SALT LAKE CITY — It's one of the most common features of comic books and super heroes: Telepathy. The ability to communicate over a long distance using only your mind. Believe it or not, telepathy, or something like it, is here.

At least, if you're a research animal forced to get a brain implant. Several recent studies have shown that things like mind reading or telekinesis are actually possible using electronics and wireless devices.

The most dramatic is a study published in Scientific Reports, where two rats that were thousands of miles apart were able to communicate meaningful motor information, allowing one rat to help the other solve a puzzle in real life.

An "encoder" rat in Natal, Brazil was trained to press down a correct lever in order to get a reward. That rat was implanted with a device that can turn a brain signal into a digital form. The "encoder" was then connected via the internet link to a second "decoder" rat at Duke University, also implanted with such a device, which would receive the raw signal from the rat in Brazil.

When both rats were placed in identical experiments, the signal from the "encoder" was sent to the "decoder" — which had not undergone any training — in real time. What they found was that about two thirds of the time, the untrained decoder would press the correct lever, meaning the data from the trained rat was helping the untrained rat to decide and get the reward.

Related:

Chinese scientists develop mind-controlled drone

Chinese scientists have developed a quadcopter drone that responds to brain signals in an effort to help disabled people, although the technology is hoped to have applications in other fields, as well.

It's the world's first brain-to-brain interface, and amounts to something very similar to telepathy.

Relatedly, researchers from Brown University have had great success with an implantable radio transmitter that could allow either people or animals to control a device using only their thoughts. It's essentially a tiny radio, fully embedded in the body, that runs of a special battery capable of lasting for some seven years.

A detector reads the radio signal, which could then be used to control an external device. It's worked so far in three pigs and three monkeys, and is capable of sending data at 24 Mbps, faster than many internet connections.

In a third study, researcher's from Cornell were able to use brain scans to determine who a person was thinking about during the scan. Though the study was not in real time, like the rat and monkey studies above, it does come eerily close to mind reading.

In the experiment, 19 young adults were asked to learn about the personalities of four people. They were then asked to think about how those people would react in certain hypothetical situations. Distinct patterns for each person showed up in the medial prefrontal cortex, allowing researchers to glean who they were thinking about from fMRI scans.

The study could have implications for understanding and treating autism and other diseases that make it difficult for sufferers to recognize faces or expressions.

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