Post by Anne 🩵🩷🤍 [נעמי יעל] / Redsky

Brain implants that read minds: a medical miracle raises new ethical questions www.france24.com/en/health/20...

aug 31, 2025, 6:06 pm • 3 1

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The answer to all those questions is a firm "No!"

aug 31, 2025, 6:59 pm • 1 0 • view

"these advances have sparked a heated debate on “neurorights”, an emerging study aimed at protecting mental life from intrusion. In other words, will our “mental security” need to be defined and protected in the future?"

BCIs work by connecting a person's nervous system to implanted electrodes capable of interpreting brain activity, allowing them to perform actions – such as using a computer or moving a prosthetic hand – using only their thoughts. The technology could offer people with disabilities a renewed sense of autonomy. Researchers were previously able to give a voice to people unable to speak by capturing signals in the motor cortex of the brain as they attempted to move their mouths, tongues, lips and vocal cords. But the new Stanford University study has managed to bypass physical speech. “If we could decode that [inner speech], then that could bypass the physical effort,” Stanford neuroscientist and lead author of the new study Erin Kunz told The New York Times. “It would be less tiring, so they could use the system for longer.”

But these exciting advances come with privacy concerns. The study found that BCIs could also capture internal speech that participants had not been asked to imagine saying, raising the spectre of private thoughts being leaked against the user's will. Technology’s new ability to blur the line between voluntary and intimate thoughts has sparked fears of non-consensual mind reading. “This means that the line between private and public thought may be more blurred than we assume,” warned Nita Farahany, a professor of law and philosophy at Duke University and author of the book, “The Battle for Your Brain: Defending the Right to Think Freely in the Age of Neurotechnology”. “The more we push this research forward, the more transparent our brains become, and we have to recognise that this era of brain transparency really is an entirely new frontier for us,” Farahany noted in an interview with National Public Radio (NPR).

For her part, Evelina Fedorenko, a cognitive neuroscientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), who was not involved in the new study, noted that much of human thought is nonverbal. She noted that BCI studies showed high success rates when decoding words that patients consciously imagined saying, but the success rate fell when people responded to open-ended commands. When participants were asked to think about their favourite childhood hobby, Fedorenko noted that what was recorded was “mostly garbage”. A lot of spontaneous thoughts, she told the New York Times, are “just not well-formed linguistic sentences”.

aug 31, 2025, 6:10 pm • 1 0 • view