Boffins have come up with a way of using your mind to control a keyboard. The method involves focusing people's minds on letters and reading what their brain is doing using electrodes.

While this is not the most comfortable of methods of playing a game or writing a novel, the boffins have got quite excited about it. They claim their findings make up one more step on the road to mind-machine interfaces that may one day help people communicate with just their thoughts.

They hope to use brain scans to see numbers and maybe even pull videos from inside people's heads. It all came about when two neuroscientists were monitoring two patients with epilepsy for seizure activity with electrodes placed directly on the surface of their brains to record electrical activity generated by the firing of nerve cells.

Lead investigator Jerry Shin, a neurologist at the Mayo Clinic campus in Jacksonville tested how well their fledgling mind-machine interface functioned in these patients. He reasoned it would perform better when electrodes were placed directly on the brain instead of when placed on the scalp, as is done with electroencephalography, or EEG.

Shin said that the problem with this technique is that the scalp and bony skull diffuses and distorts the signal. Shin said that the progress to date on developing these kind of mind interfaces has been slow because people were unhappy about having the top of their heads opened and probes shoved in so that doctors can read their mind. I wonder why.

The patients sat in front of a screen that displayed a single letter inside each square. Every time a square with a certain letter flashed and the patient focused on it, the electrodes relayed the brain's response to a computer. The patients were then asked to focus on specific letters, and the computer recorded that data as well. After the system was calibrated to each patient's specific brain waves, when the patient focused on a letter, the letter appeared on the screen.

"We were able to consistently predict the desired letters for our patients at or near 100 percent accuracy," Shin said.

So in 2020 to play your shoot-em-up with your mind all you need to do is have a craniotomy and calibrate each person's brain waves to desired actions.