Mind Reading: the Ultimate Empathy?
December 03, 2006
Five scientists at Germany's Rostock University found that administering 24 IU of oxytocin significantly improved male subjects' ability to recognize other people's emotional states. They gave their paper the provocative title "Oxytocin Improves 'Mind-Reading' in Humans."
They make it clear they're not really talking about telepathy: "Our data suggest that oxytocin improves the ability to infer the mental state of others from social cues of the eye region."
But that title is attention-getting. Nothing wrong with that.