Mind-goggling

IF YOU think the art of mind-reading is a conjuring trick, think again. Over the past few years, the ability to connect first monkeys and then men to machines in ways that allow brain signals to tell those machines what to do has improved by leaps and bounds. In the latest demonstration of this, just published in the Public Library of Science, Bin He and his colleagues at the University of Minnesota report that their volunteers can successfully fly a helicopter (admittedly a virtual one, on a computer screen) through a three-dimensional digital sky, merely by thinking about it. Signals from electrodes taped to the scalp of such pilots provide enough information for a computer to work out exactly what the pilot wants to do.