The Battle for Your Brain Quotes

“When scientists studied over three thousand games played by forty chess players, they discovered that at least two drugs could substantially boost players’ scores: modafinil, by an average of 15 percent, and Ritalin, by 13 percent. Even caffeine, the most commonly used cognitive enhancer, improved performance by an average of 9 percent!”
― Nita A. Farahany, The Battle for Your Brain: Defending the Right to Think Freely in the Age of Neurotechnology

“A recent report claims the Chinese government is already using cutting-edge AI and neurotechnology to analyze facial expressions and brain waves to see if a person is attentive to “thought and political education.”
― Nita A. Farahany, The Battle for Your Brain: Defending the Right to Think Freely in the Age of Neurotechnology

“Hackers could even install brain spyware into the apps and devices you are using. A research team led by UC Berkeley computer science professor Dawn Song tried this on gamers who were using neural interface to control a video game. As they played, the researchers inserted subliminal images into the game and probed the players’ unconscious brains for reaction to stimuli—like postal addresses, bank details, or human faces. Unbeknownst to the gamers, the researchers were able to steal information from their brains by measuring their unconscious brain responses that signaled recognition to stimuli, including a PIN code for one gamer’s credit card and their home address.”
― Nita A. Farahany, The Battle for Your Brain: Defending the Right to Think Freely in the Age of Neurotechnology

“sensor”
― Nita A. Farahany, The Battle for Your Brain: Defending the Right to Think Freely in the Age of Neurotechnology

“A team at the University of California, San Francisco, implanted a BCI device in Sarah, a patient who previously suffered from intractable depression. “When we turned this treatment on, our patient’s depression symptoms dissolved, and in a remarkably small time she went into remission,” Dr. Katherine Scangos, a neuroscientist and psychiatrist told CNN. “It was like a switch.”43 A year later, Sarah is free of both depression and any side effects from the treatment.”
― Nita A. Farahany, The Battle for Your Brain: Defending the Right to Think Freely in the Age of Neurotechnology

“Instead of drilling a hole in the skull or strapping a device onto the body, Synchron uses the “stentrode”—a device that looks like a small tube of wire mesh, and remarkably can be implanted via a catheter, much like the stents that physicians use to treat heart patients. The stentrode is fed into the jugular vein in the neck and threaded through a blood vessel that enters the brain. The device is tuned to detect the electrical signals that travel from the brain to give instructions to the limbs and fingers to move. Those signals, relayed through Bluetooth to a device outside the body, are translated by algorithms into computer commands. CEO Thomas Oxley describes it as “bringing electronics into the brain without the need for open-brain surgery.” Four Australian patients with neurodegenerative disorders have been implanted with the stentrode and are able to email, text, and even shop for groceries using only their minds.34 Synchron has also started clinical trials in the United States. Once widescale safety and efficacy have been established, it’s not hard to imagine that even a healthy individual might want a stentrode to more seamlessly interface with technology or reach just a little closer to digital immortality.”
― Nita A. Farahany, The Battle for Your Brain: Defending the Right to Think Freely in the Age of Neurotechnology

“Antonio Regalado of the MIT Technology Review, who has his finger on the pulse of emerging technologies, has advised us to “pay attention to Nectome. The company has won a large federal grant and is collaborating with Edward Boyden, a top neuroscientist at MIT, and its technique just claimed an $80,000 science prize for [cryo]preserving a pig’s brain so well that every synapse inside it could be seen with an electron microscope.”
― Nita A. Farahany, The Battle for Your Brain: Defending the Right to Think Freely in the Age of Neurotechnology

“When researchers asked students about their attitudes toward skipping class, they reported strongly negative attitudes toward doing so, but then skipped class more frequently in the weeks following.95 When study participants were asked how often they would go out drinking or watch television instead of studying, they also did so more frequently in the week following.96 But when framed negatively—telling participants that drinking and wasting time watching television are vices to be avoided—the vice behavior remained the same.97 How an influencer frames a question can liberate us to sin or increase our ability to avoid doing so.”
― Nita A. Farahany, The Battle for Your Brain: Defending the Right to Think Freely in the Age of Neurotechnology

“The New York Times reporter Charles Duhigg puzzled over a similar issue—why people weren’t donating to Syrian refugee relief. One answer came from his interviews with the social scientists Jennifer van Heerde-Hudson and David Hudson, who have spent years studying how charities solicit donations. “Children who have lost their homes, starving families, the heartstring things,” David Hudson told him. “That’s what everyone believes works.” But they found the opposite to be true. When campaigns shift from images of poverty-stricken children and messages like “Please donate before it’s too late” to hopeful and inspiring images of children holding signs like FUTURE DOCTOR, people are more likely to give. “If you can trigger a sense of hope, donations go up,” explained Mr. Hudson.28 Or as Duhigg puts it, “It’s not entirely your fault” if you aren’t donating to refugees. “You just haven’t been manipulated properly.” When neuromarketers tweaked an unsuccessful campaign by the Italian UNCHR for refugees, its new commercial led to a 237 percent increase in sellable calls over the prior one. The brains of test subjects showed them how to do it. The first commercial had low emotional arousal throughout, and poor engagement during the final call to action. Using EEG insights from participants watching the commercial, they modified the new commercial with new images to evoke greater empathy in viewers, and with new visual effects in the call to action that better engaged viewers’ brains.29”
― Nita A. Farahany, The Battle for Your Brain: Defending the Right to Think Freely in the Age of Neurotechnology

“A recent survey of Chinese doctors found that 98 percent of them would tell family members about a cancer diagnosis before telling the patient, and 82 percent would follow the family’s wishes as to whether the patient should be told.27 While the Western approach to disclosure of information is now different, it hasn’t been that way for very long. A 1961 study in Chicago surveyed doctors on this same question. Ninety percent said they wouldn’t inform a cancer patient of their diagnosis, and that they would deliberately mislead them to protect them.”
― Nita A. Farahany, The Battle for Your Brain: Defending the Right to Think Freely in the Age of Neurotechnology

“Dr. Richard Davidson, a neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, had been meditating for more than forty years when he redirected his research to the effects of meditation on the brain. This shift in his work occurred at a meeting with the Dalai Lama, who wondered at the focus of his research: “You’ve been using the tools of modern neuroscience to study depression, and anxiety, and fear. Why can’t you use these same tools to study kindness and compassion?”11 This question would lead him on a journey to find out just how much we can learn from EEG.”
― Nita A. Farahany, The Battle for Your Brain: Defending the Right to Think Freely in the Age of Neurotechnology

“Brain-fingerprinting technology using P300 is just one of several approaches to probing the brain. A scientifically promising approach uses a different ERP brain response called the N400. You could show a suspect a series of faces that includes their suspected coconspirators. Their N400 brain signals would be more negative for “incongruent” faces that didn’t belong than for “congruent” faces that did. Similarly, you could pair words together like “body” and “lake” versus “body” and “basement” to try to find out where a murder victim’s corpse is hidden.83 DARPA’s Neural Evidence Aggregation Tool program is exploring the promise of N400 signals to interrogate the brain for “congruent” and “incongruent” facts.”
― Nita A. Farahany, The Battle for Your Brain: Defending the Right to Think Freely in the Age of Neurotechnology

“When investigative journalists David Kocieniewski and Peter Robinson broke the story about the ties between Donald Trump’s incoming national security advisor, Michael Flynn, and a company that sells brain wave technology to governments worldwide, surprisingly few people noticed.66 Serving alongside Flynn on Brainwave Science’s board of directors was Subu Kota, a software engineer who had pleaded guilty to selling highly sensitive defense technology to the KGB during the Cold War.67 Brainwave Science sells a technology called iCognative, which can extract information from people’s brains. Among its customers are the Bangladeshi defense forces as well as several Middle Eastern governments.68 Following some successful experiments at the Dubai Police Academy, Emirati authorities have recently deployed the technology in real murder investigations. At least two cases have successfully been prosecuted.69 In one case, the police were investigating a killing at a warehouse. Suspecting that an employee was involved, they forced the warehouse workers to don EEG headsets and showed them images of the crime. Purportedly, a photo of the murder weapon triggered a characteristic “recognition” pattern in one of the employee’s brains (the P300 wave), while none of the other employees showed a similar response. Confronted with that evidence, the suspect confessed, revealing details that only the guilty party could have known.”
― Nita A. Farahany, The Battle for Your Brain: Defending the Right to Think Freely in the Age of Neurotechnology

“In 2019, the Wall Street Journal reported that a primary school in Jinhua required its fifth-grade students to wear EEG headsets, which fed data to their teachers, parents, and the state. The US-based manufacturer and supplier of the devices, BrainCo, had shipped more than twenty thousand of them to China already.13 About an inch wide and made of black plastic, the Focus 1 (or Fu Si) headsets are worn across students’ foreheads. A light in the middle blazes red, yellow, or blue to signal the student’s engagement.14 More intensive brain wave data is sent in real time to the teacher’s computer, whose software generates real-time alerts about students’ attention levels. The teachers overseeing the program believed that brain monitoring substantially improved their students’ engagement. One student agreed, saying he had “become more attentive in class. All of my assignments come back with perfect grades.”15 Other students are less sanguine, having been punished by their parents for their low attention scores.”
― Nita A. Farahany, The Battle for Your Brain: Defending the Right to Think Freely in the Age of Neurotechnology

“Someday employers could nip labor organizing in the bud by monitoring employees’ growing brain synchrony. One recent study tracked the EEG signals of high school students over a semester and found that their brain activity became more synchronized as they focused on collective tasks.106 In other words, just by looking at patterns of brain activity across employees, it might be possible to tell who is planning something together like organizing a union. Those who are less engaged with the group can similarly be identified by their lower brain-to-brain synchrony.”
― Nita A. Farahany, The Battle for Your Brain: Defending the Right to Think Freely in the Age of Neurotechnology

“Imagine the future of work when brain monitoring becomes more ubiquitous if these laws and norms are not in place. After a banner year at the company, division manager Sue calls employee Pat to offer her a contract renewal with a 2 percent pay raise. Sue knows the company could easily afford and would be willing to pay up to 10 percent to retain her but hopes Pat will take less. Pat takes Sue’s call using her company-issued in-ear EEG earbuds. Pat keeps her voice even throughout the call so as not to give away her emotions and promises to follow up with Sue the next day. All the while, Sue has been watching Pat’s brain activity and decoding her emotional reaction to the news. Pat’s brain activity revealed joyfulness upon learning of the 2 percent pay raise and remained joyful throughout the day.97 The next day, Pat calls Sue and says that she was hoping for a bigger raise. But Sue can’t be bluffed; she knows that Pat was happy with the 2 percent raise; moreover, she now sees that Pat is fearful as she makes her request for a bigger one. Sue responds that 2 percent is the best the company can do, and Pat accepts the offer. Pat’s attempt to negotiate a better salary was over before it began. Even the staunchest freedom-of-contract libertarian would question the fairness of this negotiation.”
― Nita A. Farahany, The Battle for Your Brain: Defending the Right to Think Freely in the Age of Neurotechnology

“Wellness programs offer important benefits, but these data policies underscore the less visible and more dangerous privacy risks they pose.82 Most are exempt from traditional health data privacy regulations. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (known as HIPAA), for example, protects individuals’ identifiable health information in the United States. But it doesn’t apply when employers offer workplace wellness programs directly rather than in connection with their group health plans. Without laws preventing them from using the data collected through wellness programs, employers can mine the data they collect, which many do with abandon.83 Employers learn everything that employees share in the questionnaires and online surveys they complete as part of these programs, from what prescription drugs they use to whether they voted and when they stopped filling their birth control prescriptions.84 And employers are using that data in increasingly more intrusive ways.”
― Nita A. Farahany, The Battle for Your Brain: Defending the Right to Think Freely in the Age of Neurotechnology

“Research on workplace engagement funded by the Bavarian State Ministry for Education and Culture found that with EEG, it is now possible to classify the type of activity an individual is engaged in—central tasks (e.g., programming, database, web development), peripheral tasks (e.g., setting up a development environment, writing documentation), and meta tasks (e.g., social media browsing, reading news sites).47 As pattern classification of brain wave data becomes ever more sophisticated, employers will be able to tell not just whether you are alert or your mind is wandering but also whether you are surfing social media or developing code.”
― Nita A. Farahany, The Battle for Your Brain: Defending the Right to Think Freely in the Age of Neurotechnology

“As neurotechnology and the algorithms decoding them continue to improve, EEG-based systems will become the gold standard in workplace fatigue monitoring. Not just employers but society as a whole may soon decide that the gains in safety and productivity are well worth the costs in employee privacy. But how much we ultimately gain from workplace brain wearables depends largely on how employers leverage the technology. Will employees receive real-time feedback from the devices so they can act on it themselves? Will managers directly monitor employees’ incidence of fatigue? If so, will they use that information to improve workplace conditions? Or will it justify disciplinary actions, pay cuts, and terminations of employees who suffer from fatigue more often?”
― Nita A. Farahany, The Battle for Your Brain: Defending the Right to Think Freely in the Age of Neurotechnology