Competing mind-over-matter toys from Mattel and Uncle Milton Industries are coming this fall to a store near you. They are the first “brain-computer interfaces” to enter the consumer mainstream.
The question everyone has about these gizmos is whether they are parlour tricks like Magic 8 Balls or Ouija boards. Evidence in favour of them being for real is that some people are worse than others at controlling them—certainly not a marketing feature.

Lawyers and other multitaskers, for example, tend to have a terrible time focusing their brain waves, says Johnny Liu, of NeuroSky, the creator of the mind-over-matter headset. But there are those to whom controlling the device comes effortlessly and instantly, as if single-mindedness is the person’s natural default position.
Nine years ago, scientists created the world’s first telekinetic monkey. Belle, a cute little owl monkey in the lab of Miguel Nicolelis at Duke University, was the first to control tangible objects, long distance, with her thoughts.

How do you make a monkey telekinetic? First you get her into a computer game. She knows that if a light suddenly shines on her screen and she moves her joystick left or right to hit it, she gets a drop of juice. Then the researchers drill a hole in her head. They take a device the size of a baby aspirin, out of which come many superfine wires, and lower it into Belle’s motor cortex—the portion of the brain that plans muscle movement. The object is to line up each wire with an individual neuron to detect its firing.

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