Cognitive Sovereignty is an Inalienable Right

The idea that thoughts should be private was once a given. Even the most authoritarian regimes could only punish what was spoken or done, not what was felt. That boundary is eroding.  Mental privacy is not merely a civil liberty. It is the foundation of psychological  development, of selfhood, of free will. To strip it away in the name of productivity or safety  is to enact a quiet form of cognitive colonization. 

We do not permit strangers to walk into our bedrooms, read our diaries, or broadcast our  medical records. Why should we allow algorithms to study our attention patterns,  emotional reactions or cognitive biases without our awareness? 

While formal academic studies require informed consent, this standard often disappears in real-world applications. In classrooms, workplaces, marketing systems and even public venues, tools tracking attention, emotion, and cognitive states are increasingly deployed under the guise of convenience or wellbeing — with consent hidden behind opaque terms. Scholars stress that such consent is often “meaningless” (Chowdhary et al., 2023), and more than half of large employers are already using emotion AI in ways that employees struggle to understand.

Chile takes the lead: neurorights emerge 

In 2021, Chile became the first country in the world to pass a constitutional amendment enshrining neurorights (ethical, legal, social and natural principles of freedom and entitlement related to a person’s cerebral and mental domain), including protections for personal identity, free will, mental privacy, equitable access to neurotechnology, and safeguards against algorithmic bias (Bublitz, 2022). Ienca and Andorno (2017) laid the intellectual foundation for this reform in 2021, and this work continues to influence global discussions on AI, brain data protection, and digital human rights. 

This reform was driven by concerns over emerging neurotechnologies and the potential misuse of brain data. This was tested in 2023 when Chile’s Supreme Court ruled against Emotiv Inc., a U.S. neurotech company, for retaining and using the brain data of Senator Guido Girardi without proper consent. The Court found this violated his constitutional rights, reinforcing neurorights as legally enforceable protections—not just ethical ideals (Genser et al., 2024). 

This landmark decision sent a signal to the rest of the world:

But progress remains slow elsewhere. Despite growing advocacy, neurorights are still not part of most legal or policy frameworks. Mental privacy, cognitive liberty, and psychological integrity are largely absent from global human rights law. While the tools to alter, decode, or influence thought now exist, the protections do not. 

Pace is picking up in other jurisdictions as well, such as Latin America and Spain (Cornejo, 2024). In addition, the U.S. states of California, Colorado, and Montana have passed legislation protecting brain data. As such, neurorights remain a topic of interest for the coming years. But even before neurorights put new legal protections into action, what data are we already waiving in terms of our right to privacy?

The illusion of consent 

You click ‘accept’ on a terms and conditions page. Buried within it are often clauses that permit your biometric and behavioural data to be harvested, processed and sold. You say yes to a fitness band, but no one tells you its sensors can track heart rate, variability to infer stress, depression, or cognitive fatigue. You join a video call; software may scan your face to predict engagement or mood.

Informed consent in the digital age is a fiction unless we update both ethics and law to  match the scale and subtlety of technological power. 

Children and the colonization of attention 

Nowhere is this crisis more acute than in the lives of children. Increasingly exposed to neurofeedback toys, attention-monitoring classroom headbands, and emotion-sensing AI tools, young people are growing up in environments where their cognitive activity is measured, monitored and even scored. 

In China, some classrooms have introduced EEG-powered headbands that claim to track student focus and send real-time alerts to teachers or even parents if attention levels drop. Elsewhere, the Eggly system combines EEG headbands with augmented reality games designed for neurodivergent children, delivering attention-training feedback through gameplay (Lyu et al., 2025).

AI monitoring and influence on emotions is also making its way into early childhood settings. One study observed AI-powered robots in nurseries that interpret children’s emotional cues—such as distress or boredom—and adapt their behaviour to soothe or stimulate accordingly (Berrezueta-Guzman et al., 2025). While some of this technology has clear benefits, there are some overlooked aspects when it comes to data privacy.

In more advanced classrooms, emotion dashboards aggregate and display students’ emotional states to inform lesson delivery in real time. Even play is not exempt: consumer toys embedded with emotional analytics are turning children’s reactions into quantifiable data, raising ethical concerns over the datafication of childhood (McStay and Rosner, 2021). These examples show that cognitive sovereignty is not a future concept for children. It is a current necessity. When surveillance enters the nervous system, the child becomes the site of experiment  and control. Cognitive sovereignty for the next generation must not be an afterthought.

The right to think freely — and to not think at all 

Cognitive sovereignty also means protecting the right to mental rest, to imagination, to unstructured thought. The modern attention economy wages war on silence, seeking to fill every space of  boredom with stimulation and every pause with profit. The ability to direct one’s attention inward, to daydream, reflect or simply be, this too must  be defended. If every thought is shaped by an algorithmic prompt, nudged by a notification, or edited by surveillance, then what remains of agency?  The right to think must also include the right to not think under pressure, not be nudged, not be ‘enhanced’ without permission. 

We are running out of time 

More than one hundred companies worldwide are now developing neurotechnologies. Some offer genuine promise in treating neurological conditions such as epilepsy, Parkinson’s disease, and depression, with firms like Neuroelectrics having already conducted clinical trials using non-invasive brain stimulation (Kaye et al., 2021). Others are embedded in defense research, education policy, and workplace surveillance, as neurotechnology increasingly finds roles in national security planning, pedagogical design, and employee monitoring (Harper & McCay, 2025; Muhl & Andorno, 2023). The stakes are not limited to privacy. They extend to autonomy, authenticity, and even democracy itself.  If political opinions can be predicted, and therefore influenced, at the neural level, what remains of the democratic ideal of free deliberation? Chile acted. Most countries have not.

A call for legal reform 

A new legal paradigm is needed, one that enshrines mental privacy as a human right, bans non-consensual neural  influence, and requires transparency and accountability for any system that reads or  shapes cognition. Several scholars and activists have begun to draft model legislation.  

Inspired by the ethical frameworks advanced by Yuste and colleagues, who in 2021 outlined principles like agency, mental privacy, equitable access to enhancement, and protection from bias (Yuste et al., 2021), legislative bodies in Latin America have since drafted concrete legal proposals grounded in these values. Notably, the Latin American and Caribbean Parliament (Parlatino) approved a Model Law on Neurorights in May 2023, comprising thirteen articles and a comprehensive conceptual annex, designed to provide member countries with a legal foundation for regulating neurotechnology (Borbón, 2025). But legislation cannot emerge without public pressure.

This is about more than policy. This is about being human

What makes us human is not only that we think, but that our thoughts are ours. When we lose control over what we think, or how we feel, or why we act, we become programmable. Without protections for mental autonomy, the future becomes a contest between those with power to shape minds and those whose minds are shaped. Cognitive sovereignty is not just a legal issue. It is a philosophical, ethical, and spiritual one. It goes to the heart of freedom. The fight for the mind is the defining civil liberties battle of our time. 

What should policymakers focus on in terms of neurorights? Let us know in the comments!

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Written by Gareth Strangemore-Jones and co-authored by Dhruv Mehrotra

Illustrated by Emily Haile

Edited by William T Mills IV, Marisa Guajardo, Janie Oberhauser

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References 

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Borbón D. (2025). What a NeuroRights legislation should not look like: the case of the Latin American Parliament. Frontiers in neuroscience, 18, 1514338. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnins.2024.1514338 

Bublitz, J. C. (2014). Freedom of Thought in the Age of Neuroscience. Archiv für Rechts- und Sozialphilosophie, 100(1), 1–25. https://doi.org/10.25162/arsp-2014-0001 

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Harper, E., & McCay, A. (2025). Neurotechnology – Integrating human rights in regulation (Research Brief). Geneva Academy of International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights. https://geneva-academy.ch/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/Neurotechnology-Integrating-Human-Rights-in-Regulation-1.pdf   

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