Theme

Neuroethics at a New Frontier: Brain, Body, Data, and the Human Condition

This year’s theme — Neuroethics at a New Frontier: Brain, Body, Data, and the Human Condition — invites participants to examine how developments in brain science and technology are reshaping some of the central questions of neuroethics — from identity, agency, privacy, and responsibility, to care, justice, and our understanding of consciousness and meaning. The theme starts from a simple premise: the brain cannot be understood in isolation. It is part of embodied lives, shaped and co-constituted by relationships, environments, cultures, health systems, and increasingly complex digital ecosystems.

This broader perspective is becoming especially important as brain-related data are increasingly connected with biometric, behavioral, clinical, environmental, and digital data — and used to predict disease, answer questions about human behavior, assess performance, personalize care, create art, or inform security and policing practices. At the same time, growing attention to the exposome — the totality of environmental exposures across a lifetime — is making clearer how biological, social, and environmental conditions shape life and health. Together, these developments point to the need for a more holistic understanding of the human condition. They also make interdisciplinary dialogue more necessary than ever, bringing neuroscience into conversation with clinical practice, ethics, law, governance, the humanities, and the voices of those directly affected by brain science and neurotechnology.

The conference theme is intentionally broad. It creates space for work in a range of areas, including neurotechnology, brain–computer interfaces, artificial intelligence, neurodata governance, mental health, clinical care, disability, dementia, enhancement, human rights, public engagement, research ethics, global neuroethics, environmental neuroethics, and the humanities. It also asks how neuroethics can remain deeply human in contexts of rapid technological and environmental change: attentive to patients and caregivers, responsive to communities, and grounded in the lived experience of those most affected. Turning these questions into a shared research agenda requires naming where the conversation is most urgent right now, and the featured tracks listed below mark a few key starting points.

Neuroethics is uniquely positioned at this new frontier to bridge conversations that too often remain separate. These include exchanges between neuroscience and the humanities, between clinical care and technological innovation, between humans and the environment, and between global frameworks and local communities. Held in Madrid — a city well positioned to foster dialogue across Europe, Latin America, and the Mediterranean — Neuroethics 2027 invites the field to confront the technological and environmental frontiers of the present while remaining anchored in the human condition and its wider ecological context.

Tracks

Thinking + Context

The impact and influence of other people, technologies, microbiomes, and the environment on moral decision making

Body + Mind

How identity, agency, and consciousness rooted is in the lived experience of the body

Data, AI + Self-Knowledge

The impact of information technologies and data flows — and how technologies to interpret them — shape self-understanding, relationships, and our place in the world

Boundaries + Limits

Identifying and setting limits on moral concern, personhood, responsibility, and free will

Connection + Conflict

Understanding community, solidarity, division, and conflict in an increasingly connected world

Brain Death + Organ Donation

Ethics, law, and public policy considerations of advanced biomedical technologies in the areas of organ donation and transplantation in the context of brain death.

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