ABSTRACT
In the last few decades, cognitive neuroscience has considerably advanced our understanding of the relationship between the mind, the brain, and behavior. We now have a detailed picture of how our brain processes shape, color, and motion, recognizes objects, discriminates sounds, and process smells, as well as how the brain enables us to perform motor actions. Progress has also been made in the understanding of higher order cognitive functions, including short-and long-time memory processes, speech generation and recognition, and the executive functions involved in planning, multitasking, and self-monitoring. Neuroscientists, however, have tended to assume implicitly that understanding a single brain is sufficient to understand human behavior. Clearly, such an approach does not allow for the fact that humans are inherently social. Brains do not exist in isolation, and their basic function includes the expression of the social culture into which brains are born. It is likely that differences between our brains and the brains of apes and monkeys are associated with our outstanding skills in social cognition, such as our ability to represent and understand the beliefs, desires, and feelings of others.
