THOUGHT READING BY WIRELESS.

Dunstan Times, Issue 3145, 27 November 1922, Page 2

THOUGHT READING BY WIRELESS.

(Jsy Cicely Hamilton.) A stunning possibility is foreshadowed by Mr F. Lloyd, a Sheffield authority on wireless. The manifestations of energy to which thought gives rise will one day be recorded as sound is now recorded. Therefore, wireless, he declares, in the not distant future, will make the thoughts of others as perceptible to our senses as speech. The fact —if fact it is destined to become—means more than facilities for Scotland Yard in the prevention of uncommitted crime it means that my neighbor's contempt for my last new hat will, to all intents and purposes, be shouted in my ear, and that my opinion on her lack of taste will be shouted back into hers! .... (liven publicity for our once private thoughts, and the possibilities of enraging each other are infinite! The salesman's impatience with a tiresome customer will no longer he tactfully concealed ; the customer, hesitating between saxe blue and vieux rose, will bo informed by wireless across the counter that it is just about time the old fool made up her mind. With, possibly, the addition of an irritable postscript to the effect that, with her complexion and a figure like that, it doesn't much matter what she chooses! While the bedside manner of the courtliest of physicians will fail to conceal from an offended patient the fact that his malady (in the doctor's eyes) is not the least interesting, and entirely the result of overfeeding . . . . The consequence, if not "red ruin and the breaking up of laws," will at least he the shattering of friendships and the rapid termination of acquaintance. The one real benefit of the new advance in science will be conferred on the younger generation, which will not be called on, in a thought-reading age, to waste its time in learning manners. Manners, as we know them, will be obsolte —defunct. It will, for instance, be useless to instruct your small boy to abstain from open comment on Mr •Jones' paunch, or Mrs Jones' squint, when the .Jones' pocket receiver will keep them well informed of his impressions. The forced smile and conventional expressioni of delight that greet the arrival of a guest not really welcome will merely brand its wearer as a liar. For good or for evil we shall have to be natural —for good or for evil we shall stand revealed for what we are. Here and there an individual, abnormally virtuous or abnormally selfsatisfied, may face the change with equanimity, but for the poor little rest of us, who get through life by assuming and aspiring to the virtues that we have not, the outlook is anything but cheery. When our (often silly) thoughts and our (often vulgar) impulses are made common property — nationalised by science—l imagine that the poor little rest of us will look back with something like longing to the days of our ancestor, the caveman. . . He at least, whatever his other disadvantages, possessed a privilege about to be denied to his descendants —he could look very much wiser than he really was and be more highly esteemed than he deserved.