By Timothy Revell

Iker Ayestaran

I FEEL like a cross between an Olympic swimmer and a cyborg. On my head is a bathing-cap-like hat dotted with electrodes, and a cable dangles behind me.

David Ibanez and Marta Castellano, from the neuroscience company Starlab, look at me from across a table at their headquarters in Barcelona. As the sun beams in through two giant windows illuminating the plain white room where we sit, I am trying to hide my nerves, but wonder whether that is even possible while wearing a device like this. These may be humble surroundings, but Ibanez and Castellano are about to try to read my mind.

For decades, neuroscientists have been trying to decipher what people are thinking from their brain activity. Now, thanks to an explosion in artificial intelligence, we can decipher patterns in brain scans that once just looked like meaningless squiggles.

“Nobody dreamed that you could get to the content of thought like we’ve been able to in the past 10 years. It was considered science fiction,” says Marcel Just at Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania. Researchers have already peered into the brain to recreate films people have watched and decoded dreams.

Now the world’s biggest players in AI are racing to develop their own mind-reading capabilities. Last year, Facebook announced plans for a device to allow people to type using their thoughts. Microsoft, the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and Tesla’s Elon Musk all have their own projects under way. This is no longer just a case of seeing parts of the brain light up on a screen, it is the first …