What are you waiting to release your full cognitive potential?
- Sofia Siti
- Jun 5
- 6 min read
“Exercise your mind”, “Increase your working memory”, “The absolute game-changer for organizing my brain”, and many other phrases like these appear every day in our Instagram or TikTok feeds and across multiple websites. There seems to be increasing pressure to become smarter, faster, more efficient…in other words, better. Where does this urgent need for improvement come from? Does it stem from professional pressures? For example, are our jobs becoming more demanding and requiring more cognitively skilled employees? Or perhaps our obsession with improvement stems from the fear that we have reached our brain’s creative threshold, and we are now desperately trying to expand it.
The market for brain-training apps has been expanding since the early 2000s with the release of computergames focused on cognitive training, such as Happy Neuron (released in 2000). Later, apps focused onenhancing cognitive skills, such as Lumosity, became available to the public. These apps claimed that regular use of their services would result in incredible cognitive outcomes. The brain-training app industry was valued at roughly USD 4.5 billion in 2023, and is expected to continue to increase through 2030, as consumer spending is encouraged by aggressive marketing practices and promises of life changing results.. Unfortunately, many of the things these apps promise – such as faster cognitive processing and improved memory have not been scientifically proven. This gap between marketing claims and scientific evidence raises questions about informed consumer choice. For example, are brain apps like Lumosity based on scientific evidence or are their promises for delaying Alzheimer’s through memory enhancement exercises simply exploiting a common fear of the aging population?. Is the marketing of these apps, which is largely based on unsubstantiated guarantees, unethical? Additionally, the marketing strategies used by these companies frame cognitive performance not as optional improvement but as a necessary condition to maintain competitiveness and wellbeing. All this magnified pressure may actually result in the opposite results.For instance, who has ever shown full efficiency when under pressure and in constant doubt about their capabilities?
How did brain apps manage to penetrate our societies and lives with such success? Why are they continuing to grow, and how do they influence our ideas about ourselves and our communities?
In a capitalistic world where concepts such as financial success and dominance over others in theworkplace sometime seem to be valued more than life itself, it is perhaps not surprising that everybody is looking for ways to become better and the brain-training market takes advantage of this. “There is always room for improvement” is a sentence heard in almost every social environment — home, school, work, even the gym. Indeed, you can always become better and increase your skills, but how can you be sure that you are seeking improvement for yourself and not simply surrendering to anxiety caused by societal pressures?
When improvement is framed as necessity rather than choice, self-optimization can shift from empowerment to obligation. Societal pressure may even push you to try to improve skills you never thought were problematic in the first place, simply because you were bombarded with ads about making those skills better. Is there even always a real need for improvement? Did your employer actually ask youto improve your memory? Did your friends ask you to think faster? We live in a society that constantly asksus to prove that we are useful beings. However, do we really need to be flooded with the demand toimprove so vastly that we develop anxiety about our brain skills even when there is no real evidence that we are dysfunctional? Is there actually freedom in the way we think, perform, act and define our cognitive abilities when we receive such technological and societal pressure?
These cognitive enhancement tools not only claim results that are not fully justified but may also threaten our cognitive liberty by persuading us that our skills are not satisfactory.
Defining CognitiveLiberty: As phrased by Nita Farahany, “cognitive liberty is the right to think, reason, and makedecisions free from external interference or manipulation"
Mental Monoculture: The Sci-Fi Scenario
While speculative, one could imagine a scenario in which brain apps become highly successful and many people across the world develop cognitive processes optimized for specific algorithms. If largepopulations repeatedly train the same cognitive patterns through similar digital tasks, this could eventually result in the preference of certain modes of thinking over others.
Training our minds to respond and act in a systemic way may eventually have the opposite results from what these apps promise. First, even if we learn to solve specific problems quickly and efficiently, other problematic situations in real environments — which are difficult to replicate in brain apps — might remain unaddressed, creating a whole new package of challenges. Furthermore, the creation of a homogenous “brain-trained” population might result in a decrease in the diversity of ideas, potentially reducing innovation in science, culture, and the arts.
And these may not even be the worst possible effects. Historically, when a new human skill or innovation emerges, it is often exploited. What if employment opportunities started advertising with new barriers to entry, i.e., you must have optimized cognitive training to apply?? Beyond the fact that many other skills — academic knowledge, communication abilities, creativity — might be undermined, those without access to these apps (for example, people with fewer financial resources or from isolated areas) might not be able to pursue such careers, creating both socioeconomic and cognitive divisions.
Additionally, those who do obtain such positions might lose the freedom to acknowledge natural limitations as a reason for failure, facing excessive criticism, fear of exclusion, and constant performance anxiety.
While you may think this sounds like something out of a Severance-like TV show, there is little preventingit from becoming reality. In fact, real cases of employee cognitive monitoring and enhancement suggest that this scenario may be even more realistic than many assume. For example, the Hangzhou Zhongheng Electric company in China reportedly uses EEG-based “smart caps” to record workers’ levelsof concentration. The collected data are then used to optimize workflows and increase productivity, while disciplinary measures may be applied to employees who appear to be less focused.
Additionally, companies are increasingly making their preferences clear regarding the employment of individuals with specific cognitive skills, as new AI- and neural-profiling systems are emerging to assist them in recruitment processes. For instance, the HireVue AI recruitment system analyzes candidates’ behavioral and cognitive patterns to evaluate whether they are suitable for specific roles. Theimplementation of these types of recruitment processes may increase applicants’ fear of failure during hiring procedures and, as a result, encourage them to seek methods to secure such positions, potentially leading to increased use of brain-training applications. What may initially sound like a science-fiction scenario raises an important question: how have legislative bodies and human rights organizations allowed such practices to develop to this extent?
Regulatory Landscapes
Unlike medical neurotechnologies, consumer brain apps often fall outside strict regulatory frameworks.Currently there are few regulations that specifically protect our cognitive liberty and autonomy from the capitalistic endeavors of the cognitive enhancement industry. One initiative addressing this issue is the OECD recommendations, which provide non-binding guidelines on responsible neurotechnology innovation rather than enforceable regulations. For example, these recommendations emphasize the right of individuals to ownership over their own mental capabilities and to be protected from unauthorized or deceptive practices.
Although this represents a promising step toward legal restrictions on brain apps, their implementation ultimately depends on the legislative actors of each country or union. Thankfully, some are beginning to act. More and more organizations seem to recognize the threat that brain-training apps may pose toindividuals’ mental freedom and are actively using these OECD non-binding principles as guidelines for establishing legal safeguards.
For instance, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has taken effective action by intervening against unethical and aggressive marketing of neuro-enhancement products. Most notably, Lumosity was fined $2 million for claiming that its app could protect the mind against age-related cognitive decline. More recently, in May 2024, the governor of Minnesota signed legislation establishing civil and criminal penalties for violations related to the brain–computer interface (BCI) industry.
While these developments are encouraging for the cognitive protection of consumers, future regulatory frameworks should tighten protections surrounding cognitive liberty and ensure that people do not allocate their resources based on misleading claims. As neurobiology increasingly merges with technology, we must ensure that the pursuit of human potential does not lead to the undermining of human dignity or the creation of a permanent cognitive divide.
Sofia Siti is currently working as a research technician at the Translational Neuroscience
Department of UMC Utrecht, The Netherlands, on an ALS-related research project. She studied Molecular Biology and Genetics during her bachelor’s degree and later pursued a master’s degree in Science and Business Management. She is interested in combining her academic
background with social and philosophical questions by engaging in the field of bioethics and contributing to empirically grounded perspectives on ethical discussions in scientific
research.
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