Mental Modeling

This article details some research into empathy, and how it appears that some animals (probably humans too) show strikingly similar neural activity watching another animal have an experience as the neural activity in the animal itself. The article casts this as "like mind reading", and I'm not sure that I agree with that characterization -- but the point here is that they're recognizing the mental hardware of empathy and projection. And that's damn cool. The mechanisms behind this are going to be fascinating, when they can tease them out.