The Mortgaged Brain

There was a lad at my gym, two months out from his first bodybuilding show. He was abnormally strong and the frame was imposing, and people treated the physique as something he was rather than something he was doing. Gifted genetics, people said. I said it too.

Then Covid arrived. The show was cancelled, the gyms closed, and they stayed closed for the best part of a year. When we came back nobody recognised him. He was slim, and it was not only the muscle, because the frame itself looked smaller. The confidence had gone with the size, and he could not stand in a room the way he had stood in one before. He never trained again. He teaches golf now. Years later he told me what he had been taking, and that having a body like that had been a kind of false reality, better to live inside than to lose.

He built it himself. His labour, his discipline, his tissue. Nobody has a stronger claim of ownership available to them than that, and it did not survive the supply being interrupted. When the supply stopped, what went with it was the man everybody had been describing, him included.

I have not been able to file that story usefully for years, and I think I now know why I kept it. What it is a case of is a capability that was authentically somebody's and simultaneously somebody else's to withdraw. I have not watched that happen at close range anywhere else.

Can something be part of you without belonging to you?

It has never troubled us because the boundary has always stayed legible. Human capability was never self-contained. A carpenter can do what he does because tools exist. I can say I know how to retouch an image while the software doing most of that work belongs to Adobe. Cancel the subscription and some of what I can do goes with it, and nobody calls that a wound, because Photoshop is something I operate: take it away and I am a man without Photoshop, not a different man. Pay a teacher to teach you Greek and the Greek does not return to the teacher when the lessons stop. A gym can cancel your membership without repossessing the strength. The transaction ends, the capability stays, and our whole language for ability rests on that.

So dependency is not the threshold, and neither is assistance. The threshold is constitution: a supply that does not sit on top of the person but participates in how the person is built, so that withdrawing it subtracts someone rather than something. He crossed it. And I should be careful about how far that carries, because nobody licensed him anything and no provider could have ended him with a billing decision. What his case establishes is one half of the problem. The other half, where somebody else holds the tap, is arriving separately, and it is arriving with paperwork.

The obvious reply is that we have lived with this for decades. Insulin, stimulants, hormone replacement: millions hold capabilities constituted by a supply chain somebody else prices, and a shortage can take the person back down with it. We have a word for that, and the word is treatment. It holds because the supply restores somebody to a baseline we can name, which makes the loss a medical event rather than a question about who they were. Aim the same mechanism above the baseline and sell it, and the word is gone. Nothing in the language covers a capability that was never standard issue, which is why the room reached for genetics.

The capability itself is early. In April 2026 the US Government Accountability Office reported that, as of September 2024, fewer than seventy people worldwide had used implanted systems that decode brain signals in clinical trials, against more than two hundred thousand who have received implants that stimulate the brain. Decoding intent is the frontier and it is barely staffed. The commercial direction is less tentative. In January 2026 OpenAI announced an investment in Merge Labs, whose stated mission is to bridge biological and artificial intelligence, and described interfaces able to interpret intent and adapt to the individual.

Retention, switching cost, service level and upgrade are unremarkable terms, the ordinary furniture of software, until the product is how easily somebody thinks. It does not take a bad company for that to matter. A good one makes it harder, because a service that works reliably for twenty years gives dependence time to stop feeling like dependence. Nobody wakes up thinking about infrastructure. They become the person who can do the thing.

And the contracts are already written. In 2024 the Neurorights Foundation reviewed thirty consumer neurotechnology companies and found twenty-nine with access to users' neural data under no meaningful limitation, and two thirds explicitly reserving the right to share that data with third parties. Colorado's 2024 amendment brought neural data inside its privacy law and recorded something sharper in its findings: that people cannot choose which neural information they disclose, and cannot know what may later be decoded from it. The data holds still while the reading of it improves. Consent today is consent to an interpretation nobody has invented yet.

Those terms govern reading rather than supply, and the distance between a headband that senses and a faculty that constitutes is an engineering problem, not a waiting period. What they establish is the posture: terms drafted for a capability that does not exist yet, in a market with no incumbent user to argue back, settling into place long before anybody is positioned to mind them.

Marcello Ienca and Roberto Andorno proposed in 2017 that this would need new rights: cognitive liberty, mental privacy, mental integrity, psychological continuity. Nearly a decade on, a 2026 paper in Neuroethics named the flaw in that framework. It was built to protect people from interference they did not agree to. The likelier case is people agreeing.

Which is where property language starts to fail.

There is a 2010 film, Repo Men, in which artificial organs are recovered from customers who fall behind on the payments. The heart is inside you, it is keeping you alive, and until the debt clears the company retains a claim on it. The horror is legible because the organ stays an object: there is the person, there is the thing, there is the repossession. A mortgage works the same way. The house is genuinely your home while somebody else holds a consequential claim over it, and you can point at both. A constitutive faculty cannot be pointed at, which makes the metaphor in this essay's title the optimistic version.

John Locke left us two arguments that were never meant to meet. In the Essay he located personal identity in consciousness reaching back through memory: you are the person whose experience you can still own from the inside. In the Second Treatise he located property in labour, in what you have mixed yourself into. Put a constitutive faculty between them and both arguments run at once. My identity extends as far as what I can recall. The provider's claim extends as far as what it laboured to supply. If I recall through it, Locke's own criteria hand the same ground to two owners, and no drafting resolves that, because it is not a gap in the drafting. It is two accounts of ownership arriving at one place from opposite sides.

Hegel saw the shape of an answer before there was anything to attach it to. In the Philosophy of Right he argued that certain things cannot be alienated even by consent, not because the bargain is unfair but because they are what makes you a party capable of bargaining. Your will, your personality, the substance of being someone: a contract over those is void, and void whether or not you signed it gladly.

He was writing about selling yourself, not about renting equipment, and below the threshold the Photoshop answer holds: a tool is a tool and you may contract over it freely. Past the threshold his objection is the only one that fits, and it runs against the user as firmly as against the company. The trouble with accepting those terms is not that you were exploited. It is that you were never entitled to agree.

Our categories will break before our laws do. Product, service, medical device, licence, personal data: each names part of the arrangement and none names what the person experiences, which is an ability. The language will give way first, in the ordinary sentences people use about themselves.

Because the question I started with points one way, and I notice I only ever ask it in that direction. Can something be part of me without belonging to me. What I am asking, underneath, is whether they can reach in. It took me a long time to turn it around, and I still do not like where it goes: whether something can belong to me merely because I experienced it from the inside, and whether the claim I would be making rests on anything firmer than theirs does.

Gifted genetics. That was the room assigning a capability to the person carrying it, on no evidence, because that is the sentence everybody prefers, him most of all. We were not deceived. Nobody in that gym was naive about what a physique like that involves. We said it because it was the better story and it cost nothing to say.

That is what will sell this. Not the recall, and not the reasoning, because capability has always been available to hire and hiring it has never once satisfied anybody. What we want is for it to be ours, to be the kind of person who knew rather than the kind who had access. The offer will not be the faculty.

It will be the pronoun.

I remembered. I noticed. I understood. I knew.

Nobody has ever once been asked to prove one of those.

Sources

U.S. Government Accountability Office. On the Horizon: Three Science and Technology Trends That Could Affect Society. GAO-26-108079, April 2026. Reports that, as of September 2024, fewer than 70 people worldwide had used implanted systems in clinical trials that measure and decode brain signals, while more than 200,000 had received neural implants that stimulate brain activity.

OpenAI. "Investing in Merge Labs." 15 January 2026. Merge Labs' stated mission to bridge biological and artificial intelligence; interfaces that interpret intent and adapt to the individual.

Genser, Jared, Stephen Damianos, and Rafael Yuste. Safeguarding Brain Data: Assessing the Privacy Practices of Consumer Neurotechnology Companies. Neurorights Foundation, 1 April 2024. Review of 30 consumer neurotechnology companies; 29 appeared to have access to consumers' neural data and to provide no meaningful limitations on that access, and two thirds (66.7%) explicitly permitted sharing neural data with third parties.

Colorado General Assembly. House Bill 24-1058, Protect Privacy of Biological Data. Signed 17 April 2024; effective 7 August 2024. Adds biological and neural data to the Colorado Privacy Act's sensitive-data definition; legislative findings concern involuntary disclosure and future decoding of neural information.

Ienca, Marcello, and Roberto Andorno. "Towards new human rights in the age of neuroscience and neurotechnology." Life Sciences, Society and Policy 13, 5 (2017). Proposes rights to cognitive liberty, mental privacy, mental integrity and psychological continuity.

de Miguel Beriain, Inigo, Anibal M. Astobiza, Francesca Tassinari, et al. "When Minds Merge: Neural Telepathy, Neurorights, and the Limits of Voluntary Privacy Waiver." Neuroethics 19, 43 (2026). Published 28 August 2026. DOI: 10.1007/s12152-026-09668-y. Argues the neurorights framework is built against non-consensual interference and is poorly equipped for voluntary waiver.

Locke, John. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), Book II, Chapter XXVII, "Of Identity and Diversity." Personal identity as continuity of consciousness through memory.

Locke, John. Second Treatise of Government (1689), Chapter V, "Of Property." Ownership as arising from labour mixed with a thing.

Hegel, G. W. F. Elements of the Philosophy of Right (1820), Paragraph 66. Those determinations constituting personality and the universal essence of self-consciousness are inalienable; a contract purporting to alienate them is void.

Repo Men. Directed by Miguel Sapochnik. Universal Pictures, 2010. Used as a cultural analogy, not as evidence.