Technology

Authors address the ethical implications of their research

Ethical implications. While the decoding of brain activity promises to help a variety of brainlesioned patients (Metzger et al., 2023; Moses et al., 2021; Defossez et al., 2022; Liu et al., 2023; ´ Willett et al., 2023), the rapid advances of this technology raise several ethical considerations, and most notably, the necessity to preserve mental privacy. Several empirical findings are relevant to this issue. Firstly, the decoding performance obtained with non-invasive recordings is only high for perceptual tasks. By contrast, decoding accuracy considerably diminishes when individuals are tasked to imagine representations (Horikawa & Kamitani, 2017; Tang et al., 2023). Second, decoding performance seems to be severely compromised when participants are engaged in disruptive tasks, such as counting backward (Tang et al., 2023). In other words, the subjects’ consent is not only a legal but also and primarily a technical requirement for brain decoding. To delve into these issues effectively, we endorse the open and peer-reviewed research standards.>