"What does he think of me? And what will he do if he guesses what I want?" Questions like these arise in negotiations, friendly conversations, and even at the family dinner table. We mentally take the place of another person, and then try to imagine how he sees us. In psychology, this ability is called mentalization, or "theory of mind."
A study published on 10 October 2026 in Nature Communicationsshows a curious result: people with focal lesions of the medial prefrontal cortex retained the ability for complex reasoning about another person's thoughts in a strategic social game. This area is located on the inner surface of the frontal lobes and has long been regarded as an important participant in social cognition.
The researchers compared participants with lesions of this area, patients with lesions of other brain regions, and people without such lesions. Participants in the first group received comparable rewards and used similar mentalization strategies. However, they needed more time to make decisions. According to computational modeling, they tended to accumulate more evidence before a final choice. The authors suggest that the medial prefrontal cortex supports strategic decisions, whereas the studied ability to reason about others' thoughts may be preserved when it is damaged.
Here a scientific paradox arises. When a brain area is active during a particular task, it is natural to assume that it is this area that provides the corresponding ability. However, participation and indispensability are different properties. One can imagine an orchestra: the sound of one instrument is clearly heard, while the melody is sustained by the interaction of many musicians. Lesion studies help to determine which components of the overall work depend on a specific area.
In everyday life, understanding another person sometimes seems almost telepathic. One person is still choosing his words, while the other is already finishing his sentence. Such a coincidence is surprising: how do we manage to catch a thought before it has been spoken?
Communication has many subtle cues: intonation, facial expression, gaze direction, pauses, and a shared history of relationships. Familiarity with a person helps to anticipate his reactions, and lucky guesses can create a sense of direct access to others' thoughts. At the same time, confidence in one's guess and its accuracy deserve separate attention: sometimes we think we have understood our interlocutor perfectly, although he meant something entirely different by his words.
Telepathy as the supposed transmission of thoughts outside known channels of communication is a separate research question. It was not tested in the described work. The preservation of mentalization after damage to a brain area is likewise not in itself evidence of such transmission: testing it would require special experiments that exclude the usual means of exchanging information.
The results of the study pertain to a specific game task. Everyday understanding of people includes far more: recognizing emotions, a sense of tact, sympathy, interpretation of hints. Extrapolating the conclusions to this entire spectrum requires additional research. Possible compensation by other brain systems also remains a question to be tested.
To help people with brain lesions, the very framing of the question matters: which abilities have been preserved, and under what conditions can a person use them? The success of the answer and the time required for it deserve separate attention. A pause before a decision may coexist with a preserved ability to take another's point of view into account.
The new work refines our understanding of how social thinking is organized.
The next question is: what connections allow understanding of another person to be preserved when part of the system is damaged? The answer will help to understand more deeply the ability thanks to which a conversation becomes a meeting of two inner worlds.
