Telepathy: Here's What I'm Thinking

Before we get into the discussion of applying Controlled Inertia, lets take a break and look into the idea of Telepathy. In short, here's how I think it could work.

The other day I was in my garage hanging some hooks on the wall so that I could get my lawn tools off of the floor. I got a stud finder as a gift some time ago, and I thought this would be a great time to use it...don't want my blower crashing to the floor and pulling sheet rock with it! So I put the stud finder on the wall, push the button and begin sliding it along the wall until it senses a stud. It's not perfect but it's a little less intrusive than the banging-on-the-wall tool I used to use. I don't know how it works. I would guess that there is some sort of circuit created when you push the button, and when it glides over an object in the wall, like a wooden stud, the current is interrupted, thus showing you the stud. So, it's not really telling you that there is a stud there, it's just telling you that the pattern created by pushing the button was interrupted, somehow. Therefore, you don't have to know what is behind the wall, you just need to know that it's something, and that based on analysis of prior knowledge, the percentage is very high that you have found a stud in the wall. All of this with a crackerjack tool that anyone can buy.

Now, take this same idea, but instead of studs, look for impulses in the brain. You might not necessarliy know what those impulses are, but you know they're there. Now you just need the right analysis and prior knowledge to be able to infer what those impulses are. Maybe this impulse found in this area of the brain, at this time, under these conditions means that you are hungry for chips and queso....whatever. The point is that if we could map the brain's impulses we could figure out what you are thinking.

So all we have to do now is have the ability to allow our brains to sense the impulses...how do we do that? Ok, how about instead of an X-Ray machine, we have a I-Ray Machine, a machine that can see the elecrical impulses in our body. Eventually we could get the device small enough so that, for instance, we could have sensors implanted in our corneas that when triggered allow us to see impulses? The big stumbling block of course, is that even if you could do any of this way out, trippy sci-fi stuff, your brain still has to have the ability to process what it is seeing and do it quickly...Huge computers can already process at unimaginable speeds, and they are only getting faster. And with the advent of nano-technology, engineering at the molecular level, those computers aren't just going to keep getting faster, they're going to keep getting smaller too. So, like all things sci-fi, maybe telepathy isn't that far out...of reach. Just some thoughts.