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麻省理工学院2003级博士生丽贝卡·萨克斯在读研究生时确定了大脑中帮助人们识别他人感受的区域。担任教授后不久,她在一项具有开创性意义的后续研究中把这项成果更往前推动了一步。丽贝卡·萨克斯想知道我们的大脑如何学会社交。更确切地说,这名麻省理工学院大脑和认知科学系的认知神经科学副教授想弄明白我们是如何对其他人的想法做出判断的。大脑的这种能力被称为“心理理论”(Theory of Mind,缩写ToM)。我们的大脑执行ToM认知来解码某人的一个微笑、一个鬼脸或者话语中的某些蹊跷背后的内容。萨克斯写道,ToM是“人们用来猜测和推断其他人心理状态的机制”。
MIT 2003 PhD student Rebecca Sachs identifies graduate students as areas in the brain that help people identify others’ feelings. Shortly after serving as professor, she took this achievement one step further in a groundbreaking follow-up study. Rebecca Sachs wants to know how our brains learn to socialize. More precisely, the associate professor of cognitive neuroscience at the MIT Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences wants to understand how we judge other people’s thoughts. This ability of the brain is called “Theory of Mind” (ToM). Our brains perform ToM awareness to decode someone’s smile, a grimace, or something in the middle of something strange. Sachs wrote that ToM is “the mechanism people use to guess and infer the psychological state of others.”