In April, a team of scientists from the University of Washington and Carnegie Mellon University published in the journal Nature a paper detailing an ambitious experiment they’d recently conducted.

Three people worked together to play a crude version of the video game Tetris. Two of the research subjects could see the whole game screen–the falling blocks, the gaps in the stack of blocks at the bottom of the screen.

Using only their thoughts, they beamed commands to a third person, whose own screen didn’t show the stack that the falling block needed to fit into. Sensing the commands from other two players, the third player rotated the block to fit.

This so-called “BrainNet” is one piece of the telepathy puzzle. Five months later in September, the California medical-device company Synchron announced it had successfully tested, for the first time in a clinical setting, another key piece. A new brain sensor whose implantation, unlike previous models, doesn’t require drilling a hole in the user’s skull.