You Exist in Your Eyeballs

Is there an innate psychological intuition about the location of the self? Do humans, especially children, have a built-in bias that tells them where the self is, and if so, how and why would this have evolved? People’s common sense usually places selves around the general head area, or as absolutely zero scientists call it, the “brain box.” But you wouldn’t say someone’s self is in the ears and hair parts of the brain box. No, the eyes, as they say, truly are the window to the soul.

Paul Bloom and Christina Starmans, of Yale Univeristy, published a clever research article last week about this in the journal Cognition, arguing that children and adults tend to assume the self is in and around the eyes. These South Park-esque alien drawings prove it. Full story on Motherboard here.