They can read your thoughts. Who will protect your mind?
By Gareth Strangemore-Jones and Dhruv Mehrotra
They can mine your data, model your behaviour, nudge your choices, even read your thoughts, but they cannot yet be held accountable. In the twenty-first century, what was once considered the most private, unassailable aspect of human existence, the mind, is being drawn into the marketplace.
Cognitive sovereignty is the right to own your own mind. It is the right not to be intruded upon, influenced, decoded, steered, or manipulated by technology, governments, corporations, or anyone else. It is a principle so fundamental to freedom that it predates language. But it is not enshrined in law. Where our ancestors fought for sovereignty over land, labor, and law, our fight today is for sovereignty over thought. We are not ready.
Neurocapitalism arrives without consent
Neurotechnology is no longer the stuff of science fiction. Brain-computer interfaces now allow researchers to decode neural signals, reconstruct speech from silent thought, and stimulate emotional responses using electrodes and machine learning (Makin et al., 2020). In a study conducted by researchers at the University of Texas at Austin, a machine-learning model trained on fMRI scans could reconstruct accurate sentences that participants were thinking about, without them speaking a word (Tang et al., 2023) This technology is being developed and deployed faster than legal systems can respond.
It is not only about reading minds, but writing them, the subtle shaping of thought through feedback loops, subliminal cues, predictive personalization, and the algorithmic editing of reality. Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (2019) reveals how tech giants have shifted from tracking behaviour to actively shaping it. To illustrate this point, Zuboff uses the example of Pokémon Go. While players enjoyed the augmented reality experience of encountering Pokémon in the real world, companies would pay the game’s creator to nudge people towards specific real-world locations.
Zuboff warns of a new form of power that predicts and manipulates our actions without consent, turning human experience into raw material for profit. In her words, “The goal is to change behavior at scale.”
It directly threatens cognitive sovereignty. Zuboff shows that mental intrusion is not a side effect of surveillance capitalism — it is its business model. Defending the mind, then, is nothing less than resisting this economic architecture. This is pure neurocapitalism: the commodification of cognition itself.
Ethics lags behind invention
When a person’s face can be scanned to infer mood, and a voice can be analysed to gauge emotional instability, what becomes of consent? Despite their growing use in hiring platforms to score job candidates (Ingber & Andalibi, 2025) and in-car systems to monitor driver alertness (Chen et al., 2025), facial and vocal emotion detection systems remain unreliable and ethically fraught. A review by Barrett et al. (2019) found that facial expressions are highly dependent on both cultural and social context, and often fail to reveal emotional states accurately, undermining many claims made by emotion AI developers.
When neurostimulators are used to ‘correct’ behaviour in the workplace, what becomes of dignity?
A 2024 study into the use of electrical stimulation to modulate brain activity (known as transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS)) to reduce fatigue in first responders found that three-quarters of participants emphasized the importance of user control, and nearly two-thirds cited privacy concerns as essential before accepting such interventions (Cabrera et al., 2024). The right to cognitive autonomy was viewed as non-negotiable.
Multimodal emotion recognition systems, which may combine facial microexpressions, voice tone, and physiological signals like skin conductivity, are becoming more sophisticated (Younis et al., 2024). But their use outside clinical or research contexts raises serious concerns. As Latif et al. (2022) point out, automated emotion recognition (AER) can easily become a tool for manipulation, especially when deployed without transparency in education, employment, or surveillance settings.
Technology often outpaces ethics. We have seen this with the rise of social media outpacing our ability to protect our children. The AI industry itself is torn by the pull of progress versus the increasingly perceived need for regulation. But in the case of cognitive sovereignty, the lag is existential. We now face the possibility that our inner world — the place where dreams emerge, where dissent begins, where love first flickers — might be interpreted, mined, commercialised, or manipulated. Without robust legal and ethical safeguards, the potential for abuse is enormous.
In their influential 2017 paper titled “Towards new human rights in the age of neuroscience and neurotechnology”, Marcello Ienca and Roberto Andorno propose a new category of fundamental rights to protect mental integrity and cognitive liberty in response to rapidly advancing neurotechnologies, that they argue should be formally recognised under international human rights law. They are as follows:
- The right to cognitive liberty
This refers to the right of individuals to freely choose whether or not to use neurotechnology. It includes protection from coercive or non-consensual use of brain-interfacing tools, whether by employers, governments, or institutions. Cognitive liberty encompasses both freedom from interference and freedom to explore one’s own consciousness or enhance mental capacity.
- The right to mental privacy
This right protects individuals from unconsented access to brain data or mental states. With technologies such as brain-computer interfaces and neural signal monitoring becoming increasingly accurate, there is an urgent need to safeguard mental privacy just as we protect personal and medical data.
- The right to mental integrity
Mental integrity guards against unwanted alterations or intrusions into the brain. This includes protection from neuro-hacking, brain manipulation, or the use of neural devices that could change thoughts, emotions or intentions without informed consent. It treats the mind as inviolable, similar to how the right to autonomy, self-determination, and security over one’s own body, known as bodily integrity, is protected in current law.
- The right to psychological continuity
This right ensures the preservation of a person’s identity, memories and sense of self. It aims to prevent unauthorised or harmful changes to someone’s neural processes that might disrupt their personal narrative or continuity of consciousness. This is especially relevant with tools that can modulate memory, emotion, or cognition at scale.
Ienca and Andorno argue that these rights must be recognized and codified due to the emergence of technologies capable of reading, influencing, or manipulating the human brain. Existing human rights laws (like those covering freedom of thought, bodily integrity or privacy) are insufficient to address the unique ethical challenges posed by neurotechnology.
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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
Barrett, L. F., Adolphs, R., Marsella, S., Martinez, A. M., & Pollak, S. D. (2019). Emotional Expressions Reconsidered: Challenges to Inferring Emotion From Human Facial Movements. Psychological science in the public interest : a journal of the American Psychological Society, 20(1), 1–68. https://doi.org/10.1177/1529100619832930
Cabrera, L. Y., Munoz, A., & Mehta, R. K. (2024). Neuroethical considerations and attitudes about neurostimulation as a fatigue countermeasure among emergency responders. Frontiers in neuroergonomics, 5, 1491941. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnrgo.2024.1491941
Chen, X., Wang, X., Fang, C., Fang, L., Gong, W., Liu, C., & Wang, S. J. (2025). Emotion-aware design in automobiles: Embracing technology advancements to enhance human-vehicle interaction. Proceedings of the 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1145/3706598.3713571
Ienca, M., & Andorno, R. (2017). Towards new human rights in the age of neuroscience and neurotechnology. Life sciences, society and policy, 13(1), 5. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40504-017-0050-1
Ingber, A. S., & Andalibi, N. (2025). Emotion AI in job interviews: Injustice, emotional labor, identity, and privacy. Proceedings of the 2025 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, 1–17. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3715275.3732002
Latif, S., Ali, H. S., Usama, M., Rana, R., Schuller, B., & Qadir, J. (2022). AI-based emotion recognition: Promise, peril, and prescriptions for prosocial path. arXiv:2211.07290. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2211.07290
Makin, J. G., Moses, D. A., & Chang, E. F. (2020). Machine translation of cortical activity to text with an encoder-decoder framework. Nature neuroscience, 23(4), 575–582. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41593-020-0608-8
Tang, J., LeBel, A., Jain, S., & Huth, A. G. (2023). Semantic reconstruction of continuous language from non-invasive brain recordings. Nature neuroscience, 26(5), 858–866. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41593-023-01304-9
Younis, E. M. G., Mohsen, S., Houssein, E. H., Ibrahhim, O. A. S. (2024). Machine learning for human emotion recognition: A comprehensive review. Neural Computing and Applications, 36(16), 8901–8947. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00521-024-09426-2
Zuboff, S. (2019). The age of surveillance capitalism: The fight for a human future at the new frontier of power. Profile Books.
