It's Aspen Ideas to Go from the Aspen Institute. I'm Trisha Johnson. We're not as far as you might think from a future where your brain data can be hacked and analyzed with affordable consumer devices. How could that affect our minds and our society? Imagine being a child believing that your brain activity is being monitored. How do you flourish? How do you develop the kinds of ability to think freely that are necessary for the cultivation of the human spirit and ideas? Duke professor and author Nita Farahani has been studying bioethics and neuro-technology for years. She takes note when new tech is adopted in harmless or positive settings, like wellness, sports, or gaming, but she also tracks it when it shows up in more consequential places, like schools and courtrooms. And if we want to keep thinking freely, she says, we have to be careful about how we allow this technology to develop. Aspen Ideas to Go brings you compelling conversations presented at the Aspen Ideas Festival. In this talk, Farahani explains what could go right with neuro-technology and what could also go very, very wrong. You'll hear her reference several slides and visuals as she shares her research on what available technology can do and how and why major tech companies are investing in brain data collection. Here's Farahani. We're going to go on a little adventure of the near adjacent future, which kind of, how many of you are worried about AI or thinking about issues of AI? A lot of you. So this session is going to talk about the next thing with respect to AI, which is AI enables all kinds of advances. Many of you have probably used generative AI tools like Chatchapiti or other ones of mid-journey, things like that. How many of you have experimented with some of those? Okay, a number of you. So AI does a lot more than just enable those advances, right? It enables, as a platform technology, advances in every other field, including, for example, being able to decode what's happening in your brain. So that's what we're going to talk about today, is this coming age of brain transparency, which has tremendous hopeful benefits, but also risks that we need to discuss. So I've long been studying the ways in which the advances in neuroscience and neuro-technology have been used in the criminal justice system. That includes, for example, criminal defendants coming in to the criminal courtroom and saying, my brain made me do it. About a decade ago, I started tracking that empirically to look at each of those claims and to look, in particular, at the ways in which people were using that information and using advances in neuro-imaging to be able to establish that they had brain differences or brain abnormalities that might explain why they committed a criminal act. In that process, I started to become really interested about what would happen if criminal defendants didn't come in and bring that information into the courtroom. What if prosecutors chose to do so instead? What if they subjected people to neuro-imaging to try to decode what's in their brain? And this isn't as far-fetched as you think. Around that time, there was a company called NoLiMRI. Terrible name, right? Somebody needed to work with them on the marketing basis of it, and another one called CEPOs, which were using functional magnetic resonance imaging in order to purportedly be able to subject a person to questioning in an fMRI scanner to establish whether they were telling the truth or lying. The idea was that there was more cognitive load for a person who was lying rather than telling the truth, and so you would see greater brain activity associated with lying. Well, it turns out that very good criminals, it doesn't take a lot more for them to lie than to tell the truth, so that doesn't work. But also, if you are, for example, trying to tell the difference between a real-world lie with serious stakes and a laboratory lie, they may be very different in the brain. But that research led me to this question of not just scientifically can we, but what would happen if somebody tried to assert a right against having brain imaging done? Does, for example, the Fifth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution protect you as a right against self-incrimination from having your brain decoded for purposes of the criminal justice system? Is it an unreasonable search and seizure to be able to search the inner workings of the human brain? In that research, I discovered that no, in fact, the Fifth Amendment doesn't provide those kinds of protections, the Fourth Amendment doesn't provide those kinds of protections because we've long treated evidence from your body as different in kinds than spoken words, for example. You can compel a handwriting sample. You can compel a person to walk and to do a gait analysis. You can compel physical evidence to prove that their DNA matches the crime scene. And so at that time, I started to worry about what that might mean. I didn't worry, though, at kind of a huge level because functional magnetic resonance imaging machines are big, bulky machines. They're incredibly expensive. It wasn't likely to go mainstream. Until 2018, when I went to Wharton for a conference. At that time, I saw a demonstration by what was then one of the co-founders of a company called Control Labs. What he was demonstrating was this technology here, which was a neural interface technology. What he was explaining was very, I think, flamboyantly saying, look, we humans are incredibly clumsy output devices. We are limited by these bodies as a way of getting information from our brains out into the rest of the world. Wouldn't it be amazing if we could take our brain activity and operate tentacles like an octopus instead? Or if we could interface with all of the rest of our technology using our brain output, where exquisite input devices were very clumsy, he said, output devices were limited by these sledgehammers at the ends of our arms. What was extraordinary about that presentation was until that time, while I had gone from functional magnetic resonance imaging to looking at advances in consumer neurotechnology, those technologies were pretty cumbersome. They were, at best, a stiff, hard plastic headband worn across your forehead that didn't have very good signal-to-noise ratio. And, frankly, how many of us are going to go around most of our lives wearing a silly-looking headband across our forehead is not very many of us. What was different about this device that he was showcasing was not only was the form factor something that they were trying to address. They were picking up brain activity as it goes from your brain down your arm to your wrist. At neuromuscular junctions, the motor neuron activity, the electrical activity that happens there through EMG, and they were embedding it into a watch, a wearable device, not unlike the smart watches that many of you may have on. How many of you are wearing some kind of smart device? A lot of you, right? People are increasingly comfortable with wearing devices that quantify their bodily activity, and he was talking about a device that would be worn in the arm. Okay, this was different and kind because it was solving the form factor of neurotechnology, and it was different and kind because until that day, most of the neurotechnology applications that I had heard about were limited in scope. They were things like meditation or niche applications with niche products that were unlikely to go mainstream. What he was describing was decidedly different. It was something that would not only be embedded in an everyday technology, but would become the way in which we interface with all of the rest of our technology. Until that day, while I had worries about self-incrimination for criminal defendants and people who might be subject to neurotechnology against their will, I still believe that our brains were our last fortress of privacy. That you could think whatever you wanted to think without fear of another person having access to it. That you could walk in and see your friend's new mustard yellow couch and tell them that you thought it was delightful, even though internally you think it's a hideous color. You could imagine that you had a dream of freedom when you were living in an oppressive regime without a fear that anybody would listen in. You could describe and determine your own identity, figure out your own sexual orientation, your gender, anything that went into who you were without fear that anyone would be able to look and listen in. But as I listened to that presentation, I realized that that last fortress of privacy, the one space that every law, every norm assumes is protected, no longer will be. And the question is, how will we navigate that future? How will we navigate a future which unlocks extraordinary potential of the human brain, which enables us to have access to our own brain activity to change it and modulate it if we choose to do so, to be able to finally treat brain health and wellness as seriously as we treat all of the rest of our physical well-being, while also giving up our last fortress of privacy? The reason I worry that this is our last fortress of privacy is we all are now accustomed to the fact that major tech companies and platforms use our personal data in exchange for the services that they provide. The barter that we seem to have made up until now is that if they're selling us a product for free, that the way we're paying for that product is with our privacy. If you look at companies like Google, they are selling access to your attention by developing unique profiles of each person and categorizing them based on every click, every search term, every swipe, every website, every activity and digital trace they have. Meta does something similar, where they are selling a unique physiological profile and access to you for targeted advertisements. When Shoshana Zuboff published her book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, she described this idea, the surveillance economy, which is based on commodifying our data. And you see the companies that are selling, as you'll see in a moment, these new products and technologies, many of them are the same companies that have commodified our personal data for years. So the question as we go into this new era of brain tracking and hacking is will our brain data be commodified in just the same way? It isn't just major tech companies that are doing so. Many of the major platforms today are using our data as ways to be able to establish their business model, when 23andMe launched its product about more than a decade ago now. The idea was to sell each person a unique spit kit that would enable them to be able to access their own genetic information. I was one of the earliest people who signed up for it. Back in the day, you used to be able to get hundreds of indications of what the associations were between your genetic, the analytic genetic profile that they established and what that meant for your health and well-being. At the time, and based on the business model that they established, they had a system by which people could opt out of sharing their data. The result was over time where the 80% of the users on the platform became part of a large data set that 23andMe then sold to other companies, like GlaxoSmithKline, and decided that the best business model wasn't selling the subscription to their services. It wasn't selling the spit kits. It was selling the data itself. All of this is why when I went home from that Wharton Summit in 2018 where I heard the presentation from Control Labs, that I dove into learning absolutely everything that I could about Control Labs and what they were up to. I was convinced at the time that Apple would acquire them. It just made sense as a way to integrate a health sensor into the watch that would also pick up and enable neural interface. Fast forward years later, I discovered there wasn't enough real estate inside of the Apple Watch, and they did in fact have conversations with them. But I was shocked when I discovered just a year later in 2019 that Meta acquired them for about 500 million to nearly a billion dollars. It undisclosed some. Okay, well, why is that? Why did Meta decide that this was the technology that they would use? Why did they decide to make this investment? It's because as Mark Zuckerberg described it, neural interface is the holy grail. And brain data, in fact, is the holy grail for corporations of commodification, of our preferences, our desires, our beliefs, our intentions. It gives access to something that they've never before had. Even inferences about your everyday activity, your preferences, your desires through your online and digital advertisements isn't the same as having a sensor that can actually detect and interact with you in every potential setting. Okay, well, it isn't just Meta who has invested in neural interface technology. It is all of... Let me just see. I'm having a little confusion on which slide are we on. What are you guys seeing right now? Oh, good. Okay. It isn't just Meta that's acquired it. They showcased this about a year ago, the advances that they've made so far with their EMG technology and how they intend in 2025 to launch it as a way to interface with virtual reality and augmented reality. But it's also all of the other major tech companies who are investing in doing the same. So what you're seeing here is the newest form of embedding brain sensors into everyday technology. What you see on the top left is the MN8 from Emotive. I've tried these out. They're pretty cool. You can take a conference call and listen to music while also having your brain activity monitored at the same time. The one next to it, NextSense, is a company that hasn't yet figured out how to have you listen to music and take conference calls, but they have brain sensors that they hope will become something universal for people to be able to track their own brain health and wellness. SNAP has acquired a company called NextMind, which is an EEG-based company out of Paris where they intend to integrate into their AR and VR offerings brain sensors and neural interface technology. And the Apple Provision technology that was just launched also tries to make inferences about brain and mental experience using pupillary responses to try to infer what you think and what you intend. And Apple also has patents on integrating EEG into their AirPods in order to enable people to track their brain health and brain activity in much the same way that they track all of the rest of their activity. Okay. Well, maybe you're thinking, I'm not going to get that technology, so why would I possibly use it? And I'm going to explain to you why it could massively shift our self-determination over our brains and mental experiences. Why there's upside potential that I think will result in most of you at some point making a choice to either use neural interface technology or to track your attention, your stress, have insights into your own brain health and wellness in ways that you don't have access to right now. But the question is, how will do that well? How will do it while safeguarding your privacy and creating a space where you can continue to enjoy the right to think freely? The book that I published in March, The Battle for Your Brain, describes a future that has already arrived. It describes all of this technology, including the scenarios in which it's being used and misused. And we'll go through some of those examples, but before then, there was a scenario that I wrote in the introduction to that book that tried to paint a picture to help people fully understand what's at stake, to help people understand what it means to track your own brain health and wellness, but also what it means for others to track it as well. Let's take a look. You're in the zone. Even you can't believe how productive you've been. Your memo is finished, your inbox is under control, and you're feeling sharper than you have in a decade. Sensing your joy, your playlist shifts to your favorite song, sending chills up your spines the music begins to play. You glance at the program running in the background on your computer screen, and notice a now familiar sight that appears whenever you're overloaded with pleasure. Your theta brainwave activity decreasing in the temporal regions of your brain. You mentally move the cursor to the left and scroll through your brain data over the past few hours. You can see your stress levels rising as the deadline to finish your memo approached, causing a peak in your beta brainwave activity right before an alert popped up, telling you to take a brain break. But what's that unusual change in your brain activity when you're asleep? It started earlier in the month. You send a text message to your doctor with a mental swipe of your cursor. Could you take a quick look at my brain data? Anything to worry about? Your mind starts to wander to the new colleague on your team whom you know you shouldn't be daydreaming about given the policy against intra-office romance. But you can't help fantasizing just a little. But then you start to worry that your boss will notice your amorous feelings when she checks your brain activity and shift your attention back to the present. You breathe a sigh of relief when the email she sends you later that day congratulates you on your brain metrics from the past quarter, which have earned you another performance bonus. You head home jamming to the music with your work issued brain-sensing earbuds still in. When you arrive at work the next day, a somber cloud has fallen over the office. Along with emails, text messages, and GPS location data, the government has subpoenaed employees' brainwave data from the past year. They have compelling evidence that one of your coworkers has committed massive wirefrog. Now, they're looking for his co-conspirators. You discover they are looking for synchronized brain activity between your coworker and the people he has been working with. While you know you're innocent of any crime, you've been secretly working with him on a new startup venture. Shaking you remove your earbuds. Is that a future you're ready for? It gives you pause, right? And I'll tell you, all of the technology that's described in that scenario is possible today. Now, all of the applications haven't been realized, but you'll see it's already being used in workplaces. It's already being used to track attention and fatigue in certain workplaces worldwide. It's already being used in educational settings. It's already being used by governments and law enforcement agencies worldwide to interrogate people for recognition of crimes. And so the question is how we'll safeguard against that. But before we get there, let me tell you why I believe that we need to find a pathway forward that enables the progress, that doesn't seek to shut it down and prevent this new age of being able to have access to our own brain activity and wellness. First, how many of you have spent some of the past few years working from home rather than working in the office? And how many of you believe that you work better at home than in the office? Some of you? And how many of you believe you work better in the office than at home? Okay, and the only way you have to know the answer to that question is based on the internal software of your own attention and behavior. What if you could track it? What if instead of just completing your rings at the end of each day of how many steps that you've taken or your heart rate, you could track your stress and your attention level? What if you could see and visualize the information from your own brain and be able to use that and change it if you choose to do so? What if you could track over a long period of time your brain activity and see the earliest stages of glioblastoma, one of the deadliest brain tumors there is, but with early detection potentially could enable interventions that could save your life, prevent it from becoming the most aggressive form or if you could, for example, start to see the earliest stages of Alzheimer's disease or depression, dementia, all of this may be possible in an era where we have greater access to our own brain activity, where we have bigger data sets to be able to understand and be able to finally have true insights into our brain health and wellness. We may be able to, with that information, with a more quantified self, have access to our own biases and learn how to be able to adapt and change to them and the opportunity to interface with other technology without using a keyboard or a mouse or a joystick and to do so more seamlessly is something that we can hardly imagine today, but it's something that already people who've suffered from paralysis or suffered from locked-in syndrome are starting to be able to do, to be able to communicate again when they otherwise have no means of communication, to be able to type and swipe with their mind, to be able to regain independence, the opportunities are extraordinary done well, but the risks are also significant. There are already instances in what's happening as people are starting to do things like neural profiling. Right now, if you try to apply to a job at most companies, there's some sort of AI interface which is used in large companies like Amazon and others like HireView that seeks to use AI to interpret a person's personality, their cognitive abilities, is reading their microfacial changes. More companies are starting to adopt cognitive and personality testing which has already resulted in discrimination of people who suffer from neuro atypicalities who have different brain health or mental health or drug use disorders that otherwise would have been undetectable or couldn't be discriminated against which now can be used and is being used. There's neural fingerprinting which is happening by some law enforcement agencies worldwide. Anybody remember the name Michael Flynn? So Michael Flynn if you remember had ties, Russia ties that going into the Trump administration became deeply problematic. Turns out one of those ties was with a company called Brainwave Sciences. Brainwave Sciences uses a technology that purportedly can pick up your recognition signal, an automatic evoked response in your brain using electroencephalography or EEG. What it claims to be able to do is show a person for example different crime scene details that they shouldn't recognize unless they were present or somehow participated in the crime and then look for those signals of recognition. Well, Michael Flynn served on the board of that company together with Kubu Soto who was a previous KGB indicated spy who had been prosecuted, not prosecuted by the U.S. government. Those ties they were using to then sell this technology to law enforcement agencies worldwide and from India to Singapore even law enforcement in Australia this P300 technology has been used to interrogate criminals with convictions of individuals for murder based on what their brains reveal. Neural mining is the possibility of using that kind of evoked response to be able to detect information in your brain because you see the information that's hidden there isn't something that is going to happen in isolation as you're interfacing with other technology and something pops up on your screen either in your conscious awareness or subliminally information and your recognition of that can already be detected. Researchers have already used this kind of brain profiling and brain mining to be able to detect a person's pin number and home address based on what their brain activity revealed. So too is it possible to hack into the brain that can happen through changing your preferences and desires it can happen through electrical stimulation it can happen if these devices don't have cyber security. All of this there are instances that are happening at least on smaller scales right now it hasn't gone to scale across society but as it becomes embedded in our everyday technologies you can bet the abuse as well as well. The Wall Street Journal a few years ago did a profile piece that led to a significant uproar about students in a Chinese classroom in fifth grade being required to wear these neural headsets to track their attention and fatigue levels in the classroom. It had a red, orange and green signal which would both show whether they were paying attention or mind wandering and there was a console for the teacher in the front of the classroom the information was also being sent to parents and to state authorities. Let's set aside whether this even works for a moment. Imagine being a child believing that your brain activity is being monitored. How do you flourish? How do you develop the kinds of ability to think freely that are necessary for the cultivation of the human spirit and ideas? How do we avoid this kind of future where it's mandated or people are having their brains interrogated? Or, for example, neuro-marketing. There are more than 150 firms worldwide that are already selling access to how people's brains react to information. These are willing participants who sign up for studies where they watch advertisements or different spots, for example, of a television special which they then look to see how their brains react to it. Are they more likely to buy a product priced lower or higher? Do they react with joy? Do they react with negativity? And then using that information to make much more precise decisions about how to market to us. Now, maybe you think that's not that different than other forms of marketing, but that access to information about yourself can be used imperceptibly to change how you react to information in your environment. Any of you watch Avatar? Turns out, the original Avatar, James Cameron had said that he was really interested in trying to figure out how people's brains lit up in response to the different scenes that he had created. So a neuro-marketing company reached out to him and said, we can tell you that. You can run the different trailers using our neuro-marketing technologies to see how brains react and then use that information to be able to sell more tickets. Is that the reason it was a blockbuster? Probably not. But what happens in this future where people are wearing brain sensors as part of their everyday activity, that the same companies who are trying to micro-target their advertisements to us can see in real time what your actual reaction is to every different piece of information that they share with you. It seems to work, and it can be put to good use. When a UN refugee organization was failing to be able to get people to donate to Syrian refugees, they ran their advertisements through a neuro-marketing company. The neuro-marketing company helped them change their advertisements. After they launched their new advertisements, they saw a 237% increase in donations. Is it causal? It's hard to know. But it tells you something about the ability to hack into the human brain. There were reports already out of China where workers on factory floors and train conductors on the high-speed rail between Shanghai and Beijing are required to have their brain activity monitored for fatigue and attention have been shown images and statements of the Communist Party and then their reaction to that is being measured to see their political adherence to the messaging that's being provided. Well, you think, okay, I now understand I would never share my brain activity without anybody thinking about it, but when my lab ran a study, a nationwide representative study to ask people how sensitive they thought their brain wave activity was or how sensitive they thought access to information from their brain was, what came out on top by a lot was their social security number being the most sensitive information that they had. I can tell you that if we could actually reliably expect a society in which people can hack and mine our brains, your social security number is the least of your worries. Nevertheless, there is value in sharing. There will be value in aggregating significant data sets if we can figure out how to do it right from our brains. Right now, more than 55 million people worldwide suffer from dementia. More than a billion people suffer from mental health and drug use disorders. 300 million suffer from depression. These are just the tip of the iceberg. Neurological disease and suffering is getting worse, even while physical health and longevity are improving. Large data sets of real-world brain data of people who are protected against misuse and harm from that data could usher in a new era of wellness. Could usher in a new era in which we finally are in the driver's seat with respect to our own brains and mental experiences. So the question really is how do we balance the risks and benefits? How do we realize this hopeful future where we're empowered by neuro technology, where we're empowered and choose willingly to use brain sensors to track and access our own brains and mental experiences without fear of it being misused against us. Without an Orwellian future but a hopeful and bright future of human flourishing. I believe we need to recognize a right to cognitive liberty. As an umbrella concept and an update to our understanding of what liberty means in the digital age. What this means is I think we should have a right to access and change our brains if we choose to do so, but also a right from interference with our mental privacy and our freedom of thought. This is a doable and possible future. Already we have a right to self-determination, a right to privacy, and a right to freedom of thought under the UN Declaration of Human Rights. But to update our understanding of those different rights in the digital era is a necessary step forward for us to start to recognize that it isn't just neuro technology, it's immersive technology, metaverse, VR, AR, the approaches that generative AI is taking to mental manipulation. An update to liberty in the digital age recognizes that cognitive freedom is an essential thing for us to protect. Which means we need to invest in our updated understanding of the human right to cognitive liberty. We need it to be a guiding principle for how research goes forward to prioritize the cognitive freedom and cognitive well-being of individuals. It needs to be a core value in commercial applications, and it needs to be an investment priority in society where we're investing in trying to improve our brain health and wellness. Not in trying to diminish or have us addicted to devices or focused in an attention economy that seeks to reduce our brain health and wellness, not enable us to flourish. As a human right, a right to cognitive liberty would serve as a guidepost. It would serve as both a legal norm as well as an enforceable concept across the world to give people rights of redress. If they don't and are frustrated by access to their own brain health and wellness, if they're not given the information that they have a right to about their own brains, or if their mental privacy or their freedom of thought is interfered with, manipulated, or punished. As a guiding principle for researchers, it should be a priority to be answering the fundamental questions of how do we enable brain health and wellness? How do we secure against mental privacy? Researchers out of UT Austin just about a month and a half ago published a new study using functional magnetic resonance imaging, but updating it with an encoding and decoding model of the human brain using generative AI, using GPT-1. What they found in that study was that by decoding what a person was listening to with respect to stories or what they were imagining, they were able to decode with a high degree of accuracy what a person was thinking, essentially mind-reading, but in a cumbersome and limited sense. What was extraordinary about that study wasn't just the advances and how much could be decoded from the brain. It was that they also asked the question of could the classifier model that they trained on one participant be used on another one? And they found that the answer was no, that you had to willingly participate in having a classifier model trained on your own brain activity. The second question they wanted to ask was is it possible that a person could use countermeasures to prevent when they're in an fMRI machine the stories that they're imagining or hearing from being decoded, and the answer was yes, you could. Embedding those questions into research helps us to understand what are the real risks? What are the safeguards that we can implement? But too few researchers embed fundamental questions of ethical and responsible innovation into the research design itself. As a core value in commercial design, we need to empower individuals with control and user-level control. If I have earbuds in at all times and I'm having an intimate conversation with my partner, I should be able to turn off brainwave tracking at that moment if I want to, or to have all of the data stored on device. To only have, for example, federated learning models where the data is kept on device and any learning or aggregation happens in a way that is privacy-preserving for individuals. There are technologies and techniques. If this is a priority that can be embedded into commercial design, rather than a design where we go into a future where our brains are commodified in just the same way that all of the rest of our technology is. And as a society, we need to make it an investment priority to improve our brain health and wellness. Increasingly in the digital age, you see that people are addicted to their technology. The mental health is getting worse. The children and youth who are on social media platforms aren't flourishing. Instead, what they're doing is having their self-image be adulterated in ways that not only make them worse off, but also make them unable to have the relational intelligence to cultivate the relationships they need to develop the skills to flourish in the modern era. We need to be investing in our brains and mental experiences to enable us to flourish in this new era. As disinformation and deep fakes and generative AI starts to become increasingly difficult for us to detect, we need to be investing in ways that we can enable cognitive freedom in individuals. These are the ideas that I've put forth in the battle for your brain. This new era that I think could be incredibly hopeful, but also incredibly risky. We shouldn't go into this new era in the same way that we did with generative AI, with our eyes closed where we're suddenly shocked about the transformation in society. We stand at a moment before this technology goes widespread in society. We stand at a moment before this is technology that transforms all of our lives, which means we can make choices right now to implement it in ways that change the terms of service in favor of individuals. If we make those choices now, if we make the right choices for humanity, I believe this technology could be extraordinary for all of us. But we need to choose and we need to act now before it's too late to do so. Thank you. We have some time for questions now, and so I see a question right over here that is shot up. Alright, so my name is Brendan Salisbury. I'm part of the Bezos Scholars Program. I'm 17, and so I come from the perspective of a student. I've been very interested in neurology for a very long time. You mentioned earlier about the contributions of volunteers to the future of neuroscience and neurological technologies. My question is, as a student, how am I able to support the further progression of neurological technology while maximally reducing the option for my contributions to be corrupted and as one possible without the other? I hope that one is possible without the other. So I'll start there. There are a lot of really extraordinary citizen science projects that are going on. There are a lot of really thoughtful companies that are investing in open platforms for being able to study the brain. I think those are promising. I think what needs to be built into those models is protection of brain data in a very thoughtful way of what that means to proceed. I think if you want to get involved, it's getting involved in two ways. One is participate in citizen science, be part of the process, but also demands of all of the platforms that you are engaged with that ethics be by design, that it be a core part of the features of how it's actually being talked about, that there be thoughtful integration up front as to what that actually looks like for individuals. That means putting into place privacy-preserving measures also advocating at the rights level for individuals. I think it's by design embedding it into the product. There's so much more power that people have on the demand side than I think people realize. Many of us have gone into this era thinking we don't have a lot of choices. The platforms have made choices about how and what the terms of service will be. It doesn't have to be that way. We can make different choices on the demand side to say, I will only participate in a platform that is thinking deeply and thoughtfully about what ethical design and progress looks like. Thank you for the question. Right here. Hi, I'm Tara Garcia-Mathison. I'm one of the Gwen Eiffel Fellows here, Journalist Fellows. I'm curious if you know of any applications of this kind of neural tracking or neural technology in schools or the higher ed space yet? Yeah. The slide that I showed that had the picture of the children in the classroom in China. I'm going to get there. The company that sold those devices to them is a company called BrainCo. BrainCo is a US-based company that has sold and has entered into significant partnerships with educational tech companies where it's been integrated into a lot of different educational settings. There are some in which it's been done on a study basis. Some in which it's been done to, for example, improve ADHD by empowering people through neural feedback to be able to improve and sustain their attention over time. Sometimes to look at what collaboration looks like between individuals at the end of that video, you see the synchronization of brain wave activity. That's something that a lot of people have studied to look at what happens when people work together and does that promote and improve learning, for example. So BrainCo is one of the companies based in Cambridge, I think, who has sold many of those devices and entered into a lot of partnerships that's enabled that and done well and done thoughtfully. I think it can be incredibly empowering in the educational system, especially when the data is given to the students to be able to improve their focus and attention and well-being. Done as a monitoring of their attention and focus is a disaster, I think. I think there was a question right here, yes. I'm George Zachar. I'm not 17. You had mentioned that a person in an FMRI machine can have countermeasures. I'd like to know what they are. My other question is, how do we keep this away from Steve Bannon? Steve who? The Trump propagandist? Oh, yeah. Bannon, you said. God, I didn't hear the end of that. So I've shut my brain out of some of these things, especially with current news and video tapes and audio tapes that are ringleaked. But in any event, I digress. So the first part of your question, I got lost on the Steve Bannon. Countermeasures. Countermeasures, yes. So it just turns out that thinking something else, if you're coercively put into an FMRI machine and you just think pink elephant, pink elephant, pink elephant over and over again with big blue spots, just so that image is starkly in your mind, there's no getting past that to then decode what you're thinking and feeling. So the countermeasure is you have to be a willing and cooperating participant in order to be able to gain access to that kind of information. And I'll say that helps. It doesn't fully answer the question. So I admire the fact that the researchers put those questions into their research design and study. If I'm right and we start to willingly integrate brain sensors into our everyday lives, we will each train classifiers our own brain activity. And so, and you're not going to be spending all day long every day thinking about that giant pink elephant with the blue spots on it, right? You're going to be going about your everyday activity. So we'll need other countermeasures, right? Which is other safeguards against interception and use of that information. But if you end up in an FMRI scanner and somebody coercively tries to interrogate you, just think of that pink elephant. You'll be fine. All right. I see a question in the back over there. Yeah. Could you, my name's David, could you possibly address the negative medical effects? What do you do when you're damaging your brain? Forget about that. And does the FDA going to have jurisdiction over that aspect? So the FDA does treat these as medical devices. They have them within their wellness suite for whether they're high risk or low risk and what they do with respect to it. If you're just listening to brain activity, I don't think it would cause brain damage. This is one of those things where looking at what phones next to our heads and radio frequencies over a time, I think we're going to want to know. The other kind of framework is looking at neural stimulation and that does have the potential to change the brain much more directly, which the FDA is significantly having oversight over. Tomorrow we have a panel that is doing a deep dive looking at implanted neuro technology. Tom Oxley is from Synchron. He will be giving us a deep dive and FDA is very involved in that. We'll also hear from companies that are doing neuro stimulation and using AR devices for health purposes, which the FDA is deeply involved in and has looked at for breakthrough medical designation. So yes, but for the everyday devices it will depend on what their use and application is for the extent to which FDA will be involved. Let me see Tom. Tom Oxley from Synchron. I have an implantable brain computer interface technology. I'm a neurologist. I wanted to ask how you think about cognitive liberty is a wonderful ethical construct and it covers, you know, you talk about protection from privacy and, you know, as a commercialization reality happens there are things that happen over time on a macro level that we couldn't have predicted going forward. So, how do you balance the challenge of the protection of privacies against, you know, the self-determination and I think, you know, just to make a quick comment, there's a big difference between the implantable technologies and the noninvasive technologies and I look at that classroom of Chinese students and I have zero confidence that that data is doing anything useful whatsoever. So I do think I'm a little bit more nihilistic about the threat or the potential for the noninvasive systems. When it comes to the implanted system, the FDA has a very strict mandate over those protections but I'm interested in that balance between privacy and self-determination. Yep. So, I doubt that there was that much that they were picking up in that Chinese classroom either. I think the, nevertheless I think having a device on your head as a child and being told that your brain activity is being monitored is enough to have a significant chilling effect which is deeply problematic. So, I sat on President Obama's bioethics commission and during that time we took on a number of emerging technologies and one principle that we outlined. So a popular approach at least in the EU to risk analysis is something called the precautionary principle. Don't proceed until you know the full set of risks. An alternative to that which is not a great one that a lot of tech companies in the US have embraced is the letter RIP model which is, you know, just go for it and don't worry about it. In the middle is something called prudent vigilance which is what we articulated as kind of the guiding principle for how we were thinking about technology and how I think about it. Which is you have an ongoing process of assessment. You can't know every risk but if you have a system in place of both adaptive governance and oversight and you are looking for and anticipating what those risks are you can develop an anticipatory model that responds to risks as they emerge. If you try the precautionary principle, you frustrate innovation, you prevent technologies from moving forward and maybe that makes sense when you have something that has extraordinary risks to destroy society or blow it up for example. But when you are talking about something with upside potential that could be so transformative for the mental health and wellness of individuals, I think a prudent vigilance approach is that balanced approach to enabling innovation while maintaining consistent oversight. There are mechanisms in place that enable that to happen. They are reporting and regulatory requirements we could put into place that would have an information forcing feature to make that happen but I think that approach, a balanced approach would enable us to allow innovation to proceed and to calibrate our regulation and our oversight to risks as they emerge. I think you had a question here. Hi, my name is Arne. I don't know if you can tell but my head's exploding right now. I don't have the sensor on it yet with the monitor up in the front of the room. I've been a climate anti-war activist, rested just a couple few times. The first thing I go to is the surveillance of people doing civil disobedience. I think of what happened after 9-11 and what happened to Muslims. So forget Steve Bannon, just what our own government does on people who use it as a way of monitoring, checking people trying to figure out what's happening. How far is this down the road already? I'm reading the reviews of your book. The first one is it's already here. When do we start to see it implemented where it's matched with facial recognition and people who are, if it's what we're seeing in Europe with the climate activists and finding out where they're going and what they're doing when they're trying to speak out against and use their cognitive liberties. What I do in the book is I describe in detail the way in which it's happening and the way in which the technology is here in ways people don't realize. The difference is just scale. Has it gone widespread? Has it been integrated into a multifunctional device by one of the major tech companies, which hasn't happened yet but they all have major investments to make it happen within the next couple of years. How do we safeguard against that? I worry too about its use in civil disobedience. I'm Iranian-American. I worry deeply. I grew up with all of my first cousins and family in Iran and I saw what an oppressive regime looks like where people live in a world in which everything they do is censored and I worry very much about that, which is why I'm advocating for this call to action, which is this movement that we need for cognitive liberty now to enable us to be able to mitigate against the risks of not just neuro technologies of all of these technologies that in conjunction are working to gain access to hacking and tracking our brains. Nita Farahani is the Robinson O. Everett Distinguished Professor of Law and Philosophy and Director of the Science and Society Initiative at Duke University. She also chairs the Master of Arts in Bioethics and Science Policy Program at Duke. From 2010 to 2017 she served on the U.S. Presidential Commission for the study of bioethical issues. She's the author of the 2023 book, The Baptist Battle for Your Brain, defending your right to think freely in the age of neuro technology. Today's show was programmed by the Aspen Ideas Festival team and produced by Natalie Jones and me. Our music is by Wonderly. I'm Trisha Johnson. Thanks for listening.