View from the North 40: Maybe read books - not minds

Back in the dark ages when I was young and the internet wasn’t even a twinkle in Al Gore’s eye, my contemporaries and I would imagine what it would be like to read people’s minds.

We were convinced it would be awesome to the nth power, even though many smart people who studied human behavior — like psychologists, sociologists, secret service interrogators and moms — all said that knowing what people are truly thinking is really not a good thing.

We dismissed their warnings. We wanted extra sensory perception to learn everyone’s secrets, to get the answers to all the tests at school, to get tha...