Emily Falk

The kids would be able to suggest ways that Charlie and Charles Adams could very generously share the toy or take turns wearing the special pajamas or take turns getting into the bath first.

And then after they had stopped and reasoned about it for those other people, then we were able to say, well, do you think that you guys could do any of those things?

And sometimes it would work.

And, you know, this came up the other day with my neighbor.

I was over at my neighbor's house and two of their kids were having a little bit of a tussle.

And I said, hey, guys, you know what happens when Emmett and Theo are in this situation?

And just, you know, tell a situation that's very similar to the one that's playing out there.

And then these little humans whose prefrontal cortex isn't fully developed can still reason in a completely reasonable way.

Yeah, and researchers who study narrative persuasion call that experience transportation, being transported into a story we can identify with the characters in a different way than when we're experiencing things ourselves.

And research in the brain that our team has done shows that there's fundamentally different pathways that are unfolding when we're reasoning about stories and other kinds of facts.

So we had smokers who came into the lab

And we used this brain stimulation technique called transcranial direct current stimulation, which temporarily disrupts the function of certain brain regions.

And so we used it to temporarily disrupt regions that typically are involved in that kind of effortful thinking.

And when people were getting their brain stimulated using this technology and they were given didactic facts, things like, you know, if you smoke for 30 years, it increases your risk of lung cancer by X percent.

Then when we disrupted the function of these brain regions, it made it so that they were less able to reason about those facts themselves.

compared to when we use sham stimulation where they're hooked up to the machine but not actually having those brain regions disrupted.

On the other hand, for people, for the smokers who came into the lab and did the same procedure, but they were given stories, even when we disrupted the function of these brain regions that we typically think of as being key for our ability to reason, they could still generate just as many arguments and think about what was happening.

So being told John smoked for 30 years and he developed lung cancer, they were able to reason about it in a different way.

And I think part of what's happening there is

is that other brain systems are being called into use.