Epilepsy Patients Are Helping Us Read Minds

Irvin Yalom, an emeritus professor of psychiatry at Stanford University, dreamt about peering into minds. “A series of distorting prisms block the knowing of the other,” he wrote in Love’s Executioner: And Other Tales of Psychotherapy, in 2012. “Perhaps in some millennium, such union will come to pass—the ultimate antidote for isolation, the ultimate scourge of privacy.” If Kai Miller, a neuroscientist and neurosurgeon at Stanford Medicine, has his way, that day may come sooner rather than later.