Protecting Privacy in Your Brain

**Rafael Yuste** (0:02)
The brain is not just another organ of the body, but the one that generates our mind, all of our mental activity, and that's the heart of what makes us human, is our mind. So this technology is one technology that for the first time in history can actually get to the core of what makes us human, and not only potentially decipher, but manipulate the essence of our humanity. 10 years ago, we had a breakthrough with starting the mouse visual cortex, in which we were able to not just decode from the brain activity of the mouse what the mouse was looking at, but to manipulate the brain activity of the mouse, to make the mouse see things that it was not looking at. Essentially, we introduce in the brain of the mouse images like hallucinations, and in doing so, we took control over the perception and behavior of the mouse, so the mouse started to behave as if it was seeing what we were essentially putting into his brain by activating groups of neurons. So this was fantastic scientifically, but that night I didn't sleep because it hit me like a ton of bricks, like, wait a minute, what we can do in a mouse today, you can do in a human tomorrow. And this is what I call my Oppenheimer moment. Like, oh my god, what have we done here?

**Cindy Cohn** (1:32)
That's the renowned neuroscientist, Rafael Yuste, talking about the moment he realized that his groundbreaking brain research could have incredibly serious consequences. I'm Cindy Cohn, the Executive Director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

**Jason Kelley** (1:48)
And I'm Jason Kelley, EFF's Activism Director. This is our podcast, How to Fix the Internet.

**Cindy Cohn** (1:56)
On this show, we flipped the script from the dystopian doom and gloom thinking that we all get mired in when thinking about the future of tech. We're here to challenge ourselves, our guests, and our listeners to imagine a better future that we can be working towards. How can we make sure to get this right? And what can we look forward to if we do? And today, we have two guests who are at the forefront of brain science and are thinking very hard about how to protect us from the dangers that might seem like science fiction today but are becoming more and more likely.

**Jason Kelley** (2:28)
Rafael Yuste is one of the world's most prominent neuroscientists. He's been working in the field of Neurotechnology for many years and was one of the researchers who led the Brain Initiative launched by the Obama Administration, which was a large-scale research project akin to the genome project but focusing on brain research. He's the director of the Neurotechnology Center at Columbia University and his research has enormous implications for a wide range of mental health disorders, including schizophrenia and neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson's and ALS.

**Cindy Cohn** (2:58)
But, as Rafael points out in the introduction, there are scary implications for technology that can directly manipulate someone's brain.

**Jason Kelley** (3:07)
We're also joined by his partner, Jared Genser, a legendary human rights lawyer who has represented no less than five Nobel Peace Prize laureates. He's also the Senior Tech Fellow at Harvard University's Carr-Ryan Center for Human Rights, and together with Rafael, he founded the Neurorights Foundation, an international advocacy group that is working to enshrine human rights as a crucial part of the development of neuro technology.

**Cindy Cohn** (3:30)
We started our conversation by asking how the brain scientist and the human rights lawyer first teamed up.

**Rafael Yuste** (3:36)
I knew nothing about the law. I knew nothing about human rights my whole life. I said, okay, I avoided that like the past because, you know what, I have better things to do, which is to focus on some other brain words. But I was just dragged into the middle of this by our own work. No, so it was a very humbling moment. And that said, okay, you know what, I have to cross to the other side and get involved really with the experts that know how this works. And that's how I ended up talking to Jared. The whole reason we got together was pretty funny. We both got the same award from a Swedish foundation, and from the Talberg Foundation, this Eliasson Award for Global Leadership. In my case, because of the work I did on the Brain Initiative, and Jared got this award for his human rights work. And you know, this is one good thing of getting an award, or let me put it differently. At least getting an award led to something positive. In these cases, that someone in the award committee is like, wait a minute, you guys should be talking to each other. And they put us in touch. He was like a matchmaker.