The US Army is dedicating millions of research dollars into discovering building helmets to allow soldiers to telepathically communicate with one another on the battlefield.

The technology, which seems like something out of a science fiction novel, would use electrodes to pick up code words that soldiers were thinking.

Those codewords would then be transmitted back to a computer where the soldier's position and message- telling, for instance, that it is safe to progress towards a target- which would be transmitted to their peers in the field.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) was established in 1958 and was dedicated to expanding the Department of Defense' technology usage, some of which included state-of-the-art, and top secret, research into the mind.

Based largely out of University of California-Irvine, in conjunction with labs in Philadelphia and Maryland, scientists are trying to improve so-called 'synthetic telepathy' so that it could be used in a battlefield.

At this point, they have set their sights on 2017 as the year when their plan may turn into silent action.

So far, 45 percent of the commands that are transmitted from one volunteer to another- like 'call in helicopter' or 'enemy ahead'- are correct. That statistic is expected to improve.

According to a soldier quoted in Stars and Stripes, the military newspaper, many of those people who will be the ones utilizing the technology are on board.

Others, including civil rights activists, take the opposite view, bringing up concerns about a possible infringement on civil liberties if the technology were to be misused.

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(Agencies)