This post is a little different from what I’ve normally been writing, but I’m hoping most of you will find it interesting.

Imagine sitting in a chair. Your eyes are closed. Across the room sits a fan.

Without moving an arm, leg, or finger; without moving any part of your body, you concentrate on the fan. You ‘will’ it to turn on.

And it does.

Two minutes later, you again concentrate on the fan. This time, you ‘will’ it off. Within a short while, the fan amazingly stops spinning.

Humans have always dreamed of controlling the material world with nothing other than pure thought. This is a common theme in thousands of fantasy novels and stories.

Amazing new technology, however, has turned this long held fantasy into a remarkable reality.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic - Arthur C. Clark

The technology was developed in Germany, and is called the Berlin Brain-Computer Interface (BBCI). The machine records your brain waves, enabling you to use pure thought to type words onto a computer screen.

More recently, similar technology has enabled a 25 year old paralyzed man to open email, turn on a television, and open and close an artificial hand- all by imagining movement.

ATR and Honda have developed an even more elaborate and powerful decoder of brain waves. Whereas the above technology is something that you wear on your scalp (EEG electrodes), the ATR/Honda setup does not require that you wear anything. Instead, while you’re lying down inside a tunnel, an MRI records and decodes your brain signals.

Right now, this technology is slow, imprecise and uses machines that take up a lot of space (an MRI can fill up a small room). Twenty or thirty years from now, however, the machinery will be thousands of times more sensitive and powerful in their mind reading ability, and might just fit on your scalp like a winter cap.

When all objects in your environment are then equipped with micro (or even nano) motors, you’ll be able to wirelessly communicate with- and control- almost everything using pure thought alone.

Imagine the possibilities…