You’re a mind-reader! But when will telepathy get a move on and become reality?

Watching those far-away-in-the-future Eurosaver ads from our friends at McDonald's, we started wondering about other technological breakthroughs that might lie ahead of us. This time around: telepathy.

It may currently only be the stuff of science fiction and illusionist entertainers, but telepathy is inching its way ever closer to reality. In fact, scientists are busy, right this minute, trying to crack the secret.

Traditionally, telepathy has been viewed with a serious amount of scepticism. That's fairly understandable given how it's been embraced by the paranormal community and assorted loonies around the world.

On the other hand, being able to communicate with someone with only our brain and a bit of tech would be seriously cool. Let's hope, though, that we'll have control of what we transmit and, more importantly, who picks it up. Like Google Thought Circles - none of us want all and sundry to hear the nonsensical gibberish we think about every minute.

The telepathic equivalent of verbal diarrhoea isn't the kind of thing we're hoping for here. So are the boffins making any notable headway? Yes, yes they are. The trick with telepathy is to see the brain as one big ball of electric impulses. And it's those balls that we need to bounce around the place for us to communicate telepathically.

However, getting those impulses from one head to another is only the first small part of the challenge. Interpreting them and converting them into transferrable information is the big test.

There has been a serious amount of success in recreating a person's visual intake from scanning their brain. Scientists at the University of California have made the first big breakthrough and are now able to scan your brain and project the images you think of onto a screen.

So, if scans can get quite a clear image of what we're seeing from the electric activity in our grey mush, then there's a good chance that capturing our thoughts is also possible.

The US army is one of the most heavily invested bodies in the field of telepathy research. They would benefit massively from the ability to have their troops on the one wavelength - literally.

No matter how kick-ass real-life, fully workable telepathy could be, it would need to be treated with respect. There's the very real prospect that technology-enabled telepathy will not just be created in the next two decades, but it could be a fully-functioning tool used in our everyday lives.

As with all new capabilities presented to us by technological advances, there are likely to be massive ethical and privacy issues following right along behind it.

Nevertheless, it looks like it will definitely come about in our lifetime, and no matter what the downsides of telepathy, there's no chance that we'd turn our nose up at it. And at the very least, the establishment of an actual Thought Police Unit might do its bit for some much-needed job creation...