Five stories from inside the book.
The night before surgery
Noland Arbaugh had been paralyzed below the shoulders for eight years. Two weeks after his implant, he stopped trying to move his hand and simply wanted the cursor somewhere. It went there.
Charlie’s chocolate bar
A boy with one coin chooses between five chocolate bars. What he really paid for was the feeling of choosing well. The book follows that feeling into a market where it can be measured, and one day triggered.
The morning song
At six every morning the same melody plays across Pyongyang. The state can send it into every home, but it cannot hear what anyone feels. Every ruler in history has had that problem.
The headset in Santiago
A former Chilean senator bought a consumer brain-reading headset, then asked for his own recordings. He needed a paid subscription to get them. He sued, and won the first enforcement of neurorights anywhere.
The phone in the shed
In Lancaster County, Amish families keep the telephone in a wooden shed at the end of the lane. They never banned it. They put a walk between themselves and the impulse to use it, and the book asks what that kind of choice looks like when the device is a neural interface.
