How to Read Minds
Not just a fairground trick. It can be done, and you can do it!
Anyone can read minds. It’s not even difficult. No trickery, no faking, no sneaky tricks. You just have to have the right approach.
Let’s get the true but misleading stuff out of the way first. Yes, you can read minds. You can read your own, right?
But I am my own mind, I hear you say, of course I can read my mind. It’s self-reading!
Without getting into a discussion of what “I” might be, and given science’s lack of answers for the mind-body problem it’s an open question anyway, let’s agree that you can read your own mind.
I say you can also read the minds of others, and that all it needs is a bit of training to do so. You may already have the skills right now. Let’s find out.
The biggest obstacle
The major difficulty in reading someone else’s mind is your own. You are constantly being bombarded with thoughts and commentary, opinions and prejudices from inside your own head. How can you understand what someone else is thinking if your mind is making such a racket, and you trust what it is saying?
This clever video clip encapsulates what I’m talking about. Your own mind is hampering your ability to see the truth of what someone else is thinking. If all you can hear are your own thoughts, how can you hear those of another?
So let’s get that out of the way
You ever meditated? I mean, really meditated, for half an hour or more, and actually enjoyed it.
True meditation isn’t about reciting a mantra until you are hypnotised, or mechanically performing some process for half an hour so you can check off a box on your meditation app.
It’s about using the mind to recite a mantra until it grows weary of the chore and leaves you alone. Once your mind has stopped chattering, you can get some real tranquillity into your head.
It usually takes me a few minutes to settle down in meditation. I recite my mantra internally. Deliberately at first, then automatically, and after a while it runs out and I have stillness. If thoughts return — as they inevitably do — I whistle up my mantra again and go through the same process. Or I imagine my mind is the surface of a lake, these errant thoughts are ripples, and they will subside if I ignore them.
The first step in mind-reading is to turn off that annoying chatter. Meditation is a great way to train yourself to ignore your mind. When you can reliably find stillness and mental peace, you are ready.
Besides, meditation gives a lot of benefits all by itself.
Next step: watch
Observe without comment. That’s the trick. Watch and listen.
With your noisy mind turned off through meditation, you are free to observe your target mind. Watch everything they do, listen to everything they say. Without comment, without prejudice.
As human beings, we all have similar thinking processes. We might differ in so many ways physically through experience, skill, culture, and memory, but in essence, we are all using the same thinking machinery.
Our brains have evolved over millions of years. Our deepest thoughts come from what Carl Sagan called our reptile brains, and we may find the same structures in every person. Indeed, in every mammal. Fear, hunger, excitement and so on come from these oldest parts of our brain, and are most strongly linked to bodily expressions.
Watch closely, and you’ll observe body language that is difficult or impossible to conceal. For example, police interrogators are trained to observe microexpressions, fleeting facial gestures that cannot be faked. Professional poker players look for “tells” which give away the inner feelings of their opponents. If they register doubt or elation when dealt a fresh card, these are facts worth knowing.
Watch someone else carefully, you are reading their emotions, and their mind. You and they are using identical brain structures to signal to each other; you can trust these signals.
But that’s the easy part
To really read somebody’s mind in fine detail, listen to what they say. Listen from stillness. Listen without comment or interpretation. Your thoughts about them are irrelevant.
Sadly, science has not yet provided us with a convincing, testable model of consciousness. Running people through machines which indicate which part of the brain lights up when they think about bicycles has not provided much more than some handy information regarding how we feel about bicycles. It doesn’t give us a comprehensive theory of mind.
We all know that we possess consciousness: it is an intimate part of our experience in the physical world, it is an essential part of being human. But we cannot explain how it works. There must surely be a Nobel Prize awaiting the first person to come up with an explanation.
I cannot even say that every human being possesses consciousness. I know that I do — as René Descartes put it, “I think, therefore I am” — but I have no way of knowing for sure that this experience is the same for another.
But I assume that it is. I haven’t found any way to disprove it, for one thing. I assume that every waking human being has a sense of self that is identical to my own, at least until we get into the differences caused by experience, education, culture and so on.
I know that my physical body has changed, my mind has been educated, my memory has been filled by life’s experience in the years since I was born. And yet, I know that I have a continuity of conscious existence with that little girl who first marvelled over a rainbow, or puzzled out the letters to tease tales out of books, or clambered onto a bicycle and lit up a bit of her brain with the delight of riding it. And the pain of falling off it.
I assume that this feeling of consciousness remains the same through life, and is the same for every person. I may not have any science to back up this view, but I have a philosophical model in the Three Primary Hypostases of Plotinus, a model that turns up again and again in different cultures with different names.
They are: 1. Personal consciousness, also termed Spirit, Soul, or Atman 2. Intellect, also known as Nous, or Paramatman 3. A causal entity, also termed The Good, the One, the Absolute, or God.
The causal entity is ineffable. We cannot know how it exists or operates. Consciousness we know about already. It is an instance of the middle entity: Intellect.
Intellect occupies the realm of Forms in Plato’s philosophy. It is where we may find mathematical proofs, the abstract concepts of Beauty, of Love, of Truth, of Justice.
I don’t know how or why this works for me; I just know that it does.
Oh look, a rainbow!
If I look at a rainbow, a sunset, a baby’s smile, the curve of a swan’s neck, I don’t have to think about whether they are beautiful. They just are. Do I need to think over whether I love somebody? No, it happens in my heart. If I make a true statement, it is true, and I have no doubt about it.
I don’t need to think too hard about these things. They flow from some deeper source. And I assume that the same applies to everybody.
So, if I listen carefully to what somebody says, and I watch their actions and expressions carefully, without letting my own thoughts get in the way, I can access the same underlying causes and feelings without any doubt about my observation.
I have to know what I’m doing, and I have to push my own mind to one side, but yes, I can read minds. Not to the extent that I can read their passwords or know what they had for breakfast, mind, but enough to have a good idea of what thoughts are running through their head.
And you can too
Women tend to be better at this than men. It is called “emotional intelligence” and it is a running joke amongst women about how blind our male partners are to things which we see as obvious.
But it’s simple really. All you need do is watch and listen, and turn off those male ideas that your own opinions must be somehow better than those of women.
Don Trump is spectacularly bad at this. It’s like he is using his shoe, or a piece of chewing gum to do his empathy thinking with.
And some men are amazingly good. The best mind-reader I ever met was a man who seemed to know exactly what I was thinking. Never a criticism, never a judgement, but his words made it plain that he understood my thoughts.
So there it is
If you want to read minds, just do three things:
- Still your own thoughts
- Watch carefully
- Listen without comment
And you know what? It’s not about you, it’s not about some benefit or inside running you might develop. It’s about understanding and bonding. Know what others are thinking, you might just find that life becomes happier for everyone. You can get rid of a lot of misunderstanding and worry, for starters.
And when your wife tells you what she wants for her birthday, you might just listen and accept, instead of getting her a vacuum cleaner. Double happiness!
Britni
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