These findings provide initial evidence that depression, and ruminative thinking in depression, are related to abnormal patterns of fluctuating communication among brain systems involved in regulating attention and self-referential thinking.
Not only existing things but also all kinds of non-beings (nonentities, Routley 1980, 7) find their place in Meinong's all-embracing theory of objects — among them even impossible objects, like the round square, as well as paradoxical, "defective" objects, like some forms of the liar or special cases of purely self-referential thinking (the thought about itself, for example).
When we get caught up in self-referential thinking, we get in our own way.
First, the identified brain areas have been previously implicated in self-referential thinking and autobiographical memory retrieval [9], [10].
In our prior neuroactivation study [16], we interpreted the results as evidence that moral sensitivity is a form of social cognition and self-referential thinking in which the FP is engaged to provide access to knowledge of self, the pSTS as a means of social perspective taking, and the PCC as a means of autobiographical memory recall in the service of interpretive awareness of moral conflicts.
This interspecies discrepancy supports the idea that self-referential thinking and theory of mind are more prominent in humans, compared with monkeys.
The posterior cingulate region of the brain is also a key component of the default mode network (DMN), a constellation of brain regions activated during self-referential thinking.
Thus, consistent with the hypothesis that one would also engage self-referential (encoding) processes when thinking about someone similar to oneself (Mitchell et al. 2006; Benoit et al. 2010), people who perceived themselves as more similar to Obama found it more difficult to subsequently remember whether they had in fact made conceptual judgments about themselves or Obama.
This pattern supports the view that similar self-referential processes are also applied when thinking about people considered similar to oneself (Mitchell et al. 2006; Benoit et al. 2010).
As noted, the DMN is not only active during mental imagery, but during various other internally-oriented tasks, including self-referential processing [29], envisioning the future [27], and thinking about another person's perspective [37].
