Faculty Opinions recommendation of "Hey John": signals conveying communicative intention toward the self activate brain regions associated with "mentalizing," regardless of modality.

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Abstract
This deceptively simple, but nevertheless clever, event-related fMRI study in healthy subjects identified brain activation associated with communicative intent i.e. such as calling a name (auditory), or by making eye contact (visual) in an incidental experimental manipulation. Common activation in the bilateral temporal poles and the paracingulate cortex was observed, suggesting that these regions may be crucial for identifying the initial stages in a social interaction, irrespective of the input modality. Importantly, these activations were not affected by arousal, as indexed by no changes in measured pupil diameter, as compared to reliable changes elicited to infrequent target stimuli that served to focus the subject's attention.

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