Advances in neurotechnology have opened up a brave new world of influencing and extracting information from our brains. Research into the human brain has demonstrated that observation and data collection can lead to the very real possibility of modifying or changing activity in the mind. These advances could potentially lead to new medical treatments and a deeper understanding of human behaviour, emotions and feelings. However, this raises a new, and urgent, question about our human rights. Do we need legal protection to prevent our brains from being manipulated?

We know from decades of social research that moods and emotions can be transmitted between people. More recently, we have discovered that human brain activity can be shaped by which posts appear in social media feeds, for instance, by including negative or positive language, images or messages. People seeing more negative information, when their social networks are controlled in this way, go on to use more gloomy and pessimistic language themselves, and show signs of long-lasting psychological effects. Therefore, while human rights currently exist to protect people from physical harm, a need is emerging to safeguard our mental privacy and prevent cognitive influencing by others to achieve political, social or economic objectives.

Some might argue that our brain activity being manipulated is hardly a new phenomenon, and that is true; consider these common activities: drinking coffee, meditating or watching a television advertisement. All of these can alter our state of mind, and influence cognitive processes, such as memory, perception, attention and the ability to reason. However, such mind alterations are nearly impossible to measure accurately and are worlds away from the targeted cognitive manipulation increasingly possible due to technological development.