars, skydive from space and grow organs — yet the most alien territory is so close to home,” she says. “In the future we intend to augment the research of many labs with our community of citizen neuroscientists and help map the first entire human brain.”

Today, December 10, EyeWire is releasing a new challenge: for players to map the specific cells — J-type ganglion — associated with motion detection in the retina. Head to the EyeWire website to join this pioneering research or just watch the hilarious trailer for the game below.