Apparently, the people at Japan's Honda Research Institute had the same idea, because they've now partnered with ATR and Shimadzu Corp. to come up with a way to use your brain as a robot remote control.

Called BMI (Brain Machine Interface – not the acronym that tells you you're fat), the tech uses electroencephalography, which measures slight electrical currents, and near-infrared spectroscopy, which looks at brain blood flow. Putting the two together gives you up to 90% accurate robot control without the use of physical implants.

Unfortunately, you still have to strap yourself to this giant chair and ridiculous-looking cap that kind of makes you resemble Dark Helmet from Spaceballs. But one day, when your mobile minions appear suddenly in the horizon, wordlessly laying waste to your enemies with nary a peep from you... oh, how glorious a time it shall be. [Akihabara News]

"Having a soldier gain the ability to communicate without any overt movement would be invaluable both in the battlefield as well as in combat casualty care," the Army said in last year's contract solicitation, which was awarded last month to a coalition of scientists and extraordinary gentlemen from the University of California at Irvine, Carnegie Mellon University, and the University of Maryland. "It would provide a revolutionary technology for silent communication and orientation that is inherently immune to external environmental sound and light."

The system, in theory, would work thusly. First, it would "decode the activity in brain networks" so soldiers could radio commands to their squad simply by thinking of the message. In the system's early stages (and, again, we're talking theoretical here), the person on the other end of that thought transmission would hear a robotic voice speaking the command into their headphones. But that's kind of primitive, don't you think?

But scientists eventually hope to deliver a version in which commands are rendered in the speaker's voice and indicate the speaker's distance and direction from the listener.

Yeah. We humans. Pretty amazing at times. At times. [TIME, Image: Wired]