What if a gadget could read your thoughts? That's what engineers at Honda Motor and the Japanese government's Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International are working towards with a system that attempts to decipher brain activity. In a demonstration shown on video the engineers have developed a brain machine interface (BMI) system that allows a person to control a robot through thought alone. Think about raising your right hand and a robot hooked up to the same machine raises its right hand. It's a long way from being ready to use -- for starters it requires the user to wear a large hemispheric scanner like the sit-down hair dryers you find in hair salons -- but who knows? One day your TV might be prompted to switch channels when you start thinking the current program is boring.