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Civic Science Fellow Narayan Sankaran Creates New Opportunities for Public Engagement in Neuroscience 

As neuroscientists learn more about decoding speech patterns from brain activity, they open up avenues of promise, as well as peril. For people who have lost their ability to speak, this technology offers hope of reconnection—a way to translate their thoughts directly into words. But that same capability raises deep concerns about privacy, especially in this age of increasing digital monitoring. 

This tension sits at the heart of Narayan Sankaran’s work as a Civic Science Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley’s Kavli Center for Ethics, Science, and the Public. As both a neuroscientist studying how our brains process sound, and a neuroethicist examining the societal implications of neurotechnology, he sees his role as helping to facilitate meaningful dialogue between scientists and non-scientists about what using all this new tech could mean. 

“As a field, we’re reaching this inflection point,” Sankaran says. “With advances in AI and computational neuroscience, we’re literally enabling an algorithmic understanding of ourselves. The more we can specify the nature of what we call the neural code, the more we’re enabling technologies that can read and write information to our brain. This is creating a fundamentally novel form of technology that will radically change how we understand ourselves, relate to ourselves, and understand others and the world around us.” 

Finding harmony between scientific advancement and societal needs isn’t just a metaphor for Sankaran. It’s an extension of his research into how the human brain processes complex sounds like speech and music. 

“For me, the neuroscience and the neuroethics go hand in hand,” he says. “I’m not interested in scientific discovery simply for the sake of discovery. I’m only motivated to understand the brain when I can also understand and work towards a place where that work positively impacts society.” 

The core of Sankaran’s scientific research examines how our auditory cortex processes complex sounds, particularly speech and music. “Music provides a really nice test bench for us auditory neuroscientists to understand the brain,” Sankaran says. “It’s acoustically complex and has this rich statistical structure that we learn across our lifetime.” 

When we hear a pattern of notes, we can predict what comes next. This predictive ability isn’t just about appreciating music—it reveals fundamental mechanisms of how our brains make sense of the world around us. “And that’s really important for understanding how music creates emotion,” he adds. “It does that by essentially playing with our expectations.” 

Science and ethics in concert 

While working in Edward Chang’s lab at the University of California, San Francisco, studying brain recordings that could decode speech and music perception, Sankaran began to recognize that the technical advances in neuroscience were outpacing our ethical frameworks for managing them. 

To address this gap, Sankaran has co-developed a neuroethics graduate seminar at UC Berkeley’s Kavli Center for Ethics, Science, and the Public, where he is based as a Civic Science Fellow. “We don’t really get taught any frameworks for parsing the ethical dilemmas we’re confronted with in our research,” he says. “I thought it was really important to establish a course.” 

Rather than focusing on traditional bioethics or historical cases, the seminar tackled pressing current issues, like unexpected side effects of deep brain stimulation, which eases Parkinson’s symptoms but might also cause behavioral changes like impulsive gambling. The course then ventured into future challenges: the current state of “mind-reading” technology, and how to think about lab-grown brain organoids, button-sized clumps of neural cells that theoretically could someday show signs of sentience. 

Now, as the first tenure-track professor in the University of San Francisco’s new neuroscience department, Sankaran is expanding this vision. “We’re really weaving ethics and social justice into the curriculum at every stage, which I think is really unique,” he says. “It’s going to set this program apart.”  

Sankaran envisions creating a program where fourth-year undergraduates work directly with communities affected by neurological conditions at facilities like the VA Medical Center or a neurology clinic. “Students can go and work in those environments and have the casual conversations and share perspectives of both impacted communities and lab-based neuroscientists.” 

Mixing in community voices 

For Sankaran, classroom discussions are just the beginning. His main project as a Civic Science Fellow focuses on creating physical spaces where neuroscientists and community members can engage in direct dialogue about emerging technologies. 

The challenge is defining who should be at the table. “If you’re someone with a disability who could really benefit from a brain-computer interface, you’re maybe going to have a different ethical response than someone who really values their mental privacy and fears the next stage of mental surveillance,” he says. Both voices are necessary, along with others. 

He’s particularly mindful of how media coverage can amplify these tensions. “In the Bay Area, there’s a lot of techno-optimism that tends to exaggerate these technologies’ abilities,” he says. “That then drives even more worry about dystopian futures.” 

To bridge these divides, Sankaran is drawing inspiration from successful public engagement models, like a UK initiative  where AI scientists stationed themselves in a bus outside a shopping mall, creating an informal space for public dialogue. He envisions something similar for neurotechnology—not just a one-time event, but the beginning of long-term partnerships between scientists and local communities. 

This integration of scientific training with community engagement reflects Sankaran’s own journey spanning multiple worlds. From studying physics and music as an undergraduate at Berkeley, to his neuroscience research in Australia, to his current work combining technical research with ethical inquiry, he’s learned the value of connecting different ways of thinking about the brain and its possibilities. 

Composing the future of neuroscience 

Looking ahead, Sankaran sees growing recognition of the need to consider the ethical and societal implications of neurotechnology and the importance of community engagement among funders. “Recently we’ve even seen the behemoths of Neuroscience research funding at NIH and NSF dedicating substantial funds towards neuroethics work,” he notes. For early-career scientists interested in this work, Sankaran says that now is a perfect time to get involved. 

But field needs more than just funding, he says. It also needs structural changes in how academic institutions value and evaluate this work. One key challenge is how universities assess faculty for tenure decisions. Traditional metrics like publications don’t capture the impact of community engagement and public dialogue.  

“A lot of the civic science work doesn’t result in traditional publications and other material that would constitute metrics for tenure consideration,” Sankaran says. At USF, he’s fortunate that his department considers diverse types of research output. “Other people are not so lucky, and it has really made people shy away from doing this kind of alternate form of research.” 

To address that reticence, research institutions can create tenure paths that recognize community engagement as scholarly impact. Funding organizations can prioritize projects that meaningfully involve affected communities from the start. And communities themselves can actively shape research priorities through sustained dialogue with scientists. 

Just as music creates meaning through the interplay of different elements, a sustainable future for neuroscience will best be shaped by the harmonious interaction of scientific expertise, ethical consideration, and community wisdom. 

Narayan’s Civic Science Fellowship at the Berkeley Kavli Center for Ethics, Science, and the Public is supported by the Rita Allen Foundation and The Kavli Foundation.