在人们认为我们走极端之前，我们应该解释一下，我们所说的读心术，并不是指任何与超自然现象或神秘事物有关的事情。我们讨论的是人类如何真正善于理解彼此，我们如何了解他人的信仰、渴望或意图。这是一种非常普通的技能，也是我们今天要探讨的基础和意义。

Our capacity for mind-reading is actually a big deal -- a major evolutionary achievement of our species. Without it, we couldn’t learn from each other as easily and as profusely as we do. And we couldn’t so effortlessly coordinate our lives with others in the many ways we do.

以太平洋大学的观众为例，这个节目就是在那里录制的。他们都设法在同一时间出现在同一地点，见证了“哲学讲座”的实践。中国伊朗亚洲杯比赛直播他们是怎么做到的?这可能与校园里贴满了海报有关。但那些可爱的海报只是纸上的一些彩色标记，但不知怎的，它让礼堂里的每个人都猜测我们是打算在那里表演的。在这一点读心术的基础上，他们也能形成呆在那里的意图。瞧!他们都在那里。

但是，关于那个古老的哲学难题——他人思想的问题呢?我从内心直接而立即地了解我的思想和它的内容。我不可能怀疑自己有思想。但了解自己的想法是不同的。我可以观察你的外在行为，也许可以猜测背后有思想。但这只是一个猜测。据我所知，你可能真的是一个没有头脑的机器人或僵尸。如果我不能排除这种可能性，我怎么可能读懂你的心思?据我所知，你可能连读书的心思都没有。

Still, we shouldn't work ourselves into a skeptical frenzy. Suppose we take our mind reading abilities at face value and try to figure out exactly what underlies that ability. There's lots of fascinating new work in philosophy and cognitive science about the basis of our capacity to read minds. Maybe learning how we actually manage to read minds might cure my doubts. Some investigators think that our mind-reading abilities are rooted in a complex theory of mind. In other words, reading minds is analogous to making inferences about the not-directly-observable behavior of atomomic particles on the basis of theories in physics or chemistry.

But the mind is a pretty complex thing. Philosophers and scientists who study the mind still don’t understand it fully. How can ordinary folks be so good at reading minds, if the people whose business it is to rigorously investigate the mind, still don’t really have a good theory of how it works? There’s another view that says mind-reading doesn't have to involve theoretical knowledge at all. Here’s how it goes: we figure out what other people feel or believe or intend by creatively projecting ourselves into their situation and figuring out what we ourselves would do or feel or believe in that situation. And there are other approaches as well, which we hear about from our guest, Shaun Nichols, co-author of "Mindreading: An Integrated Account of Pretense, Self-Awareness and Understanding Other Minds."