14 DAY TRIAL // The US Army wants to fund a research that would render regular modern communication methods obsolete and, instead, use transmission of information via thought. According to the scientists' prognoses, this technology is some 20 years away, but the premises and basic technology have already been developed.
The “synthetic telepathy” technique involves reading brain impulses by means of an electroencephalograph, or EEG, similar to the devices designed for gaming industry purposes. Mike D'Zmura from the University of California in Irvine, the lead scientist on the project states, “I think that this will eventually become just another way of communicating. It will take a lot of research, and a lot of time, but there are also a lot of commercial applications, not just military applications”. The two parts of the process consist of formulating the message and transmitting it to a person or interpreting device. Although EEG-based devices are rather large in size, the researchers believe they will eventually manage to adapt them in order to fit on a hood or a hat.
The main difficulty in using the existing technology is to code and decipher complex contextual messages. Although the approach which involves electrode placement between skull and brain would provide more accurate results, this would require larger costs and surgery. Instead, scientists focus on combining the EEG technology with designing a brain map with the aid of the functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and magnetoencephalography (MEG), thus compensating their weak parts. EEG scans brain activity on the outer parts of its folds' bulges, while the large MEG deals with ones' innermost activity. fMRI is more accurate, but also heavy and more expensive.
Within 20 years from now, the researchers would have found a way to combine the three into an efficient tool that could fit on one's head and allow it to use telepathic communication. Paul Sajda from Columbia University explains, “There are technical hurdles that need to be overcome first, but then again, 20 years ago people would have thought that the two of us talking to each other half a world away over Skype (an Internet-based phone service) was crazy”. D'Zmura assures those worrying that their thoughts might be intercepted and hacked that they have nothing to fear, since the technique would require intensive training, while the devices would be provided with an on/off switch. “When I was a kid I occasionally said things that were inappropriate, and I learned not to do that. I think that people would learn to think in a way the computer couldn't interpret. Or they can just switch it off,” he said.