" Arnav Kapur, a researcher in the Fluid Interfaces group at the MIT Media Lab, demonstrates the AlterEgo project. Lorrie Lejeune/MIT If you were a superhero, what would your superpower be? Would you want to fly or be invisible? Or, perhaps, you'd rather have the power to read minds? Wouldn't that be cool? Reading minds is not as far-fetched as you might think. In fact, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have developed a wearable device that can actually verbalize a person's thoughts and allow them to talk to a computer — without anyone else hearing. Advertisement The device, dubbed AlterEgo, allows a person to control a computer and ask it questions without ever uttering one word. When the individual wearing the device thinks of a word or a phrase but does not speak it, AlterEgo picks up the neuromuscular signals in that person's jaw and face. AlterEgo transmits those signals to a computer, which is programed to associate them with specific words.