Gentle On My Mind

"If you could read my mind, love
What a tale my thoughts could tell" - Gordon Lightfoot
To be honest, it makes me shiver to think what might become of any of my personal relationships if mind reading became a regular practice. I have a hard enough time sorting my thoughts for proper transmission on any given day, and the potential for something going horribly wrong with one of my idle notions or quirky ideas getting out before they had been properly edited is expressly intimidating. There are plenty of days when I feel that I may have mistakenly married Kreskin's little sister, but this is a condition created from years of carefully observed behavior. No real ESP is required, just a reliance on the creepy habitualness of my day to day existence.
Now we receive word that some very clever people at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have developed a machine that will allow subjects to tweet through the power of their minds. No longer will we be constrained by that pesky keyboard or limited by the bulkiness of our thumbs. With the aid of an electrode-studded helmet and a computer, brainwaves can be translated into physical responses that can send "up to eight characters per minute." At that pace, you could get off a quick "OMG" in less than half a minute.
These science types are happy to point out the way that this technology could be used to open up communication for those suffering from ALS or a spinal cord injury. I remain cautiously optimistic, and look forward to the day when I can send random thoughts such as the ones you have just read out into the blogosphere by just staring at a keyboard. I just hope my brain decoder comes with a spell-check.