How minds differ
Where I end and you begin
In shortFor some people the line between their feelings and other people's is thinner, so others' moods become their own.
The idea
Every living thing keeps a boundary between itself and the world, and the brain does the same with feelings and intentions: this is mine, that is yours. For some people this boundary is more porous. Another person’s mood becomes their own, seeing a sibling told off feels like being told off, and it is hard to tell whether a feeling started inside or came from the room. For others the boundary is thicker, and other people’s states are harder to pick up at all.
What to try
- Help name whose feeling it is: ‘Dad is cross about the car; you didn’t do anything’.
- Notice whether the child’s state follows the adults’ state, and look after the adults’ state first.
- Practise the difference in calm moments: ‘what am I feeling now? what do you think I am feeling?’
The common mistake
Treating a borrowed feeling as the child’s problem to fix, while its source stays the same.
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Short, plain pieces by the researchers and good writers.
Books
How the predictive brain shapes what we see, feel and do, with many everyday examples.
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The science behind itHow strong the evidence is, the model, videos and references.
How strong the evidence is
A way of thinking A lens for interpreting what a child does, not a rule from trials.
A Markov blanket is the set of states that separates internal from external states while coupling them through sensory and active states (Kirchhoff et al., 2018). Blankets are nested: cells, organs, persons, dyads, groups. Telling self from other requires keeping models of one’s own states and of others’ states apart; we call this self-orthogonalisation: representing self and other along separable dimensions, so that inferring another person’s state does not overwrite one’s own. Lamm, Bukowski and Silani (2016) review evidence that empathy relies on shared representations plus a mechanism that keeps them distinct. Friston and Frith (2015) model communication as generalised synchrony between two agents with shared generative models, and Veissière et al. (2020) describe how we learn through other minds and shared expectations. A porous blanket predicts emotional contagion and difficulty attributing the source of an affect; a rigid one predicts less alignment. These are hypotheses for one person, to be tested by varying the presence and state of others. ‘Self-orthogonalisation’ is our working term, not an established construct.
More technical books
Attachment and internal working models across life, written for professionals.
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References
- Kirchhoff, M., Parr, T., Palacios, E., Friston, K., & Kiverstein, J. (2018). The Markov blankets of life: autonomy, active inference and the free energy principle. Journal of the Royal Society Interface, 15(138), 20170792.
- Friston, K. J., & Frith, C. D. (2015). A duet for one. Consciousness and Cognition, 36, 390–405.
- Lamm, C., Bukowski, H., & Silani, G. (2016). From shared to distinct self–other representations in empathy: evidence from neurotypical function and socio-cognitive disorders. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 371(1686), 20150083.
- Veissière, S. P. L., Constant, A., Ramstead, M. J. D., Friston, K. J., & Kirmayer, L. J. (2020). Thinking through other minds: A variational approach to cognition and culture. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 43, e90.
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