Telepathy

I have recently been longing for telepathy more and more, due to the many complicated thoughts that make their rounds through my head that I both want and need to say, but don’t lend themselves easily (and sometimes not at all) to words. So it has become more and more common for me to be quiet for a long time, and then suddenly wish out loud for telepathy.  I now have good news: telepathy appears to be possible.

Scientists are making breakthroughs neurology, and while the technology is currently invasive, we can actually control things outside of our bodies through our brains. One example of this is a robotic arm that (I assume via surgery) is connected to a paralyzed person’s brain, allowing them to directly control that arm. I am also aware of an experiment that was conducted in which two people were connected to each other with a technology that appears to be similar to that used with the robotic arm in the last example. One person sat in front a screen, and the other sat in another room with a video game controller in his hand.  The first person was actually able to play simple video games on the screen in front of him by controlling the other person’s hands on the controller.

With some further insights into how thoughts and ideas are formed and held in the human brain, this same technology could be used to communicate telepathically. A further sophistication would be to actually have a form of transmitter and receiver surgically added to the head so people could telepathically communicate without having to physically connect each other.  You could even have something like a cell phone tower to relay telepathic signals so you could telepath (or whatever the verb form of the word is) to someone on the other side of the world.

But what if the owner of the telepathy relay decided to keep a record of your thoughts, or the government decided to add a memory chip to the telepathy transmitter in your head? So much for 1984! You could have a literal thought police! The more sophisticated versions of this would certainly be very invasive, but it is a very cool idea, in my opinion, and a dream made possible for me.

For literature purposes, you could use this to make a dystopian government with a thought police, or that has a reeducation camp where they install chips that control your thoughts and makes it impossible for you to disobey or at least monitors your thoughts and reports them to the government. You could also use this to make exterior memory chips, so you could memorize stuff more easily.  You could have doors where you have to plug your brain into a security device to open it, or a secret society that communicates in the middle of everyone via telepathy.  You could use this for a fanatical special ops team in which their vocal chords are taken out and they are telepathically linked, thus enabling absolute silence during operations.  You could use this for pet training, drone flying, internet surfing, project planning, car driving, game playing, public speaking, psychology researching, and the list goes on and on.  A lot of this would be possible in real life, though many of them would require research that proves even further that that necessary for the basic idea (such as learning how various pets’ minds work to enable human/animal telepathic links).

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