You'd be much less bothered what people thought of you, if you realised how infrequently they did it.

I try to keep this saying at the front of my mind. It takes away a lot of unnecessary brain-mileage and lets me spend time on things that I can influence, rather than on other people's opinions and thoughts, which I can't. 

But the point of the saying is, I suppose, that we naturally, but incorrectly, overestimate our own importance and prominence in the world. It's the milder version of paranoia, where you think everyone is saying bad things about you. In this version, you just think they are saying or thinking something about you - good or bad- but of course they usually are not.

Because we spend all our time in the little bubble of our own existence it is easy to see everything else in reference to it. How many times have you seen people get impatient in a queue because the slow people ahead are deliberately making them late. Or that person driving behind me is deliberately getting too close because they want to intimidate me. When in reality, that other person is completely unaware of your existence.

But think of what you do, and how often. Who is your favourite auntie, niece, neighbour? When did you last speak to them or think about them? Even people that we really like don't take up a lot of our active thinking (though they give us a warm glow). So how much less do we think about everyone else that we have no opinion about?

Now I'd ask you to think about another side of this. Quite apart from what people think about us, how do we know what they are thinking at all? It's a genuine question.

The neurological research that has been done on the sensory systems with which we perceive the world does seem to show that a lot of the information is sent from our brain to eyes, ears etc rather than the other way around. It seems to be most efficient to predict what we are seeing and hearing and fill in any gaps where it doesn't match.

So when we consider what other people have going on between their ears, maybe we just assume that it is the same as what we have, until anything clashes with that assumption. But it is still a projection from how we think rather than a careful observation of them. 

In fact, you can observe this at work with selfish people. Because they are always trying to get more than their fair share of everything, they assume that everyone else is doing the same, and can be enormously put out if they feel you have something slightly better than them. They know you must have somehow cheated because they would have cheated at the drop of a hat. But it is just them projecting their own selfishness into people who aren't actually selfish.

I'm not saying that we are irretrievably divided from other people because we are separate brains, because sometimes you do end up saying the same thing at the same time as a friend and you can be pretty sure you were thinking the same thing to make you say it. But its good to be cautious about what other people think, and why they think it. 

There are all kinds of ways of working out what someone is thinking. You can see how they react, you can use body language clues, you can even decide - if you read too much pop psychology on the Internet - that you know the type of person they are, and filter what they say through that. I don't recommend this last option.

The one that seems most neglected is just to ask them. It doesn't need to be probing, just open-ended so that it comes from them and not from you. 

Maybe just try "Best and worst bit of the week so far? or "What made you smile today?". Or anything where the response is coming from them and not projected there by me.