Former Facebook executive Mary Lou Jepsen, who previously had headed up the company's Oculus VR division, has founded a "wearable MRI" startup called Openwater where she hopes to create hats that can read our minds, and help us communicate telepathically, within the decade. As Jepsen tells CNBC, she's hoping to take the technology inside multi-million-dollar MRI machines and put it inside something the size of a ski hat.

She says the technology already exists today to read thoughts via MRI, at least partly. "If I threw [you] into an M.R.I. machine right now... I can tell you what words you're about to say, what images are in your head," Jepsen said. "I can tell you what music you're thinking of. That's today, and I'm talking about just shrinking that down." She thinks that full MRI capability could be achievable in a hat within 10 years, with telepathy (of some kind) possible in about eight years.

As CNet reports, she sees this "thinking cap" as potentially being able to allow us to communicate ideas more efficiently, without having to use our mouths, fingers, or lengthier explanations to do so.

The technology involves flexible LCDs that would scan your brain using infared light. And Jepsen is already considering the moral and ethical implications of such technology — like, for instance, if police began employing it as a lie detector, against peoples' wills.

Yes, that sounds like a potentially huge problem!

But Jepsen sees this idea as something that is at least non-invasive — ""Elon Musk is talking about silicon nanoparticles pulsing through our veins to make us sort of semi-cyborg computers," she says. At least this, she suggests, just involves light and a hat.

Anyway, file under: The Future is Creepy.