Who Needs Emotions? The Brain Meets the Robot

6
How Do We Decipher
Others’ Minds?
marc jeannerod
The central issue of how we access the mental contents of other individuals
can be grounded in the concept of “self,” both the narrative self who
knows who we are, where we are, what we are presently doing, and what
we were doing before, and the embodied self which is bound to particular
bodily events, like actions. This chapter emphasizes communication between
embodied selves, operating at a subpersonal level outside the awareness
and conscious strategies of the two selves. We will show how mental
states of others can be accessed through mind reading, a classical account
of which is the simulation theory which holds that we exploit our own
psychological responses in order to simulate others’ minds. We first describe
experiments that provide support to the notion of simulation from
outside the realm of communication, stressing how the self’s representation
of its own actions are reflected in terms of changes in brain activity.
We then extend the notion of simulation to the observation of others—
and then show that this mechanism is not immune to misattribution of
mental states in either direction, i.e., self attributing mental states of
others as well as attributing to others one’s own mental states.
The aim of this chapter is to understand how we access the
mental contents of other individuals. People generate intentions, have goals,
and feel emotions and affects. It is essential for each of us to penetrate the
internal world of others, particularly when their intentions or goals are