Are there any disorders impairing spatial attention that you think would also impair empathy? I asked GPT-4 for disorders of spatial attention and gave me Hemispatial neglect and Balint’s Syndrom. If things were really convenient with Hemispatial neglect, I can imagine that people always think of some of their thoughts and feelings as on the “left” side. Then they would have difficulties having those feelings once they have trouble attending to anything on the left side. For a cliché example, associating his love with his heart on the left side (Maybe that’s a bad example. Perhaps better would be something where someone would have trouble telling if something was their own or another person’s thought or feelings).
I appreciate the brainstorming prompt but I can’t come up with anything useful here. The things you mention are related to cortex lesions, which would presumably leave the brainstem spatial attention system intact. (Brainstem damage is more rare and often lethal.) The stuff you say about neglect is fun to think about but I can’t see situations where there would be specifically-social consequences, in a way that sheds light on what’s happening.
There might be something to the fact that the temporoparietal junction (TPJ) seems to include areas related to spatial attention, and is also somehow involved in theory-of-mind tasks. I’ve been looking into that recently—in fact, that’s part of the story of how I came to write this post. I still don’t fully understand the TPJ though.
Hmm, there do exist lesion studies related to theory-of-mind, e.g. this one—I guess I should read them.
Are there any disorders impairing spatial attention that you think would also impair empathy? I asked GPT-4 for disorders of spatial attention and gave me Hemispatial neglect and Balint’s Syndrom. If things were really convenient with Hemispatial neglect, I can imagine that people always think of some of their thoughts and feelings as on the “left” side. Then they would have difficulties having those feelings once they have trouble attending to anything on the left side. For a cliché example, associating his love with his heart on the left side (Maybe that’s a bad example. Perhaps better would be something where someone would have trouble telling if something was their own or another person’s thought or feelings).
I appreciate the brainstorming prompt but I can’t come up with anything useful here. The things you mention are related to cortex lesions, which would presumably leave the brainstem spatial attention system intact. (Brainstem damage is more rare and often lethal.) The stuff you say about neglect is fun to think about but I can’t see situations where there would be specifically-social consequences, in a way that sheds light on what’s happening.
There might be something to the fact that the temporoparietal junction (TPJ) seems to include areas related to spatial attention, and is also somehow involved in theory-of-mind tasks. I’ve been looking into that recently—in fact, that’s part of the story of how I came to write this post. I still don’t fully understand the TPJ though.
Hmm, there do exist lesion studies related to theory-of-mind, e.g. this one—I guess I should read them.