Who Owns Your Brain Data?

The Battle for Your Brain: Defending the Right to Think Freely in the Age of Neurotechnology, by Nita A. Farahany, St. Martin’s, 288 pages, $29.99

“We are rapidly heading toward a world of brain transparency, in which scientists, doctors, governments, and companies may peer into our brains and minds at will,” Duke University bioethicist Nita A. Farahany declares in The Battle for Your Brain. As a defense against this neurosurveillance, her timely book argues for a right to cognitive liberty that includes “mental privacy, freedom of thought, and self-determination”—a right that allows us to track and hack our own brains but bars us from trespassing on other minds.

We face a choice, Farahany suggests: We can have a comprehensive surveillance-and-control dystopia or a world where individuals can choose to use devices and drugs that help them “work and learn smarter and faster, cure us of addiction and depression, and maybe even alleviate human suffering.”

On the surveillance side, the Chinese state electric grid company is already requiring tens of thousands of its workers to wear Entertech helmets embedded with brainwave-measuring sensors to detect fatigue and other mental states. Such electroencephalogram (EEG) monitoring technology also has been developed by the Australian company SmartCap. It is used by more than 5,000 consumers around the world, including mining and trucking companies, to detect employee fatigue on the job. The San Francisco–based company Emotiv has developed EEG earbuds that can detect when an employee’s focus on a task is flagging and suggest that he take a break.

Farahany describes a scenario in which a boss calls an employee wearing Emotiv earbuds to discuss a contract renewal with a 2 percent raise. Although the company would be willing to increase the employee’s pay up to 10 percent to keep her, the earbuds detect that she is happy with the proposed raise. Any salary negotiation would essentially be over before it begins. “Even the staunchest freedom-of-contract libertarian,” Farahany argues, “would question the fairness of this negotiation.”

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At the same time, Farahany is a fierce critic of regulators, physicians, and bioethicists who would paternalistically deny us access to our own brain data. The South Korean company iMediSync is marketing an EEG device that can detect early signs of Alzheimer’s dementia with 90 percent accuracy. It also can detect evidence of various other neurological conditions: Parkinson’s disease, traumatic brain injury, attention deficit disorder, even depression. Farahany argues that users should have access, unmediated and unrestricted by “experts,” to the brain data that consumer neurotech c