These are important topics. But I felt that something was missing: a clearer way to ask not only what is technically possible, but also what values are being mobilized, hidden, or eroded when cognition becomes a target of conflict.

As a psychologist and neuropsychologist, I am used to working in a discipline that has often developed somewhat independently from other social sciences. Psychology has powerful methods and theories of cognition, emotion, decision-making, and behavior. Yet it can also become detached from broader debates in sociology, political theory, peace research, and critical social thought. Critical neuroscience has been one important attempt to bridge this gap by asking how neuroscience is embedded in social, cultural, ethical, and political contexts.

In this article, I tried to extend that bridge by bringing Johan Galtung’s epistemological triad-data, theory, and values-into critical neuroscience. Galtung’s framework offers a simple but powerful methodological reminder: scientific inquiry is distorted when it relies only on empirical data, only on theory, or only on values. Good analysis requires all three. This is especially important in the study of cognitive warfare, where empirical findings, speculative technological imaginaries, and political interests often become deeply entangled.

The paper therefore asks how critical neuroscience can use Galtung’s triad to examine cognitive warfare more carefully. I argue that we must distinguish between the real capabilities of neurotechnologies and the exaggerated claims surrounding them. Cognitive warfare involves not only the possible weaponization of neuroscience itself, but also the weaponization of its reputation. Inflated narratives about “brain reading,” “mind control,” or cognitive domination can shape public fear, policy agendas, funding priorities, and trust in science, even when the underlying technologies are far more limited.

A central concern of the paper is the long-term social cost of engaging in cognitive warfare. Manipulative narratives may be effective in the short term, but they can erode the very conditions that societies need in order to recover from conflict: trust, resilience, cooperation, and solidarity. Once dehumanizing repertoires, suspicion, and epistemic instability become normalized, they may persist beyond the original conflict and affect other groups and contexts. In this sense, cognitive warfare does not only target individual minds; it damages the social conditions under which minds can deliberate, trust, and collaborate.

The sections on resilience and solidarity were especially important to me. I wanted to move away from a narrow view of resilience as simply the ability to resist attacks or maintain operational continuity. From the perspective of peace research, resilience should also mean preserving the values that make social life worth defending: dignity, autonomy, justice, and mutual recognition. Similarly, solidarity is not only a moral ideal. It is a practical condition for long-term coexistence, because human societies depend on cooperation, reciprocity, and the ability to rebuild trust.

The reviewers played an important role in helping me sharpen these points. They encouraged me to clarify what is genuinely new about cognitive warfare, to avoid overstatement, to distinguish real technological effects from neuropolitical imaginaries, and to explain more concretely how resilience and solidarity fit the overall argument. Their feedback made the paper much stronger.

Ultimately, this article is an attempt to argue that cognitive warfare should not be studied only as a security or technology problem. It is also an epistemological and ethical problem. If cognition becomes a domain of conflict, then peace must include more than the absence of violence. It must also include the safeguarding of mental and social autonomy: the conditions under which people and societies can think, deliberate, trust, and flourish together.