Mind Control and the Force

So I'm watching (or I should say catching up on) my viewing of my favorite technology blog, GeekBrief.tv, and listening to Cali Lewis talk about a bunch of stuff (mostly for me it's ho hum) when she talks about this toy which uses "mind control." Mind control? WTF? So I start watching the rest of the blog and she shows this toy called The Force Trainer which is made by Uncle Milton Industries (with Mattel coming out with a competitor toy around the same time) and which should be out near the end of the summer costing about $130. Bull Pucky! I couldn't believe my eyes.... The toy reminds me of the mind control trainer from that old sci-fi flick from the 50's called The Forbidden Planet which had an alien race called the Krell who had developed a machine with no mechanisms for control... the mind did all the controlling (if you've never seen it, check it out on iTunes sometime).

Essentially, you put on a headset that monitors your Beta Wave functioning and as you concentrate a ball rises up a tube and the more you concentrate the higher up the tube it goes. The Beta Waves of your brain are the waves produced when your brain is in an intense state of concentration. the technology was evidently first developed by DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) who are the folks that gave us such things as GPS and Night Vision but is now being used commercially by a company known as NeuroSky. The potential applications are almost inconceivable: