Understanding Other Minds

This book comprises 26 exciting chapters by internationally renowned scholars, addressing the central psychological process separating humans from other animals: the ability to imagine the thoughts and feelings of others, and to reflect on the contents of our own mindsa theory of mind (ToM). The four sections of the book cover developmental, cultural, and neurobiological approaches to ToM across different populations and species. The chapters explore the earliest stages of development of ToM in infancy, and how plastic ToM learning is; why 3-year-olds typically fail false belief tasks and how ToM continues to develop beyond childhood into adulthood; the debate between simulation theory and theory theory; cross-cultural perspectives on ToM and how ToM develops differently in deaf children; how we use our ToM when we make moral judgments, and the link between emotional intelligence and ToM; the neural basis of ToM measured by evoked response potentials, functional magnetic resonance imaging, and studies of brain damage; emotional vs. cognitive empathy in neuropsychiatric conditions such as autism, schizophrenia, and psychopathy; the concept of self in autism and teaching methods targeting ToM deficits; the relationship between empathy, the pain matrix and the mirror neuron system; the role of oxytocin and fetal testosterone in mentalizing and empathy; the heritability of empathy and candidate single nucleotide polymorphisms associated with empathy; and ToM in non-human primates. These 26 chapters represent a masterly overview of a field that has deepened since the first edition was published in 1993.

This book focuses on the "theory of mind" hypothesis, an important new psychological approach to autism. The theory asserts that autistic children fail to develop the ability to think about mental states--a "theory of mind"--unlike other children, and thus fail to conceptualize behavior in terms of mental processes. Proponents argue that this psychological deficit underlies some of the key features of autism, such as abnormalities in social and communication development. The editors have collected both the evidence and the controversies surrounding the theory, and present a valuable discussion about the nature of what is widely recognized as the most severe childhood psychological disorder. The chapters are written by distinguished scholars from a variety of disciplines, including developmental psychology, neuropsychology, philosophy, psycho-linguistics, primatology, and psychoanalysis.

Why do children with autism have such trouble developing normal social understanding of other people's feelings? This new edition updates the field by linking autism research to the newest methods for studying the brain.

Leading scholars from psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy present theories and findings on understanding how individuals infer such complex mental states as beliefs, desires, intentions, and emotions.

BBC R4 Book of the Week ‘Brilliant’ Guardian ‘Fascinating and often delightful’ The Times What if intelligent life on Earth evolved not once, but twice? The octopus is the closest we will come to meeting an intelligent alien. What can we learn from the encounter?

Popular science writer Philip Ball explores a range of sciences to map our answers to a huge, philosophically rich question: How do we even begin to think about minds that are not human? Sciences from zoology to astrobiology, computer science to neuroscience, are seeking to understand minds in their own distinct disciplinary realms. Taking a uniquely broad view of minds and where to find them—including in plants, aliens, and God—Philip Ball pulls the pieces together to explore what sorts of minds we might expect to find in the universe. In so doing, he offers for the first time a unified way of thinking about what minds are and what they can do, by locating them in what he calls the “space of possible minds.” By identifying and mapping out properties of mind without prioritizing the human, Ball sheds new light on a host of fascinating questions: What moral rights should we afford animals, and can we understand their thoughts? Should we worry that AI is going to take over society? If there are intelligent aliens out there, how could we communicate with them? Should we? Understanding the space of possible minds also reveals ways of making advances in understanding some of the most challenging questions in contemporary science: What is thought? What is consciousness? And what (if anything) is free will? Informed by conversations with leading researchers, Ball’s brilliant survey of current views about the nature and existence of minds is more mind-expanding than we could imagine. In this fascinating panorama of other minds, we come to better know our own.

We all take it for granted that we are typically in a position to know about the thoughts and feelings of other people. But we might naturally wonder how we acquire this kind of knowledge. Knowing Other Minds brings together ten original chapters, written by internationally renowned researchers, on questions that arise from our everyday social interaction with others. Can we have direct perceptual knowledge of another person's thoughts? How do we acquire general conceptions of mental states? What lessons can be drawn from experimental work in developmental psychology? Are there fundamental differences between the ways in which we acquire knowledge of our own minds and the ways in which we acquire knowledge of someone else's mind? What sort of cognitive processing underlies our everyday social understanding? How should we best think of the relationship between our complex social life and moral value? The chapters in this volume convey a variety of different perspectives and make a number of novel contributions to the existing literature on these questions, thereby opening up new avenues of inquiry. Furthermore, they illustrate how questions in philosophy and questions from empirical cognitive science overlap and mutually inform one another.

Highlights the roles of intention and intentionality in social cognition.