The Discussion: Brain Data and the Sovereign Self #13

Last year at a tech conference, when I was speaking to an audience of mostly marketeers but some software engineers and investors too, I was doing a fireside chat and the host asked me what would be a surprising trend to watch, you know, something underestimated or underemphasized. And I had no hesitation whatsoever in saying it was the brain-machine interface, particularly in the workplace. I talked about neurotech, highlighting what BlackRock and Neuralink were doing, but more generally the idea that corporations would have access to our brain data in exchange for the services that they would provide that we would no doubt need in a market looking for augmented humans doing jobs that involved much more workplace surveillance than today. I even mentioned the laws being passed by the government in Chile for the protection of mental privacy and the notion of neuro rights that's been on my trends list for, oh, over 3 years now at least. I've talked about it quite a lot in relation to identity and the future of you. But I always get the feeling most people aren't taking this, or perhaps me, particularly seriously. I mean, it sounds like science fiction, right? So imagine my delight when I discovered a new and exciting book called The Battle for Your Brain: Defending the Right to Think Freely in the Age of Neurotechnology by professor at Duke University, Nita Farahani. Well, I couldn't wait to read it. And what's more, as an absolute expert in all of this, she joins me today to talk in a little more depth about the book, what's going on in the field of neurotech, and her thesis of cognitive liberty. Thanks for joining me, Nita. I know you are a very busy woman as your brand new book is hitting the bookstands as we speak. Congratulations.

It's so nice to finally have it see the light of day. You know, hope to sell.

Oh, I bet. How long have you been working on it?

I mean, to be honest, I've been working on it for a decade, but when I really started working on it in earnest was 2019, like November 2019. And so, not as long as a decade, but the first time I wrote a proposal for this book was in 2012, so.

Goodness me. Yes, you're well ahead of the curve.

Too far ahead at that point.

You can't be too far ahead. It's absolutely superb. You were kind enough to send me a copy, and I just, I'm looking forward to reading it again actually, 'cause there's so much in there. Just remind everybody exactly what it's called, the subtitle as well, because that's very important, is it?

And we agonized over it, to be honest.

Authors always do.

No, we really did. We agonized over not only the title, but the subtitle. So it's "The Battle for Your Brain: Defending the Right to Think Freely in the Age of Neurotechnology." And it is St. Martin's Press published on March 14th. And it captures, what I see as truly the battle, the battle that is ongoing that many people haven't been a part of, aren't even aware that it's happening. And it's a battle we can still win to have neurotechnology empower us. But it is a battle that unless people join the call to action is going to wage without public input and engagement.

Yeah. And I think that's the most important thing to try and draw the public into some sort of consultation or conversation. I know it's incredibly difficult, but I'm sure if any book can do it, this can, and you can. Because you do set it out as, you know, highly complex technical detail, but you make it sound so understandable. And I think that's great so that everybody can become involved in the debate and in the conversation. But to that end, I wonder actually if you might start by telling people what raw brain data is, because actually once you read the words raw brain data, it can feel, I'm sure, quite scary for people.

It almost feels like a steak or something, right?

Yeah, like mine, well done.

Yes, exactly. You know, there's a lot of different ways in which activity or information from the brain can be captured, but one of the major areas that I focus on in the book is capturing electrical activity in the brain. So as you think, as you have, you know, meditate, as you do a math problem in your head, neurons are firing in your brain and they give off tiny electrical discharges as they do so. And hundreds of thousands to millions of neurons are firing in your brain as you engage in everyday activities. And those now can be picked up through electroencephalography, or EEG. And what that's picking up is really like the summation of all of that electrical activity across the scalp, what, what can be picked up from surface-based electrodes. And It is, you know, kind of the average of the activity across the different regions of the brain broken down into different bands or kind of wavelengths. And those different bands or wavelengths can be both picked up and differentiated with algorithms and software that interpret what it is that is being detected. So raw brainwave activity is different than a lot of other data that people are used to, because if I want to know if you're tired, for example, I capture all of that summation of activity that's happening across your brain at any given moment in time or over a period of time, and then I extract the interpretation that I'm interested in, the interpretation being, are you tired? And I shouldn't say I, I don't do this, right? I'm somebody who studies the implications of this technology, but meaning that's what the technology can do. But what's What— why raw data is different is you could return to it over and again, right? The same algorithm that was used to interpret that data, that activity that was happening at a given moment of time, that could tell if you had high levels of fatigue, you know, continuously monitoring it could also pick up if you're suffering from cognitive decline and could also be picked up to decode you know, even potential simple words or numbers or shapes or images that are in a person's mind. And the more electrodes and, you know, the higher grade and quality of what we're talking about here, the more information can actually be extracted. So it's, it's different than other kinds of information. And in kind of thinking about it as like full spectrum rich information from which you can keep going back over and over again. One example I gave in the book to try to help people understand this is You know, I say, imagine you want to share something with a friend out of your personal diary. And so you hand them the personal diary and you say, turn to page 32 and you'll see this passage that I highlighted that I want you to read. And they read it and they say, oh, that's so interesting. What an interesting insight and reflection about yourself. And then they hand it back to you. You're done, right? The alternative would be they also make a copy of your entire diary without, you know, your permission. And then when you're not around, they just flip through the pages and read everything from pages 1 to 32 and all the way until the end because, you know, there's so much more that you capture in a moment than that one little snapshot that you extract. And so, you know, while it's not literally your complex thoughts that you've written down into a diary, the concept of there's a whole lot more there than the piece of information that a software algorithm is designed to extract is one of the important differences of raw brainwave data from other kinds of data that people are used to sharing or having commodified by companies and governments.

Got it. Yeah, that's very clear.

Thank you.

How much is that a shift on from something like digital phenotyping then when we've got the likes of Apple now telling us that using our data from our own body and physicality, but also the environment around us, they can predict whether we've got depression or other sort of mental health illnesses. I mean, I've seen a Wall Street Journal article suggesting that they can or they want to do that. But that doesn't— that seems like one of the bridging points perhaps to some of the stuff you were talking about.

Yeah, absolutely. So first, I think it's important to realize that right now, based on where neurotechnology is today, In some instances, you can learn more from digital phenotyping than you can from brainwave data. Um, you know, so you could pick up, for example, if you had my complete online activity, my complete cell phone activity, you turned on my cell phone to be a listening device at all times. You had everything I've ever typed into Google and elsewhere. You have a pretty rich and complete picture of a lot of what I'm thinking or feeling. So this is additive to that, right? And the question is, like, does it give you anything more than all of that already gives you? And I believe that it does. It gives you something more because it gives you unstated and unexpressed aspects of your, you know, cognitive and affective functionings, what you're thinking and feeling. And, you know, by that, like, I try to keep a poker face when I see my friends, you know, hideous new mustard yellow couch that they decided was just the right color. And I do a pretty good job of it because, you know, like my friend bought the couch. What good would it possibly do to register anything other than support? And your brain states could reveal your disgust, your— You're telling me that this is going to destroy all possible relationships. Yeah, well, you know, if we don't have some aspect of cognitive liberty and mental privacy, then, You know, it could. You know, there are parts of ourselves that we keep back, that we hold back, and that's important to our own ability to cultivate our identity in the world, our own ability to choose what we share and with whom. And that's the piece that is different than digital phenotyping. Digital phenotyping is trying to get at that, but to the extent that you haven't expressed it, written it down, done something that reflects it, —there is still something more that allows you to have mental space and reprieve, even though I think all of that is incredibly intrusive and invasive. And if you think about the principles that I'm laying out of a right to cognitive liberty, of self-determination over our brains and mental experiences, it may apply to some aspects of digital phenotyping. There may be some practices that are well beyond neurotechnology, and I talk about a number of those in the book, that cross the line between what is permissible and impermissible in today's world as well. So in some ways, it would claw back some of what we've already done, even while forging new territory with an entirely new category of technology and entirely new frontier of data that we've never before breached.

That sounds exactly like what we need, what we all need actually. So let's move on to that then, because you do give an awful lot of examples in the book, and I'm sure for people who aren't that aware of what's going on. I mean, in the UK, USA, and China, and beyond, loads of places, loads of sectors, industries, government, you know, education. Could you give a flavour of some of your, perhaps your favourite examples? Or my least favourite, right? Either way, however you want to think about it. Yeah. Where you think it's really useful and where you think it's Dystopian, right? Dystopian, yes. Yeah, yeah.

So I should say this, it was a very intentional move on my part with this book to have it be chock-full of existing examples. And there's very little futurism in the book, right? In that I'm not talking about, you know, what may happen 10 years from now. I'm trying to give people a very clear understanding of where the technology is today. And the things that we can decode today, well before we get to the point where you could decode something like complex thoughts, if we ever get there, right? The kind of inner monologue. That's not what I'm talking about in this book. I'm talking about the very real applications that exist today of decoding brain states, broad and general brain states, and what the risks and benefits of that are. So I think probably the example that has been most startling, and I didn't expect it at first, and we can talk about why I think it's turned out that way, has been the increasing use of neurotechnology in the workplace. And this has just hit a nerve, literally, with people in ways that I, I just, I've been astounded by. So already for more than a decade, there are companies who've been selling technology that enables employers to track fatigue levels by, by putting brain sensors on inside of baseball caps or hard hats or other kind of devices that a person is using already. And they're shifting into monitoring attention and focus in the workplace, and they're already doing that through keystroke logging and other kinds of pejoratively called bossware. But now sensors are being integrated into that as well. And that has a, I think, very chilling effect. That's already happening in China. There are reports of workers being required to wear brain sensors as they go about their everyday jobs, whether it's on a factory floor or as a conductor for, you know, the high-speed train between Beijing and Shanghai. Even more chilling, I think, for people is to realize it's not just in authoritarian regimes. It's happening, you know, in more than 5,000 companies worldwide and many more to come. After I gave a talk at the World Economic Forum in Davos, I had a company, a large company, you know, CEO come up to me afterwards and tell me that they were already using this neurotechnology for lots of the applications that I described in my talk. And, you know, we're planning on doing so at larger scale going forward. And, you know, the heartening part about that is they wanted to talk about the ethics of how to do so, how to do so responsibly in a transparent way that would be better for employees and more empowering for employees, but it just makes concrete for people that this really is happening. This isn't some theoretical thought exercise by a philosopher. This is already in workplaces. I think part of the reason why that struck a nerve for people is first, because most people didn't even know the technology or the capabilities existed yet. But second, I think everybody can relate to being at work and everybody can relate to the increasing surveillance in the workplace and how problematic that's already become, how much that's already undermined trust and relationship between employers and employees. And, you know, the power imbalance is, you know, there's already such a stark informational asymmetry, but also power asymmetry. You know, as we go into what appears to be kind of a global economic downturn and people have far less mobility between jobs, the idea that there could be these kind of Orwellian impositions of brain monitoring in the workplace and that people wouldn't have a choice to go somewhere else or to, you know, quit and work elsewhere that wasn't using that. I think that just, that's very disquieting, that's very intrusive and it's very relatable. You know, I talk about a lot of applications like governments using it to interrogate criminal suspects. It's easier to other people and say, well, I'm not a criminal suspect, so it's never going to be used on me. It's much harder to do that when you understand it's part of the workplace. It's also, I think, disturbing to think about it in, in children and in classrooms. So, you know, there's, there's potential value to this. There are studies that show that, you know, students who are suffering from ADHD, for example, may stand to benefit from neurofeedback using neurotechnology. But imposing it like it was in a classroom in China on students to see whether or not they're paying attention or their mind is wandering can have a significant chilling effect on, you know, their ability to flourish as children, to discover their own self-identity, to mind wander, which is so critical to growing and changing and figuring out who one is. And so those are some of the chilling examples, I think. But also, you know, I talk a lot about the empowering possibilities of this technology. We treat our brain health as if it's like mystical, you know, our physical health. People know that they need to exercise. They know, you know, to go in regularly for a physical exam to get their weight and their height and, you know, their cholesterol levels checked, their blood sugar checked. Most people can tell you, you know, their heart rate, their resting heart rate and their blood pressure. But they can't tell you anything about their brain health. And, you know, that is contributing to this growing epidemic of mental illness and depression and neurological disease worldwide. And the possibility of us being able to quantify our own brain activity for ourselves, not for anybody else to have access to it, right? But just being able to be your own advocate, having access to that information and treating it as if it is like other kinds of health where you have access to it, you have tools at your disposal to enhance it and to improve it. I think that could be transformational. So I envision cognitive liberty, not just as a right from interference by others, but a right to exercise cognitive liberty, to know oneself and to enhance and improve your brain and your mental experiences.

Presumably once some of that brain data is uncovered. You know, you can start to create biomarkers like we have physically that would take us to a much more sort of personal biological age than a chronological age. So like in the way that cholesterol is perhaps a biomarker for like heart health or whatever, we haven't explored that necessarily properly yet, have we, with the brain? But presumably there will be biomarkers coming out of that kind of brain data.

I think that's right. There may be biomarkers of cognitive decline. There may be biomarkers of brain fitness. There were some researchers a couple of years ago who published a communication in Nature about the possibility of brain benchmarking. Like we check weight and height for children, but we don't do brain benchmarking. And could we similarly develop biomarkers or other cognitive and affective tasks? You know, we test for like autism spectrum disorder, but we don't test for much more than that to see if you know, children are growing healthy— healthily and in cognitive and effective ways. And so, you know, biomarkers for that, which could also then hopefully identify when somebody is at risk of, you know, depression and mental illness and, you know, other cognitive or neurological diseases. You know, I talk about an example about— there was a group of researchers who tested out the possibility that glioblastoma, which is a terrible kind of brain tumor to be diagnosed with because it's— by the time usually it is diagnosed, there's very little medically that can be done to, you know, extend somebody's lifetime to have the possibility of a cure. But there are tiny electrical changes that may occur in the earliest stages of glioblastoma well before it's currently being diagnosed. And You know, if you pick that up, maybe you could intervene much sooner such that the course of the disease and the identification of it would be very different. And this all sounds, you know, to me promising. And so, you know, the question is, can we get to that future without the Orwellian dystopian future? Because, you know, the terrifying possibilities already happening, the Orwellian dystopic applications of these technologies are already happening. And, you know, can we get to the place where the benefits outweigh the risks and that we reset and do this in a way that could enable us to do that without also subjecting us to opening our brains up to hacking and tracking by others?

So yeah, so let's get onto what we think, what you think rather, we need to do about this and the ethical or legal sort of parameters that we need to put around some of it. One of the things that really struck me when I was reading the book is about just how personal, obviously, but kind of how personal this data is. You say at one point in the book, it's the very personal nature of this data, of the profile it can provide of us because of algorithms that can be used to analyse our brain activity and extract features that are both unique to each person and stable over time. That's obviously what you've just been explaining to us. But how your brain responds to a song or an image, for example, is highly dependent upon your prior experiences, the unique brain patterns that you generate could be used to authenticate your identity. Now, as somebody like me who's interested in digital identity and the digitization of the self, if you like, as we go forward in the 21st century, that really struck a chord in me. And I don't know whether you said it or I was thinking, you probably said it, is brain data the ultimate biometric? Tell me, what on earth can we do about that?

Yeah, so I mean, I write about that because there, It may be. Certainly people are investing in it. And, you know, there are all kinds of problems with other biometrics for secure authentication of individuals, and passwords are clearly not the answer. And, you know, hacking of information is happening all the time. And so it makes sense that governments and companies are investing in trying to figure out whether the functional biometric of the brain would be a good one to use. You can probably tell from where I write about it in the book that I think giving government access to functional biometrics in the brain is a disaster waiting to happen because, you know, what you have to look at is the functioning of the brain, like somebody literally thinking about singing a song or, you know, doing a math problem or something like that, which means you are literally having to give access to the government to your thinking in order to unlock, you know, your computer or go through security at the airport or things like that. And so It may be incredibly valuable as a biometric authenticator and just not worth the risk to—

I mean, I can see it happening in the military and then kind of, 'cause you can make the argument of security and safety, which is normally the way these things come in, isn't it? And then suddenly it's like, well, everybody needs to be secure, don't they? And then it opens up.

And the national security interests justify it because it's the most secure possible biometric and everything else has failed. Yeah, so I mean, I put it in there really to help people see how the normalization of this technology could occur and the justifications that will be made in order to make it so that you have to make your brain accessible to other people. And I just find that to be wrong and bad and disastrous. We're heading into a place where people have no freedom of thought, where the justification of giving access to your brain data in order to do so for national security reasons, for secure authentication, suddenly gives, you know, it means we drop our final bastion of freedom, the line between the government and our own individual brains and mental experiences.

But you could see it happening in like banking, for example. So you can't access your bank account. I mean, if we see what's been happening over the last couple of years. The temptation will be strong. Yeah, if we think about what's been happening over social media and opining and any sort of wrong thing, and then linking that to, you know, well, you can't make charity payments in this PayPal account, or, you know, we're going to take you off the platform and you can't find another platform to bank on. I mean, one can see how these things converge. And actually identity will play a role in that, potentially. So that was Nita Farahani on the battle for your brain. Yes, that's your brain. And we'll be back with more from Nita later on in the episode. But first, let's take a moment to appreciate what's going on in the neurotech market. There are now hundreds of thousands of mobile health apps available worldwide that consumers are using and businesses are encouraging their employees to use. No surprise then that the number has doubled in the last 5 years to something like 300,000, and there's an estimated market value of over $100 billion. And this trend is here to stay. Globally, the market for neurotechnology is growing at a compound annual rate of 12%, and it's expected to reach a value of $21 billion by 2026. Work, wellness, and education are some of the key areas of focus. But what can this technology do now, and what are companies hoping it will be able to do in the future? I spoke with Dr. Ramses Alkaid, the CEO of Neurable, whose company makes everyday brain-computer interfaces, to find out more.

What if the future we want The technology that will remake our world is already inside of each of us.

What if the future is our brain unlocked?

So welcome, Ramses, to The Future of You. Thank you so much for joining me on this episode.

It's my pleasure. I appreciate the invitation and I'm excited to be talking about brain-computer interfaces. The future of identity.

Oh, well, we both are then. So you are the founder and CEO, co-founder and CEO of Neurable. I wonder if you could just explain to our audience exactly what Neurable is about and maybe a bit of your origin story as well.

Yeah, definitely. So in a nutshell, what Neurable does is that we're a brain-computer interface company. It's just a fancy way of saying that we record brain activity, in our case, noninvasively, which means without surgery., and then we can use it to control different environments. The technology was developed at the University of Michigan. It's a technology that helps increase the sensitivity that we record brain data from. Uh, regarding the origin story, uh, it really started when I was about 8 years old. My, my uncle got into a trucking accident. He lost both his legs, and it was a really traumatic time for him and myself. Uh, and you know, just put yourself into, into the shoes of, of either one of us. You know, imagine yourself there, like how, much your life changes in that kind of situation. And so, you know, I decided from this point on, I'm going to dedicate my life toward technology that can help, you know, individuals who have any type of impairments for communicating or connecting with the world. And so I went to the University of Washington, studied electrical engineering, worked with the same prosthetic teams that my uncle did. And then I went to grad school and got my PhD in neuroscience.. And what I realized there is that the problem is even bigger than just prosthetics. You have people who, for example, don't even know they have Alzheimer's or Parkinson's until 10 years into the disease state. That's awful, right? You have people with ALS who can't even communicate with their eyes. And the real issue here is just being able to unlock the potential of the brain. And to do that, you need to be able to do it at scale. And so the company spun out from the University of Michigan focused on how do we make neurotechnology a part of everyday devices. Um, you know, how do we integrate this and make them actually functional in, in a way that people enjoy and, and can actually use it? Um, and that's a really hard challenge to do because neurotech, especially non-surgically, is, is prone to a lot of noise. And so we've been able to solve that with our technology. My co-founder Adam Olnar has actually written numerous chapters on neuroethics, and he serves as an advisor to the Neuroethics Institute. So it's a really core part of our company. But I think that what matters more to us is that a lot of these concepts actually already exist, you know, and we've already seen how if we don't take them into account, they fail. The best example of this is like with the internet, you know, we failed to really create privacy and protection for individuals. And, you know, it's turned into a nightmare that we have to deal with now. But, uh, core rules on laws, uh, regarding AI and protection of privacy, like, those concepts already existed. And because neurotech is so new, I think it's part of our responsibility to make sure that we follow, uh, in good footsteps, uh, and, and make sure that we don't repeat the same issues as, as what happened with the internet, uh, with this new direction.

So what kind of data do you collect then?

Yeah, so we collect electroencephalography, which is called EEG. It's basically just data that you collect non-invasively without surgery, essentially from the top of the scalp. Our technology right now, we've partnered with a few different manufacturers of headphones and headsets of different kinds. And we essentially, you know, they collect the data from around your ear using soft sensors. Or in the ear using, you know, essentially plastic-like sensors. And then they use our technology to actually make it usable at scale.

Do you see this being integrated into other platforms then, or is it a standalone app? How do you see it sort of entering into the ever-increasing ecosystem of sort of medical and healthcare apps and devices like this?

Yeah, I mean, I see it as like the next iPhone. That's kind of how I see it. The iPhone came out and it enabled you to have the internet in your pocket anywhere you went. And that was insanely powerful, right? And it built industries. For example, like, Uber wouldn't exist if we didn't have smartphones, right? Having GPS and internet in ourselves anywhere we go just made that a feasible thing. Uh, and so we're going to see wearable devices like headphones and earbuds replace a lot of the things that your phones do, uh, and the way you're going to control them and the way you're going to do your own health monitoring, just like you do with an Apple Watch or with an iPhone that tracks your steps, it's going to be with your hearable device. Uh, and so we really see that as kind of the next evolution of the wearable, you know, computing devices that you wear. And then long-term, when augmented reality devices come on board, What's going to be the mouse and keyboard for them? What's going to be the brain? And, you know, our technology's positioned to fit inside those narratives.

Made me think, actually, that authentication— and you talked at the beginning about there not being an identity layer at the internet, obviously big problem— authentication on something that is collecting such valuable data and is a highly personalized product and experience like this, presumably is going to become really, really important, whether it's authentication or verification that you are the you that the company thinks is using the product, because all kinds of things are being hacked at the minute, right? From bank accounts to social media accounts to whatever. What are your thoughts in terms of digital authentication or verification for, for Neurable?

Yeah, so, you know, I'm going to answer from a BCI space first. There's a big difference between invasive and non-invasive. So when you're talking about invasive brain-computer interfaces that require surgery, you can get really personal data and information from that. When you're talking about non-invasive data, it's really kind of at the same level as picking up data from an accelerometer or from a temperature sensor. It's very high-level information. It's not going to be like your Social Security number or anything like that. So, but regardless, the brain is sacred. So even just from the perspective that like human beings connect to that data in that way, I think we should respect it that way. That's our personal belief here at Nurable. And so from that perspective, our main goal is, you know, once again, communication of what type of data we're going to be getting, the ability to have choice as to whether you want that data removed, and then also making sure that it's anonymized even when we're processing it ourselves, right? Because there's still ways of gathering value even though we don't know exactly who it belongs to. And when it comes to authentication, I think that there's, you know, better and better ways of doing biometrics now, especially once we start doing AR devices. We can look at, you know, iris information, etc. In the future, there might even be brain data that we can use for authentication, although that still hasn't been proven out as strongly as one would like it. I think it would be an awful user experience right now. And so I think we need more of that. I think it's happening organically. The main thing is, do the companies building these products respect that? And then do the people buying the products, are they willing to vote on what they— what matters to them? Because at the end of the day, like, unfortunately, your dollars vote for everything.

Can you tell me a bit about some of the specific products? Obviously, I've, I've looked at, you know, you're talking about the Focus algorithm and the smarter headphones for smarter focus and then the piece with the Mayo Clinic on Take a Break. I wonder if you could just talk about some of the very specific, like, products or the way it's been packaged as product.

Yeah, definitely. So really, Nurable, like I said, started at the University of Michigan. Our goal has been how do we take neurotechnology that would typically require these large-cap systems and make them work in a consumer-ready level in everyday devices, which means headphones, earbuds, glasses, helmets, etc. That's a really tough challenge because the smaller you get, the less sensors you have. And also when you move away from regions where the data, from where the brain is creating that data from, you start to lose signal. And so the experience becomes worse. And so fast forward 7 years of development, we finally got our technology to work inside everyday devices, headphones, earbuds, glasses, helmets, et cetera. Uh, and we started to go out and identify like what is a real pain point for people. And what we found out, uh, is that there's this huge issue happening, especially because of COVID of burnout and mental fatigue. Uh, and you know, for example, we, we met with call center, they had a 30% retention rate. Like that's awful. You know, we met with, uh, college students and a lot of them are burnt out from classes, you know, aircraft, you know, controllers, for example, they get tired, you know, 30% of accidents in, in the Air Force are caused because of fatigue. Like, that's crazy. And so we found this really big need point, which is just something as simple as understanding when a person's focus starts to go downward, and then telling them to take a break, because by the time we take a break, we already feel tired. We should have taken one significantly earlier. Otherwise, that leads to burnout. And it's already known, but most people think, oh, I'll take a break when I feel tired. That's too late. And so we went down this direction and we did a study with the University of Graz, and we were able to demonstrate that we could not only identify fatigue, we could actually identify when a person was going to fail at a task 30 minutes before that moment occurred. And so now you're talking about you know, pilots, for example. Hey, your fatigue is trending to a point that at the task that you're doing, in 30 minutes, if you don't stop and take a break, you're going to get into an accident, right? And so that, that saves lives. And even from an office setting, it's just the fact that, like, people aren't getting burnt out, you know? And so we did a study with the Mayo Clinic in office settings where we had people come in, use our system, uh, by taking random breaks, no breaks, uh, and then also our, our breaks based off of brain data. And we were able to show that at the end of the day, people actually reported 20% decrease in stress, which is pretty significant, and a 70% increase in day— end of day happiness, which is really big. And all the only thing we did behaviorally is we told them to take a break in the right timeframes. So they were more energized, they did less errors in their work. And then at the end of the day, they actually felt accomplished. And they felt energized about the work that they did instead of feeling burnt out, getting home, you know, pouring themselves a cereal, you know, with milk and being depressed. You know, it's like they were like, wow, I really crushed it today and I feel energized. And like, how do you give people that feeling more and more?

Do you think we'll look back at sort of the 20th century or whatever and think it was pretty medieval in terms of our understanding of the brain? Yeah, absolutely.

Like, Yeah, it's kind of crazy, you know, and I think we're going to feel that way about cancer too. Like, it's crazy to think that we use radiation to kill cancer, you know, it's like these cells consume more energy so they will die sooner, but we're just going to kill everything inside you, right? And like, that's essentially a lot of what we do with the brain too, right? Whenever we take a pill, we're just like, well, we think it works here, but like, you know, it regulates and changes so much, you know, it's like, it very is, it really is medieval what we're doing. It just feels modern, but it's not, right? And as we get to understand more, be able to develop more specialized therapies, it's, it's, things are going to, you know, there's a revolution coming and a lot of that has to happen with how do we give access to this data more continuously to people.

I think it's partly the invasive nature of it that people, I mean, I don't think they necessarily appreciate that this is non-invasive. I think that is a distinction to make, isn't it?

For sure. And, and that's a big distinction as well too. But what I would just say is like, we're so far away from the scary stuff, you know. It's like, I, I just, I just went to this military, uh, uh, conference, uh, where they were asking us about BCIs, brain-computer interfaces, and, and like their applications in all these areas. And, you know, I was with some of the top CEOs in the field. And it's, it's, you know, we all came up there and we basically said, look, we're trying to help somebody with ALS communicate. Like, like it's having somebody control a fighter pilot jet is just not going to happen anytime soon. Super soldiers.

Is this like N3 at DARPA?

Like, get that out of your head. Like, that's just not going to happen anytime soon. But that's happening, right? Is it? No, it's not. We're so far away from that. We're so far away from that, right? Like having somebody type at a pace that's anywhere close to human-level speech, we're just trying to get to there first, right? And that's on the invasive side, right? On the non-invasive side, you have to worry about it less as well too. I'm not saying let's not be worried, let's not put these ethics into place. I think it's something that we should do and we should all be responsible for, but don't let the fearmongering impact the value that can come out of brain-computer interfaces and the real good that they can do to billions of people.

At Nurable, we're not waiting for the future. We're building it into the devices we use every day. Nurable. The mind unlocked.

I also spoke with AJ Keller, together with co-founder Alex Castillo. They run Neurocity. They developed an EEG device called the Crown, which sits on your head and uses signal processing to translate your brainwaves.

I am the CEO and co-founder of Neurocity. We are a company that is striving to be the most trusted and loved neurotechnology company in the world. The products that we're currently making are essentially brain imaging for consumers to do in real time at their home. This company was started because I believe in the future we'll all have access to incredible abilities to image our brain and track our brains all from the comfort of our own home, whether that's our office chair or a bed or a couch. You know, we'll be able to comfortably learn more about our brains on a very regular basis. I think computers do an incredible job of showing up for people every single day and giving people the ability to rely on computers, uh, is really what's exciting about this. And giving computers the ability to understand humans and giving them this new data set is just going to create this entire, you know, new world. And I think that potential is just so worthwhile and exciting to work on. So that's really, uh, where Neurosity came from.

Do you think people are ready for this? I mean, the general public?

I love being able to bring a technology that's been done in clinics home to people. You know, it's time to come home. It's time to bring this technology home. Yeah, I think people are ready. We've been traveling all over the world to go to these clinics to get our brains imaged. We only get to get our brains imaged when we slam our heads into something like a car crash or a football injury, you know. So I think, yeah, it's time to bring this home and it's time to be able to, uh, get this technology in our hands. Just like it's useful to have an iPhone in our hands, it's going to be useful to have a brain computer, a Crown on our heads.

Yeah, exactly, the Crown. So you've got some beautiful footage on your website. You know, it really looks amazing hardware, but it's also, I'm sure some people will think it's a little odd. Tell us how it works and how you kind of wear it and what it does.

We wanted to create something that was able to image the entire brain and was able to scan the entire head. And we knew that if we could create something like that, that would be tremendously useful for ourselves to write software applications or neuroscientists looking to do research. You know, it would give them a lot of help being able to image the whole brain, you know, not just imaging it from the forehead, but actually being able to see what's going on in the back of the head, the side of the head, and the front of the head and how all that energy sort of swirls around. We really wanted to be able to bring that to the programmers, to give that to the power of the programmers. And so the Crown's design had to fit on the back of the head, and we didn't want to put anything on the face of the person. You know, we wanted to create something that looked beautiful and that stood out and that gave the wearer confidence. It's definitely something unique, and it's been really helpful for us to be able to make our own design. Because we are not trying to fit it into anything, you know, and we have the ability to sort of carve our own desires and wants into the design of it so that we can fit many head shapes and hairstyles. So, you know, the crown can go through long hair, short hair, it can, you know, be comfortable for people with no hair as well. So really that was a lot of the big focus was how can we image the brain on everyone's head There has been one customer who, in particular, one target market in particular, that sends us an email if the device breaks, is like waiting for the new replacement device to get to them. And it's like, where's my tracking number? Like, I haven't gotten my tracking number yet today. And you said you were gonna send it yesterday. Like, what's going on here? These are programmers, these are people who most of the time have struggled a lot of their life to voluntarily be able to do their best work. But what The Crown, what our solution provides, is this voluntary way to get better at doing your best work and to sort of slip into a focus state, sort of like accidentally get into flow state just by showing up and by doing this priming before you work. This mobile app experience we have That's really the biggest use case we've seen. The really great part of programmers and why I think it's an amazing thing is the more programmers that we get to use this, there's going to be this snowball effect where programmers have to program the things that are around them. Like there aren't that many hardware platforms, right? But what programmers can do is write software for the hardware platforms. So they are compelled to make software for the things around them. So my hope is that as we have programmers be the first target market because they can afford it, they're sitting at home with good Wi-Fi, you know, they're stationary, they can have space on their desk to put it and keep it charging, uh, they're early adopters, they're receptive to, you know, technical difficulties, uh, they're receptive to lacking technical documentation, and they can sort of fill in the gaps. All of those things aside, and why it's a great target market and beachhead market, is that they really need it, right? They, they really desperately need it because they can't work with, you know, if they're not able to get into that flow. And then there's this whole thing where, you know, we have the Neurocity platform that has an open, free SDK and API for people to build apps for. So a lot of the organic growth that we've seen from this target market often comes from the applications that they're creating themselves, the way that they're integrating into their lives. That's something that they feel they can go viral with, with their own communities. And so there's just like all of these components that make it just the best target market. And I'm a programmer and my co-founder is a programmer, so it really resonates with us. We know the problems. I'm a programmer with ADHD, so I doubly know the problems. I can see my co-founder who doesn't have ADHD sit down and start working, and it's the most amazing thing I witness. And then me, I sit there and I'm like a little Pong game going back and forth, you know? So I think you know, just the differences in that and the problems that we have, you know, we're really ripe for disruption in this space. And, you know, programmers right now are only turning to like Adderall and Red Bulls and just like trying to do anything just to get focused. So, you know, this is a, this is a great target market for us and have been really receptive. And definitely, you know, thank you to all the programmers, if anyone's listening, that have supported us along this way as well.

What happens to the data, AJ? I wanted to ask you that about, you know, because people do have concerns around privacy, autonomy. Who's collecting what data? Where does it reside? How is it treated? How can you access it yourself? Tell me a little bit about the data.

When Alex and I started this company, we said, we're not going to put privacy on the back burner. We're not going to make the device and then figure out, OK, how do we make this private? But we said from day one, how do we make this something that is using the same standard of encryption and technology that Gmail uses? To secure your email? You know, why do you have confidence that, you know, your teammate isn't going to see your emails? Right. Like, why do we have that confidence? It's because years of trust and effort have been put into encryption and authentication and authorization. So the Crown is actually the only neurotech device in the world that you have to authenticate and authorize applications to get data from it. So let's say a third-party developer wants to make an application for detecting epileptic seizures and start building a dataset for epileptic seizures where the users who have epilepsy, you know, if they feel a fit is coming on or they have a fit, they're able to tag it and, you know, we're able to save that data. But in that user's experience, the first time they sign into that application, they're hitting you know, connect your NeuroCiti account to this. And they're saying, do you authorize Joe's epilepsy app to collect, you know, raw brain activity, you know, accelerometer data, you know, and can store this data, right? And you say yes, yes, yes. And you authorize it. And the Crown's the only device that has that, you know, and that's because we have an entire computer that's running on the actual device. When it comes to encryption and authentication, you have to have cryptographic capabilities on the device. And a lot of these IoT devices that you see out there don't have cryptographic capabilities on their devices, but the Crown absolutely does have cryptographic capabilities. It has a secure enclave that's able to store, you know, sensitive information. It's running Linux, the same stuff that Android is running. It's running the most up-to-date version of that. We do over-the-air updates to apply patches, and it's incredibly private. Once you have claimed your Crown, nobody else has access to that data, and only you have access to that data. We just started doing a research program where you can opt in to submit your data. Don't— you don't opt out. We have this thing that I invented called an opt-in culture where all of our devices and all of our software applications assume that the user has opted out and we request if the user would like to opt in. And so using this sort of methodology where everything is locked down from day one and then anything on top of that, you're asking the user for explicit permission that's revocable, you know, at any time and really just using the same stuff that we use in the rest of our everyday lives to keep it secure.

So that's the tech. Personalised wearable devices that can effectively monitor and analyse your thoughts, your emotions, maybe your focus or alertness, and help provide you with insights about your own brain. As Neurable say, your brain knows best. But what of the sovereignty over our own brains and brain data? That's something I touch on in the book a bit, The Future of You, but Nita Farahani has given it a name. Cognitive liberty. Yes, this type of neuroscience gives us intimate access to our own brain data, but what happens if governments or companies or our employers or any kind of rogue actor gains access to our own brain data too? Let's return to Nita Farahani to explore this more. I can understand that people want to put data in, you know, data trusts, and there are biobanks and all of these things going on, and it can be incredibly useful for a community or a locality or a group of people. But actually, data solidarity shouldn't be the default, should it? Cognitive liberty should.

Cognitive liberty should absolutely be the default. And, you know, and I think if we could get to the place where we had a data repository that I knew wasn't going to be mined and misused and could be used to address some of the leading causes of neurological disease and suffering, I would happily contribute to it if I had the choice and if the default rule was to have the data be my data and if I had a right to cognitive liberty and if I knew that I was secure against the misuse of that data. So, you know, if we could design a world in which people could choose to confidently share their brain data for limited circumstances, for limited purposes, for, you know, common good applications that they believed in, I'd be all for that, right? But, um, but you know, all of those things I said have to be in place to make that possible. And that's not the world we live in right now. It's a world that we could make possible by making the right choices now. But I think one of the things that I'm trying to make clear with The Battle for Your Brain is just how urgent this dialogue is, how little time we have to put into place default rules that protect individuals because The battle has arrived, right? It is here. It is already in workplaces. It's already being used by the government. It's already being invested in. People are already unwittingly giving up their brain data. The default is again in favor of government and corporate use and commodification of our brain data, but it isn't yet widespread. It's about to be. It's about to be in our headphones and in our earbuds and in our everyday devices. And before that moment occurs, if we put into place rights in favor of the individual, a right to cognitive liberty, we can flip the terms of service and put it in the hands of individuals rather than favoring corporations and government misuse and abuse of our brains.

Yes, because how much of this do you see in sort of marketing and manipulation? I know you cover manipulation in the book, and I think it's one of the most interesting areas. Because we're becoming more and more savvy to perhaps media manipulation now that we just didn't maybe see decades ago. That's perhaps awakening us to some of these issues. But of course, lots of people are being nudged, as we would say in the UK, by behavioral economics departments and teams and behavioral science. And it feels like it's not too much of a leap to move from sort of behavioural economics and nudging to sort of these attempts to alter your cognitive biases or emotions or start playing with the subconscious. Can you just tell us a little bit about what you foresee in that area?

Yeah, so I write about mental manipulation is what I call it. And I try to give a spectrum of that, which is everything from neuromarketing techniques that just try to better understand or our preferences and desires, and it's not that different from other forms of marketing, as icky as it may seem, to intentionally trying to bypass our freedom of action, meaning trying to hijack our neural processes to have us addicted to platforms, to have us unable to tear ourselves away, to really try to overcome our natural preferences and desires to do otherwise. And I think techniques that are designed to tap into that system in ways that are harmful to us and, you know, kind of meant to take control in many ways of how we act and react and behave, I think those are the ones that we should be the most suspicious of. Those are the ones that I think, you know, are more likely to fall on the line of impermissible manipulation that interferes with our freedom of thought. And so it's the hardest category, I think. That was really like the chapter that I struggled the most with philosophically, is to figure out kind of where other people have come down on this. How does the brain actually work? What are the techniques that people are trying to use? And what are the concerns with it? Like, what is it that feels so wrong about it? And can we articulate that in laws and regulations and normative lines that would help us be able to regulate it, to prevent those kinds of encroachments on cognitive liberty? And as begrudgingly as I, you know, kind of come about it and conclude on it, there are some practices that I don't like, but that I don't think the sword of freedom of thought is the right way to regulate. I think it's too heavy of a hammer. I think it interferes with too much. Ordinary human interaction to try to ban it.

Because there's a fine line between persuasion and manipulation. Persuasion's right, fine, isn't it? Kind of. But manipulation is not.

I mean, it's what we're trying to do every day. I'm trying to persuade people to, you know, care about the right to cognitive liberty and to be part of the conversation. And, you know, so I think one of the earliest skills that we develop, which I talk about in the book, is theory of mind of others. And when theory of mind comes online, then we're trying to use those theories of mind to persuade other people. So we don't want to interfere with that. And we certainly don't want to invite the government into regulating the interactions between ordinary humans to say like, "Nope, that's on the wrong side of the line and this is on the right side of the line." So we have to be careful about where we draw that line. And I offer an interpretation of how to do so in the book.

As we draw to a close, I've got a bit of a mad futurist question. You're a futurist as well, so I'm sure you've thought about this. Say we've uploaded our brains, we've done some mind uploading or downloading, however you want to think of it, and say, and I know we have to suspend our disbelief a little bit here, say that we can put our brain in some sort of, you know, digital substrate. Will that digital brain or mind have the same rights, the same cognitive liberty as our human meatspace version?

That's a good question, right? I mean, it's almost, I mean, it's basically the AI question too, right? Which is, you know, like, is the digital representation of self, you know, something that is self? Is there something uniquely human about our cognition and our processes? I hope there is something uniquely human about what it means to be human and that is different from machines. But, and I also think that the idea that we could fully upload our brains ignores that a lot of our cognition and our affective experiences are extended beyond just our brains, right? And so we would have to upload so much more than just literally our brains to make—

Have to clone ourselves really, wouldn't we?

Essentially, yeah. And you know, and it's not just your brain and your nervous system and, you know, how you have this extended personality throughout your body and what you interact with, but it is your interaction with the environment that gives rise to a lot of the different experiences and mental processes that you have. And so in that world where all of that could be captured, right, and we're not just talking about brain uploading, we are talking about the full human experience being uploaded, then yeah, I think that we would have the same rights and, you know, we would have the right to cognitive liberty in that form as well. But you can see that as a futurist, I have some disbelief about being able to reduce the entirety of the human experience into digital bits and bytes that can then be uploaded.

Yeah, it is different, isn't it, the analog brain and the digital substrate? So Nita, then what's your final message for people in terms of getting more involved in this subject matter, understanding more, you know, initiating more conversations around it so that we can push this agenda of cognitive liberty?

I mean, I hope to make many, many more cognitive liberty advocates out there in the world to be part of the conversation. And I think the very first step is to get educated. I think, You know, my purpose in reading this book is ideally to spark a global conversation and to make it accessible to everybody for people to understand what's happening and to be familiar with and understand what the issues are that are at stake. Like what rights are at stake? What does it mean to connect your brain to corporations and governments? Like what is it that you really are putting at stake in the debate? So first is to get educated. And I think a good way to do that is of course to read my book. So I hope people will. Which is to read "The Battle for Your Brain: Defending the Right to Think Freely in the Age of Neurotechnology." But I will say, I am far from the only person in this debate. There are so many thoughtful scholars, advocates, big thinkers. Where else would you recommend people look?

Are there journals? Are there good websites?

So, I mean, there was a wonderful Nature Electronics journal that just came out that declared BCI, the brain-computer interface, the technology of the year there. Are, you know, the OECD has recommendations for regulation of neurotechnology. The UN has, you know, dug into this issue. There are thoughtful scholars across the globe who are coming to the table and are offering different perspectives on these issues. And I think that diversity of thought is so important to push this issue forward and have helped push my thinking forward as well. But I'd say it's so important for people to get educated, become part of the debate, And then realize that they have choices to make, right? It isn't just like at a societal level, like, oh, let's hope somebody passes cognitive liberty. People have to start exercising their own right to cognitive liberty and they have to treat it differently. They cannot unwittingly give up their brain data just as easily as they've given up all of the rest of their data. They need to make deliberate choices as they buy AirPods and headphones and watches that have neural interface and not just think like, 'Oh, this is the next cool technology,' but figure out what the terms of service are under which that technology is being offered to you. If their employer is mandating it, demand that it be put into writing about exactly what they plan to do with that data, what they're collecting, and demand a transparent policy about that and push back, right? If the employer says, 'I'm going to track your brain activity,' push back and join with others to push back against that and say, 'No, you know what, this actually violates the fundamental dignity of what it means to be human. And so I want people to be much more active in this debate and in this conversation. And, you know, you start by becoming aware and you then transition into using that awareness as a tool of empowerment.

So really cognitive liberty is as much a responsibility as it is a right, isn't it?

Absolutely. It is as much a responsibility as it is a right.

Thank you for listening to The Future of You hosted by me, Tracey Follows. Check out the show notes for more info about the topics covered in this episode. Do like and subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. And if you know someone you think will enjoy this episode, please do share it with them. Visit thefutureofyou.co.uk for more on the future of identity in a digital world, and Futuremade.consulting for the future of everything else. The Future of You podcast is produced by Big Tent Media.