PRESENTER: So this is a beta product.
They're partnering with a major headphone maker.
And the idea is to just pack the soft, cushiony ear pieces
that you would ordinarily use with sensors
that can detect brain activity.
Their hope is to be able to help people
measure attention and focus.
So some of the beta software that we're going to look at
enables me to do some tests to see how well I switch
between tasks, but also to see how attention can actually
be tracked and monitored through headsets
that you would use to listen to music or do a conference call.
So here are some data.
What we're seeing here is, we're seeing my focus levels
while I was doing the task.
When you see these dips, these dips
show moments that I was distracted,
and I started to get a little bit bored,
and I started to think about what
I was going to make for dinner.
And then you see the peaks when I'm re-engaged.
And that's pretty remarkable, that you can actually
just pick up that brain data and actually see,
that's the moment.
OK, so this device you can see is not something
that you're definitely going to wear every day.
So this one just goes over the head like this.
Probably about a decade ago, I started
to track some of the companies that are using wearable brain
sensors in the workplace.
I think it's just extraordinary for people, the first time they
realized that the inner workings of their own mind that they
have always just assumed was this black box that nobody
else could access, suddenly could
be connected to a simple consumer based device.
I think that's something a lot of people
are going to encounter for the first time in the coming months
and years.
It's important for me to remember that novelty, but also
just the shock, and in some ways discomfort of the realization
that we can decode what's happening inside the brain.
Each of these are dry electrodes.
But we'll start by turning it on.
By wearing one of these devices, you
can actually visualize different brain activity
through a program called brain visualization, seeing
while I'm talking, the different areas of the brain lighting up.
And those are patterns that can ultimately
be decoded to at least tell us a number of simple things
about the cognitive and effective states
of individuals.
Our brain activity, particularly the electrical activity
in our brains, can be tracked, just
like our heart rate or steps or biometric information
from our bodies.
Most people have heard of EEG when
it's used in a clinical setting or a hospital.
But it looks very sci-fi or futuristic.
What's extraordinary is moving from that clinical grade
kind of experience to smaller and smaller and fewer and fewer
sensors that could be put into, for example, a hard hat.
So what can these devices measure?
You can pick up basic cognitive and effective states.
Is a person happy or sad?
Are they angry?
Is a person tired?
Is a person alert?
Are they paying attention, or is their mind wandering?
Increasingly, there's evidence that you
can start to tell what kind of task
a person is paying attention to.
So are they working on coding?
Are they working on documentation?
Are they working on an unrelated, task
like surfing social media?
A question that I get a lot, and a fear that a lot of people
express, is that on an employer or another person
or the government will be able to read people's minds
with this technology.
Maybe a decade ago, I would have said no, that's
never going to happen.
Now I would say, it depends on what
you mean by reading your mind.
Can you literally decode every thought
and every image that's in your mind with surface based
electrodes?
I think it's exceedingly unlikely that that's
going to ever happen.
Can you decode a lot of information
about what a person is thinking or feeling?
And when you triangulate that with what they're
working on their computer screen and the information
that you're already gathering from their phones.
And from their other devices that they're interacting with,
can you paint a much more precise picture?
Absolutely.
This information is going to give more precise information
about the cognitive and effective states of a person,
including semblance of what they're thinking,
even if it's not literally like a thought bubble
that you're decoding.
Already, there is a significant amount of surveillance
that exists in the workplace-- for factory workers,
tracking their movements on the factory floor.
For white collar workers, there's keystroke logging.
Or during the pandemic, more than 80% of companies
said they either have already started
doing remote monitoring of the workplace
or they intend to do so.
Are wearable brain sensors, different in kinds
or just more of the same?
When you start to veer into attention monitoring
and start to collect richer data from which you can extract
things like whether a person is paying attention
to what they're looking at in the screen,
I think it starts to be different in kind,
for a couple of reasons.
One is, most people, if you ask them where their sense of self
is located, they point to the head.
That's where most people identify their sense of self.
And when you start putting sensors on the brain,
the feeling of intrusiveness and invasiveness
for an individual employee is much more profound.
The second is what you actually potentially
could discover from monitoring brain activity.
In order to collect the information that
extracts attention, you collect this wider array
of brain activity, which if stored as the algorithms become
more sophisticated, or even with existing algorithms,
could probe that information for more sensitive and deeply
intimate information about an individual.
Brainwave data that's being collected by a third party,
whether it's a software company, the device
manufacturer, or the employer, that
could be subject to a subpoena.
It could be the kind of thing that eventually could
be interrogated by others.
So most of us are distracted much of the day.
With so many different distractions
in the workplace, a lot of people are trying to focus on,
how can they improve their focus?
How can they improve their productivity?
That turns out to be something that neuropsychology
can help with as well.
You can wear these devices that help
you see what your attention and focus levels look like.
The technology, in the hands of an employee, can be empowering.
There's the potential, of course--
and we're already seeing this in some settings
in other countries-- where the devices could
be mandated to watch a person's attention, watch their focus,
and then make choices either at a managerial level,
to say, for example, no, this division
can't work from home anymore, because it turns out
that their attention and productivity levels are much
worse, or to make decisions about hiring or firing
or promotion, based on the brain metrics that they're seeing.
I think that employees are going to increasingly
be in the position of being faced
with the option, if not requirement,
to wear brain wearables in the workplace.
Except for a few jurisdictions in the United States
that have biometric based laws, an employer
could decide that all employees have to wear
these devices in the workplace.
One thing I think is really important
for employers is to realize that people are kind of freaked out
by the possibility.
That's why it's so important for employers
to ethically implement any use of neurotechnology
in the workplace in a way that's empowering
rather than oppressive for employees.
What I recommend is that as a starting place,
we recognize a right to cognitive liberty, which
includes a right to mental privacy for employees.
And even in the absence of that, I
believe employers should act as if employees
have a right to mental privacy and therefore only seek
information for which there is a bona fide legal exception
to that-- a need for the data, as an exception
to the right to mental privacy.
Next, when appropriate, employers
should offer employees the opportunity
to use neurotic devices or brain wearables in the workplace
in order to monitor their own stress, fatigue, attention
levels, and to improve their workplace environment.
It's also incredibly important for employers
to be transparent about what the purpose is
for the use of brain wearables in the workplace,
not just the fine print in the handbook for the employees,
but being incredibly clear about the purpose of introducing it,
what data is being collected, how that data will be used,
as well as giving employees insight and opportunities
to audit and see the data that's being collected or used,
how it's being used, in any context or in any setting.
Perhaps the most important thing is
to make sure that whatever data is collected by brain wearables
is stored on device rather than on cloud servers
or on device manufacturers, websites, or software.
The reason for this is to ensure that employees
know that the data isn't being mined for other purposes.
There may be exceptions to this.
It could be that employees consent
to the use of data for aggregate information
that can improve their well-being.
But we should prefer, if not demand,
that data be kept private, on device for employees.
If it's done in that way-- that is, as something to help
employees and not something that's
another tool of surveillance-- it
has the potential to be transformative
for people's health and for people's lives.
It's used as another tool of surveillance,
it could be seen as the most oppressive kind of technology
that's been introduced into the workplace.