You have taken a hike in the wilderness, alone. At some point you took a wrong turn and lost your way. The sun has set. Your phone has run out of battery. And to make matters worse, you can hear howling in the distance.

Suddenly, a spotlight shines on your position. A rope ladder falls to the ground and a rescue worker takes your hand. Your distressed thoughts have been picked up by guards. They scanned your mind to identify your location.

The ability to communicate using thought is known as telepathy.¹ It is the stuff of science fictionStories based on major scientific or technological changes. .² But it may one day become reality.

One of Elon MuskA South African-born entrepreneur whose companies have included the online payment service PayPal.'s companies is developing a brain implant. Musk claims those who put the chip in their brain will be able to communicate instantly using thought alone. He believes this invention will replace speaking in the next decade.

Most scientists are scepticalTo have doubts or reservations. The philosophical theory of scepticism holds that some knowledge is impossible.. Our thoughts are too complex, individual and messy to easily convert into messages. The reason we use language is to translate the complexity of our thoughts into a form that others can understand. 

Yet the possibility of brain-to-brain communication is a very real one. One 2014 experiment saw a person in India send a message to three people in France.

It was nothing like Musk's full-on telepathy. The participants wore headsets. The sender moved their limb to create a Morse CodeA method of communication in which each letter and number has a dot-dash code.-like series of flashes and blanks to the receivers. It took 70 minutes to send a simple "hola" and "ciao". 

These are early days, however. A breakthrough could come through at any time. 

There are many ways in which telepathy would make our lives easier. It would remove the language barrier. Nothing would be lost in translation. Our intentions could be transferred clearly to all. The ambiguitiesThings that are unclear. and double meanings that have developed in languages could be laid aside. 

This could have extreme benefits. As science writer Kat McGowan writes: "If isolation, cruelty, malice, violence and wars are fuelled by misunderstandings and communication failures, as many people believe, telepathy would seem to offer the cure."

Telepathy would let us speak as fast as we think. This could prompt innovation. Writer Sam Brinson says: "When we can think back and forth between everyone that's connected to some giant mind-melding network, the rate at which information can be created, critiqued, and elaborated on, will increase exponentiallyExponential growth is when the rate of growth increases steadily over time, for instance by doubling: 1, 2, 4, 8 rather than 1, 2, 3, 4. This kind of growth has the capacity to lead to dramatic changes over relatively short time spans.."

Yet there may be downsides. We are already bombardedHaving lots of things thrown at you. by extreme digital noise, with an endless stream of notifications from our various devices. Imagine if all this noise came directly into our brain. It could quickly become overwhelming.

Security is also an issue. Hackers could read our thoughts and steal our deepest secrets. Rogue actors could steal dangerous information like nuclear weapon release codes. Even worse, agents could implant false or malicious information in our minds, or infiltrate our thoughts so that we think their ideas are our own.

Yes: Imagine what could be done if we could all talk on the same wavelength. Athletes could pull off amazing coordinated feats. Artists would invent bold new forms. We might even achieve world peace.

No: Individuality is our greatest asset. Technologically-assisted telepathy could strip this away, while encouraging groupthinkThe practice of thinking or making decisions as a group, often leading to irrational or poor quality decisions., filling our mind with unbearable details and opening us to exploitationTreating someone unfairly in order to benefit from their hard work..

Or... If genuine telepathy was ever developed and implemented on a wide scale, it would be the biggest shift in human history - and would make life both better and worse in many, many different ways.