THE BRAIN & HUMAN PERFORMANCE

The Right to Lie

In 2018, Dr. Mouna Esmaeilzadeh reported on live television about a laboratory reconstructing images directly from brain activity. Today, researchers can decode inner speech — what you think when you are not even trying to speak. The technology that gives paralysed patients their voice back could also give governments access to the most private space in existence. This essay is about why lying is a human right — and why your mental privacy is being dismantled while legislation sleeps.

Lying is a human right.

Not the big lies — not fraud, not deception, not manipulation. The small ones. The ones that hold civilisation together.

You told your grandmother her soup was delicious. You told your boss you respected the decision. You smiled at someone you did not particularly like because the alternative would have made everyone's day worse.

These are not moral failures. They are how human society functions.

The freedom not to say what we think is part of what makes us human. Not revealing who you are in love with. Not confessing what you dreamed last night. Not broadcasting the fleeting, ugly, beautiful, contradictory thoughts that pass through your mind every waking second.

That freedom is the precondition for diplomacy, relationships, politics, art, therapy, religion. Without it, there is no privacy. No autonomy. No self.

And right now, it is being taken from you.

The miracle and the threat

In 2018, I reported on Swedish national television about a laboratory in Kyoto that was reconstructing images directly from human brain activity. The images people were looking at were being decoded and recreated by a machine. In other segments, I had reported on paralysed patients playing piano with the power of thought, and I was passionate about technology enabling stroke patients and others who had lost the ability to speak to communicate with the world again.

In 2024, Casey Harrell, an ALS patient who had lost his voice, spoke his first sentence in years through a brain implant. The device decoded the signals when he tried to speak — silent speech. He broke down in tears. "It is like being imprisoned," he said. "This technology can bring people back into life."

In the right hands, this is a miracle. Patients like Casey are given back the gift of connection.

In the wrong hands, it looks very different. An employer measuring your focus signals. A police officer wanting to know what you were thinking during interrogation. An autocrat identifying dissidents before they have had the chance to speak.

From reading images to reading thoughts

In August 2025, researchers at Stanford succeeded in decoding four patients with ALS and stroke who carried microelectrodes in the motor cortex. They were not reading what the patients were trying to say. They were reading inner speech — what you think when you are not even attempting to say anything at all. When the patients thought the words, the researchers could decode the signals.

As a privacy safeguard, they built in a mental password function: you think a specific phrase to unlock the decoding. Otherwise, your thoughts remain private.

The fact that Stanford even needed to build that function is the entire point. Mental privacy must be designed in. Or it dies.

And as researchers in Seattle demonstrated in 2013, it is possible to use technology to let one brain control another. One person thinks "shoot." Another person's index finger moves involuntarily.

This is not science fiction. China is already monitoring EEG signals from factory workers. In the United States, EEG headsets are sold to employers to track employees' stress and focus levels. Legal protections do not exist.

The law is asleep

In 2021, I sat on an AI advisory board ahead of the EU's first AI regulation. I raised the need for brain rights, even though it felt distant at the time. Now it feels close. Urgent. The AI Act that followed regulates how AI may read your face. But not how AI may read your brain.

It is time we introduce brain rights.

Our thoughts are the most sacred thing we possess. And until now, the most secret. But we now have technology that can read them. The question is how you will protect them going forward.

Mental privacy is the precondition for all other rights. Freedom of thought means nothing if your thoughts can be extracted without consent. Freedom of speech means nothing if silence is no longer an option. The right to a fair trial means nothing if the accused's inner life can be surveilled.

Every right we hold depends on one assumption so fundamental that we have never needed to state it explicitly: that the space inside your head belongs to you. That assumption is no longer safe.

The technology is already awake. Legislation is still sleeping.

The question is not whether your thoughts will be readable. They will.

The question is whether you demand that they are protected — or whether you trust that someone else will do it for you.

— Mouna