Ever wanted to read minds? Ever wanted to communicate your thoughts without speaking a word?

It may become possible after claims by British scientists that they have created a system that allows “brain-to-brain communication”, sending messages formed by one person’s brain signals though an internet connection to another person’s brain many miles away.

Christopher James, who worked with colleagues at the University of Southampton, said that his experiments were “the first baby steps” towards technologies that would allow people instantly to send thoughts, words, and images directly into the minds of others.

“This could be useful for those people who are locked into their bodies, who can’t speak, can’t even blink,” Dr James said.

Others have hailed it as the future of the internet, a new way to communicate without the need for keyboards, telephones or even mouths. A decent broadband connection, however, would be essential.

Dr James admitted that we were a long way away from this thoughtful but speechless future. Currently, only a series of binary digits — a sequence of zeros and ones — can be sent between brains.

The scientists used “brain-computer interfacing”, a well-established technique that allows computers to analyse brain signals. Dr James said that his innovation was the transmission of these signals to another person through the internet.

During the transmission two people are hooked up to electrodes that measure activity in specific parts of the brain. The first person generates a series of zeros and ones, imagining moving their left arm for zero and right arm for one.

The first subject’s computer recognises the binary thoughts and sends them over the internet to the second person’s computer. A lamp is then flashed at two different frequencies for one and zero. The second person’s brain signals are analysed after staring at this lamp and the number sequence is picked up by a computer.

It takes about 30 seconds to send four numbers in this way. Dr James said that the next stage was to make the system quicker and simpler.

“It’s not telepathy,” Dr James said. “There’s no conscious thought forming in one person’s head and another conscious thought appearing in another person’s mind.

“The next experiments are to get that second person to be aware of the information that is being sent to them. For that, I need to get my thinking cap on, so to speak.”

He said that his research proved that it would eventually be possible to create a system where people sent messages through their thoughts alone. It would probably require electrodes to be attached inside the skull or even implanted in the brain. Dr James admitted that this opened up many ethical problems.

“How far can you go into someone’s brain? What are the long-term consequences? In principle this is all possible but there are a lot of issues that need to be considered first.”

Experts said that we need not worry just yet. “In 30 years, you’ll think of a message and it will appear on your wife’s mobile phone,” said Dr Ian Pearson, a futurologist who follows trends in advanced computing and communications. “But for that thought to appear in someone else’s mind? That won’t be easy.

“You don’t have to worry about Big Brother recording your thoughts for decades yet."

Explore Tech & Web

• Personal Tech

• The Web

• Gadgets & Gaming