Your muscles emit tiny electromagnetic impulses when you think about certain motions, whether you do them or not. If you imagine a pitcher throwing a baseball, sensitive electronics can detect signals being sent to the appropriate muscles even if you are just relaxed in a chair.
The crazy thing is that this happens with speech too. NASA scientists were able to have a computer recognize simple thought words with 4 sensors around the adam's apple. The muscles in your tongue and jaw get tiny electrical signals, detectable by sensitive sensors, that need to form the word, in the way that a word is formed, even when nothing is said. If such a sensor is placed into the fingers of a glove, the person may then read the mind of another by placing his gloved hand on the other's neck. The electrode's sensor data would then be converted to sound, which would be interpreted through headphones on the wearer.
Now this sound would not sound like speech. A person would have to be trained to carefully place a hand properly on the neck, and to recognize strange changes in tones from different modulated sensors. NASA used a complex neural network to recognize a set of 12 words, the human brain could do far better.
In the end, you would have a "psychic", that could read the mind of anyone by just placing a gloved hand on another's neck. Trained properly, they could conceal the glove's true purpose, and conceal the headphones, and pretend that their special powers were natural. Let them just bring your head up with their hand on your neck and stare into their eyes.-- dan1123, Oct 28 2005 NASA experiment http://www.nasa.gov...ubvocal_speech.htmlNASA experiment alluded to in the description [dan1123, Oct 28 2005] Reminds me of phrenology http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phrenology [normzone, Oct 28 2005] This would only work on people who internally vocalise their thoughts - something that most of us do at certain times, but those internal conversations are not likely to be something useful. In this case, the mind readers are likely to get lots of similar results like "Why does this creepy guy have his hand on my neck?" Just sitting here now (while I'm not typing) for example, there's no internal conversation going on in my head, but an experience of my surroundings that's entirely non-linguistic. If someone wanted me to think in a way that they could listen to linguistically, they could just ask me to tell them.-- zen_tom, Oct 28 2005 what happens if you put it on inside out - do you get to read your own mind?-- xenzag, Oct 28 2005 Probably make a really, really tight fist.-- reensure, Oct 28 2005 I was thinking that while this probably wouldn't be useful for reading a random person's mind, it would work in situations where you needed information and the subject was not cooperative. In the case of an interrogation, this could be useful, but I don't know if a person would need to amend the law to allow for such an action.-- dan1123, Oct 28 2005 I'm sure the results, if any, would be entirely skewed by the movement of the glove wearer's hand.-- fridge duck, Oct 28 2005 I agree with what [zen_tom] said ... even though you can't read someone's thoughts it would work for silent speech. Sometimes I have my doubts about speech controlled computers because it's so impractical - room has to be quiet and you end up looking like a weirdo talking to the computer. This technology makes it more realistic. I could be dictating my halfbakery annotation in complete silence. If I was a spy I would love this. I could have a full conversation without anyone knowing that I was speaking to someone. The glove could have it's uses too [+]-- ixnaum, Oct 29 2005 random, halfbakery