How Would You Like to Become World Famous?

Hi Everyone.

I hope you've enjoyed the stuff on my blog.  I'm having so much fun writing for everybody, and now I'm asking you to be apart of the fun too!

I've got lots of friends and lots of stuff to write about, so why not include my friends in the stuff I write about?

My good friend Kelvin appeared in my first blog post, and that was a success.  I got at least three more views than I normally would have gotten.

So, here's the deal.  Shoot me a message, or leave me a comment below, and you may very well appear in an upcoming entry.  I will use your name, a picture (of your choosing), and something about you that makes you unique to either explain a tough idea or simply make a funny joke.  I am also open to suggestions about how to format my page.  All friendly critiques about writing, grammar, content, etc. are welcome.  I want to get good.  In order to do that, I need to get good advice.  

Best wishes!


Facebook: Travis Nelson Dumais

Email: tdumais3@gmail.com


ps. I should have a separate page up soon dedicated to my photography.  Stay tuned!

Image

http://www.fanpop.com/clubs/fight-club/images/13119094/title/want-fight-club-fanart

Theory of Mind: What the Heck is it?

I went on a run today and figured out how to explain this idea to everybody.  I will ask you three questions that will force you to use your own Theory of Mind (ToM), and then I will explain what ToM is.

(1) When you see your best friend crying, what emotion are they feeling?

(2) When you give someone you love a red heart-shaped box, what types of things would they expect to find inside?

(3) When Shaquille O'Neal stands at the free throw line with a basketball in his hands, what does he intend to do?

These are not trick questions!  Your gut response to each one was right.

For the first one, perhaps you said that your crying friend was sad.  Or, if you have a friend who cries often -as I myself am prone to do- then maybe he was experiencing something sublime.

For the second question, someone you love would most likely think that there were chocolate candies inside the heart shaped box.

And, for the third question, we would guess that Shaquille intended to shoot the ball into the hoop so that he could get a point for his team.

When we think about other people's feelings (Question #1), we use our ToM. When we think about other people's beliefs (Q #2), we use ToM.  And, you guessed it, when we predict the next thing someone is going to do (Q #3), we use ToM!

We use ToM all the time, but we barely notice that we're doing it.  We don't notice it because our brains were designed to detect minds with ease in the same way that our brains were designed to easily detect the difference between blue and green.

See that little circled part?  That's called the Temporal-Parietal Junction, and it is the part of the brain that  'turns on' when we think about other people's mental states.*

In the next installment, I will explain how Mother Nature endowed us with this mind-reading ability. Down the road, I hope to address a wicked big question using Theory of Mind.

The wicked big question is this: how do we think about what God is thinking about?

*It's more like a network of neurons that 'fire' in a specific, globalized pattern; but to keep the explanation simple, I refer to the TPj as a 'part' rather than a complex neural network.