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 »

Watch Rebecca Saxe’s talk on TED.com, where you can download this TEDTalk, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances from our archive of 500+ TEDTalks.

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Unedited running notes from TEDGlobal 2009.

Rebecca Saxe talked about “the problem of other minds.” One of the most complicated things the mind does is try to comprehend what other people are thinking. But the problem she researches is not what you might think — not “why is it so hard to know other minds?” but: How is it so easy to know other minds?

One snapshot of a stranger diving into the ocean or holding a baby allows you to guess what other people are thinking or feeling — joy, or thrill. The brain, the machine we use to think, is made of the same pieces as other animals’ brains are made of, and even sea slugs have them. But how is it that the particular network of pieces we humans in particular have allows us to think about other peoples’ thoughts so easily?

We have a special reasoning module called the right tempero-parietal junction that is what we use to think about other peoples’ thoughts.

How do we learn to predict actions? It takes time for human children to learn this ability. 5-year-olds can understand that other people have false beliefs. 3-year-olds don’t understand this. The same goes for the ability to make moral judgment based on what is (or is not) known about peoples’ intentions.

But even in adulthood, people differ on this ability. Saxe tries to explain how these differences come about with fascinating experiments. Adults are given a version of the experiment given to the kids, involving a jar of sugar that is labeled “poison.” People disagree about how much blame people should get when they do something intentionally wrong — givng a co-worker sugar, but believing that the sugar is poison — and doing something by accident — giving people poison that they think is sugar — that is wrong.

Saxe wanted to know if we can change this function, and it turns out that we can. We can do so using a magnetic pulse to disorganize the function of the neurons in the region responsible for this type of thinking. The magnetic pulse, which is powerful enough to shoot a quarter into the air, causes an involuntary twitch in the hand when applied through the skull. When this pulse is applied to people who are making a moral judgment, people come to believe that accidents are less OK, and actions done with actual intent to harm is more OK.

In a brief Q&A, Chris Anderson asked about the dangers of such technology. Is Saxe talking to the Pentagon about this technology? Saxe said, “They’re calling, but I’m not talking to them.” It’s not any danger (yet), because there’s no way for this technology to work without the person knowing that the brain interference is happening.

Will this research make any impacts on education? Saxe says that is the hope. By exploring this field, we’ll understand how human brains do distinctly human things.

Photo: Rebecca Saxe at TEDGlobal 2009, Session 5: ” Hidden algorithm,” July 22, 2009, in Oxford, UK. Credit: TED / James Duncan Davidson

Crap. Another #TED talk by someone who is half my age and 10x my brain power. When I hear ‘brain’, I think zombies. — casinclair

Saxe uses magnetic pulses to temporarily disorganize specific regions of the brain. Perfectly safe, I am sure, but a little freaky. — TEDxCambridge

Rebecca is fascinating. She works at MIT & uses FMRI to identify what happens in our brains when we think about the beliefs of others — vikkichowney

TED is like drinking from five fire hoses. And it’s only Wednesday. Rebecca Saxe, neuroscientist, had a fascinating talk on the mind. — beckyblanton

Rebecca Saxe talks about using pulses to alter moral judgments, and how she gets calls from the military. She doesn’t pick up. — shanehegarty

Be sure to follow @TEDGlobal and the #TED hashtag while the conference is going on!