Basic Trope: A telepath can read thoughts in the from of precise, coherent, relevant sentences.
- Straight: Alice wants to know Bob's credit card number, so she penetrates his mind and hears him thinking "My credit card number is 8743889359387528."
- Exaggerated: Bob is apparently reciting all of his deepest secrets over and over again in his head.
- Downplayed: Only about one in five of Bob's thoughts are complete sentences or relevant to the plot. The rest are mundane and sound like an unbroken stream of consciousness.
- Justified:
- Alice only ever uses her mind-reading abilities as a Living Lie Detector, reading the answers people first think of to the questions she asks.
- Alice is able to put primer thoughts into people's minds and hear the responses; if she sends the words "PIN number", most people will immediately recall it. If not, "Oh crap, I've forgotten my PIN number!" usually shocks a reaction out of them.
- Alice received training in how to to be able to sort the jumbled mass of thoughts into something coherent.
- Bob was silently trying to memorize the number at the time.
- Alice is mindreading an organic android, who are explicitly clear-minded one-track thinkers.
- Inverted:
- Alice takes a peek into Bob's mind, and what she sees is... Surreal and confusing, to put it mildly.
- Even when Bob appears to be in absolute concentration Alice gets a confused cacophony.
- Subverted:
- We hear a coherent sentence of Bob's thoughts... but Alice finds this suspicious, and realizes he's mentally repeating the sentence as a kind of Psychic Static.
- The complete, coherent, sentence detailing Bob's credit card and Social Security numbers is followed by "...And I wish Alice would quit digging around in my head!"
- Alice reads Bob's thoughts. Here they are. "Holy cow that chick is so hot I'd like to bang her wait wasn't I supposed to get milk oh god Mom's gonna kill me when I get home I really need to call her at some point..." Eventually, he does reveal the PIN, but Alice is so confused that she completely misses it.
- Double Subverted: She's proved right when we hear "Haha, little does Alice know I'm mentally repeating this sentence as a kind of Psychic Static!"
- Parodied: Alice listens to Bob thinking "Alice has no idea who I gave the access code to! No, whom... to whom? Alice has no idea to whom I gave the access code! No, that still doesn't sound right..." and gets increasingly frustrated as his thoughts continue running off on tangents.
- Zig Zagged:
- The coherence of people's thoughts is dictated by the Rule of Drama. If Alice just has to find something out she doesn't know, she can do so in moments. If her Story-Breaker Power needs to be handicapped for the moment, she can use the excuse that it's difficult to make people dredge up the relevant information.
- The coherence of people's thoughts is dictated by how consciously they're thinking about it; if it's the first thing on their mind, for their own convenience people tend to think in sentences. If Alice has to dredge it up from the subconscious, it's often a much more garbled web of vague associations, difficult to make sense of out of context. Less skilled telepaths are only able to read the top-level thoughts, thus playing the trope straight.
- Averted: Alice can't just open someone's mind and find the information she needs sitting on the top. Instead, she has to telepathically "ping" trigger thoughts into Bob's mind to bring his thoughts around to the subject she's interested in.
- Enforced: It's a Translation Convention. Exposition reveals that telepathy is much harder than it's made to look; we're just hearing the relevant information after it's been found and decoded.
- Lampshaded: "How do you always find the exact thoughts you need like that? People must have a lot of other stuff on their minds..."
- Invoked: Bob is secretly in league with Alice, and is concentrating as hard as possible on the information she needs.
- Exploited: Bob learns to think out coherent sentences containing wrong information, so that Alice immediately picks up what he wants her to hear and doesn't go rooting around through all the less coherent thoughts in his head- where the information she's looking for actually is.
- Defied: "It's not as simple as just 'reading Bob's thoughts to find out the access code', Charlie! I have to make him think about the access code, and I have to find a way to do that without making him suspicious... It's more like remotely hacking his computer than reading the screen over his shoulder."
- Discussed: ???
- Conversed: "Pssh, that's not telepathy, you hacks! That's just... Sci-Fi eavesdropping!"
- Deconstructed: Any thought Alice "overhears" also pops to the forefront of the readee's mind. Her enemies learn that any time they find themselves "thinking out loud" in a coherent way about closely-guarded secrets for no apparent reason, there's a telepath in the room, and they set up countermeasures appropriately.
- Reconstructed: Fortunately, they don't know the exact location of mind readers, and Alice is able to slink away with the required information. The countermeasures also have a practical limitation such as limited duration or energy cost that prevents them from always being active, giving Alice an opportunity to find and exploit the window of opportunity.
- Implied: We don't hear anyone else's thoughts directly, but from the information Alice is able to glean from people it seems like this is what she's hearing.
- Plotted A Good Waste: The fact that everyone's thoughts are coherent turns out to be foreshadowing that Alice is trapped in a simulation of some sort where every other actor is 'scripted'.
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