Mentalizing, Schizophrenia, Consciousness

hello everyone and welcome back to active inference insights I your host darus parvey Wayne and today I absolutely thrilled to be speaking with Professor Chris FFF Chris is a neuropsychologist and a Pioneer in the application of brain Imaging to the study of mental processes he has contributed more than 500 papers to peer-reviewed Scientific journals and is known especially for his work on agency schizophrenia and social cognition within this latter he has worked extens extensively with his wife Professor utaff together they have published seminal papers on theory of mind and social signaling and last year they published the book what makes us social again it is no overstatement to say that Chris possesses a legendary status in the Spheres of Psychology and Neuroscience and so it is a real Honor on my part to be chatting to him today Chris thank you so much for joining me and welcome to the show oh thanks for those nice words you're welcome uh it's are you are you in London currently it's a beautiful day yes all be a bit Frosty yeah uh excellent so as I mentioned in my introduction uh you root many or you ground many of our social capacities in mentalizing which requires theory of mind now some of our audience might not we we our audience is diverse you know act brings in people from maths physics all sorts they might not have a psychology background so they might not be aware of what mentalizing or theory of Mind actually is so it might be worth just setting the stage and giving a brief exposition of what those terms mean if possible right oh yes theory of mind is a rather misleading phrase because it's not a theory of how the mind works and it's probably not even a theory so mentalizing is a slightly better term I think but the idea is that a one way into this is to say we're trying to predict prct is useful to be able to predict what people are going to do and to understand why they're doing it and theory of Mind originally said people do things because of their hidden mental state such as beliefs and intentions so if somebody takes an umbrella with them this doesn't mean that it's raining it means that they believe it is reigning or is going to rain and the key um to the experiments on people's ability to understand these hidden mental States is the impact of false beliefs because if somebody if you know it's not raining and this person goes out with an umbrella then you can say he has a false belief that it's going to rain and his belief is different from mine and I have to take this into account when I predict what he is going to do so that's basically what mentalizing is about that's the process of predicting what other people's mental states are and mental States meaning things like intentions beliefs and desires and we think that this is probably different from understanding people's emotions yes I can imagine a lot of people make that conflation um I guess and a further thing to unpack there is when people hear about sort of mentalizing they might think of autism and and the associated difficulties in mentalizing that seem to be associated with autism but over time uh many autistic people use heuristics or tricks or social cues to mentalize yes is there a difference because behaviorally they might manifest similarly and permit kind of harmonious social interaction or is theory of mind or mentalizing committed to saying that uh those who are mentalizing actually have a mental representation a kind of recursive mental representation of what the other part in this thinking um well that's what I think I don't think everybody agrees with that there is I mean more recently there is evidence that there are two I mean depends on how you decide to talk about it two levels of mentalizing which some people say the low one is not really mentalizing but that is to say some sometimes called Behavior reading um that you can solve many you can make many of these predictions without needing to know about other people's mental States…