In theory, yes. In practice, no. The main problem is that we can’t understand the minds of other people—and we know that they aren’t reading ours, which means they can’t read our minds.
It’s been argued that we rely on our own senses to interpret information—and that’s true, but it doesn’t quite explain why. In his famous 1962 book, The Language Instinct, American psychologist John Bowlby posited that the two most significant types of mental processing are: first, our sense of sight and sound, which we use to create mental images, and second, our sense of smell and touch, which we use to “hear” our environment. It was only with the development of more sophisticated scientific instruments and other techniques in the 1970s that we could decode and decode the differences between these two types of sensory processing.
When you see a woman on the street, you probably see people, cars, and buildings. These senses, Bowlby argues, provide us with a powerful idea of the context in which that person is found. When this idea is combined with information about the color of her shoes and the size of the car that drove her, the reader’s mind then gets a picture of the events that happened at the time and place.
How does our brains interpret images and sounds that we see? As Bowlby noted, we understand sound and image just as well as we understand sight. But the difference is that we use both visual and auditory information to decode what we see.
For example: Imagine you are driving behind a red car on a highway. You hear a man shouting: “Hi! I’m going to give you four dollars!” The visual senses—eyes, ears, nose—are picking up this kind of sound from the road and making sense of it as loud and intense as possible.
When you hear the man shouting, however, your ears aren’t fooled. The human eye has a better resolution for different sounds that will allow you to hear at the highest level possible, like the scream of a man in the street.
Why is it hard to decode this kind of sound? For the most part, the sound that’s heard is a series of complex tones that form a continuous pattern, as you can hear here in this audio example:
Now, you can use the auditory system to decode this sound. You’ve heard it before. But when you hear it from a person, your brain can’t readily combine it with
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