Wired Minds: Community Conversations on Hopes, Fears, and Choices in Neurotech

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Project Overview

In the last decade, our ability to measure and manipulate the brain activity underlying our thoughts, emotions, and actions has grown by leaps and bounds thanks to advances in sensor technology and machine learning capabilities. These advances have brought new hope to people with various disabilities, ranging from speech paralysis to major depressive disorder, but have also spurred controversy stemming from the concern that neurotechnologies such as brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) would fundamentally threaten our ability to think and act freely. 

In order to realize the Kavli Center's vision of a world in which the ethical trade-offs of science are well-balanced to benefit society, we must engage society with scientists. With generous funding from the Rita Allen Foundation, the Kavli Center for Ethics, Science, and the Public in partnership with Neuroscientist and Civic Science Fellow, Dr. Narayan Sankaran, is conducting a community and stakeholder engagement research project to understand and connect impacted communities and non-scientific perspectives into the research agenda for the development of novel neurotechnologies, such as Brain-Computer Interfaces that function as neuroprostheses for communication and mobility. The project engages and researches perspectives around the ethical tension between the benefits these technologies may confer for people with disabilities on the one hand, and the threats to mental privacy, agency, and autonomy that these technologies could create on the other.

Lead Investigator

Headshot of Narayan Sankaran with campus in the background

Narayan Sankaran, PhD

Civic Science Fellow

Co-PIs

Lea Witkowsky, PhD

Jodi Halpern, MD, PhD

Understanding Research Motivations

Despite wide acknowledgment that advances in neuroscience raise new and complex ethical dilemmas, there is a dearth of research examining the ethical frameworks under which those creating new knowledge operate. Through conducting surveys with neuroscience researchers spanning diverse settings and career stages, our goal is to examine the intrinsic and extrinsic factors that neuroscientists value and cite as motivations for conducting research. We further seek to investigate the degree to which neuroscientists find utility in ethical and societal considerations of research, and their proclivity for engaging in these issues in both academic and informal ways.

Conversations with Impacted Communities

Capitalizing on the ability to directly measure or modulate human brain activity, emerging neurotechnologies promise a range of compelling clinical applications, with the potential to drastically improve quality-of-life for their users. For people who are paralyzed and cannot speak, a brain-computer interface that decodes imagined speech could restore fluent communication. A deep-brain stimulator could modulate neural activity to alleviate a user’s depressive symptoms. Here, we seek to bring the neuroscientists whose research is enabling such technologies directly into conversation with the patient and caregiver communities who will be immediately impacted by its development. By fostering bidirectional exchange in a conversational context, we hope both parties can share their hopes as well as their conception of the risks associated with the pursuit of such technologies. For scientists, we believe these conversations will illuminate perspectives about patients’ needs, desires, and interests that were previously hidden from view.

Conversations with the Public

As neuroscience research increasingly shapes how we understand ourselves and advances technologies that directly interface with the brain, it is unclear how this new knowledge will or should impact society at large. People have diverse needs, desires, experiences, and hobbies, and neuroscientists alone cannot know how neuroscientific advances can best shape the various dimensions of people’s complex lives. Our goal is to bring neuroscientists out into non-academic settings around Berkeley, California, where they can convene with members of the public to share perspectives and deliberate on what we hypothesize are key ethical tensions that exist when projecting the implications of neuroscience research – and the attendant development of neurotechnologies – onto the interests of a diverse society. In particular, the prospect of general-consumer neurotechnologies that read and manipulate brain activity seems to provoke a range of public responses – from fascination to fear. Through direct conversations, we hope to unearth and expose working scientists to the breadth of these public perspectives.

Purple logo for 2024-2025 Civic Science Fellows Program

This work is funded by a grant from the Rita Allen Foundation to the UC Berkeley Kavli Center for Ethics, Science, and the Public to host a Civic Science Fellow in neuroscience. 

Read about the launch of the 2024-25 Civic Science Fellows and the program here. 

If you are interested in being contacted about opportunities to participate in this project, please fill out this form.
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