The “chronic overactivity of those brain regions implicated in social thought” can, writes Mitchell, lead us to perceive minds where no minds exist, even in “inanimate objects.” There’s growing evidence, moreover, that our brains naturally mimic the states of the other minds we interact with, whether those minds are real or imagined. Such neural “mirroring” helps explain why we’re so quick to attribute human characteristics to our computers and computer characteristics to ourselves—why we hear a human voice when ELIZA speaks.
