Telepathy

The person who has the ability of telepathy may become the wealthiest and the most powerful person on Earth because they  can read others' minds at will. However, he or she would also be feared because they can dig out the deepest secret from others' minds effortlessly. During the cold war, CIA founded a research called Star Gate. This research was about telepathy and its goal was to train some people, giving them the ability to perform mind control and remote viewing. CIA believed, if they could trained people to be telepaths, they could locate the military installation and submarines of Soviet Union. Unfortunately, even CIA sponsored $500,000 per year on this project, they didn't get a satisfying result, and the money of taxpayer was dumped into the water. Although we have persuaded the ability of mind reading for a long time, we still haven't reached it. So here's the question: is telepathy possible? The answer is yes.

When our brains are functioning, they transmit electrical signals. If we can catch and interpret those signals, we may be able to read people's minds. However, there are some stumbling blocks with using those signals to read mind. First, those signals are too weak, in the milliwatt range. Second, those signals are gibberish, indistinguishable from random noise. Third, we can't catch the signals from others' brain because we lack an antenna. The last, even if we can receive those signals, we can't unscramble them. But don't despair, because reading others' thoughts is still possible. In the last decades, a kind of new instrument, MRI, is introduced. This instrument can help us looking into the thinking brains. Since brain activities are related to oxygen consumption, MRI can indicates the part of brain that is activated by detecting the concentration of oxygen. The higher the concentration of oxygen, the greater the mental activity in that part of the brain. By looking carefully at the MRI pattern, scientists can briefly tell that what a person is thinking or doing. Nowadays, scientists are able to find the corresponding MRI patterns of specific words, creating a MRI pattern dictionary. It means that we are able to know what words or sentences a person is thinking by looking at his or her MRI picture of brain. If we establish a MRI dictionary in computers, computers can "translate" MRI patterns into human languages, so that we can read others' thoughts by scanning their brains. Although the current MRI devices are large and heavy, scientists are confident that handheld MRI devices can be invented one day. If the handheld MRI devices could be invented, it would be possible to scan other people's brains and know what they are thinking about. 

The mind reading machine I mentioned above is a little bit different from what telepathy has been depicted in fictions. In some fictions, the person who has real telepathic ability can read not only words but also images in others' minds. In reality, such a tasks is extremely hard to achieve because one must be able to catch all the neuron activities in others' brains. The neuron networks in our brain are complicated. Moreover, the connections may alter when dealing with a new task, making a single neuron activity observation a nearly impossible task. Even though the kind of mind reading depicted in fictions is hard to achieve, our technology may be advanced enough to address all the issues one day.