Mentalism, mind reading and the art of getting inside your head

We are all trapped

inside our own heads,

and our beliefs and our understandings
about the world are limited

by that perspective,

which means we tell ourselves stories.

Right? So here we are
in this infinite data source.

There's an infinite number of things
that we could think about,

but we edit and delete.

We choose what to think about,
what to pay attention to.

We make up a story

to make sense of what's going on,

and we all get it wrong,

because we're all trying to navigate
with our own skewed compasses,

and we all have our own baggage,
but the stories themselves

are utterly convincing.

And we all do this,

and a lot of the stories that
we live by aren't even our own.

The first ones we inherit
at a young age from our parents,

who of course have
their own skewed beliefs,

their own frustrations,

their own unlived lives.

And for better or worse,
we take all that onboard

and then we go out into the world

thinking maybe we have to
be successful to be loved,

or that we always have to put
other people's needs first,

or that we have some big terrible secret
we couldn't possible tell people.

And it's just fiction, it's just stories,

and we'd worry a lot less about
what other people think of us

if we realized how seldom they do.

(Laughter)