Big Tech Wants to Harvest Your Thoughts

Aug 12, 2026 6:00 AM

Silicon Valley companies are already working on neurotechnology products that track your brain activity. The next privacy frontier might be the things you only think.

Photo-Illustration: Jobanny Cabrera; Getty Images

Rafael Yuste is in his early sixties and bears a more than passing resemblance to Pablo Picasso—if Picasso had worn glasses and had a trim white goatee. Speaking succinctly and methodically, his accent rich with Spanish inflections, he told me about an experiment he had carried out in his lab at Columbia on the brains of mice, and specifically on that part of the cortex that responds to vision. His mentor had been the Swedish neuroscientist Torsten Wiesel, who won a Nobel Prize for his research into how our visual systems process information.

Reporting from WIRED contributed to this story.