“Hell,” you say, “what am I supposed to do, read your mind.”

When you think about it, though, we often have to judge what other people are thinking, if nothing else, as a matter of safety.

One man that has a mind and knows it can always beat ten men who haven’t and don’t.–  George Bernard Shaw

Rebecca Saxe tells us that the first question we have to answer is whether other people have minds at all.  We are pretty sure we have one, but we often wonder about some of those other bipods out there. The next is to decide what other people are thinking.

In this TED talk, Dr. Saxe tells us that it isn’t actually all that hard to read other people’s minds and that there is a specific area in the human brain that does the job for us.

I would rather have a mind opened by wonder than one closed by belief. — Gerry Spence

photo credit: Julio Ignaci0