Mind reading can refer to mentalism or telepathy. Mentalism is a performance art using well-understood principles, while telepathy lacks scientific evidence. Mind reading is popular in culture, with characters often given telepathy as a special power. Transhumanists propose artificial telepathy as a future evolution of humanity.
The term mind reading can be used to refer to two quite disparate things: the effect of mentalism and effective communication between two minds. The former is a well-documented performance art with an established history and system by which it is made. The second is a parascience, and is therefore treated with great skepticism by the official scientific community. However, telepathy in mind reading remains a very popular belief among many people around the world.
Mind reading using the tricks of mentalism is meant to give the impression of true telepathy, but is actually accomplished using well-understood principles, including cold, warm, and hot readings, and some basic stage principles. Mentalists have performed mind reading tricks since ancient history, with performances recorded as far back as the 16th century. Early mentalists did indeed claim to possess telepathic abilities, and indeed some may actually believe they have these powers, but many modern mentalists, when pressed, will recognize that what they are doing is a mentalist performance, and not an actual parapsychological phenomenon.
Mentalists can perform all sorts of different mind reading tricks, to prove that they can read minds. One of the most famous of these is known as the book test. In the book test, a book is picked at random and given to a member of the audience. The member is then asked to open the book to a random page and select a random word. The mentalist then appears to read the audience member’s mind by saying the word they had chosen. While effects like this seem like obvious cases of mind reading, they are actually the result of a rather elaborate system of reading techniques, which have been codified into cohesive structures by mentalists in recent years.
While mentalism is one area of mind reading, actual telepathy is entirely different. It’s a matter of debate whether telepathy actually exists, with no strong scientific evidence to validate its existence and largely anecdotal evidence to back it up. Many people still believe in telepathy, however, and many people claim to be able to engage telepathically on occasion. In fact, a majority of Americans say they have experienced telepathy on some occasion, often in the form of knowing exactly what someone was going to say or do before it happened. Skeptics would likely attribute this to detecting subtle cues or environmental cues that create a shared response in both people.
In popular culture, mind reading remains a constant source of interesting stories and characters. Superheroes, science fiction characters, and popular movie and video game characters often used mind reading as a special power. From the Jedi in the Star Wars movies, to the Witch of Castle Grayskull, to Lwaxana Troi in Star Trek, to Dr. Tachyon from the Wild Card books, interesting characters are often given telepathy to help tell them apart. Transhumanists, who believe that humanity will eventually evolve on its own beyond the current species, often propose a form of artificial telepathy, which will be added to humans in some way, through bioengineering or technological hardware.
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