Who's in Charge?: Free Will and the Science of the Brain

men only report sadness with a double affiliation: a close, ingroup member.

30-millisecond (ms) exposure to happy, neutral, and angry faces (too fast to consciously register that a face was even seen) will cause you to have measurable facial muscle reactions that correspond to the happy and angry faces

a lesion in the lateral frontal lobes produces deficits in sequencing behavior, leaving one unable to plan or multitask.

In humans, however, there are mirror neurons that correspond to movements all over the body, and they fire even when there is no goal;40 in fact, the same neurons are active even when we only imagine an action.

inhibition. It seems that sociocognitive evolution has occurred in the experimental foxes as a correlated by-product of selection on systems mediating fear and aggression.

He realized that humans have the innate ability to understand that others have minds with different desires, intentions, beliefs, and mental states, and the ability to form theories, with some degree of accuracy, about what those desires, intentions, beliefs, and mental states are. He called this ability theory of mind (TOM)

I am suggesting that the brain has all kinds of local consciousness systems, a constellation of them, which are enabling consciousness. Although the feelings of consciousness appear to be unified to you, they are given form by these vastly separate systems. Whichever notion you happened to be conscious of at a particular moment is the one that come

The reality is, listening to people’s explanations of their actions is interesting—and in the case of politicians, entertaining—but often a waste of time.

in order to understand the mental states of others, we literally simulate their mental state.