Yavi 25's Key Ideas from Mindwise
by Nicholas Epley

We don’t really know what’s going on in our own minds. What chance then do we have of figuring out the minds of others?

Very little, it turns out. It’s very difficult to know what others think of you.

So while you might be confident that you’re well-liked it’s almost impossible to tell if others likes you, or just pretending.

The fact is that learning more about a person does not give you a greater ability to accurately read their mind; it's merely creates the illusion that you can.

Which is more human: your car or a homeless person? The answer might seem obvious, your brain might disagree.

There’s a region in the brain called the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) that’s engaged whenever we’re thinking about other people.

The MPFC is most active when thinking about people close to us, because we consider them to be as human as ourselves. But the MPFC is far less active when thinking about people with whom we can’t really identify.

One of the biggest obstacles in understanding other people is that we see things only from our own perspective.

It’s crucial to remember that the way that you perceive a situation is unique. It follows logically that other people may have a totally different impression than your own.

Why is it that we often think in such an egocentric way?

The answer is simple: doing so makes us feel more important than we actually are.

You’re walking past a man with no shoes and greasy hair and who smells like rotten garbage.

We make a snap judgment and place him in a specific category – homeless – without any further reflection. We all categorize people in this way on a daily basis.

Gender differences give rise to many stereotypes. These lead us to seeing men and women as distinct types of people, with very different mindsets (such as men as unemotional, women as over-emotional). We overlook the similarities between genders.

We think that we know the minds of others better than we actually do.

To learn how to become more precise “mind readers,” we must first learn more about our own minds and the many flaws and prejudices we hold.

Even then, reading minds remains difficult, so the best way to learn about the thoughts and feelings of the people around you is through direct communication.