What do Professor Snape, Queenie Goldstein, Lord Voldemort and the Sorting Hat all have in common? Not much at all, apart from a rare ability that allows them to read a person’s thoughts. That’s great if you’re a piece of headwear specialising in school admin. But for the rest of us, life as a Legilimens would be tougher than you’d expect.

First of all, though, what exactly is (or rather, isn’t) Legilimency?

‘Only Muggles talk of “mind-reading”. The mind is not a book, to be opened at will and examined at leisure. Thoughts are not etched on the inside of skulls, to be perused by any invader. The mind is a complex and many-layered thing, Potter – or at least, most minds are.’ He smirked.

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

Epic Snape-snark aside, this does help explain things. Legilimens don’t see a stream of coherent and well-formatted sentences laid out before them, because that’s not the way humans think. Thoughts are intermingled with emotions, memories, sensations and whatever annoying tune just popped into your head. Legilimens must hear a lot of advertising jingles.

There’s no doubt this skill would come in handy at times (it certainly helped Queenie in Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them) but it would also be a real headache – maybe literally, thanks to all those noisy thoughts buzzing around. Here are a few reasons why Legilimency might be no fun at all.

It’d be hard making (and keeping) friends