PSYC 741 Lecture Notes - Lecture 13: Mentalization, Prefrontal Cortex, Posterior Parietal Cortex
Document Summary
What is the self: cannot be objectively measured. Neuroscience does not focus on what the self is, etc. Instead, it deals with internal processes when thinking about one"s own feelings or thoughts: i. e. what is going on in your brain when you"re thinking about yourself or your feelings. Self reflections requires an initial redirection of attention from external sensory events. Ex: someone is in a dark room and the only thing to look at is a white fixation cross on the screen. After a while, the individual will start thinking about themselves and things going on in their minds and lives this is done in fmri. Engagement of attention networks turns off resting network (and vice versa) fmri and self-reflection tasks. They are shown traits (adventurous, ambitious, etc. ) and asked how well the trait describes you and then how does it describe your best friend. Subtraction between self and friend leaves us with activation in the medial prefrontal cortex.
