by Pamela Grundy

Created on: November 15, 2007

Minding-reading can be very real.

Having clearly made that claim, it's important to note that mind-reading is also easy to fake. "Mentalism" is a time-honored form of stage magic in which the magician appears to read the minds of individuals in the audience by telling them what is in their purses, what city they are from, what they have written on a piece of paper, etc. and so on. The Amazing Kreskin was an accomplished mentalist and a regular on the Johnny Carson Show. Mentalism is not mind-reading; it's a showman's method of redirecting attention, a sort of psychological sleight of hand.

So what constitutes "real" mind-reading? Most anecdotal stories of mind-reading are logically chalked off to coincidence. You receive a phone call from a distant friend moments after thinking about past times you spent together. A relative dies minutes after you get "funny feeling" that they are in trouble. Other personal experiences are more a function of familiarity and repetition. You finish you partner's sentences. You say exactly the same thing at exactly the same time. You 'hear' a loved one say something that that person was only thinking. These are common experiences, easily explained away.

We live in a culture that equates "mind" with "brain", so that when we speak of mind-reading what we are referring to is the ability to look into someone's brain and read the thoughts there, as if they were written on some kind of cellular paper. But what if we expand the concept of mind to include the entirety of a person's experiences, feelings, thoughts, hopes, and dreams? What if we include body language, facial expression, vocal inflection, and a myriad of other subtle cues routinely picked up by psychics and empaths? When I was a teenager I read palms. I would take the subject's hand in mine, look at the palm, and the say the very first things that popped into my head. I thought this was funny and clever, but I soon discovered that people took these things profoundly to heart and sometimes were deeply shaken, asking how could I know such things? I quit reading palms this way when a priest told me I had revealed things to him that no one else could have known, and in doing so, deeply shaken his core beliefs. All that, when I was just trying to be a smart ass!

Psychology provides an explanation for this specific phenomena in the mechanism of projection-the tendency of any given person to project his or her own issues and emotions onto a vague verbal or visual cue. But after years of studying divination and human beings, I am convinced that these interactions are indeed two-way. I pick up on a subtle nonverbal cue that is part of who you are but maybe not a part of who you think you are. I verbalize this observation: you infuse it with your own interpretation and your own meaning. This could well be called mind-reading, but it is a dynamic form of mutual storytelling, not a static "reading" what is written on your brain cells.

I believe that all human beings have a innate need of this kind of dynamic personal story, that such activities center us in the world of others and enrich our lives and relationships. Nothing about it is all that simple. But real? You betcha.

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