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Mind Reading!?
A DEFINITION OF THE CONCEPT
In which I explain what I mean by “mind reading,”what it was that Descartes got wrong, and ourjourney together begins.
I believe in the phenomenon of mind reading, completely and wholeheartedly. For me it’s no more mysterious than being able to understand what someone is saying when she is talking to me. The fact is that it might actually even be a little less mysterious than that. There is nothing particularly controversial about mind reading, as far as I’m concerned. In actual fact, it’s completely natural—something we all do, all the time, without realizing it. But, of course, we do it to varying degrees of success and with more or less awareness. I believe that if we know what we are doing and how we do it, we will be able to train ourselves to do it even better. And that’s the point of this book. So what is it that we actually do? What do I mean when I say that we read each other’s minds? What does “mind reading” actually mean?
To begin with, I want to explain what I don’t mean. There’s something in psychology that is referred to as mind reading, and it’s one of the reasons why so many couples end up in therapy. This happens when one person presumes that the other person can read her mind:
“If he really loves me, he should have known I didn’t want to go to that party, even though I agreed to go!”
Or:
“He doesn’t care about me, or he’d have realized how I felt.”
Such demands for mind reading are more like outbursts of egocentricity. Another version of this is supposing that you can read someone else’s thoughts, when you’re actually just projecting attitudes and values from your own mind onto hers:
“Oh no, now she’s going to hate me.”
Or:
“She must be up to something—why else would she be smiling like that?”
This is called Othello’s mistake. None of these things are mind reading in the sense that I am talking about here. They’re just foolish behavior.
Descartes’s Big Mistake
In order to understand mind reading as I am about to describe it, it is important that you first understand a different concept. The philosopher, mathematician, and scientist René Descartes was one of the great intellectual giants of the seventeenth century. The effects of the revolution he instigated within mathematics and Western philosophy are still being felt today. Descartes died in 1650 of pneumonia in the Royal Palace in Stockholm, where he was tutoring Queen Christina. Descartes was used to working in his warm, cozy bed, as befits a French philosopher, so the cold stone floors of the castle quite understandably finished him off once winter set in. Descartes did a great deal of good, but he also made some serious mistakes. Before he died, he introduced the notion that body and mind were separate. This was pretty much the most stupid thing he could have come up with, but Descartes had won the ear of the intelligentsia, thanks to neat sound bites like Cogito, ergo sum (I think, therefore I am). As a result of his popularity, the peculiar (and basically religious) notion that human beings are made of two different substances—a body and a soul—gained ground.
There were naturally those who thought he was wrong, but their voices were drowned out by the cheers of celebration for Descartes’s idea. Only in recent times have biologists and psychologists been able to scientifically prove the exact opposite of Descartes’s claim; perhaps the most notable among them is the world-famous neurologist Antonio Damasio. Now we know that the body and mind are actually inextricably linked, in both the biological and the mental senses. But Descartes’s view was dominant for so long that it is still taken as an accepted truth by most people. Most of us still differentiate, albeit unconsciously, between our bodies and our thought processes. If the rest of this book is going to make any sense to you, it is important to understand that this isn’t the case, even if it feels a bit strange to think this way at first.
Here’s how it is: you can’t think a single thought without something physical happening to you as well. When you think a thought, an electrochemical process occurs in your brain. In order for you to create a thought, certain brain cells have to send messages to each other according to certain patterns. If you have had a thought before, the pattern for it is already established. All you’re doing then is repeating the pattern. If it is an entirely new thought, you create a new pattern or network of cells in your brain. This pattern also influences the body and can change the dissemination of hormones (such as endorphins) throughout your body, as well as in the autonomous nervous system. The autonomous nervous system governs things like breathing, the size of our pupils, blood flow, sweating, blushing, and so on.
Every thought affects your body in some way or other, sometimes in a very obvious way. If you’re frightened, your mouth will go dry and the blood flow to your thighs will increase in preparation for possibly running away. If you start to have sexual thoughts about the guy at the supermarket checkout, you’ll notice other, very obvious reactions in your body—even if it is only a thought. Sometimes the reactions are so small that they’re invisible to the naked eye. But they are always there. This means that by simply being observant of the physical changes that occur in a person, we can get a good idea of how she is feeling, what her emotions are, and what she is thinking. By training yourself at observation, you will also learn to see things that were previously too subtle for you to notice.
Body and Soul
But it doesn’t stop there. Not only are all our thoughts reflected in our bodies; the reverse is true as well. Whatever happens to our bodies affects our mental processes. You can easily test this yourself. Try the following:
Clench your jaw.Lower your eyebrows.Stare at a fixed point in front of you.Clench your fists.Stay like this for ten seconds.If you did this right, you might soon feel yourself starting to get angry. Why? Because you’ve just performed the same muscle movements as your face does when you are feeling angry. Emotions don’t only happen in your mind. Just like all our other thoughts, they happen in the whole of our bodies. If you activate the muscles that are associated with an emotion, you will activate and experience that same emotion, or rather, the mental process—which will in turn affect your body. In the test you just did, you activated your autonomous nervous system. You might not have noticed it, but when you did that test, your pulse increased by ten to fifteen beats per minute, and the blood flow increased to your hands, which are now feeling warmer or itchy. How did that happen? By using your muscles as I suggested, you told your nervous system that you were angry. And presto!
As you see, it works in both directions. It makes complete sense, when you think about it—anything else would actually be pretty peculiar. If we think a thought, it affects our bodies. If something happens to our bodies, it affects our thoughts. If this still doesn’t seem to make sense, that could be because we usually refer to some kind of incorporeal process or sequence with the word “thought,” whereas the word “body” is used to refer to a physical entity. Another way of describing it in more straightforward terms is this: you can’t think anything without it having some effect on your biological processes. These processes don’t just occur in the brain, but in the whole organism. In all of you. In other words, forget Descartes.
Wordless and Unconscious
The mental and biological parts are two sides of the same thing. If you understand that, then you’re already well on the way to becoming a fantastic mind reader. The basic idea of mind reading, as I use the term, is to gain understanding of other people’s mental processes by observing their physical reactions and features. Of course, we can’t “read” what goes on inside their minds in any literal sense (to begin with, this presupposes that everyone thinks in words, and we will find out that this isn’t always the case), but we don’t actually need to, anyway. As you are now aware, seeing what is happening on the outside can be enough to allow you to understand what is happening on the inside. Some of the things we observe are more or less fixed: physical stature, posture, tone of voice, and so on. But many things change constantly as we speak to someone: body language, eye movements, tempo of speech, etc. All of these things can be considered “nonverbal,” or wordless, communication.
The fact is that the majority of all communication that takes place between two people occurs without words. What we communicate with words is sometimes just a fraction of the total message. (Even collaborating to solve a mathematical problem requires a certain amount of nonverbal communication, if only to get the problem solvers motivated to work together.) The rest is communicated with our bodies and the quality of our voice. The irony is that we still insist on paying the most attention to what someone is saying to us—in other words, which words the person chooses to use—and only occasionally consider how it is said. To put it another way: wordless communication, which constitutes a huge chunk of our total communication, doesn’t only happen without words. Most of it also happens unconsciously.1
What’s that? Surely we can’t communicate without being aware of it? Well, actually we can. Even if we look at the whole person we are talking to, we almost always pay the most attention to the things she’s saying to us. How she moves her eyes, her facial muscles, or the rest of her body are all things we don’t often pay attention to, other than in the most obvious of cases. (Like when someone does what you just tried doing: lowering the brow, clenching the jaw, and staring with clenched fists.) Unfortunately, we’re also pretty useless at picking up on what people are saying to us with their words; we are constantly exposed to loads of hidden suggestions and ambiguous insinuations that slip straight past our conscious minds. But they do a little dance with our own unconscious mind, the far-from-insignificant part of us where a lot of our opinions, prejudices, and preconceptions of the world are stored.
Copyright © 2019 by Henrik Fexeus
