The three concepts alongside this one describe what the public record contains: consumer devices whose makers reserve broad rights over neural data, three states legislating that data as sensitive, a decoder that partially reconstructs meaning, and a defence programme that funded a nonsurgical interface with published targets. Setting them side by side makes the boundary visible, and the boundary is the useful part. Every documented capability requires at least one of three things: physical contact with the head, a cooperative and individually trained subject, or equipment the person is inside or wearing. The decoder needed fifteen hours per person and failed against an untrained subject, and failed again when a trained one resisted. The DARPA targets describe sixteen channels within sixteen cubic millimetres — a wearable interface on an operator who put it on. Consumer EEG reads voltage at the scalp through electrodes touching it. Not one documented system operates at distance on a person who has not participated. That is not an argument that nothing could ever be built. It is a statement of where the published record currently stops, offered because a person who suspects something is happening to them deserves to know what the actual state of the art requires — and because a claim that outruns it should be recognisable as doing so.
- Semantic decoder: ~15 hours training per subject, subject-specific, defeated by deliberate resistance
- DARPA N3 targets: 16 channels in 16mm³ at 50ms — a wearable interface on a consenting operator
- Consumer EEG: electrodes in contact with the scalp, measuring voltage at the surface
- No system in the documented record operates at a distance on a non-participating person
Open questions
- Absence from the public record is not proof of absence. Classified capability would not appear here, and this concept cannot speak to it.
- The boundary described is where publication currently stops, not a claim about physics or the future.
- Nothing here rules out harm by the documented means — commercial data, contact devices, or a cooperative subject who did not understand what they consented to.
References
- Can a machine read what you are thinking?
- Did anyone try to build a way in without surgery?
- Who owns what your brain emits?
- Next to each other is not because of each other
The first three are the sourced entries this one reads across. The fourth is method: setting findings side by side does not establish a relation between them, and this concept draws a boundary rather than a connection.
Not independently verified
This concept describes the limits of publicly documented capability. It makes no claim about classified work, about future capability, or about the cause of any individual's experience.
Topics: Technology