Piece Description

Telepathy, or mind reading, violates the known laws of physics. But physics can be used to read a person's thoughts. At Brown University, scientists have connected a chip to a paralyzed stroke victim's brain, which is then connected to a laptop. With some practice, the person can read and answer e-mail, surf the web, do cross word puzzles, while being paralyzed. In the future, normal people may have a microscopic chip in their brain to surf the web by sheer thought (e.g. while taking a final exam). And MRI brans scans are good enough to see the erough outlines of a person telling a lie. Eventually, we may havea "dictionary of thought," with certain brain patterns corresponding to certain thoughts. All of this, of course, raise deep ethical questions as well.