“The “Star Wars”-themed game, The Force Trainer, comes with a headset that reads your brainwaves and wirelessly triggers a fan to blow a ball toward the top of a clear chamber.

The technology inside the game’s “Jedi Training Remote” is pretty basic, actually. The remote is a “dry” EEG-sensing device – a headset – that reads the beta-wave emissions from your brain. (Beta waves are associated with meditative states.) The harder you concentrate, the faster the game’s fan spins, and the higher the ball goes.”

“It’s not unusual for new technologies to first enter popular consciousness as toys. In the 1st century, Heron of Alexandria invented the aeolipile: a metal ball with curved nozzles sticking out of it, perched on stilts. With water in it, and flame beneath it, the resultant steam would make it spin, whiz, whiz, whiz. Such fun. Nobody understood they were looking at a steam engine. Hence, the Industrial Revolution didn’t start for another 1700 years.”