Protecting My Mind: Cognitive Liberty, Commons, and Neurorights

Neurotechnology represents both an extraordinary opportunity for our intellectual capacities and a risk for the security, privacy, autonomy, and integrity of our minds and cognitive acts. Therefore, it is very important to find legal protection for the mind and its contents, that is, to recognize as an individual and social value the integrity of cognitive processes linked, or not, to the subjectivity of the individual. Suppose this issue has traditionally been addressed through recourse to categories such as individual private property, a new perspective that can allow the mind (and its products) to be recognized as having a peculiar “status”: is the one of the Commons. In this essay, I question the elements of these Commons: Mental Integrity and Cognitive Liberty.