Communicate Without Talking...

When you want to share an idea with someone you have to take that idea, you have to form thoughts, encode those thoughts into words, and command your body to speak those words. Then the other person has to hear those words, decode them into thoughts, and then interpret your idea based on the information they received and what they consider them to be.

At Reading University East of London there is a team of researchers performing experiements in Cybergenetics that theoretically could someday allow us to communicate to eachother with out words--raw thought to raw thought! Essentially they are implanting a computer chip in one of the researcher's arms and connecting it directly to the main nerve path that travels through the arm. The computer chip is able to send and receive electral signals to and from the nervous system via radio frequency to a nearby computer. The idea is that they'd be able to communicate signals for basic motor skills (like moving a finger) to full blown emotional feelings and ideas. Here's an excerpt:

I can envision a future when we send signals so that we don't have to speak. Thought communication will place telephones firmly in the history books. Philosophers point to language in humans as being an important part of our culture and who we are. Certainly, language has had everything to do with human development. But language is merely a tool we use to translate our thoughts. In the future, we won't need to code thoughts into language - we will uniformly send symbols and ideas and concepts without speaking. We will probably become less open, more able to control our feelings and emotions - which will also become necessary, since others will more easily be able to access what we're thinking or feeling. We will still fall back on speech in order to communicate with our newborns, however, since it will take a few years before they can safely get implants of their own, but in the future, speech will be what baby talk is today.

Read more here:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.02/warwick.html
Photo credit: Wired Magazine Cover, August 2002