Lieberman also discovered that the human brain devotes significant resources to two different major networks that work together toward the goal of mentalizing: helping us understand other people’s minds, including how they are feeling and their intentions. Something as simple as a casual conversation with a store clerk requires massive amounts of neuronal computational power to take in and process a high-bandwidth stream of clues about what’s going on in the clerk’s mind. Though this “mind reading” feels natural to us, it’s actually an amazingly complicated feat performed by networks honed
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