BRAIN scans have revealed how we can second-guess other people’s behaviour by subconsciously thinking through how we would do the same task ourselves. These mental dry runs enable us to anticipate the next moves of others in many everyday situations, from what opponents will do in chess games to avoiding vehicle collisions.
“We probably put ourselves in the shoes of other people and run through the same processes in our own minds as they do in theirs,” says Narender Ramnani of the University of Oxford.
He and his colleague Christopher Miall made the discovery by taking MRI brain scans of…
