The Race to Make Consciousness Programmable

Computers have spent decades becoming better at presenting information. The next frontier may involve changing how that information is perceived, felt, and remembered.

A new study published in the International Journal of Human-Computer Studies¹ explores this possibility through what its authors call digitally induced altered states of consciousness, or DIAL. This emerging field includes technologies capable of influencing a person’s perception or mental state through digital rather than chemical means.

The possibilities extend beyond conventional screens. Virtual reality, brain-computer interfaces, neural stimulation, biofeedback, and adaptive software could eventually make consciousness part of the interface itself. Instead of merely selecting content, users might adjust their emotional response, perception of time, sense of identity, or capacity to absorb information.

That future remains largely speculative. However, the individual technologies needed to move toward it are already developing, creating potential markets across healthcare, entertainment, communication, education, and workplace productivity.

Using Science Fiction to Study Emerging Technology

The researchers examined 25 science-fiction novels in which digital technologies alter consciousness. This was not an experiment evaluating whether a particular device works. It was a structured analysis of how fictional societies imagine these systems being used, commercialized, accepted, and abused.

Science fiction is valuable in this context because laboratory research typically evaluates a technology within a narrow setting. A clinical study might determine whether virtual reality reduces anxiety, for example, without revealing what could happen if similar systems became consumer entertainment, workplace requirements, or instruments of political persuasion.

Fiction can place an immature technology inside a more complete society. It lets researchers consider business models, social norms, unintended consequences, and power imbalances before the necessary hardware exists.

The study organized these imagined technologies around two questions. First, does the experience originate within the user or come from an external source? Second, is its purpose exploration or communication? Exploration is further separated into cognitive and affective uses, while communication is divided into one-way and two-way interactions.

From Digital Content to Digital Mental States

Today, software usually changes what people see or hear. DIAL systems would go further by making the user’s mental state an adjustable component of the experience.

Early versions of this concept already exist in limited forms. VR exposure therapy can place patients in controlled environments designed to change their relationship with fear. Biofeedback applications respond to heart rate, breathing, and other physiological signals. Neural stimulation can influence activity within targeted brain networks. Brain-computer interfaces translate biological signals into commands for external devices.

None of these technologies currently provides the precise control over memory, emotion, or identity depicted in science fiction. Even the most advanced brain-computer interfaces remain focused primarily on restoring communication and computer access for people with severe physical impairments.

The direction of development is nevertheless significant. Interfaces are becoming more immersive, more responsive to biological signals, and more closely integrated with the user. As those capabilities converge, digital systems may begin shaping experience rather than simply delivering media.

This could produce several commercially important applications:

• Therapeutic environments tailored to a patient’s emotional and physiological responses
• Training systems that adapt difficulty and sensory input to cognitive load
• Entertainment built around programmable mood and perception
• Communication platforms that transmit richer emotional or sensory context

The commercial breakthrough may not come from a single consciousness-altering machine. It could emerge gradually as separate markets in spatial computing, biosensors, neural interfaces, artificial intelligence, and digital therapeutics begin to overlap.

Why Time and Attention Could Become Products

One of the study’s strongest themes concerns temporal and cognitive capital. Science fiction frequently portrays technology changing the subjective passage of time, allowing users to experience hours of thought or training during a much shorter period.

The extreme versions remain imaginary, but the economic logic is familiar. Productivity software already competes to reduce the time required to complete a task. Generative AI compresses research and content production. Simulation reduces physical training costs. Immersive systems could extend that logic by optimizing the user’s state while the work occurs.

A training environment might reduce distractions, regulate stress, and adjust sensory intensity as a learner’s performance changes. In medicine, similar techniques could help patients tolerate painful procedures or confront traumatic memories under controlled conditions. In entertainment, platforms could personalize stimulation to sustain attention or intensify emotional impact.

The risk is that cognitive optimization becomes another workplace expectation. A tool designed to reduce mental strain could eventually be required to increase output. If employers can modify attention, suppress fatigue, or accelerate training, the boundary between assistance and coercion becomes difficult to maintain.

This is where the paper moves beyond predicting hardware. It asks who controls the altered state, who benefits from it, and whether the user can meaningfully refuse it.

The Value and Danger of Programmable Emotion

The study also examines systems that manage grief, anxiety, attraction, pleasure, and traumatic memories. Some fictional technologies reduce the emotional force of painful experiences while leaving the underlying memory intact. Others manufacture entirely new preferences or emotional attachments.

There is a major difference between helping someone regulate an unwanted response and rewriting that person’s motivations. Yet a sufficiently powerful platform could potentially do both.

This creates an unusual safety problem. Traditional interfaces can manipulate behavior through notifications, recommendation algorithms, and persuasive design. A DIAL interface could make that influence more direct by changing the emotional conditions under which decisions are made.

Advertising offers an obvious example. A platform that knows when a user is anxious, lonely, excited, or highly suggestible could deliver content at the moment it is most persuasive. If the same platform can influence that state through immersive media, biofeedback, or stimulation, measurement and manipulation become part of one closed loop.

The same concern applies to political messaging, gambling, and compulsive entertainment. The study imagines systems capable of implanting desires or suppressing doubt. Present technology cannot reliably perform those feats, but algorithmic targeting already demonstrates the value companies place on predicting and influencing emotional behavior.

Identity May Become a Technology Governance Issue

The most profound DIAL applications involve identity rather than productivity. The analyzed novels describe memory modification, artificial personalities, simulated bodies, digitally transferred experiences, and systems that divide or merge aspects of the self.

Current brain chip development is far removed from such capabilities. Recent clinical progress has instead concentrated on restoring practical functions. In 2025, for example, the FDA granted Neuralink’s speech-restoration system Breakthrough Device designation, reflecting the medical focus of the present market rather than the enhancement scenarios imagined in fiction.

Still, privacy rules designed for conventional personal data may prove inadequate for neural and emotional information. A password can be changed after a breach. A record of someone’s involuntary reactions, private speech patterns, or neural activity may reveal characteristics that cannot be replaced.

Future regulation may therefore need to address mental autonomy, informed consent, emotional profiling, and the right to remain cognitively unmodified. These issues could become especially important when devices are used by employers, insurers, schools, healthcare providers, or governments.

Investing in the Next Human-Computer Interface

Investors cannot yet buy a pure-play leader in programmable consciousness. Many prominent brain-interface companies remain privately held, while the field’s most ambitious applications are still experimental.

Meta Platforms (META ) offers a more practical connection to the enabling technologies. Through Reality Labs, Meta is developing immersive headsets, augmented-reality systems, AI glasses, avatars, and new ways for people to control computers.

The company’s Meta Neural Band illustrates how interfaces are moving closer to the body. The wristband uses surface electromyography to interpret muscle activity and convert subtle hand movements into digital commands. It does not read thoughts or alter consciousness, but it reduces the distance between human intention and machine response.

Combined with Meta Quest, AI-powered glasses, spatial computing, and personalized software, this research gives Meta exposure to several layers that could support more adaptive and psychologically immersive experiences. The opportunity is balanced by substantial costs, uncertain consumer adoption, and serious privacy concerns. Reality Labs remains a long-duration investment rather than proof that a market for DIAL systems has arrived.

Programmable Consciousness Is Still a Direction, Not a Product

The paper’s framework is most useful as an early map of where human-computer interaction could go. It does not demonstrate that memories can be downloaded, subjective time can be stretched, or emotions can be precisely rewritten. Its findings are interpretive and shaped by a science-fiction sample drawn largely from English-language works by Western male authors.

However, the underlying question is already relevant. Digital systems are learning to sense more about users while gaining greater control over what those users see, hear, and experience. Neural interfaces, biosensors, artificial intelligence, and immersive displays are narrowing the separation between the person and the platform.

The investment opportunity will initially appear in practical applications such as accessibility, therapy, training, and spatial computing. The larger challenge will be preventing tools that improve human experience from becoming systems that quietly dictate it. If consciousness becomes part of the interface, user protection can no longer stop at data privacy. It must also include control over perception, emotion, and identity.

References:

¹ Belousov, A., Macey, J., Bujić, M., Ojell-Järventausta, T., & Hamari, J. (2026). Designing the future of consciousness: A components framework and speculative implications. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 103926. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijhcs.2026.103926