Big Tech Wants to Harvest Your Thoughts
James CrawfordThe Big StoryAug 12, 2026 6:00 AMBig Tech Wants to Harvest Your ThoughtsSilicon Valley companies are already working on neurotechnology products that track your brain activity. 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.“He discovered by chance that the strongest stimulus is a pattern of high-contrast dark and light bars.” He held up one hand and waved his fingers back and forth.
- ▪James CrawfordThe Big StoryAug 12, 2026 6:00 AMBig Tech Wants to Harvest Your ThoughtsSilicon Valley companies are already working on neurotechnology products that track your brain activity.
- ▪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 vis
- ▪His mentor had been the Swedish neuroscientist Torsten Wiesel, who won a Nobel Prize for his research into how our visual systems process information.“He discovered by chance that the strongest stimulus is a pattern of high-contrast dark an
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| Original publisher | WIRED |
| Canonical URL | https://www.wired.com/story/book-excerpt-the-vanishing-earth-james-crawford-brain-mining/ |
| Publication time | Wed, 12 Aug 2026 10:00:00 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-08-12T10:01:29.931Z |
| Last seen | 2026-08-12T10:01:29.931Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | aucDpwzX8Efk · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
James CrawfordThe Big StoryAug 12, 2026 6:00 AMBig Tech Wants to Harvest Your ThoughtsSilicon 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 ImagesCommentLoaderSave StorySave this storyCommentLoaderSave StorySave this storyRafael 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.
…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at WIRED.
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