Researchers at Duke University have shown with functional MRI that the degree of activation of the posterior superior temporal sulcus [PSTS], a brain region activated when people observe others’ actions but not perform them themselves, correlated with personality ratings of subjects’ degree of altruism. (Hindustan Times ) This has some relationship to the ‘mirror neurons’ with which I have been fascinated and about which I have written repeatedly in FmH, which I think of as the neurophysiological basis for interpersonal empathy and — to extrapolate — socialization.

The capacity to have an interior experience upon watching someone else’s behavior similar to the experience of performing that behavior yourself may be a basis of the sense of inherent congruence between others’ feelings and thoughts and our own, the ability to have a so-called ‘theory of mind’, which is an important developmental achievement for humans. As suggested in the article, this body of work may help explicate the neural basis for certain conditions, in which I am interested in my work as a clinical psychiatrist, in which the capacity for empathy or mutuality break down, such as antisocial personality disorder or autistic spectrum disorders. (I am overwhelmed by the incident at Lincoln-Sudbury [MA] High School, down the road from my hospital, last Friday in which a student with a mild autistic-spectrum condition stabbed another student, apparently unknown to him, to death in one of the school restrooms.)

Here is what you come up with if you search on PSTS and ‘mirror neurons’ together. Two good starting point reviews of the nascent field of social cognitive neuroscience, which is built on these and similar observations and speculations, are these papers by Rebecca Saxe of MIT (Current Opinion in Neurobiology) and the Friths of London (Science). And, while I was browsing related materials, I came upon this paper by Chatterjee (Journal of Medical Ethics), which you might find intriguing if you are interested in this area at all.