The Complexities of the Mind in Social Interaction

We love doing it, to family member, friends, or strangers: give advice. And we are terrible at it! Even if we have an important message, something that is crucial for another person's happiness or for the survival of humanity, even if we have all the facts on our side, we are more likely to mess up than influence another person. When it comes to advice giving, we cannot trust our instincts. In this talk, I will show you what the last decades of the science of advice can tell us about how not to do it and what our failure to convince others has to do with how our brain works.

In the action observation literature, there is plenty of evidence on how sensory and motor experiences modulate the way we process others’ actions. During my PhD, I investigate the role of somatosensory and motor areas of the brain when it comes to perception, encoding & maintenance in memory, or predicting information related to human bodies and biological movement.

We all yawn, at least once every day. All vertebrates yawn, but we still don’t know the real function of this behaviour. What is equally as puzzling, is that it is contagious. You might even start yawning now by simply reading the word Yawn. In my talk, providing the audience manages to stay awake, I will share my research on the strange phenomenon of yawning being contagious, which I explored, and found that it happens with dogs, with chimpanzees, with humans with intact vision, with humans who are blind and beyond: how come we may yawn when we see an android yawn?