Girts Ragelis/ShutterstockWhile it may sound like science fiction, earbuds that read brain activity are already on sale. Wearable technology company Neurable claims that its headphones, equipped with electroencephalography (EEG) sensors, can track your fatigue and reduce burnout. At night, NextSense’s Smartbuds pick up the electrical signals of your brain to chart your sleep. By day, the same EEG sensors help schedule demanding tasks for the hours when you are sharpest. Interest is not just confined to specialist companies. In 2023, Apple filed a patent application for AirPods with electrodes that would measure brain activity. With hundreds of millions of earbuds already in circulation, Apple’s venture into EEG technology would pave the way for truly widespread, mainstream adoption.While this technology may sound futuristic, it certainly doesn’t look it. There are no glowing headsets, no visible apparatus, and no solemn declaration that the brain itself has now become an interface. Instead, the shift is so quiet and gradual that it would be easy to miss altogether. In the near future, a ten year old given brain-sensing earbuds won’t experience them as neurotechnology – they’ll just be earbuds they wear to sleep, study, or focus. One day, that child could well become an employee at a workplace where brain monitoring is unremarkable. They will be part of the first generation to grow up within what I’ve called the neurotechnology shift. Leer más: The Neurotechnology Shift: how next-generation wearables interface with the brain itself The brain-as-interface eraNeurotechnology is leaving the labs and hospitals where it was born, and settling into our offices, streets and bedrooms. This migration represents a new technological condition – one where the brain becomes a routine point of contact between our biological selves and the digital systems around us. My research has dubbed this the brain-as-interface era. This is not some speculative forecast, but a reality that is taking shape in the world as you read this.Two developments explain why this shift is arriving now. The first is artificial intelligence, which is allowing scientists and developers to extract useful patterns of mental activity from noninvasive recordings. This includes signals produced by cheap wearable sensors – a task that once demanded specialised clinical equipment. The second is the bet that large technology firms are placing on neural interfaces. Meta, for instance, launched a wristband in 2025 that reads the neuroelectrical signals of muscle activity to control its new glasses, backed up by research it published in Nature. Neural sensing is being integrated into the consumer devices that millions already use. But in combination, the ongoing neurotechnology shift and the brain-as-interface condition raise an urgent question: what happens to a mind that grows up inside all this? Leer más: Your brain for sale? The new frontier of neural data Neurotechnological nativesMany of today’s young people will be the first to grow up in a world where neurotechnology is simply part of daily life. We can think of them as “neurotechnological natives”. The term echoes that of digital natives, but it marks a sharper break than the parallel suggests.Up to now, digital technologies have shaped our minds from the outside. Screens, platforms, and the internet changed what we pay attention to, how we remember, and the way we relate to one another, but they have always sat between us and the world, mediating our experience of it. Neurotechnology works on the inner side of that boundary. It measures, decodes, and modulates brain activity itself. That’s a difference in kind rather than degree.The neurotechnological natives hypothesis – which I have proposed and developed in a newly published article – is not a forecast or a claim that a uniform generation is on its way, but an analytical tool for asking the right research questions. The significance of the “digital native” label was often overstated, and my extension of the idea is presented in full awareness of that. However, a population nobody names is one that research and regulation will struggle to see, let alone address.Nine urgent questionsThe research agenda I propose rests on the same three dimensions as the neurotechnology shift, each of which raises three questions that researchers have barely begun to address.The first dimension is technoscientific. How do we move interfaces reliably out of the labs and hospitals and into daily life? What happens as artificial intelligence and neurotechnology become more integrated? And what happens to neurodata once it becomes just another stream of information flowing through the biometric and digital systems we already use?The second, highly consequential dimension is cognitive. What does sustained interaction with these devices do to a developing sense of self and personal identity? How do self-regulation and impulse control change when the thing being monitored – or even surveilled – is your brain state rather than your behaviour? And less obvious but most striking: how does inner speech – which normally develops by internalising spoken exchange with others – take shape in children raised with speech-decoding and silent communication tools?The third is sociocultural. What norms and institutions should govern all this? Who gains access, and who is left on the far side of a neurotechnology divide? And how do collective imaginaries and narrative frames picture the brain, once treating it as an interface becomes ordinary?Regulation cannot waitThese three research dimensions are not isolated – they intersect with and influence one another. Technical capacity makes the cognitive stakes real and gives institutions something to adopt. What we learn about the developing mind reshapes what engineers build and what regulators fear. Social debate and regulatory pressure decide which devices get made and whose brains they touch.But regulations and governance cannot wait for the evidence to arrive, as the infrastructures that produce it are already being set in motion. In some workplaces, such as the mining industry, employees already wear EEG devices that track their fatigue levels. Anyone who does not remember a time before the internet can be labelled a digital native. Before long, the same will be said for people who grow up using neurotech. Naming this new population before it fully exists is important – it makes it visible to research and regulation, and the vital questions about this new technology can only be answered if we ask them early enough.Half a century ago, the philosopher Thomas Nagel probed the limits of one mind’s ability to imagine another by asking “what is it like to be a bat?”. Today, this question is turning inward, to the children growing up in the brain-as-interface era. For those of us who grew up without it, the question we need to be asking is this: what is it like to be a neurotechnological native? A weekly e-mail in English featuring expertise from scholars and researchers. It provides an introduction to the diversity of research coming out of the continent and considers some of the key issues facing European countries. Get the newsletter!José M. Muñoz leads The Neurotechnology Shift, a research project launched by the Center for the Governance of Change at IE University and the Tatiana Foundation. He is Founding Director of the International Neurotechnology Governance Observatory (INEGOV) at the International Center for Neuroscience and Ethics (CINET). He is also a Board Member of the International Neuroethics Society. His work is supported by academic and institutional funding. He does not receive funding from, nor hold financial interests in, companies developing consumer neurotechnology products discussed in this article.