Warning: Do not Google the term 'thought control' unless you're intensely bored and have the world's greatest popup blocker. You'll get all sorts of results, from spoon-bending Uri Geller to brainwashing and government conspiracies that are too Looney Toons even for me.

We've seen it in movies such as Firefox (No, not the web browser.): thought-controlled devices. Okay, it wasn't a great movie. It presented, however, the concept of taking motor skills out of the device control equation. In this case, Clint Eastwood controlled the weapons systems of an advanced military aircraft through thought. Sensors in his helmet 'read' these thoughts and translated them into actions.

How far from reality are thought-influenced and/or mind-controlled computers and devices?

Thought influence, believe it or not, could already be here. Princeton University's Dr. Robert Jahn, Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research, has been exploring, investigating, and acquiring scientific data about the connection of consciousness and matter for more than 25 years. In an article in The Daily Princetonian, PEAR suggests that "…the role of consciousness is not completely passive in physical reality. 'We have observed very tiny but repeatable effects indicating that the mind can insert some degree of information into random event generators that makes the information not so random,' Jahn said." This is the real deal. Real science, real research, really respectable. Have I ever participated in the studies? I can't say. PEAR keeps its volunteer 'operators' anonymous. Should your interest be piqued, check out Margins Of Reality: The Role of Consciousness in the Physical World. Trust me, there's no spoon bending here. Not even a single tinfoil hat.

In a more incremental step, no doubt toward something greater, experiments at Duke University—in which sensors were implanted in monkeys—found that those sensors detected brain signals "…and sent them to a robotic arm, which carried out reaching and grasping movements on a computer screen driven only by the monkeys' thoughts." (Source: New York Times, October 13, 2003) Seems like hotwiring a car, but it's interesting nonetheless. "The achievement is a significant advance in the continuing effort to devise thought-controlled machines that could be a great benefit for people who are paralyzed, or have lost control over their physical movements."

While it's fairly easy to imagine that the brain works in different ways depending upon a given mental activity, this activity has in fact been mapped using MRI scans. More importantly, in the study Learning to Decode Cognitive States from Brian Images (Mitchell, T.M, et al, Machine Learning; full PDF of the study is available here), Tom Mitchell and his team at Carnegie Mellon University trained computers to recognize patterns which accompanied cognitive states for different tasks. Using mathematical models developed by the computers, the computers predicted the subjects' mental states from the brain scans. While not batting a thousand, the computers beat chance when it came to distinguishing whether a subject was looking at sentences or pictures; reading sentences associated with different categories such as people, tools, or fruit; or reading ambiguous or non-ambiguous sentences.

Various medical applications are, of course, expected. Could it also be that both studies are steps toward computers recognizing some basics about what we're thinking and, thus, be able to act on those thoughts?