Rebecca Saxe delivered this fascinating speech at TED in 2009. She has discovered the one part of the brain that gets engaged when we are evaluating the intentions of other people.
Of note:
- Children don't develop a sense for morality and evaluation of other people's consciousnesses and intention until after age 5.
- Using trans-cranial magnetic stimulation, Saxe and her researchers were able to disrupt this part of the brain and that it has a significant impact on the ability of people to make judgments about other people's intentions.
This seems to have wide-reaching impact for product designers. Designers must spend time inhabiting the consciousness of others -- to feel their pain and empathize with what they would feel at any given moment in an interaction.
I would suspect the overdevelopment of this part of the brain is one of the key differentiators between designers who make things pretty and designers who make things well.