Being able to reading people’s minds may sound mysterious, but it is not actually something as inaccessible as we might have imagined. The ability to understand what others are thinking and feeling is partially innate. It is adaptive for social animals to sense and predict other individuals in the population (Byrne, Bates, 2010). 

 

A particular region in the human brain was found to be responsible for understanding how other people think (Saxe & Kanwisher, 2003; Saxe & Wexler, 2005; Saxe, 2009). It was found that the right temporal parietal junction (RTPJ) is responsible for us to account and reason for other people’s decisions and actions. Moreover, studies on false-belief tests in children reveal how development or the RTPJ occurs early on in childhood, from the age of 3 to 7 (Saxe & Kanwisher, 2003; Saxe, 2009). Being able to conceive and predict mental states of other individuals is significant for development of social skills since childhood.

 

Another important element of perceiving other’s thinking is nonverbal communication. We all use nonverbal communication daily whenever we interact with other people. Walking into the subway, you can immediately notice how tired someone might be by the way they stand or sit. You can also easily tell whether a presenter in front of the class is confident or not by his or her gestures and postures. Facial expressions are another important composition of nonverbal communication and many are known to be universal. We rely on nonverbal communication to an extent much higher than we are aware of, because we use it both at a conscious and subconscious level. For example, when a group is given several difficult tasks, groups with face-to-face discussion lead to better group decisions as opposed to the virtual teams which communicate only with technology (Bartelt, Dennis, Yuan & Barlow, 2013). This is because a lot of information exchange among members is nonverbal, which is greatly reduced in the virtual teams.

 

Mentalists exploit the use of nonverbal communication exhibited by the target and reads what the target is thinking. Mind-reading is a science. Just as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle says, "I never guess, it's a shocking habit, destructve to the logical faculty." Mind-reading is not a simple guess, nor is it something supernatural. It is a science of careful deduction of cues and guiding our thinking — reading the physical signs we exhibit upon memory retrieval and guiding us to create new memory within ourselves in advance.

 

One very common pattern of mind-reading is that the mentalist asks you a question and he or she tells you the answer in your mind without you having said it. For example, a mentalist may ask you to pick a fruit of choice and confirms that you have made the decision. From then until giving the answer, the mentalist will continue to speak. The things he or she says may seem simple and plain such that you are almost not even aware of what is being said. However, there are actually key words that the mentalist carefully hides within the conversation, allowing you to match those key words with your mental representation of the fruit of choice – colour, shape, taste, origin etc. The mentalist finds the answer from your minor reflexes and body language without you noticing, as if your mind is being read.