Neurorights · Grey Matter

Neurorights are proposed human rights aimed specifically at protecting the mind and the brain from misuse of neurotechnology, and they are the framework behind the first laws, from Chile's constitution to UNESCO's recommendation.

Neurorights. Neurorights are proposed human rights aimed specifically at protecting the mind and the brain from misuse of neurotechnology, and they are the framework behind the first laws, from Chile's constitution to UNESCO's recommendation.

Two proposals from 2017 set the terms. Ienca and Andorno proposed four rights: cognitive liberty (to use or refuse neurotechnology on one's own mind), mental privacy, mental integrity (protection against harmful interference with brain activity) and psychological continuity (protection of one's sense of identity from unconsented alteration). Yuste and colleagues, in a group that later formed the NeuroRights Foundation, called for priorities on privacy and consent, agency and identity, augmentation and bias; the foundation's list is mental privacy, personal identity, free will, fair access to mental augmentation and protection from algorithmic bias.

Both reading and writing are covered. Privacy addresses devices that record; integrity, identity and free will address devices that stimulate or that shape decisions, from deep brain stimulation to systems that nudge choices.

Whether new rights are needed is debated. Critics argue that existing rights to privacy, bodily integrity and freedom of thought already apply if interpreted for neurotechnology, and that new rights risk being vague; supporters answer that explicit text is what courts and regulators act on.

They have reached law. Chile wrote protection of brain activity into its constitution in 2021, US states have added neural data to privacy law, and UNESCO adopted a global recommendation in 2025.

Questions: Does stimulating the brain from outside fall under the proposed right to mental integrity? It does when it happens without valid consent or causes harm. TMS changes the excitability of the cortex for minutes to hours and is used with consent as a treatment, which is ordinary medicine, but the same capacity to alter brain activity is what the right to mental integrity was proposed to protect against when it is imposed or misused. The debate is less about clinics than about non-medical uses, such as stimulation sold to enhance performance or required in workplaces, where the person's freedom to refuse is weaker. What does Chile's 2021 constitutional amendment protect? Law 21.383, approved unanimously and enacted in October 2021, amended the article of Chile's constitution on the right to life and to physical and psychological integrity. It states that scientific and technological development will serve people and respect their life and physical and psychological integrity, and that the law will regulate the conditions of its use on people, with particular care to protect brain activity and the information derived from it. That made Chile the first country to give brain activity and neural data constitutional protection, the first neuroright written into a constitution. What did UNESCO adopt on neurotechnology in 2025, and does it bind anyone? In November 2025 the General Conference of UNESCO, at its 43rd session, adopted the Recommendation on the Ethics of Neurotechnology, the first global standard in the field. It sets out values, principles and policy actions for governments, with concerns grouped around mental privacy and brain data, freedom of thought, personal identity and the integrity of brain and mind, the same ground the neurorights proposals cover. A recommendation does not bind by itself: member states commit to consider it and report on it, and it gains force through the national laws that follow it. When does measuring a brain become changing it, and which proposed right covers that? Every method close enough to read single neurons also acts on them: electrodes provoke a tissue response, light heats, and recordings used for feedback train the brain that produces them, as users of a brain-computer interface learn to drive its decoder. The proposed right to mental integrity, in the framework of Ienca and Andorno, protects against harmful interference with a person's neural processes, and the right to psychological continuity protects their sense of identity from changes they did not agree to. Applied to implants, these rights ask that the effects of the device on the brain, intended or side effects, be known, disclosed and reversible where possible. Which rights have been proposed to protect the mind, and where does mental privacy sit among them? Ienca and Andorno proposed four rights in 2017: cognitive liberty, mental privacy, mental integrity and psychological continuity. The group around Rafael Yuste, which later founded the NeuroRights Foundation, proposes five: mental privacy, personal identity, free will, fair access to mental augmentation and protection from algorithmic bias. Mental privacy is the one shared by every list and the one closest to law, since it can build on existing data protection, while the rights that protect identity and free will address devices that write to the brain and are harder to define. Why does a tool that can switch chosen neurons on raise questions of mental integrity? Optogenetics has shown in mice that writing activity into a small number of chosen neurons can stand in for a real experience: reactivating a small ensemble of visual cortex cells with holographic light made trained mice behave as if they had seen the stimulus that ensemble encoded. The same group that ran that work, led by Rafael Yuste, co-authored the call for neurorights, arguing that devices able to write perceptions or shape decisions threaten agency and identity. No such writing is possible in people today, and the proposed right to mental integrity is meant to be in place before it is.