thinking the television on

Cybernetic research is starting to pay dividends for quadraplegics. From BBC news:

Matthew Nagle, 25, was left paralysed from the neck down and confined to a wheelchair after a knife attack in 2001.
The pioneering surgery at New England Sinai Hospital, Massachusetts, last summer means he can now control everyday objects by thought alone.
The brain chip reads his mind and sends the thoughts to a computer to decipher.

This type of application, called BrainGate, involves placing a small chip with a hundred electrodes onto the surface of the brain itself. It directly interacts with the neurons. The chip can recieve signals from nearby neurons, and over time, the person learns to control the impulses going into the chip in their head to a greater and greater degree. This demonstrates the remarkable plasticity and adaptability of the human brain.
So currently the technology exists for quadraplegics to control a mouse on a computer screen, and switch the television on and off, with nothing more than thoughts. This technology is only going to improve. In fact, cybernetics generally is set to explode over the next couple of decades.
For example, here in Memphis, there is a company that has developed prosthetic joints for children. What's so special about them? They grow as the child grows, so that the child does not have to go in for multiple operations at different stages of development. Through slowly extending the parts of the prothesis, the child must only endure a single operation.
Brain-electrode interaction is relatively new, but it is building on a line of research going back several decades. For some time, biofeedback has been known to benefit certain types of illness, such as anxiety, blood pressure and even epilepsy. Biofeedback is where you get feedback on real-time changes in your body, so that you can learn to control it better. As noted on psychotherapy.com, using bathroom scales to monitor weight is actually a crude form of biofeedback, but this is not what we usually mean by the word.
Epileptics that are allowed to watch real-time recordings of their EEG are able to sometimes control or ameliorate epileptic spikes, which show up clearly on an EEG recording. People suffering anxiety or blood pressure, who have feedback on their heart rate, GSR (sweaty hands) and blood pressure can learn to control those symptoms.
Monitoring, accessing, and responding to internal body and brain processes has been used for various purposes for some time. Brain chips are simply the next step... and not the last.