Did you know that you can pick up a homemade EEG kit and the open source software to run it for under fifty quid? I have been irrationally excited by this all week.

Admittedly it does ship from somewhere in Bulgaria as a bare PCB board and comes with documentation explaining that attaching it to humans or animals ‘may result in electric shock or seizure’ – you probably wouldn’t want to mention that to your initial test subjects.

The neuroscientists in Web Publishing have explained to me that EEG can’t actually read your mind as such since the electrical signal it detects isn’t localized. It’s only useful as a general measure of brain activity.

Still, I reckon it’s worth thinking about (or something?). Forget Singstar – at your next house party why not invite some rhesus macaques and hold a monkey vs human mental ping pong tournament? Totally doable with EEG.

We could put the personal touch back into email messages. As you write the EEG records your emotional state and then retroactively formats the message appropriately – so angry sentences are larger and in red, distracted, off the cuff missives are in a scribbly font, calm and collected messages are a cool blue.

From a work perspective you could harness the collective intelligence of entire departments without them actually having to do anything – except wear a silly hat with cables coming out of it that occasionally results in shocks or seizures, obviously. I suggest we hook up all of Nature’s editorial staff and record their brain activity while they are browsing scientific papers, then use the data to automate the ‘Editor’s Picks’ sections of journals, or perhaps create a sort of upmarket scientific Digg…?