Reading Capabilities ==================== - Complete decoding of conscious thinking, whether verbalized or not. - Complete transcription of one's inner monologue. - Identification of intent, even if it's not verbalized. For example wanting to get up and do something, or wanting to initiate a conversation; and even "passive" intents like wanting to not respond or deciding to not react to something. - Decoding of visual perception, whether its source is vision, memory or imagination. - Decoding of audio perception, including the sounds you hear, remember or imagine. - Decoding of somatic sensory perception, including that coming from physical stimuli, memory, imagination. - Decoding of all sorts of emotions and what I call "virtual sensations" that are activated in the cortex as a reaction to thoughts, emotions or experiences. From general moods like joy, sadness or anger, to everything else you perceive "in your body", like goosebumps, "pins-and-needles", sexual stimulation. Manipulation Capabilities ========================= (Before I start I want to set something aside, which is that they do **not** have the ability to control your thinking - at least not directly. This is discussed more in the `limitations <./limitations.rst>`_ article.) Visual ------ Inducing visual perception and visual phenomena, both during wakefulness and sleep (i.e. hallucination and dreaming, respectively). They can also cause your vision to black out, make you see "television static", induce an artificial blurring in any segment in your vision, superimpose visual artifacts and effects like flashing, and even beam waveforms that manipulate the interpretation of existing objects in your vision - e.g. make something seem briefly larger or smaller than it is, alter its perceived position, make it seem like it's moving, or alter the perceived colors in your view (what I'm going to liken to an Instagram filter being applied to your vision). Audio ----- Inducing audio perception and phenomena. This includes the well-known high- pitched buzzing sound ("microwave hearing"), voice-to-skull (v2k), audio hallucinations, and various "effects" like altering the perceived loudness or location/direction of the sounds that you are hearing, and causing your hearing to black out. Sensory ------- They can induce all sorts of sensory perceptions and phenomena, which includes way more things than you'd realize is possible, because the somatic sensory cortex in the human brain has a surprisingly vast range of functions. This includes: - **Primary sensory phenomena:** Anything you can ever experience from physical stimuli, like touch, heat, cold, pressure. - **Interpretative sensory perceptions:** This includes various "feelings" that you may experience in your body, for example feeling like your arm is "tired" and needs to rest (which normally would happen after some workout), or feeling like your limb is "about to fall" (which you'd normally experience e.g. if you're on the edge of your bed), or feeling that **your entire body** is about to fall (which would normally happen if you lose your balance), or feeling that a part of your body is "unwell" (which would normally happen if you have an illness or infection of some sort in there), and much more. - **Systemic sensory perceptions**: Like fatigue, dizziness, hunger, feeling "unwell" or "sick", and really any systemic feeling you can experience. Emotions -------- Pretty much every emotional state you can think of, and even ones you have never seen before - joy, anger, sadness, anxiety, feeling "unwell", feelings of doubt, feelings of unconfidence, feeling helpless - they can all be beamed into your brain. I'm not mistaken, emotions (or at least a significant part of them) might be "represented" in human perception as "virtual sensations" that occur in the somatic sensory cortex (but without any physical stimuli, as they are activated via cognitive neural paths).