God Soul Mind Brain

at a location in space. This was no clever deduction. It was no theory about the state of his mind. It was a perception.

    It is easy to overlook social perception. It is so immediate, so ubiquitous, that we tend to take it for granted. It has a subterranean quality that does not invite scientific scrutiny. Social cognition , on the other hand, is more obvious. We humans expend a great deal of energy cleverly theorizing about the inside of each other’s minds. Indeed the term “theory of mind” is often used interchangeably with social cognition.

    A typical way to test theory of mind in the laboratory is to tell someone a story like the following:

    Sally and Anne are in the kitchen. Sally puts a sandwich in the refrigerator and then leaves the kitchen. While she is gone, Anne moves the sandwich to the freezer. When Sally comes back into the kitchen, where will she look to find the sandwich?

    Most adults, once they get past the arbitrary weirdness of the story (why is Anne a deceitful creep? . . .), realize that Sally will look in the refrigerator. That is where she put the sandwich. As far as she knows, it is still there. In reading this story, we are able to construct Sally’s mental perspective. That is to say, we develop a “theory” of Sally’s mind. (This clever experiment was developed by Wimmer and Perner in the 1980s. Sometimes it is known as the “Sally-Anne” task because for some reason those two particular characters have become traditional.)

    Most three-year-old children lack this cognitive ability. To the child, the sandwich is in the freezer and therefore that is where Sally should look for it. The child is unable to construct Sally’s mental perspective. He or she has no theory of Sally’s mind.

    Theory of mind is cognitive and complicated. It requires an advanced intelligence keeping track of other brains—of the knowledge those other brains have gained. A debate has raged for decades over whether non-human animals have the capacity for theory of mind. Adult chimpanzees arguably have the capability to some degree, but monkeys (who are much less smart than chimpanzees) probably do not. Cats and dogs almost certainly do not. Social cognition is a difficult skill.

    The scientific literature on social intelligence is dominated by—in fact is almost uniformly about—social cognition. To me, this emphasis on cognition seems unnecessary and limiting. Social intelligence almost certainly spans the entire range from perception through cognition to motor control. Our social needs have no doubt shaped every aspect of brain function from input to output.

    In my previous book on brain function, The Intelligent Movement Machine , I wrote about social motor control. At its most basic, social interaction is about sending and receiving signals. Some of the most universal social signals are clearly inborn. A smile, a laugh, a scowl, puffing out the chest and standing up straight, cringing down, these actions serve as universally understood social signals. The psychologist Ekman first noted that humans have universal facial expressions that convey emotion. For example, no matter the culture of origin, everyone understands and can make a happy face or a fearful face. Even people who are blind from birth automatically and correctly use these basic social signals. We seem to be born with pre-wired motor machinery that deploys highly specific social signals. Our social capacity is therefore not just a matter of cognition. It is not just a matter of cleverly deducing the inner thoughts of other people. It has a major extension into the motor system that probably deserves more study than it gets.

    Just as social intelligence has an extension into the motor domain, and a large presence in the cognitive domain, it certainly also extends into the perceptual domain. Social perception is ubiquitous, if sometimes overlooked. It is more basic, more direct than social cognition. It is more of a feeling about someone else’s state of mind than a cleverly contrived theory. Adults, children, chimps, monkeys, probably dogs and cats, probably mice and rats, probably birds, have varying degrees of social perception. A social perception, like a visual perception, is a model in which attributes are assigned to an object and assigned a location in space. That model, that bundle of information, is a proxy for the real thing. We experience the model rather than the reality.

    In the presence of other people you might