Learn about the neuroscience behind text messaging

It's really interesting. I had a summer student last summer who wanted to know how brains differed when they were talking face to face and whether they were texting each other. And I started this with the notion that, oh, texting really didn't involve much of the social brain, and what we're going to see is this active social areas of the brain when we're face to face, but we're not going to see very much in texting.

While, I was plenty wrong, as oftentimes students show the professors are wrong, and this was one of them. That the texting actually involved a lot more what we call the temporoparietal junction. It's the sweet spot in the brain that we think is sensitive to social interactions.

So it turns out that in all the people that were texting each other, they were involving this very special part of the brain. And we interpreted this as a greater involvement of theory of mind ways of projecting yourself into another person. But anyway, so the moral is we don't really know very much about what goes on in the brain in social interactions, and we have an awful lot to learn.