Imagine you could slip inside someone else’s head to learn how they determine right or wrong, or what they like or dislike. Then imagine you could derail that train of thought and set it on a different track. Imagine no more.
MIT... scientists in Rebecca Saxe’s “Saxelab”—officially the Social Cognitivie Neuroscience Laboratory—already had techniques to identify the source of judgments and intentions in the brain. Now they have the power, via magnetic interference, to alter those ideas. Saxe’s earlier studies show a particular section of the brain is highly active when a person thinks about someone’s intentions, thoughts and beliefs. By disrupting activity there—with a magnetic zap applied through a device attached to the scalp—you can alter the process of judgment. Rather then intuition or personal bias, the judger must now rely more on facts and outcomes.
Dubbed the neuroscience of empathy, the specter of mind control may give pause. But for Saxe, 31, it’s a benign attitude adjustment, a tool that could potentially be used to intuit motivation, lessen negative behaviors and perhaps, ultimately, defuse global conflict.
Saxe’s lab is now working to see whether insights into how the brain reacts to cues from others can help unlock mysteries about autism. By studying the atypical, such as the reactions of blind children, she hopes to learn how facial expression affects judgments. By learning about the brain region that allows juries to reach verdicts—and “what oversimplifications and flaws there are in the process”—Saxe believes her work could eventually help the justice system assess guilt more accurately.
“You can change attitudes, if you figure out a strategy to understand how empathy breaks down,” Saxe says. “It’s a way to answer why is it so hard to know what someone wants or believes, and why is it so hard to change that.”
http://www.ted.com/talks/rebecca_saxe_how_brains_make_moral_judgments.html
