The EU is preparing legislation to protect brain data from commercial exploitation. This is a confirmation that cognitive integrity, the ability to think independently in algorithmically optimized environments, is now recognized as a fundamental right.
Neurotechnology enters everyday life
Earbuds that read brainwaves. Headbands that measure focus. Apps that claim to influence your dreams. What just a few years ago seemed like science fiction is now consumer products available to the general public.
A new report from Our Kindred Future shows that 29 out of 30 neurotech companies in the consumer market already have access to users' neural data without meaningful restrictions. The majority also share this data with third parties. Meanwhile, according to an American survey, 77% of marketing companies plan to experiment with so-called dream advertising.
The question has shifted. It now concerns who owns the rights to what technology finds in our thoughts. For a detailed overview of the technology, data collection, and legislative proposals, see Neurotechnology and Brain Data: What Is Collected, Who Owns It, and What Is the EU Doing?
From Data Protection to Thought Protection
The EU has been a world leader in digital rights. GDPR set the standard for personal data protection. The AI Act regulates artificial intelligence. But when it comes to brain data and cognitive freedom, regulations still lag behind.
Neural data still lacks explicit classification as sensitive personal data under GDPR. This allows companies to treat brainwave data like any other data stream, despite it being the most intimate information that exists about a human being.
Now demands for change are growing. UNESCO has called for stronger governance of neurotechnology. The European Parliament's science panel (STOA) has recommended new frameworks to protect mental autonomy. Chile has become the first country in the world to enshrine neurorights in its constitution. US states, including Colorado, California, and Montana, have already legislated neural data as sensitive personal information.
Europe risks falling behind without swift action.
Cognitive Integrity: The Concept That Unites the Perspectives
The proposed neurorights encompass three dimensions: mental privacy (protection against unauthorized collection of brain data), cognitive autonomy (freedom from manipulation), and psychological integrity (protection against subtle behavioral influence).
These are exactly the dimensions that the concept of cognitive integrity captures. A concept I have developed through nearly twenty years of work with digital behavior and recent years focusing on how AI systems affect human cognition.
Cognitive integrity concerns the ability to maintain a coherent and autonomous interpretive structure despite systemic fragmentation, algorithmic influence, and dopamine-driven design. The concept extends beyond individual capacity to become a systemic requirement, as fundamental as energy, water, or data.
Where personal integrity protects data from unauthorized use, cognitive integrity protects the brain from unauthorized reshaping.
The Threat Is Already Here
The neurotechnological development is merely the latest wave of a larger transformation. Over the past decade, digital environments have been systematically trained to optimize for engagement rather than understanding, for reactivity rather than reflection.
Research shows how the brain's physical structure gradually adapts to the cognitive patterns it inhabits. Synaptic pruning strengthens well-used pathways and weakens unused ones. Dendritic retraction causes neural networks for deep concentration to gradually weaken in environments that reward rapid context-switching.
This is what I call dopamine logic: reward systems that work in both directions. Systems are designed to exploit dopamine responses, which trains brains to expect and seek these responses, which makes the design patterns more effective. A feedback loop where system design and neural architecture evolve together.
With large language models, the development takes another step. Previous digital tools supported specific cognitive functions: calculators for computation, search engines for information retrieval. Language models deliver interpretation, the process that was previously exclusively human.
This creates what I call synthetic safety: the experience of cognitive security that arises when AI delivers well-structured, confident-sounding interpretations. It feels like rigorous thinking because the output appears well-considered. But the reasoning is synthetic. It emerges from statistical pattern matching rather than genuine understanding.
What Is at Stake
When neurotechnology meets algorithmic optimization and AI-generated interpretation, a perfect storm for cognitive erosion emerges. Brain data can be collected, analyzed, and used to reinforce exactly the patterns that weaken our capacity for independent thinking.
The question is larger than individual products or companies. It concerns a systemic shift where what shapes our thinking, the environments we inhabit, the tools we use, the information we receive, is increasingly governed by forces that optimize for goals other than our cognitive health.
If reflection thins out, so does democracy's resilience. If analysis is replaced by ready-made answers, society's ability to make decisions that endure over time weakens.
The Path Forward
The authors of the Our Kindred Future report propose six concrete measures for the EU: classify brain data as sensitive personal data, extend medical device regulation to neurofeedback products, enshrine cognitive self-determination in law, require ethical transparency and user control, introduce a NeuroSafe certification for consumer products, and fund independent research and public education.
These are important proposals. And legislation is only half the answer.
We also need to build understanding of how these systems affect us. We need to develop competencies to navigate algorithmically optimized environments while maintaining cognitive autonomy. We need to recognize cognitive integrity as a strategic resource, for individuals, organizations, and societies.
This is precisely the work we do at Erigo. By understanding the mechanisms, neuroplasticity, dopamine logic, synthetic safety, and cognitive endurance, we can build resilience against the logics of systems and protect the ability to think on our own terms.
Future resilience begins in the brain's capacity to interpret. It is time to protect that capacity: legally, technically, and cognitively.
Sources and Further Reading
External Source
Europe's Neurotech Moment: A Test of Cognitive Rights, Our Kindred Future, December 2025
Related Articles on Erigo
Cognitive Integrity: A Systemic Requirement in the Information Age
When the Brain Is Shaped by the System: And What Changes Faster Than We Think
Synthetic Safety: When Confirmation Logic in AI Affects Our Cognition
Bias in AI: Interpretations, Weightings, and Systemic Risks
Simultaneous Capacity in Digital Environments and the Loss of Depth
