A CHILD watches her mother pick up a toy. The child smiles: Mum wants to play. A husband watches his wife pluck car keys from a table. He shivers: she really is leaving this time. A nurse watches a needle being jabbed into an elderly patient. She flinches: it must have hurt.
How do these people know what the other person is thinking? How do they judge intentions and feelings, or assign goals or beliefs to the other? It sounds simple, but the child could just as easily have decided that Mum was leaving or the husband that his wife wanted to play. Yet they didn't. They knew.
"Reading" the minds of others is something we take for granted. Yet philosophers, psychologists and neuroscientists alike have been baffled by our ability to anticipate other people's behaviour and empathise with their feelings. Now a team of Italian neurophysiologists may have stumbled ...
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