I've Got Questions with Sinead Bovell - Tech Companies Want Your Brain To Be The Next Smartphone | Professor Nita Farahany

Episode Date: November 20, 2025

Professor Nita Farahany, author of The Battle for Your Brain, is one of the world’s leading experts on the ethical, legal, and societal implications of emerging technologies and their impact on our brains. We discuss how every major tech company is racing to build devices that could replace keyboards and smartphones with your neural signals — with AI glasses, smart rings, wristbands, and earbuds as the first step. Professor Farahany breaks down why the brain is the holy grail for tech companies, what these devices may soon decode, and the massive privacy implications. We get into what brain data can reveal and why “freedom of thought” is suddenly up for debate. Grab Nita's book - https://www.amazon.com/Battle-Your-Brain-Defending-Neurotechnology/dp/1250272955 5:00 – What Brain Data Can Reveal About You10:00 – The Rise of Neural Interfaces and Thought-Based Communication15:00 – Attention, Stress, and How Sensors Read Your Inner Signals20:00 – The Privacy Crisis: Why Brain Data Is the Final Frontier25:00 – Manipulation, Nudging, and AI Predictions of Your Behavior30:00 – Cognitive Liberty and the Fight for Mental Autonomy35:00 – Workplaces, Schools, and the Coming Mental Privacy Battles40:00 – How Algorithms Build a Complete Psychological Profile45:00 – Vertical Integration and the Risk of Full-Stack Brain Data50:00 – New Rights for the Brain: What Legal Protection Should Look Like55:00 – Communication Beyond Language: Sharing Thoughts and Feelings1:00:00 – Brain Health, Seizure Prediction, and the Medical Promise1:05:00 – What a Future With Thought-Sharing Could Unlock1:10:00 – AI, Free Speech, and the Blurring of Human Expression1:14:00 – Designing a Future That Respects the Mind Follow my work here: Website: ⁠⁠⁠https://www.sineadbovell.com⁠⁠⁠ Substack: ⁠⁠⁠https://sineadbovell.substack.com⁠⁠⁠ Instagram: ⁠⁠⁠https://www.instagram.com/sineadbovell⁠⁠⁠ LinkedIn: ⁠⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/sineadbovell⁠⁠⁠ Twitter / X: ⁠⁠⁠https://twitter.com/SineadBovell⁠⁠⁠ YouTube: ⁠⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/Sineadbovell⁠⁠⁠ TikTok: ⁠⁠⁠https://www.tiktok.com/@sineadbovell

We are moving towards a future where you will be able to send a text message just by thinking about it. And this isn't decades away, it's years away, and not through brain chips, but through devices like AI glasses and wristbands. The vision that the major tech companies have is to replace the keyboard and the mouse with neural interface devices. What privacy implications exist there? I have talked about this as kind of our final frontier of privacy. Up until now, what happened in your mind really was the last domain of privacy that you have. So a lot of people say, I don't really care about my data anymore because there's nothing in it that can be used against me. Can we set the record straight as to what actually happens with your data?

Brain data is one piece of all of the other data that's going to be collected. It's kind of like the final piece in the puzzle. And suddenly with all of that data together, AI is able to make pretty precise inferences about what a person at least is feeling and over time potentially thinking. There are a lot of reasons to want some of these devices in our world to reverse course on one of the leading causes of human suffering, which is neurological disease and suffering, the question is how do you get that without losing your mental privacy and what it means to be human? So our freedom to actually think is really now up for debate. I'm worried about manipulating and changing what's happening in our brains too. Today I'm sitting down with Professor

Nita Farahani, one of the world's leading experts on the ethical, legal, and societal implications of these emerging technologies and their impact on our brains. I'm Sheney Beauvel and this is I've Got Questions. When people hear brain computer interfaces, most people are going to picture Elon Musk's neuralink, a brain implant, but that's not actually what's happening, right? What's unfolding is going to look a lot more familiar. Headphones, rings, wristbands. So can you paint a picture for us of the world you expect we're going to be living in

with communication devices over the next three to five years? Yeah. You know, it's arrived, right? So it's not even like over the next three to five years. But I will paint the picture. And I will say first, in that three to five year time frame, there will also be implanted brain computer interface. Like I think that those will come to market.

So, you know, the kind of extraordinary potential of brain computer interface and what most people think of when they think of brain computer interfaces, they think of implanted devices. So that's like drilling a hole in your skull, putting a device inside. And it's for somebody who has lost the ability to communicate or lost the ability to move. And an implanted. device offers the possibility of being able to communicate using neural signals as a way that

can be decoded and maybe allow a person to move a cursor around a screen or type more directly with neural signals. And I think that's extraordinarily exciting. And it's also driving what is happening more broadly for consumers, because most of us, I hope, will not need to have an implanted brain computer and device device because we won't face a situation where we are suffering from paralysis or from a nerve generative disease. And so what is much more likely for the rest of us are a new way to interact with our devices. So if you think about the traditional way that we have interacted with computers or with cell phones or, you know, kind of more non-traditionally with AR and VR devices or with gaming devices, it's been through a keyboard or a mouse or a joystick.

So there's some input device that we use, which serves as the, you know, kind of intermediary between us and the rest of our digital lives. And the vision that most of the major tech companies have is to replace the keyboard and the mouse and the joystick with neural interface devices, meaning a sensor that picks up your brain activity. The first major kind of play in this space just launched. And it launched on September 30th of 2025. That is, that's the day it arrived into Best Buy. And that was by meta. And that was really what led me to write my book, The Battle for Your Brain, was seeing

an early prototype of that device before it was acquired by meta. And that's a brain sensor. So just think of like a heart rate sensor that's inside of an Apple Watch or in any other kind of, you know, watch or ring that somebody wears. And instead, now imagine that what it's measuring is instead of heart rate or temperature or, you know, kind of variations in skin, sweat or things like that, it's picking up brain activity. Here, for the meta device, it's picking up brain activity as it goes from your brain down your arm to your wrist and picks up your intention to swipe or to type or to move and then turns that signal into something that

AI can decode that allows your intention to type to be picked up or your intention to swipe or to move. And the hope and the promise by most of these devices and companies is that, that'll be a more natural and seamless way, especially for augmented reality classes or virtual reality classes to interact with them. You're not going to be carrying a keyboard around with you or carrying a mouse around with you. But it will also be used for health purposes. So brain sensors put into AirPods that can pick up brain activity through the ear, picking up electrical activity in the brain. And, you know, it could track things like your brain health over time, your stress levels during the day, your attention. your mind monitoring, your fatigue levels, in much the same way that a lot of people are using

fitness trackers to track and quantify their bodily activity in health, this will open up the possibility of tracking brain health as well. So, and I think you said so much there. I think the first is that brain implants will serve a very specific purpose, but neural devices more broadly, one, they're already here. So some are in Best Buy. So I think a lot of people, when they purchase Meta's wristband, they don't necessarily think of it as the pathway to, you know, a neuro ecosystem or a neural device ecosystem. And then you mentioned AirPods, and that's not theoretical. Apple has been granted the patent to have EEG signals or EEG capabilities within the AirPods. So on a high level, how is that actually working? So if I'm to pop in my AirPods and

theoretically send a text message to you, how is that text message reaching you? Because most people would think that that's going to require a brain implant. So what is actually happening that's going to make this possible or that is already making it possible. Yeah, so we don't know when and if Apple will launch a BCI device, but I'm going to answer the Apple ecosystem first and then how exactly it works because I think it matters, which is Apple in May of 2025 announced, along with a whole bunch of other things, something really important that a lot of people didn't notice, which is a new accessibility feature, which is called BCIHid.

what that is is that it treats brain signals as a native signal for Apple devices. So it's like switch control, your ability to, you know, turn on and off things or be able to move a cursor. Instead of you needing to use your hand on a cursor, it allows brain signals to be the direct input. Okay. Second major thing is that that BCI head was demonstrated by an implanted brain computer. interface company Synchron in August of 2025, where they had one of the patients, you know, thinking about being able to move around the screen on the iPad, going directly from the brain signal to the iPad and the iPad movement. And then the third partnership that was announced recently

was with cognition. This is a wearable brain computer interface company that's focused on therapeutics, that is trying to enable people with ALS to be able to use an augmented reality and virtual reality headset. And they have a backstrap in the back of the head that has electrodes in it that detect electrical activity in the brain here in the visual cortex. And what they're detecting is like if you see a bright light and that shows up in your visual cortex, your brain signals record that. Like it's evident.

And it's through that backstrap with the electrodes that they're able to detect it. And the partnership with Apple is that they're. trialing using an Apple provision, replacing Apple's backstrap with their backstrap that has the electrodes in it. And this isn't BCI Hid. This is another way of being able to have, you know, Apple's eye tracking together with electrode input, be able to move around the Apple provision. That tells us a lot about where Apple's going with their ecosystem, that they have multiple ways of using brain signals to be able to move around Apple devices. Okay, now what is being red. In both of those cases, so in the synchron case or in the cognition case, there's slightly

different signals. One of them is e-cog, the other one is EEG, but both of them are based on the same principle, which is when you think, when you do anything, neurons are firing in your brain. They're giving off tiny electrical discharges, and those electrical discharges can be detected with sensors. And the sensors that are implanted into the brain are going to be far more sensitive, and there's far more of them than sensors that are placed on the head or in the ears or on the scalp, where it has to detect those signals through the skull and much more of an average than being precise in a particular region of the brain, which is what an implanted device can do. But those different electrodes can sense what's happening with electrical activity, and then

AI can decode what that means. Right now, not at like a level of precision. to say, you know, here's what Nita is thinking or here's what she needs thinking, but it can detect things like your reaction to a light or your intention to go up, down, left, right. And so in motor activity, like if you are moving, that's going to work in your motor cortex in your brain and having electrodes there, allow that signal to be picked up, then decoded, and then that can be translated into an input for a device, right? So the brain signal will be trained to say like this is what up on a cursor looks like. This is what left and right on a cursor

looks like. Or with the device that meta just showed, really minor flicks of the wrists, pick up what's happening at the wrist, which is like your intention to type when you move your fingers, right? All of those are brain signals, motor neurons coming down to your wrist. And if you can pick up those signals and decode what they mean, then instead of actually typing, you could be thinking about typing. The motor signals can be decoded by AI. which then translates into typing a text message. And so I think you said a few things that are really important. So the first is that Apple is basically opening up,

has officially opened up its ecosystem to start accepting brain signals or brain-based data as a form of input to control Apple devices. So it's not necessarily the devices coming from Apple yet, Synchron, which is more of an implant or the catheter, and then cognition which goes around the strap. But you're pointing to a future where the Apple Vision Pro, and I think a lot of us miss this, could have a strap at the back of it

that is actually starting to sense and detect brain signals. So for the average person that throws on the Apple Vision Pro, what could that mean having that EEG capability in the headset at the back strap? What could that lead to?

What could we be capable of when we have that Apple Vision Pro on in a world where the technology works? What understanding is that their eye tracking is not actually as efficient as they would like for it to be, Meaning right now, if you put the Apple ProVision on and you look around the screen to like focus on your mailbox in order to open it, that it's not as efficient and as effective as they'd like it to be. And I think that the brain signal together with the eye gaze is supposed to be a lot more effective and a lot more efficient.

One thing I think people should realize is that the world we're moving toward isn't just, you know, much more brain activity being measured. it's many different pieces of data and especially sensor data that's trained on our faces and our biometrics, including our brain biometrics, together with AI, allow for much, much more specific and precise inferences about what our intentions are. And so if you're navigating with an Apple provision and you don't want to have a joystick and you do want to move around, gaze at your mailbox, open it up, send a, like, compose an email and send it. And you want to do all of that without speaking and without using a cursor and without moving, that will be possible in the coming future in the next few years with the combination of these sensors. And the brain sensors are an important addition to that ecosystem for Apple to be able to make that happen. Same for this is like the promise of what meta's glasses right now together with the neural band on the wrist are supposed to enable you to do,

which is, you know, you could be hanging out with a friend. You know, you don't want to fub them. That is, take out your phone, snub them, and send a text message. But you have the meta glasses on. You have the neural band on your wrist, and you just sort of subtly move your fingers a little bit, and you're able to send a text message to a friend who is not in the conversation right in front of you with the glasses. So the vision is that you can much more seamlessly and in many ways naturally, just by thinking about it, interact with these devices. That's the kind of promise by these companies of what you might be able to do.

I think given that Apple is a health-first company, you can also expect that the likelihood is that Apple isn't just going to use this for neural interface. Once there's a backstrap or once there's brain sensors integrated into AirPods or integrated into the, you know, kind of front of the device as well, they'll start to use those metrics to build up a lot more other offerings that will be around brain health and brain wellness and brain insights. And I think a lot of devices, they do, or a lot of capabilities and applications start with the accessibility as the way in and then it expands to more of a consumer profile. Yeah. I think most people don't know that trajectory, by the way, but like they almost always start as accessibility features. And most of the things that we enjoy is like modern conveniences today started as accessibility features. Like Siri, for instance, talk first and so forth. And so essentially, if you're using them at a wristband today or what Apple will be. piloting with the vision, this is like the training ground for moving us towards a future where we probably don't have keyboards and we don't have a mouse and instead our intention is what drives the technology. And so what, from an actual privacy standpoint, what am I sharing?

If I throw on glasses, smart glasses with AI and I throw on a wristband that's reading my intent to swipe, to open, to text, what privacy? implications exist there. Or for the most part, it's only my intent to send that message that's being read. There's nothing else to really be concerned about. It's a can of worm, Cheeney, that's the truth, right? So, you know, I have talked about this as kind of our final frontier of privacy. That that's where we are right now. That up until now, what happened in your mind, like what you were thinking or feeling, really was the last domain of privacy that you had, that at this point, anything that you express, anything that you write, anywhere that you go,

anywhere that you have your phone, right? We've lost all forms of privacy given the kind of commodification of data economy that we live in, the kind of surveillance capitalism that Shoshana Zubovac described. But, you know, there's a question of like, how much data can an EEG center pick up right now versus what's the complete picture that we're moving toward? And we should differentiate between those two things right now, because an EEG sensor, right now can't pick up that much, like with AI, it cannot detect that much about like what you're thinking. It's not even just like what you intend to communicate or not. It's really low resolution data, right? So we can pick up general brain states. Again, it has to go through your skull to be

picked up. It's pretty nonspecific. Most of these devices only have a few sensors versus medical grade EEG or implanted EEG, which has thousands of potential sensors picking up what's happening inside of the brain. That being said, there's a lot you can do by being able to figure out a person's reaction to information. And there's a lot of potential privacy risks and harms just by being able to pick up inward intention or inward feelings. And it's not just what you intend to communicate. So your question was, is it going to pick up just what I mean to write or can it pick up other things? Today, EEG sensors cannot pick up what you don't intend to type. Like there is intentional speech communication, and that's true for implanted or non-implanted devices.

It can't pick up like you're just kind of inner dialogue well. But that's probably a design constraint right now, not a theoretical or technical limitation of the devices. And it's like over time you can expect that more and more will be decoded. But there's a difference between speech and the other things that can be detected. So let's compare it to something like facial emotional recognition software. There is a whole field that has developed around being able to pick up kind of micro facial changes or tiny flushing that might happen in your face that you wouldn't even necessarily pick up on or little subtle eye movements and then be able to make inferences about a person's mental state

or eye movements that can actually reveal a lot about a person's mental states. some of that is more powerful than EEG can do right now, and some of it is less powerful than what EEG can do right now, which is why earlier when I said I think of this as like the brain data is one piece of all of the other data that's going to be collected and is being collected. It's kind of like the final piece in the puzzle. You might be able to make inferences about what a person is thinking from their facial expressions and from their eye movements.

Then you have the EEG data, which provides a different and potential, more complete picture of what the person is thinking or feeling. And suddenly with all of that data together, AI is able to make pretty precise inferences about what a person at least is feeling and over time potentially thinking as well. So in combination, so when somebody wears glasses and the wristband. And has her own, right? And you have their social media account, right? Think about it. It's meta. So if meta has your social media accounts, your gazing history on Instagram, your posts, your likes and comments, how much time you spent per video, so the things that you've shown preferences for, which ads you've clicked, together with your biometric data, including

cameras on your face, eye gaze data, and journal information, suddenly they have a very complete, like, psychological and behavioral profile of you. And so a lot of people say, but I have nothing to hide. Right. So over and over and over, and it just happened to me a few weeks ago, a friend saying, I actually, I don't really care about my data anymore because there's nothing in it that can be used against me. And can we set the record straight as to how what actually happens with your data, even the data that you give off today? Nobody actually cares whether you're having an affair or there's something private in your life. Your data is getting used in ways that you don't understand. So from the data that we have today, could you set the record straight on why people should actually care?

Yeah, it's a frustrating reprieve, right? I don't have anything to hide, so I don't actually care. One thing that's fun to do is to just give somebody a dossier back of them. And so I've done this for a couple of people who've said that to me, which is I've just, like, done a Google search of them, spent like 10 minutes putting together a kind of profile on them and then serve back to them. And they're uncomfortable by it, right? It's the kind of precision by which somebody can be psychologically kind of targeted and profiled. in my AI law and policy class, I just taught manipulation. And one of the things I think people don't appreciate is how easily they're manipulated

and their opinions are shaped. And so having data allows, for example, AI systems and recommender systems to be able to precisely change what you see at any given time, which psychologically shapes and reshapes how you feel and how you operate through the world, essentially limiting and kind of suffocating in many ways your cognitive autonomy. It can design what kind of videos you see to override your self-control and lead you into kind of an addictive loop. And people say, oh, no, I'm pretty good about it. Actually, just like check your screen time. All of the systems are designed on your data to be able to manipulate, nudge, shape, and change how you feel and think. And then when it comes to mental privacy,

just think about like the thousands of time each day. You tell a tiny little white lie, right? Or you bite your tongue. Imagine not being able to bite your tongue, right? So like you can't bite your tongue because everything you're thinking and feeling is transparent to your employer or to, you know, your partner. I give the example of I have a pretty ugly orange couch. And, you know, I think it's kind of a bold choice, but it's not for everyone, right? And so when somebody walks in for the first time and sees my bold orange couch, their first thought is something either like, wow, that's bold or that's hideous, right? And if I say, do you like my couch, how many people do you think say to me that's hideous, right? Nobody, nobody would be that rude to say it's hideous. Wait, one of my friends

maybe, but most people would never, like, actually admit it, right? And we do that all the time. Mental privacy actually is fundamental to being able to develop our own identity, to be able to choose what we share and when we share with other people. Privacy is a lot about that, right? It's about being able to cultivate and decide for yourself, like, who am I and who do I want to be? Like, part of the reason I don't say that's ugly, Nita, is because who they are as a person is somebody who doesn't say mean and hurtful things, who wants to be supportive of their friends. And you don't get to make those kinds of choices when data speaks for you instead of you getting to speak for yourself. And I think that's what people don't understand is that privacy isn't just about like hiding your

data. It's about being able to like define your own identity on your own terms rather than somebody else shaping and deciding what your identity will be or amplifying for the world what they think your identity is rather than the one you choose to define for yourself. A hundred percent. And it's also impacting your ability to get into college, the insurance rates that you see. Yeah. Algorithmic scoring of you is happening everywhere all the time. Automatic scoring of you with almost no human oversight. It's about, you know, health care decisions that are made about you, financial decisions that are made about you, whether you get into college, you know, whether you get homeowners insurance or car insurance or any other kind of insurance that you want,

what the rates are, right, whether you have a $500 credit limit, a zero credit limit or a $20,000 credit limit, right? Every one of those decisions are made not just from data about you, but data about you in relationship to other people. People don't realize that even, like, their friend networks are being scanned and analyzed for credit scoring reporting. I'm really lax about LinkedIn, like, invitations. If somebody sends me an invitation, I'm usually, I'm like, fine. You know, I don't care.

I'll accept just about anybody's invitation. I'm probably more selective on other sites than on LinkedIn. And then I sort of realizing that, like, suppose I have a bunch of people in another country who send me, you know, links, but they have. links to like terrorist organizations or something. Suddenly I'm targeted as a terrorist having not thought at all about accepting a LinkedIn profile, but that becomes the kind of social graph of who I am for predictions about me without some human oversight that's actually looking into it. People have no idea. The friends, the context that you have, the people that you're

following on social media, their actions are impacting how you're being rated with college, with insurance. And then when you had mentioned the example of your couch, because I think we and I am probably the queen of that as a Canadian. You wouldn't get the exact how I'm actually feeling about. Right. You would be very bright about it. It's very polite. It's different.

But you're seeing in a world with these neural interfaces, that's where you could, you would be able to see how I'm actually feeling or, and these are the devices that already exist today. So more likely that is, you know, in the workplace. Like, suppose you have work issued AirPods and your. reaction to whatever's flashed up on your screen at any point of the day is being recorded by, you know, your employer who's able to have access to the data. But I'll give you an example of something that exists today that I oftentimes tease my students. Or like if I'm giving

a lecture somewhere, I'll be like, I'm going to hand these out in the beginning of the lecture. There are these, you know, kind of almost joke, but they sell them as a real product. E.EG headband where it's like a little headband, it has little ears on top. And when you're paying attention that ears are up like this. And when your mind starts to wander, the ears come down like this, little cat ears. And just imagine, right, that I hand that out in the beginning of class to my students and say, isn't this fun? Like, we can all look around and see whose mind is wandering. But suddenly their brains are transparent. It's a simple metric, right? Are you paying attention or is your mind wandering? But in the wrong setting, it's really quite Orwellian to think about, like, you have to

sit in my class with this on your head, which tells me whether you're paying attention or your mind just wandering. And something that, you know, you thought you could hide or that you thought like you'd have a moment of private mental reprieve suddenly become something that is, you know, amplified for the entire class and for the professor in the front of the classroom. And is that just in case anybody's unclear on the technology, whether that's a little headband or a little air pause you've popped in. That's because it has, all it needs to read is just some mild brain signals and brain activity. And it can detect you're stressed. You're not paying attention. I don't like your couch. Just from the basic things that you will be able to buy and

best buy in the next couple years. Well, that should be already buy, right? So those devices already exist. Like to be clear, they're already, meta is just the first major tech entrant. A lot of these devices have already been on the market for a while. You know, there are headphones that are really high quality headphones to be able to listen to music, but also have EEG centers that are surrounding the cups. There are, you know, in-ear, EEG devices where you can take a conference call while also having your brain activity that's rad. There's already the ears that are on the marketplace. There's already, for more than a decade, a company called SmartCap, that has been selling two enterprises to workplaces,

like a little what they call a life band that has EEG sensors in a little headband that can be embedded into a hard hat or a baseball cap or train conductor's hat. And there are more than 5,000 companies worldwide that require everything from truck drivers to mining workers to wear these devices during the workday to track if they are fatigue or awake, which is good for safety, but raises questions about, you know, to what extent can a worker in a workplace refuse to wear one of those devices? What other data is the employer collecting about the individual? Do they have a right to mental privacy in the workplace? Yeah, so this isn't a far out future. This is here. There are devices all over workplaces.

You can buy, they've been on the market for years. And that's what I think is important for people to understand because you could often imagine, or you can imagine people listening and thinking, there's no way I'm going to buy a device that interprets anything that comes out of my brain. But as you write in your book and as you're explaining now, there are thousands of people that use meditation headbands that track what state their meditation is, that use smart bike helmets that let them know that they're improving their performance or athletes and then workplaces.

So this stuff is already here. And as you had also shared in your book, people actually upload this data to Facebook. So I'm going to get in the second to what can actually be interpreted from that data. But in terms of the workplace, so you also make important points that there are some instances

where we might want to somewhat track someone's brain activity in the workplace, but used incorrectly or used nefariously, there are scenarios where it could actually impact your ability to get a promotion. You paint a fascinating, foresight snaring your book. So could you make the case for both, a world where it's actually a net benefit to society to have these devices, and then one where it could go too far and be used

against us? Yeah. So the example that I just gave about SmartCap is, I think, a great example of both good and how it could go poorly, which is having, like, if you have an employee who is in trucking, They're long-haul trucking. They're driving for 12 hours at a time. And they're driving what is essentially a weapon on a highway, right? It is a giant 18-wheel or truck. I'm always scared to pass one. I bet other people are scared to pass one. I'm always afraid they might not see me. You every now and then see a major car accident with them. And the leading cause of accidents is drowsiness while driving, not drunkenness while driving. And so you really don't want them to fall asleep at the wheel. So it turns out that in many instances, that driver is this technology that's built into these vehicles that picks up either through a camera that's trained on the person's face or in combination with sensors on the vehicle itself that pick up like tiny shifts on how you use the steering wheel or tiny changes with cameras in the front of the road that are looking at the stripes on the road to see how the car is moving, that those pick up later stages of drowsiness, like one-trances.

are already starting to be dangerously drowsy rather than earlier stages as you start to fall asleep. And if you think about it when you're falling asleep at night, like you're thinking, you're thinking, there's some point at which you might be like, I'm not sure if I'm asleep or awake, right? Because you're still like a little bit lucid. And you're going through these phases of sleep. Like you're going from being wide awake to a sleep. It's not binary. It's not asleep and awake.

And what EEG can detect is those shifts, right? And so we can sort of imagine it as like five levels, right, where level one is wide awake and level five is that you're completely asleep. And then as you start to go to level two, we should start to be worried and give you an alert. And what SmartCap can do is it can pick up those earlier stages of the transition to sleep and give an alert to the driver to be like, oh, wake up, right? You're falling asleep. That's a good thing, I think. And it's a good thing if the only thing that's being collected is the data, like the inference, about whether or not you're asleep, if the raw EEG data, that is like the brain data that's being

collected, the signal isn't stored and kept, isn't sold to a third party, isn't mine to learn anything other than which stage of sleep are you on. And then you might also say, and isn't shared with the employer, but maybe you might think it's okay to share it with an employer if the only thing you're sharing is the score, one to five. That's what SmartCap does. SmartCap keeps the data on the device, they overwrite the data, they don't share with the employer anything other than the simple inference that is drawn about a score of one to five. And the employee is told all of that. They're told how it's used. They're told it's used for their safety. They are given clear disclosures about what happens to their data. There is purpose minimization. There is data minimization

sort of all best practices. Now let's imagine the alternative. You're at work and you're issued work-based AirPods or work-based earbuds, and the earbuds have EEG sensors in them. And your company doesn't have a data minimization policy. They can collect the raw data. And by here I mean the actual brain signal data, not just like some AI interpretation of a simple metric. And they can do anything they want with it. They can track it over time. They can see that you're starting to suffer from cognitive decline over time. They can every now and then flash a picture of your boss up on your screen and see whether or not your brain signals, uh, signal like that you like them or dislike them. They can try to figure out your political affiliation because they're trying to have a more

diverse workspace. Maybe they want to know your sexual orientation. So they start to put in little probes to figure that out. Maybe they even want to figure out what your pin or password number is to a particular account. And so they are able to mine your brain data with whatever information they flash up on the screen like researchers have done. in gaming platforms where they've been able to mine information using EG about a PIN number. And they do all of that because there's no restriction on what they can do with the data, how they can use the data. Or your boss, like, calls you up and says like, hey, last quarter we did great.

Unfortunately, we're only going to be able to give you a 10% raise this year, which you were expecting a much higher raise because that's what had been promised to you in your contract. You're actually thrilled because you were afraid they weren't going to have any raise at all, right? So your brain signal is like elation. You're just like delighted by this, but you keep a like total poker face. And you say, I'm going to need to think it over and get back to you because that's not what we had agreed to in the contract. Your boss is able to offer you 20%, but you know, is starting with 10% rather than 20. You guys hang up. The boss is able to look at the brain data, sees that you were totally elated by it. You come back the next day and you say, listen, the contract.

Contract said 20%, I'm willing to settle for 15%, and now you're terrified, right? And your boss says, I'm so sorry. Like, 10% is it. Your boss already knows you were happy about it. And you're like, okay, fine, I will take the 10%. Right. There's no freedom of contract in that negotiation because the informational asymmetry that's just been enabled by that brain signal is totally different than what existed

before the capability of having brain activity data. Which is why I say in my book, like even the source. staunches libertarian as they approach this question who believes in freedom of contract, right? Go work somewhere else if you don't like the brain tracking device. They don't believe in that, right? They believe freedom of contract is necessary in order for that kind of theory to be true. And so I think most people would agree we have to think about what like appropriate safeguards are on the collection and use of mental data within the workplace would be to ensure that there is like some fair balance and some right. to cognitive liberty for individuals. And what you're saying, the data that gets collected, it depends on how it's used.

So the raw brain data with neural devices that exist today, so whether that is a meditation band, whether that's a cap you're wearing at work, whether that is any of the tech companies, and it's SNAP, it's Amazon, it's Microsoft, they're all working on these types of devices. Yep. That raw brain data, it might tell you you're a great meditator. If you apply an algorithm to that raw data, it could start to reveal things such as your political biases or sexual preferences, what your password is. So you can imagine a theoretical future or maybe not so theoretical where a partner could get a hold of that data and a partner

could see what you're actually thinking or not thinking, but what you're feeling during the day, how loyal you feel to that relationship. All of that can be interpreted. And there was, I should just like, on that point, there was a study, there was a researcher actually at Stanford and a series of studies that she had done about more than a decade ago now. It was an fMRI, but where couples would want to know if the other partner was in love or in lust with them. And so they would show them pictures of their partner, and they would show them pictures of like a past X, and then look at their brain activity and tell them, like, oh, sorry, you're not in love with your partner. Oh, sorry, you know, this is just lust, not love.

And people took that so seriously. like the brain data revealed so much more than whatever they personally themselves felt or what they shared with each other. And it is not impossible to imagine people being in a relationship, each having these headbands and having, you know, partners say to each other, like, I want to know if you're really in love with me. Like I want the data, right? And so like we're going to run this like this new app is out. It tests by showing you a series of images about me, you know, whether your brain registers love, lost and I, like, I want the data and I want to see it, right? So it's not necessarily like that you walk in and literally it's, you know, I now know that Sheenade is just being polite and she doesn't

actually like my orange couch. It becomes like the trust and truth barometer in relationships that people say like, you know, in the same way that they want to be able to look through your phone and see if you have any text message exchanges or whatever else, they won't access to your brain data to know if you really love them or not. And so yes, today is the check the DM, check somebody's text message in the future or in the today, depending on the device, it is check the raw brain data to see how you actually feel or flash a photo of somebody that you think that a spouse is having an affair with and their brain can't lie. So what are it so our freedom to actually think is really now up for debate, isn't it? I mean, what is the thing that worries you the most

about where we are and where we're heading? I fundamentally am worried not just about mental privacy anymore, right, which is safeguarding what's happening in our brains. I'm worried about manipulating and changing what's happening in our brains, too. And by that I mean, you know, we're in this era of widespread AI. If you look at some of the really tragic cases that have already emerged with people interacting with AI systems and seeing how quickly people have fallen prey, especially teenagers, to, you know, suicide, like, thoughts and emotional entanglements and emotional dependency with AI systems, when you start to be able to have it be a closed loop, right? You've got meta with its chatbots. It's able to read not just, you know, your likes and your interactions,

but literally your brain signals in response to whatever the chatbot says, the chat bot is generative and is able to customize and change in response to everything you do. Or as Mark Zuckerberg recently said, like he was planning on using generative AI for advertisements where every advertisement is a, you know, N of one. It's personalized literally to you. And when it's personalized not just to conscious you but subconscious you, to not just to what you say and do, but what you think and feel as well.

I worry about the kind of instrumentation of humanity that goes beyond just your ability to think private thoughts, but to be able to think thoughts that are your own, right? That's the kind of even more fundamental cognitive autonomy that I'm worried about. And say more about that, that because we're in this feedback loop, so AI is learning about you as you're engaging with it,

and then it is slowly, it is understanding how you're actually feeling, about what you're engaging with it because if it has your brain data, it also has everything else you've ever done online. Yeah. It is able to, in some ways, insert thoughts that weren't your own by slowly nudging you down a certain path. Yeah, well, so think about it this way, which is already it's clear from AI systems that they're able to know human cognitive biases, right? Whether that's authority bias that, you know, we're more likely to rely on an AI system. or interact with an AI system if it presents it as authoritative, or framing effects, right,

what it chooses to frame things as and how it frames them, or, you know, being able to, like with recommender systems, which are very good, like on TikTok, to be able to figure out pretty precisely and quickly what will keep you glued to the device, right? So they have an optimization target, which is to optimize the time that's spent online. and so it figures out like, oh, you're reacting to this kind of video, so I'm going to serve up this kind of video. All of that data is behavioral data, which is quite good, but not precise. When you think about brain data, think about it just like the missing piece. It's the subconscious data. It's the inward information. It's the piece of yourself that you do not yet reveal to the world. And when you

reveal that signal that can now be mined and used to customize all of that, even more precisely. Suddenly you have the kind of stickiest content in the world and not just sticky content, but like, oh, you didn't quite react positively to that or I'm trying to get you to react negatively to that, right? I can shape and change as a company like meta, whatever that data is. And so I worry that that's the kind of world that we're entering into if there are no safeguards for cognitive autonomy and cognitive liberty, is that there's nothing which prevents, you know, advertisements which are targeted to your inward reaction to information, that there's nothing that prevents a chat bot from, you know, cultivating even more emotional dependency because it's optimizing user engagement

to exploit the kind of weaknesses of human cognitive, you know, biases to be able to keep people online, to optimize data, or even, you know, to present increasingly more radical information to them or increasingly more politically, you know, kind of siloed information to them as possibility. So the brain really becomes this final frontier when you look at it with this full ecosystem. So it's not just that there's the brain data that you're going to give off when you have some of these wristbands or these rings or these earbuds. But in combination with AI that's constantly learning about you, studying you, studying all of the data that you're giving off, there's this full ecosystem that is now making a prediction about you and swaying you towards the answer that is

going to be in the best interest of a private company. And so when there's a lot of those neuroscience debates around do we have free will, do we not, this is actually where that conversation needs to happen because you have an AI system that is going to make a prediction about what you're most likely to do before you do it and then nudge you that way. And with the final frontier of brain data, knowing that you did react to that face cream that you thought was out of budget, but you reacted in a way that showed, I should, I probably need this. I have this insecurity. It showed that, you know, you gave off some self-doubt signal. That's going to continue to come up in front of you. Yeah, exactly. And that's like, that's, I think, the piece that's most important to recognize when we think about it from a law or policy perspective is that you can't single out one technology to regulate if you're trying to address. rest the concern here, right? It's not it's not just neural sensors and brain data. It's not just AI, you know, chatbots. It's the broader kind of cognitive autonomy, cognitive liberty that's at risk. And so when you think about it, picking out one technology, one sensor, one stream, one,

you know, kind of aspect of privacy would be kind of missing the forest for the trees. And that bigger picture of what's at stake is, I think, the thing that we have to start grappling with really seriously, knowing that we are now, you know, at that moment of the final frontier, right? There's, there's kind of no other data to go for by these companies. And it's just like within that, it's really important to realize the vertical integration that's happening, right? It's not like your brain data is over here by these medical companies and your social media data is over here by the big players like meta. It's meta, who has the brain data, who has the, you know, VR devices, who has the social media platforms, who is developing the generative

AI, you know, advertisements. And when it's the same company that vertically integrated has all of your data as a full stack, the risk that that presents is really amplified in ways that we didn't have before. And when you say cognitive liberty, if you were to summarize what that contains in a world where we have cognitive liberty, where we also have these brain implants or neuro devices, what does that mean that we have? Yeah, I mean, it's context-specific, right? Generally, what it means is we have a right to self-determination over our brain and mental experiences. Like, that's how we should understand it. And that's going to look different in different settings. If you're in an educational setting, you would have a right to actually have freedom of thought in that

setting. That might even entail things like academic freedom more broadly. It's not just about technology. But it's a, you know, the right to be able to voice your views, to be able to keep your views private to not have them manipulated and coercively shaped. That kind of right to self-determination in the workplace, it would mean that, you know, you would have broader rights that would safeguard mental privacy that would prohibit the kind of collection that happens in the bossware and surveillance that happens in those settings. In a police setting, you'd have a right not to have your brain interrogated and, you know, to be safeguarded against it. But you'd also have a right against brainwashing. You know, you can imagine there have been a number of people. You know,

people who propose things like, well, once you have really effective brain computer interface devices, maybe rather than prison sentences, you ought to just mentally rehabilitate people. Like, that's really Orwellian. And you can quickly see how badly that goes for every divergent thinker in the world about what people think brainwashing might look like or, you know, moral rehabilitation might look like. So it's really safeguarding our mental spaces, which I think is the most important thing in the digital age. I just don't think that people appreciate how much, like, our cognitive autonomy has been compromised in the digital era and what prioritizing that would look like. Like, it would fundamentally change how we think about design of products if what you have to prioritize is cognitive liberty, not cognitive co-option.

And when you think about all of the thoughts that you have in a day, I mean, some great, some not so great. Yeah. Who would you be if you felt like those thoughts were being observed? And in many ways, what you're thinking can already be inferred by your digital footprint where you go, your geolocation and so forth. But in that final frontiers, as the term you use, if you actually couldn't let your thoughts just be, who would you become? Who would you be in that level of surveillance? But I think a lot of people listening would say, and the obvious conclusion is, well, at least under law, my thoughts are private. So in a court of law are thoughts private?

I mean, if I have anything to say about it, yes, right? But the truth is right now, no, right? We have rights to freedom of speech under the First Amendment, which are really restrictions on your freedom of speech. That's what you have a right to, particularly government restrictions on your freedom of speech. You have some rights that might apply. Like if a court tries to compel your thoughts, to speak against you in a criminal case, you might have a right against self-incrimination

under the Fifth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. If they try to search your brain, you might have a right under the Fourth Amendment, you know, kind of search and seizure, right against unreasonable searches and seizures, although even those rights may be quite limited, and I get into that in the battle for your brain as well. But there's no overall right to cognitive liberty. We might find it in the First Amendment, freedom of speech, to say, that freedom of thought is an implied or, you know, kind of necessary precursor. I'd say that's unlikely under the current U.S. Supreme Court to find implied rights within the existing U.S. Constitution.

And there's no right to mental privacy, although there are a few states that have put safeguards around neural data. But those aren't rights to thought. Those are rights about the, you know, kind of secondary or third party use of neural data. So, you know, there are efforts underway. I was a U.S. representative to developing a set of standards at UNESCO, but the U.S. has just pulled out of UNESCO, and so it's unlikely that that will have force or effect here in the U.S. And that's a soft law instrument. It's a set of standards. It's not law. Under the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights, we have a right to privacy, which most likely includes a right to mental privacy. an absolute right to freedom of thought and there's a right to self-determination, but human rights don't have strong enforcement mechanisms, and so they have to actually be enforced through law. And then we have a process underway at the Uniform Laws Commission, which is a

non-governmental organization that is developing a potential set of recommendations around what a model state law might look like for mental privacy. But, Again, that's model state law. It's not adopted. It doesn't yet exist. So all of that is to say, there is a lot that needs to be done in this space to try to figure out how and whether there is a right to mental privacy to freedom of thoughts, what kinds of safeguards might be put into place. And then if it would cover, not just like detection of your thoughts or misuse of your thoughts, but also, for example, safeguards against mental manipulation, like we're seeing in, you know, kind of chatbot suicide cases. So as it stands today, there are efforts to safeguard what it means to think freely.

But there, you are not legally speaking granted freedom of thought as it stands today. There is no law that actually deems your thoughts private. And if we look at precedent where now Fitbit evidence is now coming on the, the stand and we see Amazon Alexa evidence coming on the stand. And it's gone both ways. It's helped people show that they're innocent or that they're guilty. There is a world in which your thoughts could be used against you in a court of law. Yeah. I mean, I think quite likely. And those are some of the examples that I point to in my book to say, like, look, if we look at the Fitbit data, if we look at these other cases, there are doctrines that are called like the third-party

doctrine, which is when you have a device that you kind of willingly participate in the conveyance of your data to that third party. You give to Fitbit your data. And maybe you give it for your own personal purpose, but you have no longer kept it private. When you start to do that with brain data, it's no longer searching you for the police to try to get data about what you were thinking at the time. So, you know, you had your AirPods on or more likely you had your watch on and weren't thinking about it while you committed some crime. And the police subpoena that evidence from whoever the manufacturer of that watches, MATA, Apple, etc., that's not a search of you. You don't have a Fourth Amendment right to complain anymore about the, you know, government obtaining that data. And that's the way in which a lot of that data is likely to show up in courtrooms is that you don't have the kind of standing or right to complain about it once you have willingly participated in sharing it with third parties. And are there examples of people's thoughts or brain data being used against them to convict people of crimes? Is that are we heading to a future where your thoughts may be used to convict you of a crime or are we already here? Yeah.

I mean, so we're already there. And that's, I get into some of that, some of the examples of that, like the early examples of that, I think, are in the book, which is one of the areas that has already shown up, especially in other countries. But even here in the United States, there are a couple of examples of defendants willingly submitting to P300 interrogation. So P300 is a brain signal that's like a before you are conscious of recognizing something. Your brain has a little, you know, kind of earlier signal of recognition that can be measured by EEG. And that's this P300 signal. And so in some criminal cases, people have been shown images of crime scene details that they shouldn't have any recognition. or knowledge of. And then what their brain signals reveal have been used as evidence of guilt

or innocence against them. In India, this is used quite frequently a version of this called Beos, looking at brain oscillation signals, where it's been quite controversial, but there's, you know, more than 400 cases that have been documented where this evidence has been used to convict people of crimes, even of murder, based on recognition of a crime scene, detail. It's apparently been used in interrogation in other settings in places like Singapore and the UAE and even in Japan. And so it is the kind of thing that we should not just sort of imagine as a sci-five scenario. It's already happening across the world. And from your vantage point, somebody is so close to the data, is it possible that we could move toward a future where you

could be prosecuted or persecuted for what you're thinking before you even commit a crime? I mean, And I think we all kind of laugh and joke at Minority Report. But there's some truth in science fiction. It often is correct, at least in some elements, directionally. So is there a potential future where your thoughts, just your thoughts, could get you in trouble? Yeah, I mean, there is at least one setting that I could imagine that happening, which is the conspiracy to commit a crime. Right. So in criminal law, at least in the United States, a bright line that has mattered for a very line that has mattered for a

very long time and I have a hard time imagining us moving past it really anytime soon is that you have to have completed a crime before we hold you guilty of it with like this hope of you know at the last minute you may change your mind or we want to give you every possible incentive to avoid committing the crime because if just thinking about the crime is the same as me completing the crime and I know I'll be convicted of it either way like what incentive do I have to not actually just go ahead and complete the crime once it's popped into my head right but conspiracy to commit a crime with another person is more of a thought crime anyway, right? You think about committing the crime, you plan to commit the crime, like what is the crime is the planning and the engagement of planning,

but maybe like one of the things that's very hard to find is that really overt evidence of planning. And suppose that brain data one day could make that kind of evidence of planning much more convincing and much more concrete. Then I think you could imagine that the line of like, what kinds of overt acts do you need in furtherance of thinking about the crime would be a lot smaller. And so then, like, conspiracy to commit a crime becomes a thought crime, not just a crime of actual actions. I mean, when you're in rooms with policymakers, with regulators all the time, you're on many, many boards. How are you advising them? How are you explaining concepts that some people would just respond with slow blinks and think you're talking about a movie script?

Yeah. Do policymakers seem like they're understanding they're keeping up? They're concerned or is there a gap in a delay and how fast is this moving? I mean, you're talking about stuff that's being sold in Best Buy. Yeah. So, I mean, it's both, right? So on the one hand, intuitively people seem to get why mental privacy matters, right, across the aisle, whether it's Republicans or Democrats. There doesn't seem to be a lot of political division on an understanding about why mental privacy matters. matters. And that's encouraging in a way, right? I think everybody can understand why coming into my living room and seeing my orange couch that they don't necessarily want me to know that they hate my couch and then they can extrapolate from there all of the other things that they might be thinking in a given day that they don't want other people to know, especially politicians, right? And so for them, I think they can get it pretty quickly. The technical details become challenging, though, right? And then the political lobbying becomes really challenging as well. Because, you know, it's not lost on meta that if they make the narrow as possible regulation that only regulates brain sensors

and allows them to capture every other kind of data freely, that that's good for them. And for a policymaker to understand the kind of broader concept of cognitive liberty and the implications across the board of modern technologies and how susceptible humans are, it's hard. It's hard for them to figure out technologically what's happening. It's hard for them to fully appreciate it. It's hard for them to face the really intense lobbying efforts that companies put into place to kind of avoid any regulation that might limit their capacity to mine as much psychological and behavioral data from us as possible. So I'd say it depends on what nature of regulator you're talking about, right? In human rights, you know, situations, they all get it. They all want to

acts quickly. And it doesn't move as fast as you would like for it to, but it moves faster than it has in other areas. But in U.S. policymaking, it's hard to get anything other than the most restrictive legislations passed. On the flip side, there are a lot of reasons to want some of these devices in our world. I mean, in a world where we do have even a wristband that's starting to understand our brain signals, what could be possible? And why is that world worth fighting for in a way that we get it right. Yeah. So, I mean, I am far from a techlidlid in this space, right? I actually am somebody who has used neurotechnology for deeply personal reasons to overcome PTSD to work on my migraines as ways of trying to find alternative non-drug-based interventions for migraine,

to neurostimulation devices that have been therapeutic applications from my migraines, to meditation as a way to try to get into meditation since I was having a hopeless time in being able to do so, and there are so many benefits to it cognitively and mentally and health-wise. That's just the tip of the iceberg. You know, it's shocking to me how little information we have about our brains, even though it is in so many ways the part of ourselves that we most closely associate with our sense of self. And, you know, I think that lots of people appreciate that we've been. to do things like track their heart rate or their VO2 max over time or be able to know if,

you know, through one of the sensors that are in their watches these days, if they have an arrhythmia, being able to, you know, predict things like their periods based on temperature and morning, you know, kind of fluctuations and basal body temperature to being able to track sleep activity overnight and, you know, get pretty precise health metrics from what their rings and what their other devices provide to them. Now just imagine unlocking the world in which you get insights into what's actually happening in your brain from, you know, more serious medical conditions, like are you going to have an epileptic seizure, minutes to, you know, more than an hour before it occurs, to am I going to have a migraine tomorrow? Or, you know, are there ways that I can stave it off earlier?

To are the earliest signs of glioblastoma such that you could have intervention before it becomes fatal? to am I stressed? Do I work better at home? Do I work better in the office? What's the cognitive tax to me when I switch between tasks over time? What does taking a five-minute micro-napp do for my, you know, productivity or for my health over time? Like, these are just some of the things you can imagine, and there will be so many more where if we prioritized and treated brain health as seriously as we treat the other aspects of our health, it could really be revolutionary for human well-being and flourishing. And so we should want that. I mean, I think that to be able to reverse course on one of the leading causes of human suffering, which is neurological disease and

suffering, and to have the insights to be able to address it, would be extraordinary. The question is, how do you get that beautiful future without losing your mental privacy and what it means to be human? And I think it has to start by understanding that this is really the final of privacy. Like, we have to make different choices. And it's interesting to note that meta, who really has been the biggest culprit of misappropriation of data over time, has launched the neural ban with a different policy than they have had with every other device that they've launched, which is they are keeping for now the data, neural data, on the device. Only inferences ever leave device. Like, they have heard that this is something that they need

to treat differently, and they are for now. That could change tomorrow, right? They could change their terms of service and make different choices. But the fact that they recognize it's different means everybody else should recognize it's different too. And we shouldn't just make it a voluntary industry standard, right? We need to put into place the right set of incentives, the sticks, and the carrots to make sure that that becomes the norm. And that overall, there are things like user-level controls on devices. If I want to wear a multifunctional device, like a watch. And I want to use it to tell time sometimes and to track my brain activity at other times, I should be able to turn off the sensors, right, and have that kind of fine level control.

And right now, none of that exists, but if we were prioritizing cognitive liberty and cognitive autonomy, we would call for those kinds of user level controls and determinations. So, you know, I just think we have to rethink what the next steps are as we enter into this new era. And I mean, the things that you pointed out. usually when it comes to mental health, it is after the traumatic event or after you're feeling down or anxious that you then flag something. But imagine a world in which a week before your anxiety really kicks into high gear or you don't have to wake up and think, wow, I feel low today

and I don't know why. You have information about why that is and why that's maybe connected to a certain traumatic event or a certain memory that's triggering a certain attachment style, whatever it may be, empowering you about what's actually happening inside your mind. And you do point to a future where it's really about the choices that we make and the policy choices, the design choices that are going to incentivize a future where this could go pretty well or a future where it doesn't. And even when you look at what could be possible with communication, I mean, if we've gotten this far in society with the invention of writing and reading, and I think people forget that these are technologies, right? Right. We now have just become so used to reading and writing that it seems like it just came naturally when we were kind of, you know, in our evolutionary state. We invented these technologies for the sole reason of getting what's in my brain into yours. That's right. And it's a very low bandwidth technology. I mean, when I tried to explain how I feel. Right. I mean, they were right. You know, fundamentally change, you know, the transmission of knowledge between people. It was going to destroy human culture. It was going to lead to a proliferation of lies. And, you know, you know,

synthetic information. And, you know, so people have been afraid at every one of these steps. But you're right. We could have a new form of communication, right? A new form of communicate. And it did change the brain. I think writing and reading changed our, we started to process symbols better than we did the face. Yeah. So we've always done this. But it also led to culture. It could be passed down. It could be memorialized. And you could see it and read it centuries out, all of these amazing things. So in a world where I could actually give you my thoughts, instead of trying to explain to you how I'm feeling you could feel what I'm going through, what could be unlocked. I mean, two scientists sharing thoughts on a breakthrough. That potential is really exciting. But of course, it comes with

all of these other risks and downsides that we would want to mitigate for. But the potential for a world in which we share thoughts, while it seems scary, so did a lot of these other inventions. And things did get crazy with the invention of writing. And then therefore the printing press, things got a little out of hand. But in a world, would we get this right, that to me is really fascinating what could be possible. I agree with you. I mean, I think it's exciting to think about what a different form of thought sharing could look like, to be able to share the feelings, the experiences, the visual connection, kind of like a robust thought, as opposed to that kind of narrow bandwidth thought that I'm able to share with you right now. But getting that right means,

you know, figuring out what we mean by human meaning, what we mean by human, like what it means to be human, what it means to connect with another human, because, you know, we haven't had to think about like what makes you, you, and me, me, even though we're related to each other, we're shaping and changing each other's minds all the time by being in conversation with each other, we have this sense of like, I'm an island of me and you are an island of you and that I have kind of rights and protections over me. It's a lot more fluid than that, right? We are shaped and changed by things around us all the time. But there is a core of that that really matters, right? Your capacity to form your identity requires that you have some control over the entity that is you. And you can

just easily imagine a world in which there is that kind of robust thought-shed. of thought shaping and manipulation, right? And so being able to have that kind of autonomy over self and identity and the right to make choices about what you let in and what you don't let in, those are, I think, the kinds of hard questions that we haven't had to have before, but that we have to have now. So this is actually just sort of personal curiosity. You had written in one of your substacks that it is possible that AI might be granted freedom of speech.

and I'm trying to understand what that loophole is. Well, it's not even necessarily that the AI will have freedom of speech so much as AI speech will be protected as free under freedom of speech. So what that is is there, and I actually get into this in significant detail in my lecture on manipulation in my AI law and policy class about what the arguments there are. So if a developer is making choices for an AI from everything. like the training data that goes into it, the parameters and like what they're going to set is the parameters, the architecture of the system itself, how to do reinforcement learning through human feedback, the kind of training that happens on the later end. Those are all expressive choices, which have an impact on how the chat bot or whatever the AI is has its

output, which could mean that the speech output is so mixed with expressive content and expressive of decisions of the developer that it's protected in that way. The second view of it is that you as a listener have listener First Amendment rights. And so you have a right to receive information as well. And so on the other end, the user has First Amendment rights. And so restricting what the, you know, AI can have as output could have limitations on your right to receive information. And these are, you know, views that other people have advocated in the kind of chatbot cases where they've filed pretty extensive friend of the court briefs that lay out these arguments on the First Amendment. And so far, like, courts haven't fully had to grapple with this.

But in almost every software case that courts have had to grapple with First Amendment, you know, kind of content restrictions, they've come out on the side of saying that whatever it is is protected by First Amendment. The strongest argument I've heard about kind of worries about regulating the speech output of AI is that within the next few years that you can expect that almost all of human speech will be mediated through AI in some form or another. And that means that almost every way that you would express yourself is somehow commingled with AI. And if we were to try to go through and figure out which pieces are AI and which pieces are human, it would mean almost everything that we say or do would be subject to government regulation, which we wouldn't want. So it becomes very dangerous overreach if we don't recognize

first member rights. And that, I think, is. a compelling argument for us to be cautious about how much we regulate AI speech from that perspective, given how quickly the trajectory and the uptake of AI is in the world. So AI will be much more like the pen and paper. It's merged in an extension of us, and that's why you write. So if we're worried about things like AI psychosis because we're getting manipulated down some loophole, go upstream and argue that we actually don't even have freedom of thought when we engage with these systems because of the manipulation and because of everything that they know about us and the generative character.

So that's where the argument starts. Yeah, exactly. And for my final question, for anyone who is listening today, what can people do in their own capacity as citizens and as consumers? Because we do have some buying power in this to shape how this goes. Yeah. There are a lot of opportunities for individuals. And, you know, there's advocacy abilities for individuals so we can just start there, which is, you know, right now, for example, if we have a functioning government at any point in time,

there is the LEED Act that has been proposed in Congress. This is an AI Accountability Act. What's interesting about it is that it specifies manipulation as a form of harm. And that's a great starting point to think about actually putting into place some liability. And you can just imagine picking up your phone, calling your senator's office and saying, like, I'm really interested in the LEED Act, and I'd like to see it introduced, and it passed, and it's notable that it's Durbin and Holly who introduced it. It's a bipartisan piece of legislation. Like, pick up your phone and call and advocate for that. That matters, that kind of advocacy. And that would impact how chat bots are built. That would impact how child bots are built. It would impact how, like, how we think about, you know, manipulation across the board. It would be an important move toward protecting cognitive liberty. And, you know, that would be great. You know, that kind of advocacy, there are so many different AI legislation that is impacted in the space that is being proposed in states around the country. Taking the step to just make a call actually has a much bigger effect than people realize.

Like, your state legislature wants to hear from you. Your state senator wants to hear from you. And it has a huge impact in the outcome. Then starting to actually make choices that are aligned with cognitive liberty matter to. So, for example, if you're using AI, which I am, and I think it's a true, terrific tool when used correctly. I right now am not allowing it to use any of the data to train. I'm not like I have all of my settings to say like I don't want memory preserved across chats. I don't want to develop a relationship with my AI chat bot. And so I strongly encourage that

people do the same, which is set all of the settings in ways that actually preserve your cognitive liberty and cognitive autonomy. That also sends a strong signal to the companies, which is what we want to do. We want to send those strong signals. And then it's to start to realize some of the things that are being lost in your own cognitive liberty. And the biggest ones, and this is a big focus of my next book, looks at some of the kind of skills that we're losing that are kind of core to our cognitive autonomy. And these are around like your connection to your own physical body, your cognitive offloading and the impact that has on your competence and your relationships between other people. And so focusing on those three fundamental capacities help you rebuild your own

self-determination, which is really the foundation of cognitive liberty. That's a kind of personal practice that you can do. The simplest thing that I tell people is when you wake up in the morning, spend five minutes scanning your own body before you reach for your phone. Like it's a small intervention, but it's a huge intervention because the fundamental disconnect between what we used to do which is to be built on like grounding yourself in your own body to immediately starting with external input into your body actually rewrites your neurology in ways that are not good for you. So like get up and go to the bathroom before you read your phone and don't take your phone with you, right?

Like just spend ideally an hour, but at the very least five minutes reconnecting with your own body and fully waking up before you have that flood of, you know, extraceptive and like signals going into your body. So start there to like ground yourself in you. And the more you develop that grounding yourself and you actually the stronger your safeguards are against manipulation and everything else because you have a strong sense of your own gut instinct because you have one. Right. So those are some of the things I think people can do. And then just as a self plug, read my book. It'll give you some good ways to do that. And then follow me on substack because I am giving, you know, updates about everything that's happening in this space along with the kinds of things that you can do as well. And my,

you know, substack appropriately is called thinking freely because those are the things that I'm really focused on in the digital age. I was just going to shut out your substack and your book. I've read your book twice. Thank you. And I'm an avid reader of the substack. And you break it down in ways that it doesn't you don't have to have a neuroscience background, a legal background, an AI background. Anybody can understand. Thank you. It has been such a pleasure. Thank you so much for making the time. We can't wait to have you back, especially when you have your next book. Thank you. Follow Nita on all of the channels and thanks again for making the time with us. Thanks for thanks for the time and the wonderful questions and conversation.