BRAIN scans have revealed how we can second-guess other people鈥檚 behaviour by subconsciously thinking through how we would do the same task ourselves. These mental dry runs enable us to anticipate the next moves of others in many everyday situations, from what opponents will do in chess games to avoiding vehicle collisions.
鈥淲e probably put ourselves in the shoes of other people and run through the same processes in our own minds as they do in theirs,鈥� says Narender Ramnani of the University of Oxford.
He and his colleague Christopher Miall made the discovery by taking MRI brain scans of volunteers as they watched other individuals reacting to computer instructions. They found that the motor system of the brain lit up when people were predicting what other people would do next. A sub-circuit called the ventral premotor cortex did the predicting, while a second sub-circuit called the dorsal premotor cortex planned doing the same task (Nature Neuroscience, DOI: 10.1038/nn1168).
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The results confirm that we predict people鈥檚 actions subconsciously, rather than consciously working out what people will do. Ramnani says the finding could help explain some symptoms of autism. Some of the brain regions that lit up during prediction matched those that other researchers have identified as abnormal in the brains of individuals with autism. 鈥淲hen normal people try to figure out what鈥檚 going on in someone else鈥檚 head, they use the same brain regions that are abnormal in people with autism,鈥� he says. 鈥淲e plan now to build on our work to better understand autism.鈥�