I chose telepathy, because it would help me to better understand people and their motives. I'm already pretty good at determining what people are thinking and I could make an argument that I already possess a subtle form of telepathy, but it's weak, operates passively and hard for me to harness consciously. I was much better with it when I was younger. SeekerVI mentioned that "most people's minds are like fortresses with carefully guarded gateways of encoded communication," and that's an excellent way of putting it. Even with telepathy, what you are receiving may be just that: the walls of someone's mental fortress. Minds are complex things and sometimes we aren't even sure what we're thinking. Quite often in life we think we're doing things for one reason, which sits in an obvious position near the surface, and find in retrospect that we were really being driven by something else buried much more deeply. To possess telepathic abilities able to reliably bore through that wall of surface thoughts and unfailingly retrieve information from the core of a person's mind would be to hold great power, for good or ill.
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