We are about to make history. As long as these electrodes don’t electrocute me first, I am seconds away from becoming the first journalist in the universe to try the professor’s telepathy machine.

He doesn’t call it a telepathy machine, of course. He’s a scientist so it’s called the brain-to-brain communication experiment, or B2B. Still, my brain is about to read his daughter’s brain. Gwyneth and I will communicate solely by brain wave. Which, in my unscientific book, is telepathy.

The “professor” is actually Dr Christopher James, a pioneering biomedical engineer at Southampton University, and his invention makes fact out of science fiction. Decades from now we won’t be phoning home to say the train’s late. We’ll be thinking it. Soldiers will take orders from their commanding officers cerebrally and minds imprisoned in disabled bodies will be free to communicate with others via cyberspace. Centuries from now, one evil dictator will misappropriate the brain-to-brain technology, take over all our minds and destroy us.

Right now we’re at the very beginning of this revolutionary journey. I’m at one end of an anonymous office on the university campus with two electrodes stuck to the back of my head (and one, alarmingly, on the front “for grounding”). Gwyneth is sitting at the other end thinking either “left” or “right”. Two electrodes are connecting her to a computer that can tell, from her brain waves, what she is thinking.

It then passes this information, via the internet, to my computer, which flashes a series of lights at me. I can’t tell the difference — it’s all far too quick — but my brain can. My electrodes detect the same sequence of lefts and rights that Gwyneth is thinking. In short, my brain has read her brain. Eureka.

James is keen to point out his invention’s limitations. If his 11-year-old daughter thought of a cat or Venezuela or how she’d much rather be out tobogganing than sitting here thinking of left and right, I wouldn’t know it. We can only do lefts and rights. Nevertheless, non-verbal communication has arrived.

“These are the very first baby steps towards communication by thought,” James explains. “It is not impossible to imagine a future where this direct brain-to-brain interaction is commonplace. But we have a long way to go in terms of the speed, accuracy and robustness of the technology.”

He likens the thought processes of a brain to a cocktail party. Except that it’s a cocktail party attended by 100 billion guests and they’re all jabbering away noisily at the same time: “What we’re trying to do is eavesdrop on individual conversations at that cocktail party but we’re trying to do it from outside the building. Currently, the eavesdropping is fairly crude.”

The external sensors that James uses to measure the tiny electrical currents generated when we think are haphazard. They pick up interference, they mix up signals and, frequently, James has to glue them back on when they fall off. New ones are being developed but, says James, “the point where we can measure hundreds of thought waves in isolation is still a long way off”.

The alternative is to ditch the sensors and bury electrodes directly in the brain. Invasive brain-computer interfacing is far more controversial but also far more accurate and it has already been tested in America. In 2005 Matt Nagle, a college football star left tetraplegic after a stabbing, became the first person to control an artificial hand through thought. He had a 96-electrode chip implanted on the surface of his brain. A computer was then programmed to recognise Nagle’s thought patterns, enabling him to operate the robot hand.

“I can’t put it into words,” said Nagle during the trial. “It’s just — I use my brain. I just thought it. It will give me a sense of independence.”

James believes the non-invasive route to brain-computer interaction is a more feasible one. He speculates that the holy grail of full thought-controlled navigation — a life-changing concept for the severely physically disabled — could be achieved in decades.

The next watershed is when computers become faster at reacting to our thoughts than our own bodies, when a tiny chip in your glasses can understand millions of brain waves in millionths of seconds. It is still a long way off but is by no means unimaginable.

Full brain-to-brain communication is certainly further off and faces significant hurdles. While progress in reading thoughts is rapid, passing those thoughts to another human being is fraught with both scientific and ethical problems. Since announcing his breakthrough in direct communication, James has received letters imploring him to desist in his mad science. People are gravely concerned that his team’s work will lead to an underclass of zombies controlled by the scientists of tomorrow.

I wouldn’t worry. Quite apart from the sheer complexity of reproducing the exact electrical and magnetic stimuli to precise areas of the brain that trigger thoughts and movements, the amount of electrodes (and accompanied drilling) that would be required is something of a stumbling block.

Back in the office I have swapped places with Gwyneth. I’m thinking left, right, left, left but the computer claimed that I had thought four lefts in a row. If I was in a thought-controlled wheelchair I would have shot down the stairs by now. The computer needs time to learn my brain waves. I need time to learn how to imagine right and left clearly enough for the computer to understand.

Frankly, I’d rather be out tobogganing as well. And even though it is conceivable that James’s invention will one day be viewed with the same breathlessness as Archimedes’s momentous night in his hot tub, right now I can’t help thinking it’s simply good to talk.