The Eavesdropper is only hearing thoughts

This post is in reply to a post on IMDb.

A typical misconception in entertainment industries — perhaps carried over from older mediums (print and radio), where text and speech was important to communicate ideas — is that people only think in speech, while I prefer to think that there are people who rely on text to think and that there are people who use mental images in their thought processes.

This makes catching someone's thoughts more difficult, if a person observed uses the kind of mental imagery that necessarily does not use that person's own (inner) voice, but that of someone s/he thinks about. The trick, then, is to be able to detect what the person's underpinning thought process is in relation to the image and the activity in that image that is working in their primary consciousness. The difference here is in getting to observe what the person perceives in their thought processes, and actually eavesdrop on what he or she really thinks about. Overlap isn't always guaranteed.

Since I haven't seen the film, I guess the experiment was in getting people (or just the protagonist; see below) to only 'hear' someone's thoughts, but not necessarily see them. This would mean that the ability of perception was probably limited to receiving just one type of sensing faculty.

Given the film's premise of 14 people (out of 15) becoming crazy as a result, then I guess the failed method did not include a filter on these people, and so their minds vere overwhelmed. I remember this issue was once handled in an episode of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer", where Buffy's mind-reading sensitivity to read others' minds and sensing radius progressively expanded to the point that it became almost impossible to have a sane mind.

See the Mental image article on Wikipedia for more.

Another point is that even despite filmmakers, of all people, realizing that people also think in images, then it's probably just easier to use the "hearing of thoughts" method than "seeing the thoughts" method, as the former is cheaper, while the latter may sometimes require expensive means of post-production to visualise 'seeing' someone's thoughts. Think "Minority Report" and "Brainstorm" (1983).

P.S.
Saw a poster and that George Takei was in it, so got here.