Create a personalised content profile. Measure ad performance. Select basic ads. Create a personalised ads profile. Select personalised ads. Apply market research to generate audience insights. Measure content performance. Develop and improve products. List of Partners vendors. What happens to your body when you're thinking?
You might think that is a simple question to answer: a thought is just words in your brain that cause you to do something, right? In reality, this question has plagued scientists for decades and the precise answer is still something that is the subject of research.
For this reason, it's not something that can be clearly described in a flowchart format. However, what we can do is break down what we do know about our thoughts and then try to put the pieces of the puzzle together to create a picture of what is happening.
The first problem with describing what happens in your body when you are thinking is that not everyone agrees on what constitutes a thought. At first glance, you probably think of a thought as something that you tell yourself. For example, this morning while lying in bed you might have had the thought, "I don't want to get up. Let's take a moment and deconstruct that thought to try and figure out exactly what it is. Is the thought "I don't want to get out of bed" something that spontaneously appeared in your mind?
Or was it triggered by something? Is it just a physical process of your brain or the manifestation of something deeper like a soul, spirit, or other entity? Phew, that's a lot to think about. And, depending on who you ask, you will get different answers. While scientists might apply reductionist theory and predict that thoughts are simply physical entities that can be explained by chemical changes in the brain, philosophers or other theorists might argue a more dualistic theory that your mind is separate from your body and your thoughts are not physical parts of your brain.
All that aside, if we want to consider what happens in our bodies or specifically our brains when we are thinking, then we need to at least acknowledge that our thoughts can influence our bodies. We know this to be true for a number of reasons. For example:. Since we know that thoughts can influence our brains and our bodies, let's take a look at exactly how they do that and what is happening under the hood in your head.
Let's jump back to that morning thought: "I don't want to get out of bed. Scientists would argue first that the thought you had was not spontaneous and random. Instead, your thought was likely a reaction to something around you. In this case, it might have been an alarm clock, checking your phone to see what time it is, or hearing something like the garbage truck go by that reminds you of time passing.
In other cases, thoughts might be triggered by memories. Now, once you have that thought, what happens? So to figure out which brain regions are involved in a certain type of thinking, we need to find the regions that are more active during that type of thinking than they are during other types of thinking.
Mentalizing is important not only when we are reading about or observing others, but also during social interactions. However, most MRI studies of mentalizing have used tasks that do not allow the participant to interact with anyone.
Thus, it is not clear whether the brain works the same way when we mentalize about people we are interacting with as it does when we are not in a social interaction. Usually, only one person at a time can fit inside an MRI scanner. But neuroscientists have figured out creative ways around this problem. For example, in one experiment, participants in the scanner were connected to someone in another room through a live video feed, and they played a simple game together [ 5 ].
This social interaction led to activation in similar brain regions as those activated in mentalizing studies. This result could mean that we automatically mentalize whenever we interact with others. However, because the game did not require the players to think about mental states, we cannot be sure that the regions activated during the game were exactly the same regions that the participants use when they mentalize.
To clarify this, we designed a new game, in which the players interacted with another person and had to think about mental states. Most of what we know about mentalizing and the brain during social interaction comes from studies of adults.
We know that our minds and brains change as we grow from children to adults, but few studies have looked at whether children use the same brain regions as adults when mentalizing or interacting with others. During middle childhood , children start to interact in more complex ways. They spend more time with friends and classmates and can think about more complicated mental states.
Therefore, we decided to focus on middle childhood for our study of how the brain works during mentalizing and social interaction. To answer these questions, we invited healthy children aged 8—12 to get their brains scanned using MRI. We ended up with good-quality scans from 28 children. While in the scanner, the children believed they were playing a guessing game over the internet with another child. The other half of the game was the same, except instead of getting hints from a supposedly real partner, children got hints from the computer about a character in a story Figure 2.
For both the partner and story character, half of the hints were about mental states, like something the partner or character knew, wanted, or felt. To figure out which brain regions are involved in mentalizing Question 1 , we looked for regions that were more activated when children guessed using Mental compared with Non-Mental hints.
The study found that as kids become teenagers, especially as their bodies start changing with puberty, the mPFC is more active when thinking about the social self [ 3 ]. Another study found that even though the mPFC becomes more active in the teenage years, its activity then decreases, and it is not as active in adulthood [ 4 ]. So, knowing what goes on in the brain has helped explain why our self-perceptions are most social during adolescence Figure 2.
One other study found that it is not just the social self that gets more social as we grow, but also the physical self [ 5 ]. These researchers found that the mPFC is also very active when people think about their physical selves. And just like the social self, it keeps getting more active into the teenage years, until about age After age 15, the mPFC starts being less active into adulthood.
This means that around age 15, when we think about our physical selves, we also think about other people. So, this research finding shows that our brains are thinking more and more about others when we think about our physical selves during the teenage years. Bringing it all together, scientists have known for a long time that teens tend to be more social than both children and adults. This means that they start to care more about how they compare to others and what other people think of them.
More recently, neuroscientists have helped us learn about important changes in the brain that can help explain why teens are more social. Starting around the time of puberty, the mPFC, which is a part of the social brain, starts to become more active when people think about themselves.
Some might wonder why our brains become more social over time—is it just a random change or does it help us as we grow? Here, it is important to remember that adolescence including the growing brain has an important evolutionary function—it helps us transition from childhood to adulthood.
As our brains become more social, we understand how we relate to others and how we fit into society, which helps us be ready for adult decisions and relationships. Not only does this science teach us some really cool things about ourselves, but it also shows us one of the many ways that neuroscience has helped us better understand how people grow and experience the world!
In one study, Lee and a colleague exposed volunteers to different odors. When they did, they found that getting a whiff of a fishy odor evoked feelings of suspicion; likewise, when research participants were exposed to another person behaving suspiciously, they were better able to detect a fishy scent. The range of findings demonstrating embodied cognition is impressive.
A small sampling: Looking upward nudges people to call to mind others who are more powerful, while looking down prompts thoughts of people we outrank. People judge a petition to be more consequential if it is handed to them on a heavy clipboard rather than a lightweight one. Baseball players with high batting averages perceive the ball as bigger than poorer hitters.
Hmm, weird. Pass the guacamole. In fact, we fundamentally perceive the world in terms of our ability to act on our environment, says Sabrina Golonka, a cognitive psychologist at Leeds Metropolitan University in the United Kingdom.
In one study, researchers at the University of Virginia asked volunteers to estimate the steepness of a hill just by looking at it from the bottom. To investigate, Witt and a colleague showed college students photos of people holding different objects and asked them to quickly decide whether what they saw was a gun or some neutral object, like a shoe or a cell phone.
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