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 natu-ral—-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!"
"He doesn't care about me, or he'd have realized how I felt." Such demands for mind reading are more like outbursts of ego-centricity. 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
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.