“The single biggest problem with communication,”2 said the playwright George Bernard Shaw, “is the illusion it has taken place.” But scientists have now unraveled many of the secrets of how successful conversations happen. They’ve learned that paying attention to someone’s body, alongside their voice, helps us hear them better. They have determined

the human brain devotes significant resources to two different major networks that work together toward the goal of mentalizing: helping us understand other people’s minds, including how they are feeling and their intentions. Something as simple as a casual conversation with a store clerk requires massive amounts of neuronal computational power to

When we interact with other people, we present them with computational problems—not just explicit requests and demands, but implicit challenges such as interpreting our intentions, our beliefs, and our preferences.

Much of what is conventionally taken to be “thinking,” namely the internal monologue that we sometimes become aware of, is a form of internalized speech.

Another aspect of language for which mentalising is crucial is that we almost never say exactly what we mean, but instead rely on the listener to interpret what we say correctly

The reason is, in order for communication to be effective, it has to create what’s known as common knowledge, which is a string of embedded knowledge—you know, if you have two individuals, and I need to know that the other is going to show up to protest, the other needs to know that I’m going to show up to protest, and I need to know that he knows