Self-perception: mechanosensation and beyond
Brain-organ communications play a crucial role in maintaining the body's physiological and psychological homeostasis, and are controlled by complex neural and hormonal systems, including the internal mechanosensory organs. However, the progress has been slow due to technical hurdles: the sensory neurons are deeply buried inside the body and are not readily accessible for direct observation, the projection patterns from different organs or body parts are complex rather than converging into dedicate brain regions, the coding principle cannot be directly adapted from that learned from conventional sensory pathways. Our lab apply the pipeline of "biophysics of receptors-cell biology of neurons-functionality of neural circuits-animal behaviors" to explore the molecular and neural mechanisms of self-perception. In the lab, we mainly focus on the following three questions: 1, The molecular and cellular basis for proprioception and interoception. 2, The circuit mechanisms of sensory coding and integration of internal and external information. 3, The function of interoception in regulating behavior homeostasis.
Personality Evaluated: What Do Other People Really Think of You?
What do other people really think of you? In this talk, I highlight the unique perspective that other people have on the most consequential aspects of our personalities—how we treat others, our best and worst qualities, and our moral character. First, I compare how people thought they behaved with how they actually behaved in everyday life (based on observer ratings of unobtrusive audio recordings; 217 people, 2,519 observations). I show that when people think they are being kind (vs. rude), others do not necessarily agree. This suggests that people may have blind spots about how well they are treating others in the moment. Next, I compare what 463 people thought their own best and worst traits were with what their friends thought about them. The results reveal that friends are more likely to point out flaws in the prosocial and moral domains (e.g., “inconsiderate”, “selfish”, “manipulative”) than are people themselves. Does this imply that others might want us to be more moral? To find out, I compare what targets (N = 800) want to change about their own personalities with what their close others (N = 958) want to change about them. The results show that people don’t particularly want to be more moral, and their close others don’t want them to be more moral, either. I conclude with future directions on honest feedback as a pathway to self-insight and, ultimately, self-improvement.