I certainly don't believe that people can read other people's minds.
I think you say the word in your mind anyway, you know. When you look at a word, you say it.
And the mind actually does generate electrical currents - very weak ones and not necessarily ones that can be picked up by anyone else.
How does any idea come to your mind? I don't know.
The notion of a thing, materiality, was something that I think was something very in peoples' minds when they were dealing with earth and metal and different kinds of metals and the interaction of different sorts of material.