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However, whether and how subcortical structures, particularly the thalamus, contribute to this high-level computation remains unknown. Here, we investigated human thalamocortical dynamics during a naturalistic ToM movie watching condition, taking a rare dual-modality approach by combining high-field 7T fMRI and intracranial stereoelectroencephalography (sEEG). Across both modalities, ToM events reliably activated the DN, whereas the thalamus lacked canonical local activation. Despite this absence of local activation, the thalamus shared ToM-related representational structure and exhibited enhanced bidirectional interactions with the DN during mentalizing across methods. Crucially, sEEG revealed that the thalamus coordinated DN activity via cross-frequency phase-amplitude coupling (PAC), whereby thalamic low-frequency phase unidirectionally modulated DN high-frequency activity. Furthermore, the strength of thalamic-DN PAC predicted both the activity magnitude and the representational quality of ToM-related information within the dorsomedial DN subsystem. Together, these findings identify the human thalamus as a regulatory hub that gates DN computations during ToM without exhibiting observable localized activity, revealing a previously unrecognized mechanism by which thalamic dynamics coordinate high-level social cognition in humans.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.64898\/2026.07.28.741302","type":"posted-content","created":{"date-parts":[[2026,7,31]],"date-time":"2026-07-31T09:55:23Z","timestamp":1785491723000},"source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":0,"title":["Thalamocortical orchestration of human theory of mind"],"prefix":"10.64898","author":[{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0001-5703-076X","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Runhao","family":"Lu","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"Montreal Neurological Institute, Department of Neurology and Neurosurgery, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Emily","family":"Davidson","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Montreal Neurological Institute, Department of Neurology and Neurosurgery, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Jonah","family":"Miller-Smith","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Montreal Neurological Institute, Department of Neurology and Neurosurgery, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Dian","family":"Lyu","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Laboratory of Behavioral and Cognitive Neuroscience, Department of Neurology and Neurological Sciences, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, CA, USA"},{"name":"MOE Frontier Science Center for Brain Science and Brain-Machine Integration (BBMI), Zhejiang University, Zhejiang, China"},{"name":"Department of Neurosurgery, School of Medicine, the Second Affiliated Hospital of Zhejiang University, Zhejiang, China"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Zoe","family":"Lusk","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Laboratory of Behavioral and Cognitive Neuroscience, Department of Neurology and Neurological Sciences, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, CA, USA"}],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Prantik","family":"Kundu","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Ben L. 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