Investigations of brain substrates for social cognition have polarized in two camps. The simulation camp focuses on so-called shared circuits (SCs) that are involved in one's own actions, sensations and emotions and in perceiving those of others [ 1 , 2 ]. The theory of mind (ToM) camp emphasizes the role of midline structures in mentalizing about the states of others [ 3 ]. Scientific energy has often flown into fruitless arguments about which camp is closer to the truth [ 4 ], but the true questions for contemporary social neuroscience should be (i) why do investigators find different sets of areas to be most prominent, and (ii) how do the two sets of brain areas interact? Here we propose a highly speculative model that complements the view of Uddin et al.[ 5 ] to stimulate and canalize future empirical work into a direction we believe to be promising.