• Question: in the future could reading minds be possible for normal people or to do on a day to day basis?

    Asked by anon-204423 to James, Sally, Lucy, David, Dan on 6 Mar 2019. This question was also asked by anon-204603.
    • Photo: James Munro

      James Munro answered on 6 Mar 2019:

      Hey, thanks for writing this question :),

      We sort of already do read minds whenever we communicate with people if we try to. If you want to show me you are happy, you smile. My brain knows that when I smile I feel happy – so It guesses that you must be happy because you are smiling. My brain has guessed what your brain is feeling. This is called emotional contagion, and is responsible for sympathy and empathy. It also allows us to enjoy reading books. If I read that a character is happy, I know how happiness feels so I can understand the character.

      Using cool parts of our brain called “mirror neurons” and “inferential systems” I can also guess where you are going to move and why, and if you are trying to cheat me. If you are bouncing up and down and clenching your fists I might guess you need the toilet. If you reach to pick up a mug, I can tell you are either going to drink it or move it. If we are playing tennis and you turn your body to the right as you swing your racket, I can make a guess about where you are going to hit the ball. This happens so quickly that I can hit a moving ball out of the air back at you.

      Mind-reading is so important to daily life, because we have to get on with other humans to survive. This is why we are so good at it. We finish each others sentences and help each other with tasks that require trust. If you can understand someone else you can trust them more.

      However, will we ever be able to know exactly what someone else is thinking? Hmm… it is possible. We are a long way off, but we can already kind of do it in a slow way. We use somethnig called machine learning. Machine learning means we show a machine a bunch of information about the brain and tell it what the brain was doing. So the machine learns what a brain does when it sees yellow, or eats bread, or watches a movie about birds. We can then give it new information and tell it to guess what the brain was thinking about based on what the brain is doing. This video demonstrates it pretty well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsjDnYxJ0bo

      The coolest thing is, computers are learning mind-reading very very quickly. Predictive text apps guess what you will type next. Google knows what you are going to search for before you type it, and uses google photos to categorise your pictures by face, event, object etc.

      I hope you found this answer interesting 🙂

    • Photo: Dan Taylor

      Dan Taylor answered on 13 Mar 2019:

      I think it depends what counts as reading minds, we’re pretty good at things like first impressions and the like so in some ways I guess we can, but I don’t know about being able to hear someone else’s thoughts as if they were your own!

    • Photo: David Chadwick

      David Chadwick answered on 13 Mar 2019:

      We are pretty good at reading people’s minds, moods and intentions when we see them face to face.
      But we are hopeless at doing this over the Internet. This is why my research is so important. I am trying to help people improve their relationships over the Internet by helping them to know the real identities of the remote people they are talking to, in a way that can be trusted.

    • Photo: Sally Tilt

      Sally Tilt answered on 13 Mar 2019:

      One of the things that I think is interesting about this question is – if computers or people were able to read minds in future – would this change the content of what we thought about?
      So much of our thoughts are things that we keep private – quite often we do this so that we don’t hurt the feelings of others, or offend others. But if we could routinely know what each other was thinking, that wouldn’t work – would we be able to stifle our thinking – or would we become less easy to offend?

      We might end up asking the question – is it the right thing to do to develop techniques to read people’s minds? It would likely feel like quite a loss of privacy.

      Great question – enjoyed thinking about this one!

    • Photo: Lucy Maddox

      Lucy Maddox answered on 14 Mar 2019:

      I doubt it – but never say never with science!

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