Question: Do you see people in the future speaking to each other telepathically?

Martha Havenith answered on 18 Jun 2015:

Hey Niamh
that’s a really cool question! I wonder…. if it happened, it would probably take us at least a few 100.000 years to develop that kind of ability as a species. It also depends though on how you define telepathy. If you’re strict about it, you could say it would be the ability to sense the electrical signals in another person’s brain and make sense of them. I don’t think that will ever work, because those signals are really small, and the air around us is full of small electrical changes, so the signals would get lost.
If on the other hand you define telepathy as the ability to understand another person’s thoughts without speaking… then in some ways we are already doing that. After all, humans are extremely good at reading thoughts from another person’s face – in fact we are usually much better than we think! I can imagine humans getting better at reading those kinds of small, unspoken, signals over time. Another possibility is that we start carrying around more wearable technology that translates our thoughts to devices another person is wearing. Something like a big hat that measures electrical signals on our skull and alerts the hat on our friend’s skull that we are feeling hungry and want to go for lunch… 🙂 Not sure if I’d find that scary or fun!