Nita Farahany argues that we need to establish a new human right of Cognitive Liberty in order to address the threats of Neurotech like VR, AR, BCIs, & non-invasive neural interfaces in her new book Battle for the Brain: Defending the Right to Think Freely in the Age of Neurotechnology (releasing on March 14th). Cognitive Liberty is a umbrella term that includes a complex of other human rights including mental privacy, freedom of thought, and self-determination, but clearly defining this novel concept of cognitive liberty will hopefully provide a pathway for creating the philosophical, legal, and ethical foundations to create viable regulations around these new forms of sensitive brain data, physiological data, and biometric data as well as the inferences that can be made from it.

Farahany’s book is a tour de force of scholarship that is not only catching everyone up on the last decade’s worth of neurotechnology research and enterprise industry developments, and it was actually Meta’s acquisition of CTRL-Labs & their wrist-based EMG interface into VR and AR (see my previous coverage in episodes #814 & #987) that was a catalyst for her to write this book as we’re on the threshold of these neurotechnologies starting to be deployed at a much broader consumer scale. She does a comprehensive audit of both the promises and perils of these neurotech applications across multiple contexts in order to develop of the novel concept of a new human right of Cognitive Liberty and it’s associated rights in order to address the threats from these technologies.