Mind Readers as Viewpoint Characters

[Black Dragon]

What's the most effective way to use a mind reader as a viewpoint character?

Telling the story from the perspective of a mind reader runs the risk of spoiling any sense of mystery or surprise. However, it may be possible to limit the character's power in significant ways, so that some things are kept hidden.

Can you think of any examples of this being done successfully in a novel?

 

[Ravana]

Yes: Alfred Bester, The Demolished Man. He did it so well he got a character named after him in Babylon 5.… (In fact, if you like B5, you might also go back and view the episodes involving telepaths: they were pretty well handled in general. A lot of which they owed to Bester—ergo the tribute.)

Telepathy (the mind-reading kind, at least, as opposed to simple communication) is one of those abilities that can easily "break" any plot. It has to be limited. The easiest way may be for it to be non-selective… either because the telepath can't choose what to read—or because he can't choose who to read. You think signal-to-noise is bad when holding a conversation in a crowded room? Imagine trying to "listen" through all those people's thoughts. Of course, the latter approach tends to destroy the utility of a telepathic character in the first place.…

A possibly more "realistic" [sic] way, but one that I've never seen used because it would be incredibly difficult to maintain for anything beyond brief scenes, would be for the telepath to receive all his targets' thoughts. Consider all the associations your mind draws every second it's active. You select for priority—sometimes, at least: other times, thoughts "intrude," or you can't get them out of your head—but the telepath, not having your entire life's history of doing this with your thoughts, may receive them all with equal force (since they're all equally unfamiliar), and will have to patiently await the ones that remain foremost, get repeated and reinforced, as opposed to the ones that fall away almost as soon as they arise. If he can stand to remain in someone else's mind that long (which is another possible way to limit their utility). You'd have to be pretty good at stream-of-consciousness writing, though, since that's exactly what this would be.

Another possible method of limiting telepaths, in worlds where people know there are telepaths, is to develop ways to deceive them. One of the big questions that usually gets ducked is whether or not someone whose mind is being read is aware of it happening: most people blithely assume not. But why not? And if they can tell, they may be able to deliberately think of something they figure the telepath might bite on… especially if they can then arrange for it to be impossible for the telepath to follow up, for whatever reason. Or at the very least they may be able to bring charges of invasion of privacy or unlawful search and seizure.

Me, I just don't use mind-readers.

 

[SeverinR]

I can't think of anything I read.

My mind reader is limited to surface thoughts. She can hear what a person is thinking foremost. What you consider saying but don't, the compliment you consider but don't say it.

During one encounter, she enters a tavern where there is gambling with cards. card player makes a rude comment so she tells him and his opponents that he should put the extra card in his sleeve back in the deck. He flees quickly. They ask her to play.
She refuses, telling them she would know every card.
They challenge her, she tells them to draw a card from the deck and show it to the others but not her. She reads their minds and announces the card.
The other player asks her to tell them what the next card is. She tells them to play on without her, it would not be gambling if she played. She could not tell them what the next card was, because no one knew until they picked it up.

They have a spy riding with them, but he never thinks about his real job, focusing on the person he is suppose to be. He doesn't know the real ability but he was warned that one of them can tell things and he should always be on his guard.
Which she can sense but she doesn't know why. Possibly he has simple trust issues?

She can read minds but is limited to what people unknowingly "share" with her. This ability caused alot of embarassment and troubles in psi school. All psi can mind speak, mind reading is just going alittle deeper so she "accidently" read the thoughts of friends and students.
Limited mind reading rather then all knowing nothing can be hidden mind reader.

 

[sashamerideth]

I have a mind reader in mine but he is a villain. I have him operating on a kind of Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. He can read thoughts but the act of reading destroys whatever the thought was. Not a useful POV character.

For some added oomph, what if the mind reader POV character believes she is always able to read and always correct, but what she thinks she is reading is not always right? We would be presented with an unreliable narrator which usually makes for good fun.

 

[Ravana]

Another interesting variation on this ability (which I just remembered from a game some years ago) is what might be called "telepathic clairvoyance": the telepath can receive the target's sensory data–what he sees, hears, etc.–but not the target's thoughts. This is still an incredibly powerful means of collecting data, especially when the target is talking about what he's thinking (assuming the telepath receives audio as well as visual: a more accurate name then would be "clairsentience")… but the telepath won't know if, for instance, he's speaking truthfully, or how what he's saying fits into his other plans/intentions, etc. It also requires the telepath to catch the target at just the right moment, or else to be able to monitor him for lengthy periods of time. Beyond that, the telepath is stuck trying to extrapolate the target's intentions from what can be observed. And here, if the target suspects or can tell he's being monitored, it would become very easy to deceive the telepath, "setting him up" by doing certain things and avoiding certain others.

(All the same considerations apply to normal versions of clairvoyance, clairaudience, etc. as well, of course… the only difference here would be the telepath is essentially "riding along" with a single person, rather than looking over his shoulder or viewing an area rather than an individual. In fact, what the telepath would end up receiving would be exactly what a reader gets from a third-person-singular narrative PoV.… )

This might suggest other ways to constrain telepathic powers, even when the telepath has access to a target's thoughts: limit which thoughts can be received by categories they fall into. The classic example–but one that leans toward plot-breaking–is the telepath receives "surface thoughts": what the target is consciously thinking, his internal dialogue. But what if he can only receive what the target actually says–or at least is considering saying–and not all the other connections involved in trying to decide what to say? Or perhaps he can only receive what the target hears, and whatever thoughts that immediately prompts… but nothing beyond that? (Kind of like listening to one side of a telephone conversation.) Or go to the other extreme: the telepath can only receive those thoughts that are not products of linguistic processing–feelings, impulses, intuitive reactions, memory flashes triggered by sight or scent, snatches of music: but as soon as the target starts thinking in words about something, it's lost to the telepath. (Songs, by the way, are processed by a completely different part of the brain… so it's possible for someone with damage to the language-processing area to be able to sing lyrics he knew prior to the damage word-perfect–even though he may no longer understand what they mean. Imagine being a telepath who can only access this part of the target's thoughts, and trying to figure out what the person's up to based on his "internal soundtrack." The mind is a very strange place.…)

 

[Amanita]

Thoughts are an unreliable thing to read, at least mine are. Many things I'm thinkin, when I don't have much to do focus on my stories and made up worlds or other completely fictional situation, stuff that hasn't happend yet but might and so on.
Often, my thoughts would make me seem much more aggressive than I really am. A few days ago, I didn't get a seat on a train I had to stay in for three hours and was so angry I kept thinking about beating up the people who did get seats. Something I'd never seriously consider doing of course. The mind reader might have gotten a completely different opinion though.

In my world, there are empaths who can sense feelings and catch some surface thoughts but the latter only if the person in question keeps their mind open. My empath characters always knows more than she should anyway however and is offended because the main character tries to keep her thoughts from her. And that's not because she has to hide something but just because she wants a bit of privavy.
Forced mind-reading is possible for some people as well, but it takes quite an effort and they have to deal with the problems I've described above.
None onf them is a viewpoint character though but that's not why.

 

[Ophiucha]

I wrote a story about a couple of quasi-telepaths. They could only read one another's thoughts, but they couldn't filter them at all, and they were on opposing sides of the war (as the generals of that war), so every single battle plan was ruined if the general was informed of it. Of course, the story ended with the two of them becoming a single, completely unstable mind and both having to be locked away for their own health, so the war was sort of secondary in the grand scheme of things.

In general, I find telepathy to be something that necessitates some sort of balance. For instance, mind-reading in Harry Potter was as much a field of magic as blocking people from reading your mind was. Even though Dumbledore and Voldemort could read minds, there were characters like Snape who could just as easily keep them from reading his mind. Or the magic itself can have limits - as has been covered by the above posters, limits to only 'surface thoughts' or being forced to read every, individual thought in the same cluster we see in our own minds - but in general, I would say it takes a certain sort of story for a telepathic character to work. Most of your average adventure, sword and sorcery stories aren't going to work with a telepath - they'd catch the traitor, they'd know who their father is, they'd ruin all the twists. But if you set up the right setting, the right plot, then sure, it'll work.

 

[Lord Darkstorm]

Now, imagine the smart villain, who knows there are telepaths and feeds false information to other people (who don't know it's false) so the telepath will think they are understanding what is going on, but really aren't. Turn the ability against themselves.

 

[Kristene Collins]

My first thought upon reading this thread was of many characters in Mercedes Lackey's Valgarth books. Lots of them are mind readers, but in order not to be reduced to mush, as mentioned earlier in the thread, they learn to put up mental barriers to keep others thoughts out unless the mind reader consciously wants to listen in. Of course, the non-mind readers can also put up barriers to keep mind readers out.

I also have a story where mind reading happens, but that is because two of my characters minds are permanently linked together with magic. The only way mind reading occurs is when two (or more) people actively open themselves up to this link... though in saying this, I've just given myself the plot bunny "well, what happens when one person doesn't consent to it but someone with magic wants to force the link?" I guess I'll have to explore that. Thanks for creating the thread and giving me a new idea! :biggrin:

I guess these are just some other ways of thinking about it. There's lots of different ways, but only you'll know what makes sense in your world, for your characters.

 

[Terry Greer]

What if gthe mind reading were 'interpretive' for example they get a sense of true, false etc/ but not constructed sentences and nuances of complex speech.
That way the mind reading must work in conjunction with what the target is actually saying (a bit like a much more refined and accurate lie detector).

Though you could argue that that is really nothing more than an empath I suppose.

Another alternative is to have the mind reading become very visual and abstract - have it become a language in its own right that the reader has to work at undertstanding. Perhaps the visual language the mind reader is presented with is based on events in their own life - which have to be interpreted in the context of the character whose mind is being read. I used to like the US series Medium - the visions that Alison received were often allegorical in this way and took some teasing out to find out what they meant.

 

[Legendary Sidekick]

For a limitation...

In my Flat Earth RPG, I have some characters who can fool a mind-reader and others who were hypnotized so a mind-reader would not be able to read specific sensitive information. Ireth's mind-reader character would sometimes pick up a nonsensical phrase: The Maiden is a pretty face on a silver coin... The Maiden is a pretty face on a silver coin... The player first assumed "the maiden" was a woman in the party and never guessed the child in the game was a goddess in her earthly form. The misleading phrase only gave Ireth cause to keep guessing. Eventually, her character picked up mental images from two people who saw The Maiden, but their memories were tampered with. The character who rescued the baby suffered memory loss, but the mind-reader could see the baby-rescue in his mind when a certain word or event triggered the memory. The mind-reader could only see the rescue as a movie, so there was no way of knowing the baby was a goddess in the form of a human child. The NPC who had the "silver coin" phrase playing in his head pictured the baby-rescue as it happened, except that the rescuer was running away with $1!

I know this is something in my RPG and not a novel like you asked for, but what's interesting is how Ireth played off of the information. She has this mind-reader character, but thoughts he reads are not always reliable. She plays her character quite well, as I imagined a mentalist would act: reading misleading thoughts and trying to piece together both conflicting and consistent information to find the truth.



In a recent episode of Believe, a character blocked her thoughts from a mind-reader by repeating a rehearsed phrase. So I'm not the only one who thought of that. (The idea was inspired by an article on "human lie detectors." Short version: lies that are rehearsed eventually appear truthful, as if the liar believes his own lie.)

 

[wordwalker]

Another limit to mind-reading is that it isn't precognition. However much you can get about someone's thoughts now, it doesn't mean you'll always know how their mind is going to change-- the next day when new plot events have hit them, or even in the next few busy seconds.

One example of this might be something like the Deryni books, where the main telepathy that doesn't require an extended touch is a convenient but limited "truth-reading." This means it's easy for a Deryni king to know if any of his lords are planning outright betrayal when they're at court, but much harder to tell if someone might make them The Right Offer once they're back at their own castles, or to spot a lesser secret, or a major secret held by the fourth groom on the left. It can make an interesting mix of intrigue and loyalty.

Or, a less formal story could do the same thing focusing on the human drama of that gap. We all think we know the people around us, but even if we really could, the moments we hate most are still the ones when people decide to jump exactly the wrong way.