Neuroscience
Can You Look Into Another’s Mind?
A new technique takes a deep dive into subjective experiences of others.
Posted September 20, 2021 Reviewed by Devon Frye
Key points
- The true subjective experiences of other people are deemed to be unknowable.
- But researchers in Finland recently had the audacity to attempt to make some aspects of thought externally observable.
- The Finnish team didn't divine what test subjects were thinking, but succeeded in pinpointing where in the body subjects experienced thoughts.
- It turns out that most people feel their thoughts inside their head, but some experience thoughts at other locations, including outside the body.
At one time or another—perhaps in an all-night bull session in your freshman dorm, or out for a nature hike with a close friend—you may have pondered the question: "Can I ever truly know what’s in another person’s mind?" For instance, does the “red” that I see match the red that you see? (For some reason, this question always seems to be about red, not some other color.)
Although some questions about what others truly experience may forever go unanswered, other questions not only can be answered, but have been answered, with intriguing hints that our brains function in ways different from current orthodox neuroscience doctrine.
For instance, Dr. Lauri Nummenmaa and colleagues of Turk University in Finland have made progress turning subjective experiences into objective data by asking 1,026 test subjects where in their bodies different subjective experiences such as thoughts and emotions were experienced, essentially treating intangible experiences as if they were concrete, tangible, localizable somatosensory sensations (such as light touch, heat, itching, etc).
The Finnish team’s research, published in 2018, covered 100 different subjective experiences, but for brevity’s sake, I’ll focus here on just one class of experience: thoughts—in particular, exactly where in our bodies we sense that thoughts take place. In Nummenmaa ’s research, “thoughts” (cognitions) encompassed imagining, daydreaming, thinking, being conscious, memorizing, remembering, reading, inferring, estimating, recognizing, recollecting, and reasoning.
Employing a technique where subjects placed a token on a map of the body where such thoughts were experienced, Nummenmaa’s team found that, overwhelmingly, subjects localized the “physical” sensations of thought in the head.
Intrigued to gain deeper insights into other people’s private thoughts, I asked 65 contacts on social media where they localized their thoughts. I learned that 52 of my contacts localized thoughts in their head, but not all in the same place. Although most respondents in the survey did not specify in more detail than “in the head,” 10 people said their thoughts lived directly behind their eyes, 5 in their forehead, 2 at the back of the head, 2 at the center of the head, 1 in the lower back right corner, 1 between their mouth and their eyes, and 1 person reported that their thoughts “moved around” inside their head.
Seven participants did not experience thoughts in their heads at all (one said “nowhere,” one said “stomach and chest,” one said “starting in body and bubbling up through the head,” one said “distributed, not localized," one said “moves all around my body and head, depending on the thought,” and two said “floating in space.”)
My favorite was “I feel like a mind, floating in space, controlling a meat robot by remote control.”
The trivial explanation for why most people say that thoughts are physically located in their heads is that we all know our brains—where thoughts presumably take place—are in our heads. Or possibly we place thoughts in our heads because of phrases such as “it’s all in your head” or “tell me the first thought that comes into your head.” Thus, we unconsciously localize our thoughts to a region in which we are trained to believe that they occur.
But non-trivial possibilities could hold important insights for the neuroscience of consciousness and for how our brains really work.
Orthodox neuroscience doctrine asserts that the brain itself has no sense of touch, pain, temperature, or proprioception (location-sensing) which is why brain surgery can be performed on conscious patients. But orthodox doctrine has sometimes been proven wrong, as with the discovery—contrary to then-prevailing wisdom— that adult brains actually do grow new neurons throughout adulthood.
Indeed, recent research shows that brain tissue does possess some direct sensory abilities: for example, neurons in the brain respond to “extra-ocular” light shining through the skull and to changing magnetic fields surrounding the head.
Thus, it is possible that neural activity associated with thought itself could directly generate subtle stimulation inside the head, based upon brain tissue’s “self-awareness” of its location relative to other body parts.
As with the brain’s direct response to light or magnetic fields, we currently have no idea how neural activity associated with thought might be localized in the head, or if thought localization is anything more than an illusion.
But if thoughts actually do produce localizable physical sensations, then, as with suggestions that brain tissue directly responds to light and magnetic fields, the neuroscience of the brain is even more mysterious and complicated than we thought.
And thrilling.
"The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' but 'That's funny.'" —Isaac Asimov
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