SELF and OTHERS

a few remarks on Orphanogenesis

slide 2

self vs. others

compare:

imitation by the orphan in Egan's Orphanogenesis

and

imitation by babies in Gallagher's TiCS article (see week 5)

slide 3

genesis

Claim of identity. Challenge. Response.

Blanca said, "Welcome to Konishi, Citizen Yatima." Ve turned to Inoshiro, who repeated Blanca's challenge then muttered sullenly, "Welcome, Yatima."

Gabriel said, "And Welcome to the Coalition of Polises."

Yatima gazed at the three of them, bemused — oblivious to the ceremonial words, trying to understand what had changed inside verself. Ve saw vis friends, and the stars, and the crowd, and sensed vis own icon ... but even as these ordinary thoughts and perceptions flowed on unimpeded, a new kind of question seemed to spin through the black space behind them all. Who is thinking this? Who is seeing these stars, and these citizens? Who is wondering about these thoughts, and these sights?

And the reply came back, not just in words, but in the answering hum of the one symbol among the thousands that reached out to claim all the rest. Not to mirror every thought, but to bind them. To hold them together, like skin.

Who is thinking this?

I am.

slide 4

brain substrate of social cognition (Adolphs)

same normal brain, reconstructed from multiple MRI "slices", shown in different views, with different amounts of transparency

judgments of approachability and trustworthiness

  1. mean judgments of approachability and trustworthiness of 100 unfamiliar faces, for:
    • normal controls (N)
    • bilateral amygdala damage (B)
    • unilateral right amygdala damage (R)
    • unilateral left amygdala damage (L)
    • seven brain-damaged controls with spared amygdala (C)

  2. deviations from the control mean for one of the subjects with bilateral amygdala damage

slide 6

attribution of social meaning from visual motion

normal control subject: invents a story describing the social interaction among the three "agents"
subject with developmental amygdala damage: describes the geometrical shapes and their spatial relations

slide 7

attribution of social meaning from visual motion

normal control subject: invents a story describing the social interaction among the three "agents"
subject with developmental amygdala damage: describes the geometrical shapes and their spatial relations

CONSIDER: would Yatima have needed to be equipped with a simulated amygdala to grasp the (social) meaning of the agora scenes??

slide 8

reasoning on the Wason selection task

  1. subjects with ventromedial frontal lesions (circles) did better than controls (squares) on the "logical" version of the task, but worse than the controls on the "socially relevant" version of the task

  2. overlap map of the ventromedial frontal lesions, color-coded by the number of subjects

open issues

how do we represent minds of others? [are these ideas mutually exclusive? is the distinction valid? what about the mirror neurons?]

slide 10

neural systems involved in `theory of mind' (Siegal and Varley)

a "misleading-contents" task developed to minimize the verbal component of ToM performance

the subject is asked to indicate which of the four alternatives corresponds to the boy's false belief and reality (the subject sees the top left picture, then either the top right or the bottom left)

slide 11

MR data

structural MR image from patient SA, who has preserved ToM performance despite a large left hemisphere lesion (white)

slide 12

preserved thinking in patients with aphasia

"if not in language centers, where is it?" asks patient SA

slide 13

design of a deception task

subject (right) acting on his judgment of the knowledge of the assistant (standing) concerning the location of the hidden coin

slide 14


slide 15

(Octavio Paz, Jacques Roubaud, Eduardo Sanguineti, Charles Tomlinson)

These hands restore us
to a natural and thus more human
because more than human lineage:
 These hands restore us
to a more natural and thus more human
because more than human lineage:
Al cruzar el Paisaje de la Visitación, me dijo:
Mira a la luna. Y yo la miré — a ella, no a la luna. 		Crossing the Paisaje de la Visitación, she said:
Look at the moon. and I looked — at her, not at the moon.
Et mon visage était reflet dans l'eau (au creux
d'une main) et elle-même, peut-être, l'eau,
le creux de l'eau où j'avais mal vécu: 		And my face was a reflection in water (in the hollow
of a hand) and she herself, perhaps, the water
the hollow of water where I had lived badly:
(dentro i paesaggio, o lí, appena in margine: i paesaggi della terra che sono le rivoluzioni:
e anche sotto i paesaggi, dentro le stanze sotterranne,
qui, tra il giuoco e l'utopia, tra le poesie e le verità): 		(inside landscapes or there - just - in the margin: landscapes of
the earth which are revolutions:
and also beneath landscapes, inside underground rooms,
here, between game and utopia, between poems and truths):

slide 16

supplementary material