telepathy (usually uncountable, plural telepathies)
(parapsychology) The capability to communicate directly by psychic means; the sympathetic affection of one mind by the thoughts, feelings, or emotions of another at a distance, without communication through the ordinary channels of sensation.
Synonyms: mindreading (rare), thoughtcasting, far-feeling (puristic)
read (third-person singular simple present reads, present participle reading, simple past read, past participle read or (archaic, dialectal) readen)
(transitive or intransitive) To look at and interpret letters or other information that is written.
Synonyms: interpret, make out, make sense of, understand, scan
Have you read this book?
He doesn’t like to read.
(ergative, of text) To be understood or physically read in a specific way.
Arabic reads right to left.
That sentence reads strangely.
(transitive, metonymic) To read a work or works written by the named author.
At the moment I’m reading Milton.
speech (countable and uncountable, plural speeches)
(uncountable) The ability to speak; the faculty of uttering words or articulate sounds and vocalizations to communicate.
He had a bad speech impediment.
After the accident she lost her speech. speech - Wiktionary, the free dictionary
Is reading the closest thing we have to telepathy?
I believe so.
To be fair, it’s the closest we have to mind-reading, but having “reading” two times in a phrase looks bad.
It’s a way of communicating from mind to mind. We usually do that through speech, so speech is the baseline of human communication.
But traditional speech has its limits. Traditional speech as in speech not aided by technology…
Is slow. I notice this when sometimes I think faster than I can speak and mess up my wording.
Happens at a single moment:
Requires synchronicity of thought. It needs both participants to be active at the same time.
Is ephemeral: Can’t be rewound easily without resorting to the help of others’ fragile memories.
Happens in a defined space:
It’s unbroadcastable beyond the sound waves’ reach.
It’s public in that space.
It’s unfair to compare speech-without-tech to reading since writing IS a technology. Technology can solve the time-space confinement of speech. But it cannot solve the speed issue. It can make it go faster, but it’ll never be at the limit of your own speed of thought.
You can set the YouTube video to run at 2x speed, 5x speed, but you have your own inconsistent speed of thought. Sometimes you may be able to watch the video at 3x speed, other times at 2x. You may need to change the speed between videos because the speakers have different talking speeds.
But you have your own personal speed of thought.
And the only way to sync with that is for the medium depending only in your own speed of thought. I cannot think of any other medium other than reading.