When The Mind No Longer Belongs To Us, How Technology Takes Over!

Is the real danger is the human intelligence!

In 1848, a railway worker named Phineas

Gage survived a metal rod shooting through

his skull, His body lived, but his personality

died. He transformed from a disciplined man

into someone impulsive, erratic, and

unethical.

Medicine concluded: “The mind changes if

the brain changes”

But in 2025… we no longer need a metal rod.

All we need is an internet connection.

We’re not just living in a technological age

we’re living under its rule.

Our phones know us better than we do.

Our thoughts are shaped quietly by

notifications, headlines, images, comments…

Every day, our internal world is updated like

background software.

And the twist…

We believe we’re “thinking, ” when really,

we’re just consuming pre-written thought

scripts.

The real questions are no longer “What do I

think?”

But rather:

Who controls the gateway to my thoughts?

What rewrote my mind without asking?

And is my mind… still mine?

This article won’t offer final answers.

Instead, it’s a reflective walk-across history,

philosophy, and the edges of the human

psyche…

when the mind is being reprogrammed

without knowing it.

Silent Programming: How Thoughts Are

Planted Without Noise.

Nothing changes a person more than the

things they don’t feel happening…

We don’t wake up and suddenly see the world

differently…

True change doesn’t arrive with noise it

creeps in quietly, through routines, through

small habits repeated until they feel natural.

A simple example?

You check the weather.

A notification pops up, “How to boost your

productivity”.

You scroll!

An ad for Thinking, Fast and Slow appears.

Then a meditation app.

Then a friend’s photo in Bali working

remotely and smiling in the sun.

Did you choose to think about productivity

and mindfulness and quitting your job?

Or did a silent algorithm reorder your mental

priorities?

The problem isn’t technology…

The problem is we no longer know the line

between what we want to think… and what

was designed to think for us.

The Hidden Shock:

A 2018 Stanford study showed that the average person consumes up to 74,000 pieces of digital information per day.

That’s 74,000 attempts to influence your perception daily.

In another experiment by Meta, researchers quietly altered the newsfeeds of 600,000 users.

The goal: influence their mood.

It worked.

People were made sadder or happier not by events, but by how posts were arranged.

This isn’t science fiction.

This is your real digital life.

You don’t just choose how you feel…

You’re being programmed to feel.

The Quietly Terrifying Thought;

That opinion you hold… May have been drafted by a product team in Silicon Valley months ago.

Escaping the Maze: Can the Mind Be Reclaimed?

One day, I realized something was wrong, I didn’t seem to have real opinions anymore.

Every thought I “owned” felt like something I’d seen, read, or heard… somewhere else.

Had I lost myself? Or had I never really formed my self-just collected pre-approved fragments?

I started practicing silence, Not for peace, but to mute the inner noise.

And in the silence, something horrifying became clear; Most of my thoughts weren’t mine.

A Subtle Technological Horror:

We don’t carry our phones, They carry us!

In 2023, Amazon confirmed Alexa could detect emotional shifts in your voice.

By 2024, ad networks began tailoring content based on your live emotional state.

Pause and think:

There are systems that know when you’re weak and sell you something.

We may not need artificial intelligence to think for us…

“The real danger is the human intelligence that convinced us not to think at all.”

Reclaiming the mind isn’t about resisting machines it’s about resisting internal surrender.

It means thinking as if you’re alone in a room with no notifications, no suggestions, and no invisible eyes that know you better than you know yourself.

This article is available in Arabic.

Thank you