The mentalizing network does something incredibly special to facilitate our dealings with other people. It allows us to peer inside the minds of those around us, take into account their hopes, fears, goals, and intentions, and as a result interact with them much more effectively. It allows us to figure out the psychological characteristics of people we see every day so we can better predict their reactions to novel situations and avoid unnecessary feather ruffling. We use these abilities to achieve cooperatively things that we never could do on our own, as well as to strategically compete with those around us. The mentalizing system allows us to filter our experience to figure out the best information to share with others and how to do it. We would be absolutely lost without our all-purpose mindreading machine.