This past weekend the in-laws were in town. My missus and step-mom went shopping for porcelain kitties in the quaint shops of Old St. Charles. I have not been down there in a decade. The bastards went and doubled the effective length of the commercial district. I remember it being a healthy walk. The reality turned out to be twice was I was prepared for.

And this isn’t guy shopping. This is a solid mile of Dickensian cobblestone street with quilt shops and soap shops and “Basket-O-Estrogen” shops, one after the other after the other. My father-in-law and I spent a lot of time sitting on benches and in various Man Chairs while our women shuffled laps around creaky hewn-plank floors, admiring antique Amish shit. Yay. Amish shit. Oh look. Another wine rack bent out of something repurposed and slightly ironic. Yay. Adorbs. Yay.

My father-in-law and I had a lot of time to shoot the shit. He’s retired, but he still consults as an industrial psychologist. He’s interested in how humans learn. I tried to explain some of über-genius Walter O’Brien’s theories on the quantifiable nature of consciousness. Stuff like being to travel instantly anywhere in the globe by uploading your consciousness into a waiting, cloned loaner-body.

“Yeah,” said my F-i-L, “I get that. But even if you can buy the storage and processing power to contain the consciousness of my brain at Best Buy, they still don’t have a way to get my human memory into the computer. Science doesn’t have the interface to get my consciousness out of my head and onto a hard drive. I doubt they ever will.”

Au contraire, mon pere.

The first scientifically documented case of telepathic communication between two humans is now in the books. This is not a joke or a cute parlor trick of viral YouTubism. They fucking did it.

In the tradition of “Watson, come here. I need you,” and “One small step for man…” you may want to pre-load into your Jeopardy-brain the trivia question of the next millennia: “What is ‘Hola?’”  That was the first word transmitted by documented human-to-human telepathy. Hola.

Okay, okay. You got me. You know with a room full of ponies, there’s got to be some horseshit in there somewhere. The telepathy was achieved with an external appliance strapped to the skull. An advanced EEG brain wave transmitter and corresponding receiver.

Scientists are a lot farther along on brain-to-computer Interfaces (BCIs) than many people realize. They are mapping electrochemical transmissions of the various motor-centric parts of the brain the same way they mapped the human genome. Big-to-small. They have a pretty impressive grip on the “big” motor brain synaptic signals. They know precisely how many microvolts from which region of the brain produce which movements of which muscle groups.

Ten years ago, they had to measure these micropulses of electrochemical energy by wrapping parts of the (test animal) brain in a kind of foil. In this video of a monkey feeding itself with a robotic arm wired to its brain, the journo categorizes the interface as “wires in its brain” but it’s more like foil gum wrappers inserted between the lobes. (note that you don’t see the top of the monkey’s scalp in the video. That’s because it isn’t there.) There are scalpels involved. Placing those resonance sensors around lobes causes irreparable damage to other parts of the test animal’s brain.

Long story short, science has developed magnetic measurement devices so sensitive that they can be worn outside the skull and still measure the microvoltage changes of a pinpoint zone deep in the brain. Non-invasive. Zero scalpels. That’s pretty cool. Reading and transmitting mapped brain directives to a computer from a non-invasive appliance is a small miracle.

But in this case, it’s the receiver that is the HOLY SHIT! breakthrough.

Brain electricity detected by decoder device located outside the skull and translated into bits and bytes: Cool!

Bluetooth data exchange between transmitter device and receiver device: Yawn.

Receiver device zapping a “thought” BACK INTO THE AUDITORY LOBE OF THE BRAIN OF SOMEONE ELSE? Without even removing the skull?  Are you fucking kidding me???

The obvious metaphor is that the lid is officially off Pandora’s Box. But hey. Clever sumbitches didn’t even have to lift the lid, did they? What hath we wrought?