You Have a Caveman Brain in an AI World

Your brain is running on software that has not been updated in forty thousand years. It was designed for a world of immediate physical threats — predators, scarcity, tribal conflict. It was not designed for a world of infinite information, algorithmic feeds, and decisions that compound across decades.

Understanding this is not a matter of academic interest. It is a matter of survival — professional, emotional, and increasingly, political.

Why we think the way we do

As a neuroscientist trained at Karolinska Institute, I have spent years studying how the brain processes information, makes decisions, and constructs the experience we call reality. What I have learned is both humbling and liberating: most of what we call thinking is not thinking at all. It is pattern recognition, fast, unconscious, and frequently wrong.

In 2017, a photograph of strawberries by the psychologist Akiyoshi Kitaoka went viral. It contained no single pixel of red. Not a faint pinkish tint. Vivid, unmistakable red. And yet nearly everyone who looked at it saw red strawberries. Not a memory of red. The actual perceptual experience of red. The visual system reconstructs the scene under what it assumes is an overlay of cyan light, subtracts that illumination, and recovers what it predicts the surface colours must be. The mechanism is called colour constancy, and it operates automatically — long before you consciously identify the objects as strawberries.

This is not a flaw. It is how all perception works. The brain does not passively receive reality from the senses. It constructs reality, every moment, from a combination of incoming signal and prior expectation. As the neuroscientist Anil Seth puts it: we are all hallucinating — we just happen to agree about which hallucinations are real.

Now consider: we are building artificial intelligence systems that do something remarkably similar. They predict the next word, the next pattern, based on statistical probability. The output can look indistinguishable from genuine understanding. But the mechanism underneath is fundamentally different. Understanding this distinction, between prediction and comprehension, between pattern and meaning, is one of the most important cognitive tasks of our time.

Performance is neuroscience

The brain is not a fixed machine. It is a dynamic system that rewires itself in response to experience, a property neuroscientists call neuroplasticity. This means that how you think, what you pay attention to, and the habits you build are not just psychological preferences. They are architectural decisions that physically reshape your brain. Our brain is filled with biases and blind spots, understanding and mastering these will help you in rational decision-makings and understanding the future.

The case for brain rights

There is a dimension of neuroscience that goes beyond performance and enters the territory of human rights. Brain-computer interfaces can now decode neural activity with increasing precision. Consumer EEG headsets are collecting neural data that users rarely understand is being harvested. In research settings, scientists have reconstructed images from brain activity and predicted decisions before subjects were consciously aware of making them.

The question is no longer whether we can read the brain. The question is who gets to read it.

I grew up in a country where thinking the wrong thing could get you killed. In the Islamic Republic of Iran, my parents were dissidents. Teenage girls were executed for speaking the word freedom. When we talk about freedom of thought, most people in democratic societies treat it as a settled question. That certainty is about to be tested.

I have spent years advocating for what I call brain rights — legal protections for the human mind in an age of neurotechnology. The mind is the last truly private space. If we do not protect it now — before the infrastructure is built — we will find ourselves in a world where the most intimate part of human existence is subject to surveillance, manipulation, and commercial exploitation.

I survived a regime that punished thoughts. Our thoughts are sacred and must be protected.