Mindwise Summary

Introspection is blind to construction. This does not mean that our introspective guesses are never accurate, just as you might guess the correct answer to a multiple-choice question.

When you don’t know the actual facts about yourself, your consciousness pieces together a compelling story, much in the same way it does when you’re trying to read the minds of other people to make sense of why they act as they do.

Introspection makes us feel like we know what’s going on in our own heads, even when we don’t. We don't realize that we’re spinning a story rather than reporting the facts.

• Naïve realism: the intuitive sense that we see the world out there as it actually is, rather than as it appears from our own perspective. 
• When other people don’t share your views, the all-too-common sentiment that comes straight from naïve realism is “I’m right and you’re biased.” 
• Disengagement can come anytime there is a distance between two minds that needs to be bridged. 
• Minds are inferred rather than observed. They exist only as a theory each of us uses to explain both our own and other people’s behaviour.

We’re all mind readers. Each of us has the ability to divine the desires, wishes, thoughts and feelings of other people.

But understanding others isn’t that difficult, the fact is that we all make mistakes when it comes to reading each other’s minds.

There are variety of common errors that we all make in our attempts to understand one another and the reasons behind such misunderstandings, including the stereotypes we hold, which have a major impact on our lives and even our lifespan.

We believe in the fact that we know everything about your own thoughts, right? Wrong! Unfortunately, we don’t even have access to the mental processes that construct our own behavior.

The truth here is that we’re only aware of the “final product” of our thoughts. This is due to majority of our mental processes occur unconsciously, beyond our direct control.

Our mind functions by making associations, meaning that two thoughts or behaviors that were previously connected can trigger one another.

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.