Consciousness and the Social Brain

relevant circuitry in the brain and triggers the construction of a model of awareness. In that model, amind is located behind you and is aware of you. This model of a mind is a type of social perception and a particularly pure case of attributing awareness. Other aspects of social perception are stripped away. The model that you construct includes the property of awareness, a rough spatial source of the awareness behind you, and a target of the awareness on the back of your head. The model has a distinctive spatial structure: a source, a target, and a vector leading from the one to the other.
    The illusion helps to demonstrate that when computing someone else’s attentional state, we do not merely construct the abstract proposition “Person
X
is attending to thing
Y
.” It is not solely higher-order cognition or higher-order thought. We construct a rich perception-like model that includes a spatial embodiment. Indeed, we may know cognitively, with our higher-order thought, that nobody else is present and yet still have that creepy impression.
The Extromission Myth of Vision

    The extromission myth of vision is the myth that we see by means of some substance that emanates out of the eyes and touches objects. Gross 8 reviewed the history of this myth. It was seriously considered as a theory of vision, or at least one of several competing theories of vision, by the ancient Greek philosophers. It was refuted scientifically by the thirteenth-century Arabic scientist Alhazen, who developed an essentially modern understanding of optics. Yet, even though the myth was debunked scientifically, it remains embedded in human culture.
    For example, almost all cultures include a belief in the evil eye. 9 The evil eye refers to a malign, invisible influence that emanates from certain people’s eyes and is especially harmful to children. The evil eye is not an antiquated belief. It remains common among a range of modern cultures, including Indo-European and Semitic cultures. Amulets to ward off the evil eye are also common.
    The psychologist Piaget noted that when school children are asked to explain vision, they often describe something emanating out of the eyes. 10 Building on that finding, in the 1990s Winer and Cottrell 11 – 13 found that extromission views are common among American elementary school children. About 57% of them expressed the view that vision involves a substance coming out of the eyes. Even more shocking, about 33% of college students chose the same description. These studies were conducted fifteen years ago, not during some distant benighted historical epoch. The subjects were modern students in American colleges. When the question was asked in a variety of ways to avoid misunderstanding, and when the students were asked to draw pictures and arrows to clarify their responses, the results were essentially the same. Even students who had recently been taught basic science or basic physiology often chose an extromission account over an intromission account. The widespread belief in extromission is all the more remarkable given that the correct account is conceptually easy to understand and is taught at all school grade levels. As expressed by Winer and colleagues, “the source and apparent strength of extromission beliefs in children and adults is somewhat of a mystery.” 13
    I suggest a simple explanation to the mystery. The myth of extromission is an abstract version, a cognitive summary, of an underlying model that the brain constructs to represent visual attention. The model is not physically accurate, but since it is built into us it is unavoidable. It is like the universal perception that white is pure and lacking any color, a physically incoherent mistake based on the model of white light constructed in the human visual system. No matter how well we understand the physical reality in a cognitive sense, we cannot eliminate a built-in perception. We can understand it to be scientifically wrong while accepting it to be perceptually true.
    So far in this chapter I’ve briefly discussed the out-of-body experience, the feeling of being stared at, and now the extromission myth of vision. These strange but common experiences, I suggest, come about because our brains naturally depict attention, especially visualattention, as something that emanates from a source, travels through space, and arrives at a target. Though nonsensical from the point of view of physics, this simplified schema is actually a