Beyond The Truman Show Delusion: Solipsism and The Neuroscience of Mentalization
You give a dog food, water, shelter, love and affection and they think you’re God
You give a cat food, water, shelter, love and affection and they think it’s God
— Christopher Hitchens
The age-old argument about which makes the better pet will continue on forever. Wherever you fall in the debate, you’ll have to admit that this quote sums this up pretty well. The dig at felines may be a tad extreme, but even the most die-hard of ‘cat people’ will have to agree that they tend towards self-centeredness.
Some of us humans also tend to think this way. As we’ve seen in the case of the Truman Show Delusion, we can all feel like the whole world is watching us. This trespasses into an even more extreme perspective: Solipsism. The idea of solipsism is a step beyond: Not merely that the whole world is constructed around you, but that your inner experience is the only one actually to exist! The only thing that is real is your mind, and your mind alone.
Before we dismiss this extreme cat-like attitude, let’s examine it further. Strictly speaking, our own internal experience is the only thing we can possibly be certain about. We’re probably right that the external physical world is out there in front of us, but we can’t actually be sure. It’s possible for example, that we’re living in a Matrix-like simulation, where our subjective world is technologically engineered. Whatever the true nature of reality is, the one thing that we can be certain of is that we are experiencing it.
While an interesting theory, most of us don't actually operate this way. Instead, we naturally assume that other people think, feel, and have internal experiences just as we do. Even “cat people”.
We're driven to understand the minds of others, but how do we do this?
From The Truman Show Delusion to False Beliefs
This general process of understanding other minds is called mentalizing. This is a complex computation requiring our brains to instantaneously pick up nuanced social cues, social norms, and background information in order to model another person’s conscious experience.
But before we can even begin to make these computations, we have to do something even more fundamental: differentiate our own minds from the minds of others. That is, we have to distinguish between what we know, and what we know that others know.
It sounds pretty straightforward, one’s ability here can be evaluated by what scientists call the False Belief Task. Here, participants are probed on their mentalization ability by responding to scenarios like this:
Imagine the following:
It’s Saturday morning and you go to the fridge to start making breakfast. As you start imaging the delicious omelet you’re going to make, you open the carton of eggs and - surprise! There are golf balls instead of eggs. Turns out, your roommate played a not so funny joke.
Now imagine your Mom comes over later in the day and doesn’t know about this practical joke. And say that she goes to the fridge to make an omelet. What do you think they are going to think is inside?
If you’re mentalizing properly, you can easily put together that your Mom would be fooled just like you were. You know about the golf balls, and you also know that your Mom does NOT know about the golf balls. This process requires you to separate your own perspective from that of another and to put yourself in someone else’s shoes.
Mentalizing usually comes pretty easy for us. However, up until a certain age, young children lack this ability. If you present young children with this scenario, they reliably fail. They don’t differentiate between what they know and what they know you know, and will instead think that the Mom also knows about the golf balls. Their own mindstate, and the mindstate of others, are blurred.
Mentalization, Neuroscience, and Impulse Control
Many have taken from these findings the idea that mentalizing is simply an ability we have to acquire through experience. Like language or mathematical ability, we simply acquire these with age. But before we think that children are simply bad mentalizers, let’s take a closer look at this process in adults. Recent work on False Belief Tasks in adults suggests that more is at play.
In one experiment, participants played a game that tested their egocentricity. The subject in the experiment was seated across in front of a 5 x 5 shelving unit, which contained a variety of different toys such as cars and figurines. On the other side was another participant with whom they were partnered with. Their test was simple: their partner would say the name of the object, the partner is instructed to grab it.
Easy, right? However, several of the alcoves within the shelving unit had a back, obscuring their partner’s view. Specifically, three of the objects were toy cars—a small, a medium, and a large car—but the smallest car was hidden from their partner’s view by a wooden backing. The key trial came when their partner requested the “small car,” which from the partner’s point of view was actually the medium car.
First up are children. Similar to the egg carton scenario, they fail. They grabbed the car which they thought was smallest, not the one their partner thought was smallest.
As we might imagine, adults did better. However, there was an important wrinkle. Most of the adults grabbed the correct car, but, their eyes told a different story: They consistently looked first at the wrong car first - just as children did. This suggests that adults do continue to have an egocentric bias, in line with phenomena like The Spotlight Effect.
These results suggest that impulse control plays an important role in the mentalization process. Since we’re naturally biased towards our own egocentricity, we have to actively fight in order to suppress our own perception and keep it distinct from our model of another person’s.
Work in neuroscience furthers this idea. Work over the past 15 years has helped identity regions responsible for mentalizing: the left-temporoparietal junction. This region becomes engaged when we undergo mentalization and allows us to perspective take in these types of False Belief Tasks.
What happens when you directly stimulate this region of the brain responsible for mentalization? Using a new technology called transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), researchers now have that ability. And in a set of experiments, researchers did this while participants took part in a classic test of impulse control.
The results? Boosting the ability to mentalize actually caused people to be less impulsive. Overall, these findings indicate that not does impulse control influence mentalization, but that these processes may actually be subserved by the same neural real estate.
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Assuming other people’s inner worlds exist is just the start. We also strive to understand what these inner worlds are like. Mind perception is a foundational element of human nature, and one of our most important tasks as social creatures is to understand the inner worlds of other people.
It's long been thought that to better understand others, we have to put ourselves aside. This may be literally true. These findings suggest that this ability is much more cognitive than we may have assumed: mentalization is predicated on the ability to suppress our own egocentricity.
Humans are unique in our ability to mentalize. As the age-old debate about dogs and cats illustrates, this can only take us so far: We may have the capacity to understand other minds, even if we don't always agree with the contents.
Photo by DiAnte Squire via UnSplash
About the author
Matt Johnson, PhD is a researcher, writer, and consumer neuroscientist focusing on the application of psychology to branding. He is the author of the best-selling consumer psychology book Blindsight, and Branding That Means Business (Economist Books, Fall 2022). Contact Matt for speaking engagements, opportunities to collaborate, or just to say hello
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