My colleagues at the brain research institute where I am doing my PhD occasionally present the scientific articles that claim these things at out weekly discussion group meeting. Trust me, we are nowhere near being able to read people's thoughts.

The movie "Surrogates" showed where this is going to take us. Not pretty. Not pretty at all.

Sounds like a fun idea can't wait to see what comes of it

It seems a bit unrealistic, actually, Have you tried thinking about just one thing, with no distractions or other thought processes, The brain seems a bit TL;DR to successfully.."hack"

Personally I dont really think we will ever get to the point of thought monitoring/cencorship. A real thought reading machine would require far to much information from each individual to be accurate enough to give detailed information. Every persons higher thought processes are totally unique and mapping everyone seperately would more than likely be un-feasable.

The thing to remember with this style of tech is that the inputs are measuring the neural electromagnetic waves emitted by the brain, they're not actually reading specific thoughts... eventually we may develop the tech to do so but not anytime soon. Even the most advanced prosthetic limbs, the ones controlled by moving your "ghost limb", require hours upon hours of configuration to the specific person in order to work properly, kinda makes thought control n targeted advertising difficult.

Maybe do some yoga so you don't get shocked as easily as those guys in the video :)

The limiting factor is that you really need to start putting detectors within the skull itself to get much useful information, the skull blocks your brainwaves getting out about as effectively as it blocks cell phone radiation getting in.

In the short term the main use for 'mind reading' technology will be very basic computer input and communication for the paralyzed.

There are actually fair number of devices now that uses mind, or rather brainwave interpretation technology, as input device. For example, Emotiv is a fairly popular one you can buy commercially. Nintendo Wii is also researching into it at this moment.

"Imagine employers using the reverse - if you dumb down too much you get a shock to wake you up." I can't see how that will even fly considering gross violation of human rights not to mention torture.

... so just to add to that: you have nothing to fear as long as you don't have transmitters surgically implanted in your brain, unless they invent nanorobots that can get inside your brain non-invasively and 'wiretap' your neurons/axons. But hey, that's a long way off.

Disclaimer: I am not a neurologist and may be talking a bunch of crap.

It's the beginning of the end imo. It's just a matter of time before matrix/terminator type scenarios will happen. It's amazing how much the world has changed just in the last 10 years. People go crazy without their email and facebook.