Dr. Moran Cerf (neuroscientist)

Episode Transcript
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Chuck Shute (00:14):
Welcome to the show, and today will be a little
bit of a departure from themusic interviews that I've been
doing. And there will be, ofcourse, more music episodes
upcoming, but also more episodeslike this that I've done. And
I'll continue to do so make sureto subscribe to the show so you
don't miss any future episodes.
Now, my guest today is Dr. MoranCerf. And he has degrees in
philosophy, physics andneuroscience. And he's used to

(00:37):
it used to be with a computerhacker, and he used to rob
banks. And now he's in thehacking brains. And he's used
his understanding anddeciphering of computer codes to
understand the brain and crackthat code. And he's doing some
really cutting edge researchwith brains, neuroscience and
dreams. And we're just going toscratch the surface of

(01:00):
everything in this interview.
But a lot of this stuff soundslike something out of a sci fi
movie. And Dr. Cerf is actuallyconsulted with Hollywood, on
movies and TV shows, includingDr. Robot and limitless. So get
ready. This is a fascinatingconversation and prepare to have
your mind blown. Please welcomeDr. Moran Cerf to the Czech shoe

(01:22):
podcast. How are you doing?

Dr. Moran Cerf (01:23):
Wonderful, thank you. It's pleasure to be here.

Great. Yeah, well, I've done a little bit of
research on you, and you'refascinating guy you're doing
you're studying some fascinatingthings, doing cutting edge
research. But let's start alittle bit at the beginning. If
I could, if we could tell peoplea little bit about your
background, with the bankrobbing and the hacking and all
that stuff. I'm sure you've toldthe story a million times. But
it's so fascinating.

Sure. I mean, I think that no matter what I do
in my life, I will always beknown as the former hacker, or
the stories of its bank robbingare going to be the first thing
I'm gonna introduce to it. SoI'm owning it, right? Yeah, I
was a child of the 80s. And hischild of the 80s. I grew up with
computers, kind of as theybecame a household item, I had

(02:05):
one and I learned to operatethem. And quick kind of cut to
the chase, I became a hacker, soI knew how to tinker with the
inside of computers. And itbecame useful when I turned 18
and joined the Israeliintelligence. So as an Israeli
kid, at age 18, you go to theIsraeli army, I was acquitted to

(02:25):
the intelligence. And my skillsas a hacker became useful. So
for four years in the Israelimilitary, I got to hone those
skills and practice them in amuch, you know, bigger setup.
Yeah, sorry, budgets.

So you're robbing banks. And not only through
computers, but also youphysically wind into banks and
robbed them, but it's part ofthe government the government's
hired you then how does thislegal because you don't want
we're actually breaking the law,right?

When I finished the army, I started a company
and the company was doing thesame thing as civilians. So then
we would be hired by banks, orby the government, FBI and stuff
like that. And the way it worksis that the board of the bank,
let's say hires you and says wewant to make sure that our bank
of monies, a client's money issafe. So we're going to hire you
a team of hackers to try tobreak into our own bank without

(03:18):
anyone else other than boardknowing about it. And when you
succeed, you tell us how we didit so we can actually change
something in the security so wewould be hired to rob a bank by
the owners of the bank but noone else knew. So from the
perspective of the bank ownersit was legal but from a business
perspective, this was a typicalbank robbery. So we would come
to the bank either physically ormostly virtually and transfer

(03:40):
money from one account toanother or change some numbers
or show that we can actually getdata from the inside and then
help the bank secure themselvesbetter so the bad guys wouldn't
be able to come in

so when you physically went in there Did you
rob it with a gun or are youjust like manipulate the teller
because some of the stuff youcalled the teller and you you
asked for the password and theysaid she says no, I can't do
that. And then you call the nextday and you say okay, good job
I'm the head of security so nowgive me the password and then
you tricked her

Yeah, so I think that hacking is a broad term for
everything from going into thebank physically and trying to
take something to goingvirtually to phone calls human
intelligence and so on. We didall of those I think that the
most sexy stories are the oneswhere we actually came to the
bank in person and pretended tobe bank robbers old fashioned

(04:29):
Those were the kind of we did itvery few times.

Did you have a gun though? or How did you What did
you use?

There are some rules even even when you pretend
to hack a bank Yeah, to makesome rules so we picked a
branches that have only oneteller so they want to be kind
of fitting our customer fee.
Okay also let the guardssecurity guards know in advance
that so the only the bank tellerwould be not on the in and would
actually kind of go through theCall but everyone else was aware

(05:00):
of what's going on there. Wealso had, you know, kind of
lawyers letter that we're readyto pull. If someone says, Hey,
what's going on? It's like, youknow, the police comes, which
happened not once. And you haveto explain like, no, it's
actually a pretend bank robbery.
We're just doing it to testsecurity. We had all the
repertoire of things you canimagine happen when you try to

(05:21):
do it, but at the same time, itwas relatively safe.

Okay, but you get you got to get a little bit of
an adrenaline rush for that,right?

seemingly. I mean, that I mean, so don't try
it at home. Like one sentence.
All right, yeah. It's scary nomatter what, because you never
know. And you know, once you saythe word, it's a bank robbery.
And once you start the process,there's stress in the air. And
that's as good as it gets fromthe perspective of everyone
else. But you it's a real bankrobbery, they don't know that

(05:49):
it's like a test. And that's theonly way you can prepare them.
So after you kind of finish theheck can you explain to them
they actually find it useful?
Because now they know how theywould act? If it were really
what to do. But it's a prettyintense moment.

I bet. Yeah. So then you meet this
neuroscientist, Dr. FrancisCrick, as I know it says name?
Yes. And that's the guy thatchanged your life because he was
saying, well, you're studyinghacking, but why not study
hacking of the brain? That's themost important thing you could
hack. So it talked about him he,you said, He's your idol.

Yeah, he was my idol way before I met him in
person, I actually went to meethim because I came as like a
fanboy to see him giving a talk.
But his story was that hehimself was a hacker during
World War Two, a different typeof hacking different types of
machinery, but he was kind ofhacking into the German radar
system during the war. And whenthe war ended, he said, what do
you do with those skillsafterwards? Like, what what does

(06:43):
a hacker do when they'reunemployed? And he was recruited
by James Watson, who was abiologist? Who told him Look,
there's this molecule that I'mlooking at Tesla's letters hgtc
in a similar code. Do you knowhow to make sense of that, and
then taking his skills as ahacker applying them to biology,
he was able to decode the humangenome, and essentially was the
guy who discovered the DNA is

the double helix of DNA. Yeah, yeah. Francis Crick.
That's amazing.

is the second name out of the sorry, Jackie
Watson. And Crick said Francis,right, right. What something
Creek with a team that decodedthe DNA. And, and this was
applying hacking skills tobiology and working it out later
years after he became aneuroscientist. And when he met
me, and learned, I'm doingbasically in his mind the same
thing, hacking into systems. Butdoing it only for the service of

(07:33):
security. He said, Forget aboutsecurity, take those skills,
bring them to the world ofneuroscience, you will find a
lot of uses for those that canhelp the world and that was
basically the transition fromhacking into vaults of banks to
hacking into our inner vaultthat Yeah, our innovation.

Amazing. Yeah. And so before we get into all the
amazing research that you'redoing one more thing I wanted to
point out if you could talkabout just a little bit about
the movie and TV work stuff thatyou do like your consultant with
your with Mr. Robot and thelimitless show, and don't here
Ancient Aliens as well.

I was once this was nothing This was once I was
interviewed there in kind of insomehow became involved with how
they think about things, could Itry to change the way the show's
course goes? I tried to take theword alien from the show and
make it about science. Okay, sothis was my involvement. So I
guess so I was I was a gradstudent at Caltech in Los

(08:29):
Angeles, which is convenientlyclose to Hollywood. And
oftentimes, you will haveHollywood producers show up at
Caltech and pick a scientist andask him or her to help them with
the movie, they would say, youknow, we have this TV show
house, in house, they put somechemicals into a jar, and we
have a line that says, Putchemical name here, put

(08:51):
quantities here, and we don'tknow what it is, I mean, the
scientists to come in to kind ofsay, this would be
benzodiazepine, 20. cc. So wedid. And I signed up to do that
first for, I think, one or twoTV shows, and I did a good job.
And they said, Well, you know,you can if you're interested in
film, you have good ideas. Youdon't just like putting the, you
know, quantities where we needto, but also giving us ideas for
how the science could workforward, would you want to do

(09:14):
that as a permanent position,and I started doing it for the
Academy, a film for now over adecade, where every now and then
they would send me a script fora movie or a pilot TV or so and
they say, look, we have sciencethere. Can you make sure it's
accurate? Can you help us figureout how it works? And sometimes

(09:34):
it's critical for the narrativeof the show. Sometimes they say,
well, we don't have the showends, we need the scientists to
actually figure out, dragged uscan figure it out. And here's
the plot and certain saboteursdo that.

Yeah. And so with limitless, I think you'd
finished the the ending of thefirst season and they loved it
so much. Like actually we'regoing to put that on season two,
and we're going to stretch theshow out. We loved it. So that's
really cool. So do you get it,you don't get a writing credit
for that. If you

You know, I once went to see the filming of a
show that I put the kind of Imean, you know, at the end is
like a few words here and there.
It's not like you kind of havebig input. But I asked myself
the same question because onetime I went to the filming of a
show that I put a lot of sciencein. And I kind of saw that the
director actually makes the showand none of the things I said

(10:21):
were actually in there. So youknow, I spent so much time kind
of putting all of those kind ofdetails in the show and like
really making sure that thisdrug goes with that drug and
that, like the numbers work out,how can we something to show so
that we don't need it, in asense of why do you even kind of
make me go through. So reallymaking sure it's works, it says
sort of you can put in thecredit a science advisor,
everyone would be able to kindof go to you if there's

(10:44):
questions, but I think thatwhat's interesting, and that
would be my last sentence onthat if you could go into a one
hour monologue just sure sure isthat the world becomes more
interested in that, as in thereare now people who would pause
Mr. Robot on one frame, and theywould magnify it, and they will
try to read the text on thescreen to make sure that it
actually makes sense. And if youknow, if you have like a game of

(11:04):
thrones character that has aStarbucks mug on the table,
that's right, your watch thatthey're gonna go up in arms. So
sure directors are starting tomove to really caring about
that. And even if there's like amoment where they coming up pens
over a screen, they would bringme in, they say we want to look
at the screen, and make surethat the text on the screen
makes sense. And if we use somejargon on kind of the background

(11:27):
of a conversation, you're goingto put the jargon that would
make sense to someone who kindof magnifies that and stops that
and it goes to extreme levels ofyou know, the, what's the stars
alignment in the night where thetwo people kiss, because it
happened in 1920. And you wantto make sure that it's like the
right constellation that comeswith a really started to go into

(11:48):
the desert, it's a lot of fun tothink about those things.

Yeah, that's really cool. So now let's talk about
your your, your research yourwith education, and learning. So
you say that, you know, brainslearn differently. And this was
an interesting place, I workedin education for 17 years, and
probably didn't need 17 years tofigure this out. But you say
school systems are outdated. Andbecause they're putting all the
brains of, you know, people inone room and just hoping that

(12:13):
they learn but you're sayingthat it would be better to
separate kids by learningstyles. And rather than age and
geography that's reallyinteresting. Talk about that.

I agree. And I should say it's about kit, it's
about anyone or people wholisten to you right now, your
audience, they have differentways of understanding you and
some people may be understand itbetter when you say things
compared to when I say things,some people understand it only
when they pause and think aboutit in the continuous. So every
person has a different learningprofile. And we kind of went to
the average one that we know howto work with best. And we

(12:44):
created a system that works withthat. And we throw out a lot of
people who don't operate thesame way. So so the concrete
example with kids, for instance,is that some kids get things
really, really fast, when youtell them right away, but then
they need a lot of time toreally practice that themselves
to actually cement it. And somekids the opposite, they don't
understand it, when you tellthem they actually have to
practice in play and makemistakes, and then they get it

(13:05):
themselves. So just just thosetwo examples, there are
different styles of learning,but you put them in the same
class and you broadcast to themthe same way. And it will work
perfectly for one but totallyhorrible for the other one, and
it's gonna lead to outcomes thatare bad, but you don't know how
to operate it. Anothersuggestion that we had was to
actually try to learn eachstudent's profile, and then

(13:27):
match them with the perfectteacher or perfect teaching
style. Now that's a change of alot of things. Because right now
the school system operates byyours. Basically, if your six
year old, six year olds, ifyou're 77 year olds, no one says
let's take the nine year old sixyear old and seven year olds
that learn the same way and putthem together in class, because
we think that it's ages matters.
And we learned that it's nottrue, but we didn't change.

Yeah, that's it.
Well, hopefully they can figurethat out at some point because I
think you're right, I think itreally needs a rehaul the whole
thing. So that's again, that's awhole nother hour. But let's
talk about now freewill. You'vetalked a lot about this. Explain
this example. This is reallyinteresting to me that there are
more dentists named dentist ordentists sorry named dentists.
That is what that is sofascinating to me. Why explain

(14:09):
why that is.

So this is an example for something that
neuroscientists would callembodied cognition. It's a name
for a field that boils down tothe fact that things in the
environment leak into ourthinking and affect our
behavior. Specifically, thereare a lot more than you would
expect. Dentists whose firstname is Dennis. Now, of course,
we can see quickly what's theconnection here, dentists and

(14:33):
dentists sound the same andsomehow this leads to more
dentists choosing to be dentist.
Now if you ask any swagaliciousbe a dentist, they would not say
well, my name sounded like adentist. They would tell you a
story about them. Always caringabout medicine and helping
people and teeth wereinteresting for them. They will
tell you a story. The reality isthat most likely what happened
was the person's name was Denniswhen they walked in the world

(14:54):
and suddenly they heard someonecalling their name so they
looked and say so you called meand they said, Oh no, you're
talking about dental Nevermind,they just started calling my
name and they kept moving on.
And then another time they heardabout themselves and they looked
in, it turns out to someone likea dentist. So they just heard
about dentistry a lot more thanthe average, because it was
silly, and it sounded like theirname, so they just paid more
attention. In the end, when theyturn 25. And they choose a

(15:16):
profession, the dentistry optionis just more cylinder brain
because they heard about itmuch, much more. They think that
there are a lot more dentistsout there, because they just
hear about them. We all went andheard the word dentist, but we
just ignored it. And they paidattention to it. And that's why
they actually choose freely tobecome dentists. But the
proportions of the options havedifferent, so they still have a

(15:37):
little bit more awareness. Andto kind of take it to the bigger
picture. We all have thisexperience with our life where
things sound like us, and we paymore attention to them. Or
they're affecting us becauseit's colder in the womb we're at
and it affects our mood. And weare a little bit meaner because
the temperature is affecting ourmood. And we don't notice that

(15:59):
we don't say well, I'm a littlebit more mean to you. Because
I'm shivering, we would thinkthat we're just mean to you
because you're not nice. Butactually it's other things that
leak into our perception, wechange our thinking. I'll give
you another example. It will belast one because again, we can
go into an hour talk aboutcondition. when Hurricane Sandy
happened a few years ago, welooked at people who donated

(16:21):
money to actually kind of helpthe the relief afterwards. Then
it turned out that other peoplewe gave money had a name that
said sounded similar to Sandypeople It sounded like Sandra
and, and Sally, so it's justthat the hooligan itself has a
name. And all the people whosename sounded like it, we can
kind of pay more attention toit, it sounded like someone

(16:43):
talks to them. And so they caredmore, and they gave more money
and so on, which is kind ofstrange, because we enable
weekends alphabetically, kind ofarbitrarily, we don't say, well,
this weekend is going to eatLouisiana, let's see what name
is mostly prominent Louisianaand named again, that's name so
most people lose theirattention. We cannot think of
policies like independent ofpeople's psychology. But it

(17:04):
turns out that the name of ahurricane will change a lot as
to what people do to give moneyto help the relief. And we could
start thinking about it andactually change policies
accordingly.

That's fascinating.
And then not not use experimentslike this with people, right,
where they think that they'remaking the decision. But you're
manipulating things in the labright?

Many times. So this is the kind of bread and
butter of experiments trying tomake your brain do things behind
your back. Now, of course,there's philosophy here, what is
your back versus what's yourbrain, but the point is that you
will give us one answer. And wewill know that the answer that
you give is kind of flawed orincomplete. And we will actually
have a better answer that comesfrom your brain. And we will pit

(17:45):
them against each other andunderstand why is it people come
up with answers that are nottrue to actions that they made
without knowing what drivestheir actions? That's the kind
of setup that we use for most ofour experiments.

Yeah, so and talk about this with like emotions
and pain, like if someone'sgoing, you're talking about
someone going running, you know,for the first mile, their legs
hurt, and then they just keeppushing themselves, like emotion
can heighten. You know, like whysports teams do better at home.
But like I had a navy seal on myshow, and he was explaining
like, you know, motivations Bs,and then our, you know, our

(18:18):
brains don't want to doanything. So we have to, like
kind of override our brains. Andso how do you do? How do people
because it's so hard to controlemotions, but you're kind of
doing research and experimentson how to teach people how to
better have control of emotions.

So there are many ways Thanks, I'll give you
one. And then if you want, wecan elaborate. So one of
expenses we do is expanded, justask this exact question. And
that is, what's the connectionbetween our brain and our body,
when it comes to moments thatare difficult, is a, an example
that will resonate with youraudience easily. I would say
that if you went to the gym, andworked really, really hard, at

(18:58):
the end, you'll be sore. Becauseyour brain knows that this
feeling of soreness happenedafter you went to the gym, it
can create the connectionbetween Okay, I exercise a lot.
That's why I feel so you wouldignore this pain and you would
actually, you know, flag it islike a good thing or is a way
that things work. And if youwoke up this morning, this
morning, with the same pain thatyou would feel after the gym

(19:18):
without going to the gym for thesame pain, you would be allowed
to go to a doctor and you saysomething is wrong. Because even
though it's the same pain, thefact that you have a reason for
that, that you know, okay, it'scaused by this action is going
to go away tomorrow allows youto essentially frame this pain
as a positive thing. So if youjust woke up and you felt pain,
without any reason for itwithout having been to the gym
now before you would think mybody's failing me to do

(19:40):
something about it. Thissuggests that the way our brain
perceives pain changes theentire experience to it being
negative to it being positive tothe pain could be positive, if
you're associated with thebody's working out, me being
stronger. Take it to theextreme. Many times when we do
things our body says I Unlikeit, let's stop. And your ability

(20:02):
to frame the story differentlyallows you to continue or to
stop. So for example, if you runa marathon, surely at some
point, whether you're an athletethat exercise for that all your
life or not, around mile 20, youwould be in pain, and your brain
is going to tell you pleasestop. That's the natural,
normal, kind of rational, makesense? Answer to your body not

(20:26):
doing something that it's usedto doing. It's It's not easy,
you're you're burning a lot ofcalories more than the usual,
your body's actually exercisingand stretching its limits, it
will tell you to stop. Becauseyou say to yourself, I know what
causes this pain, I know what mygoal is, I know that it's not
going to kill me, you canactually tell your body to
continue and do things eventhough it asked you to stop. And

(20:49):
this ability is something thatyou can train for. So we can
take athletes or navy seals, orany person CEOs, and train them
to not make their stronger bodywork for them, but make their
brain control the bodydifferently. So we can help you
keep working when you a feelingthat you want to stop or control

(21:10):
your emotions, when you feelthat they take over or in the
context of the athletes that wework with in a study, we
actually try to break their bodyand try to see when is the
moment that their brain tellstheir body, let's stop. And we
try to tell them. Look, we'regonna now read the activity from
your brain. In those moments,when you're about to quit when
you say I can't do it anymore.
And we're just going to tell youthat we know that you're there.

(21:33):
And we'll ask you to spend onemore minute in this state. So
just train your brain tocontinue running, lifting
weights and cycling for oneextra minute. After the moment
that your brain wanted to quit.
It doesn't matter if it took you10 minutes or 20 minutes are
based on your muscles, it willtake you different times. But
when you get to this moment,we're going to train you to stay

(21:53):
there for longer. And this willtrain your brain to endure the
pain a little longer. And let'schange the game for athletes.
Yeah, no,

that's exactly what the Navy SEAL guy was saying
with the with the hell weekshe'd say like, okay, just you
know, let me just go one moreminute. And he's always like
pushing himself one more, hedoesn't say okay, I'm gonna run
another 20 miles. He's like,Alright, let me just run for one
more minute. And then it's justlike, you just keep doing that.
So that's kind of like a way totrick your brain in a way,

I can tell you the opposite, which is I was a
soldier for many years in theIsraeli military, one of the
ways to break us was tobasically tell us, Okay, one
more minute that it's like, justpause for one more minute, we're
going to get to this amilestone, and that's we're
gonna, that's when we're goingto stop. And just when you get
there, they say, actually, threemoments. So the fact that you
kind of get your brain used toOkay, I can summon all my energy

(22:42):
and keep it together for 60 moreseconds. And then someone pulls
the rug and says, actually, it'sgoing to be 180 more seconds is
much harder for your brain thanif they just told you, you're
gonna run out four more minutes.
The fact that you kind of like,sitting in this place where you
frame the milestone as the end,then you put all your energy and
then you ask for more canactually break you. So it's

(23:02):
either way like you can lie toyourself and make your brain do
more things, or someone else canlie to you and break you just by
kind of changing the end postsrepeatedly.

Yeah. And so I mean, there is neuroscience
behind this. And then the otherthing you talk about is like, if
people want to be funnier ifthey want to be smarter, more
successful is surroundthemselves with people that are
like that. And I've heard a lotof like, you know, psycho life
coaches and things say this, butthere is some science behind
this as well.

Right? So I think that there's kind of like
a, you know, a lot of coacheswho say something like you're
the sum of the five peoplearound the rise, kind of the,
the essential, similar idea, alittle less quantitative. So
what we did is neuroscientists,we started to look at the
synchrony between the brains ofpeople. So you and I, right now,
we've been talking for a fewminutes. Something about the

(23:53):
communication isn't justtransferring information from
your brain to my brain by usingacoustics and it translates over
the Internet to sound on my headand then it becomes percept in
my mind, we actually also alignour brains by a speaker to doc
my brain immediately tries toalign itself and we kind of go
into the same speed I probablymade you speak a little faster

(24:15):
than your usual He made youspeak a little slower than usual
because we start with differentpaces. Mine is kind of a little
bit hectic because I havedifferent accents. So
immediately forced you to kindof do things differently.
Whether you look at me or lookaway when I talk actually kind
of is coded in my brain is whatI'm saying in this moment is
resonated with him or not. Andeven without paying attention to

(24:37):
it. My brain says okay, thissentence didn't work out say it
again differently, because theperson kind of looked confused.
All of those cues that happened.
They actually are subliminallike we don't really say Oh, he
is confused. Let me say it againa second time with different
words. We just learned toincorporate them and work with
them. But they lead to ourbrains overtime when we interact
synchronizing, we learn to speakeach other's language better. We

(24:58):
Learn to use the same metaphorswe learned to basically what we
call shell reality. Now we do itwith two people, the two brands
synchronize, you add a thirdperson, all three brands
synchronize all combinations,121323, you start doing it with
larger populations, positionsbecome more alike. And if you
can't do that, if you can'treally become like the
population, you usually standout, you people say that you

(25:19):
have less empathy, or that youweird, or that you have some
kind of elitist behavior. Sopeople who are not able to are
perceived by the community issomehow an outlier, for better
and for worse. Now, all of thisto say that those cues change
our brains, not just by uslearning things. cognitively,
you teach me something, I'mlearning it, but also over some

(25:40):
kind of a small slice ofinformation. And that's when I
say that if you want to befunnier, you don't have to just
learn to be funny by reading abook of 1000 Jewish jokes and
memorize them. That's one way itwill take things cognitively.
But to be funny involves alsotiming, and knowing how to
change your voice and take apause before you give the
punchline. And that's somethingthat you will learn by being

(26:02):
next to comedians. In this casefor a while you will see him do
it and you will learn it inturn, internalize it without
knowing that you're learning it,you just kind of start doing it
because your brain wavessynchronized. And you'll become
a better comedian, becauseyou're next to comedians. And
it's true for if you're next topeople that are on time, you
will internalize their thinkingof how time works. And you will
be more on time without sayingOkay, I need to leave home 10

(26:25):
minutes earlier than I used to,because I now learned that this
is the way you will just seethat they do it. They leave home
earlier, and it will start doingit with them. And suddenly
you're much more on time withoutknowing what happened. And it's
still for many, many trades thatare happening to us without us
coming to you saying I'm goingto now become that, huh?

Yeah. And I think you talked about how people, it
takes eight times of repetitionfor the brain to be rewired?
Like it takes eight times for ifyou see a commercial for then
it's kind of like hardwired inyour brain. Yeah,

there's a study by a colleague of mine, he
showed that, you know, it'saverage, like some people need n
equal one, just one repetitionover the wires, the younger you
are, the fewer kind of petitionsyou need, but the average was
eight. So at times you you kindof see a pairing of associations
a and V together, is when yourbrain says, You know what, I'm
going to actually create a setof neurons that will code this

(27:19):
association as one. So everytime you see George Clooney, you
will think of Nespresso, I thinkthat's the right pairing of like
a spokesperson is right product,eight times have you seen them
will actually take the clusterof yours in your brain that code
George Clooney, and the clusterof cells that code Nespresso,
create a third cluster, they'rejust fires for the two of them
together. And suddenly, when yousee one of the two, the same

(27:42):
cells fire, so your braincreated a mapping of two items
into one.

Okay, and so then so and then we're talking about
memories. So memories can changeover time, and you talk about
how that's like, that's whytherapy works, is, you know,
you're you're, we're controllingthe narrative. And then when you
keep telling the story, itchanges every time you tell it,
because you're going to rememberthe most recent time that you
told it. So by telling it intherapy, and then kind of

(28:06):
reshaping it, that's how therapyworks is that

you said it perfectly, I couldn't say
better, so I let it let itsimmer the way you did. I think
that the best analogy that I canthink of is a telephone game.
Only it's happening in our brainwith ourselves. So you know,
different games, you tellsomeone something, and they tell
someone else, and then someoneelse and it kind of keeps
changing, because every timesomeone uses it, they modify a
little bit. And by the time youget to number 10, it might be a
different story. This is what'shappening in our brain all the

(28:31):
time, we have a memory we,whenever we talk about this
memory, or we use it, we openit, and we use it to tell a
story to our therapist, but alsowe expose it to information
leakage from the therapist fromour mindset at that moment, and
then we overwrite the original.
But then tomorrow, if someoneasks us about the same Emily, we
won't load the original, we'regoing to load the over written
version that was modified theday after. And then we're going

(28:52):
to again, allow it to bemodified and maybe changed and
overwrite it again and again. Sothe more we use the memory, the
more it's changed. And that's afeature of our brain or the bug
that allows us to actually takethat memories, and instead of
just reliving them again andagain, and just going through
the same trauma without gettingout of it, to actually expose
the trauma to some informationfrom the outside world that

(29:12):
allows us to change it. So after810 20 repetitions 10 sessions
with a therapist, you can stillremember that you were in the
tank exploded or that yourgirlfriend dumped you. But
instead of just reliving themoment again and again and not
being able to get out of it. Youcan look at the memory from far
away and say, okay, yes, thedeck exploded and my friends
were hurt. But here's some wayfor me to be able to move on

(29:35):
with my life without justconstantly smelling the smell of
the burning, or releasing theimages or political, the ex
girlfriend to not just keepsaying Why did she leave me I
can't move on. I'm stuck therebut actually say okay, there are
ways for me to move on. That's afeature of our brain that allows
us to work out and move awayfrom things without totally,

(29:57):
really them all the time. Butcouldn't

it be worked in the same way negatively, like, if
you have a breakup withsomebody, and then you're
telling people that, you know,you're the victim in this, it
was all her fault, and maybeyou're shaping it in a in a in
an untruthful way and making itworse on yourself and making her
you know, making it seem more,you know, traumatic than it
really was, rather than tryingto. Yeah, so it can work out I

(30:23):
think,

I think that opening remember, we I painted
it in a good way. Because Ithink the role of therapists is
to be the positive nudges. Soyou go to your therapist, you
tell them the story of theexploding tank, if they're good
therapists, they would know thatright now your memory is
malleable and available fordiscussions. And they will
introduce ways to look at itdifferently that will allow you

(30:44):
to see it better and overwritewith the vegetation, a bad
therapist or bad friends or canhave bad experiences will lead
you to maybe amplify and sit inworst light. And I think that,
of course, we rely on our humanbrains desire to get better. So
the assumption is that everytime you open it, you try to
help yourself get better. Andthis changes the internal view,

(31:08):
or if you cannot get help fromfriends, therapists, any service
that can help you and their job,if they're good is to do that to
say, hey, let's not just keeptelling you, it's actually your
fault that she left you andyou're responsible for that and
you deserve it and like make itworse, but actually tell you
Okay, there is a light in thetunnel and get better. You're
right, we the valence of thingslooking better. There's only

(31:31):
because I assume that people aremaking an effort. But if you're
not making an effort to get itbetter, you can easily spiral
into worse thoughts.

Yeah, okay, that's good to know. Um, now let's talk
about also about memory. Soobviously, you do work with the
brains now, I've been told thatmemories are not actually stored
in the brain that they're storedin the body. Like for people
with organ transplants, youknow, like, my dad wrote a book
about this stuff. And, you know,there was a lady that was she
was a lesbian, and then she gota heart transplant, and then she

(32:01):
became straight. So it's Do youare you familiar with this
topic? Or like, what do youthink of this,

you took me away from out of my comfort zone? No,
definitely where in the brain,our memory is stored. When when
you store memories in the brain.
Now, what you're saying, whichis kind of new, a thing is that
there are things that are storedoutside of the brain, in the
form of genetic material. So weknow that they're kind of
stories of like, epi a kind ofbasic epigenetics, when a parent

(32:30):
inheritances inherits to theiroffspring, some traits in the
genetic material. So things thatturn into genetic material that
are actually in the kind ofperiphery of the cells move from
the parents of the kids. And,and that's kind of like getting
a little bit of interest rightnow from scientists. Because,
you know, the the classicalgenetics said that you don't

(32:54):
move traits to your offspringsoutside of ones that are coded
in your DNA. So if you get totalk to your kid want to be born
in a tattoo, because the toolsare not part of your genetics,
DNA, this is the assumption. Nowwe know that there are some
things in the form of, forinstance, learning and memories
that actually aren't part ofyour DNA, but they do transform
from parents to kids, but it'sstill very, very mechanical.

(33:18):
It's like it's not, it's notspiritual, it's not that like
you really can have a you know,some soul transfers from one to
another. Those are things thatwe can actually quantify and
find tangible. And the researchthere is relatively new, it's
less than 10 years in, and it'skind of very, a, I would say,
not sexy, when it comes to whatactually gets transferred from

(33:40):
like the parents, the kids, it'snot that we find that you know,
you really can have a change.
Things that you learn in yourlife, like you learn history and
your son is born knowinghistory, it's not at the level
of like, really knowledge, it'smore like a, the example that is
often used is one where a babymonkey that's born on day one,

(34:03):
it's never seen a snake in itslife. So it doesn't know that it
needs to be afraid of snakes.
Yet, if you show this the monkeya picture of a snake, it's
people dilated heart startsracing. So it definitely
exhibits signs of fear. And theassumption is that the parents
learned to be afraid of snakesbecause they actually saw a
snake attacking another monkeyand it became like a thing. And

(34:23):
they coded this information insome way in their material that
they actually delivered to theoffering such as the offering is
born without knowing what it asnake is or why it's afraid of
being afraid of that. And thistranslates to actually over
time, a neural pathway so we canhave, you know, set the set up
for the baby to already have apathway that and it's kind of

(34:45):
shown that you know, humansgenerally are more afraid of
darkness than of light, or haveloud sounds, then of quiet time
as babies like you've neverheard loud sound but you already
bought presumably Over genetics,we passed from one day to
another, the fact that darknessis riskier than light for
humans. And that's why you'reborn with a setting that is a

(35:08):
little bit moreprobabilistically likely to be
afraid of darkness as a baby.
Even though you've never reallyexperienced that, you know, bad
things happen when it's darkcompared to the good things
because our light in our sensesare not as heightened. Right.
But I think that then put into alittle bit, we don't know that
you know that you can actuallychange entirely a personality

(35:29):
with like, small modificationsof that nature.

How did you Was it a camera review? did this
experiment or you were talkingabout experiment with the rats
and learning the maze and howthey transfer? How do you
transfer the knowledge of thatmaze to the next rat? What
explain that,

right. So this is a study by a colleague of
mine that works with rats, I doonly human work, okay. And with
rats, you can do a lot morethings than you can do with
humans for two reasons. First,we know a lot of other brains
like their smaller brains, andwe map to pretty much everything
genetically, and at the level ofneuron. And also, they're kind
of similar to one another, youcan genetically engineer a rat

(36:05):
with a specific condition, itworks well. And you can also
open their brain and do thingsyou cannot do with humans,
clinically. So the classicalstudy that I think you talk
about is one way to take fretone, you put the rat in a maze,
and the veterans navigate themaze and find a cheese at the
end. And she does it maybe 10times. And at some point, she
gets to a level where she justknows the maze. And we can

(36:25):
actually find in her brain, theexact mapping of the maze, there
are cells in the brain calledplace cells. And you can see it
directly gets to a T section.
And a cell lights up and tellsher to go right and she gets
another one in the cell lightsup and tells it to go left. So
you can actually see the mappingof the maze, in the red spring,
such that the rat can navigatethe maze perfectly in like one
girl, she just goes the reasonshe stopped running to the to
the cheese perfectly. Now youfind this mapping in the brain,

(36:48):
if they can use that, it's neverbeen to the maze. It's a rat, it
has the same cells that codeplaces and location and
movement. But it's neveractually used them in this
particular maze. So it doesn'tknow the race, when you start
zapping the new rats brain inthe order and sequence of the
maps sales. So you basicallytrigger this new reps to think

(37:09):
about making a right or making aleft hand Right, right, again,
left, left, straight left, andso on. So you kind of zapped the
brain. And the rep essentiallygets the feeling that she should
go right go left straight andzone without even knowing why.
And then you drop it in themaze, then she just reactivates
the map that is in her brain.

(37:30):
And she basically act as if sheknows how to get from the
beginning to the end in one gowithout having ever been there.
So effectively what he did is hetook a memory from one rat, and
you put it in the other ratsbrain. And it's now know
something and after it actuallydoes it once it cements him in
his brain. So now it's just knowthat this image that she has in
her mind actually maps to thereal world. And from then on,
she can just navigate the mazeperfectly. So you move the

(37:51):
memory from one entity toanother. There is no theoretical
reasoning why this wouldn't workwith humans, or any other
animals. We just have not triedit yet.

Okay, but so one thing that you have done now
let's talk about your work withdreams. So I think originally
you said recording dreams wasimpossible. And but then I think
they the press kind of twistedyour words. And you said that
they said that you said it waspossible. But then some
scientists in Japan figured itout and because he didn't know

(38:20):
was impossible. And now you'reworking with him and then
explain your work on dreams.
It's fascinating stuff.

So this, of course, is one of my favorite
topics right now. It's kind ofwhat I spend all my time these
days. So I will have to reallywork out to stop myself from
spending the next half an hourjust talking about that. But I
will say the following dreamsare fascinating to humans. Since
the dawn of time, you can find apictures of dreams on
hieroglyphs in caves 5000 yearsago. And if you go to any

(38:47):
historical records, like theBible, a mythology, it's all
about dreams affecting ourlives. And if you don't want to
go fall into history you can goto today. And if you wake up one
morning and tell your ex yourgirlfriend that you learned
about your ex girlfriend, youwill see that they will respond
to dreams as if they're real.
Like they would say How couldyou do about your ex girlfriend
a What did you love me? You sayit wasn't my choice. It's a

(39:10):
dream. It just happened to me.
But somehow you will be blamedin the real world for your
dreams, or they say is that wein the real world think that
dreams are meaningful. And weattribute a lot of function to
them like as if they meansomething that drives our awake
behavior. And it's so much sothat a lot of psychology relies

(39:31):
on dreams as a key aspect of whowe are in Freud and Carl Jung
and others, in the last 100years have made an entire kind
of discipline out of askingpeople to wake up in the morning
and tell the therapist whattheir dreams are about and
having the therapist and theperson together tried to come up
with a reasoning behind that.
But here's the flaw that kind ofpulls the rug out of everything

(39:53):
that Freud did and in a way kindof changes the entire narrative.
The stories that people tellwhen they wake up are flawed.
They're not really the dreamsstory. They're the story that
you tell when you wake up andtry to pick residues of the
dream and make meaning out ofthem.

Because you can't remember the whole thing. Is
that what it is right? You can't

remember and you use the language of your awake
self. I'll give you a concreteexample that will make it easy.
In the 1910s, where people wereasked about their dreams, most
people describe their dreams inblack and white. Why? Because
movies were in black and whiteback then. And people thought a
dream is kind of like a movie orsomething in my head. How do
movies look? Well, they look inblack and white. So that's how
it means my dreams were in 1950,when movies started having

(40:37):
coalos, everyone immediatelyshifted to decide their dreams
in color. No one told them nowyou should. But it's like,
again, they thought, okay,dreams are like movies, movies
are in color. So I guess mydreams are in color. Which means
that we don't know if the dreamsin your head are in color and
black and white. But we know isthat you use the language of
your awake self, which islanguage of color, or black and
white, and you describe yourdreams. And there are many

(40:58):
examples like this one that showthat people's reporting of their
dreams is not flawed in thatthey lie. It's just not really
existing. The Dream itself, it'sactually saying the awake
person's interpretation of adream already. And it's useful.
I think Freud was right, thatit's meaningful to see why they
even come up with this story.
Rather than that story. Why doyou choose black and white
rather than color to tell yourstory, but it's also confusing

(41:19):
because it's incomplete. Fastforward to the last 10 years
neuroscientist like myself, wereable to actually look at the
dreams while you're sleeping. Sowe don't have to ask you any
question. We don't need you totell your story. We can look at
your brain while you'resleeping, and extract the dream
from your brain directly. Andthen we can ask your questions
when you wake up And see why isit that you forget some bout

(41:40):
what is it that you forget? Orhow do you tell a story compared
to how your brain tells a story,we can start still asking
questions, but we also haveaccess to the source. That's a
big change. And this is onlystep one, which is to read the
dreams, we're doing a good jobin getting there. We're still
not as good as you can imagine.
We don't really kind of have aDVD. Which beautiful. Yeah, so

it's not so what is it? It's because it's not a
video of the person's dream? Isit? Is it text or is it's I
mean, what have you mapped out.

So what we basically do is before you go to
sleep, we look at your brain andthis is now my work. So we work
with patients who undergo brainsurgery. And they have
electrodes inside their brain,right while they're operated on
for clinical purposes. So wehave access to a human being
with open brain identicalHDInsight that's just a set up
that would work. So now that theelectrodes in your brain we will
come to you and say Chuck I'mgoing to now show you 1000

(42:30):
pictures one after the other apicture of an NFL player a
picture of I'm just looking atthe pictures behind you record a
picture of a kind of the AbbeyRoad A me records, crossword
crossword, whatever it can haveit I could think would be in
your mind. And I'll just showyou those on the other while I
record your brain activity. Andat some point, I'll show you the

(42:51):
Beatles record. And suddenly, Iwould see once a lining up. Aha,
we found in Jack's brain, thecell that codes the concept of
The Beatles, when you think ofthe Beatles, this cell is the
memory of the Beatles, okay,find another cell that codes the
the image of Nirvana, I'm justgoing to now go with a so it's

different for each person. It's it's an individual
mapping for each person, itwouldn't be the same for you.

And even even you across multiple days, you
might shift them and move themaround. But at that moment, we
know exactly that. Today, thisis the mike tyson sell in chalk
sprint, okay, for the nextcouple of hours, not gonna move.
So once we map the flow ofthose, we have to go to sleep.
And we might give you a taskthat will increase the chances
of you dreaming of Mike Tyson.
But it doesn't really matter.
You go to sleep. And if duringthe night when you sleep in your

(43:38):
specific moment, which is thismoment where we think dreams are
most likely to happen. It'scalled the REM sleep. If at that
moment, this is Mike Tyson saidlights up, we will know that you
in your mind right now arethinking mike tyson now we
wouldn't know if you thinkyou're mike tyson wearing a
white pants or is he fullydressed? Or does he have to say

(43:58):
we don't know what you see. Butwe know that the concept of Mike
Tyson is activated in your mind.
And if immediately after youthink of your mom, we will not
think of your mom. So we canbuild a narrative that's
building a story. Not withvisuals, but with kind of
entities or percepts. We callthem concepts one after the
other like this, this this this.

(44:20):
And this. Sometimes it's enoughto have a clue as to what was
the story like if you told methat you went with your mom to
Paris A few years ago, and I seethat in your dream, you have
yourself, your mom, you have theEiffel Tower, you have a budget
kind of lighting up in thissequence, I could suggest that
maybe it's you're dreaming nowabout your journey with your mom
to Paris. I wouldn't know ifit's true. But if you wake up

(44:41):
and tell me in my dreams, I wasactually with my mum in London
seeing the Big Bang. I would saythat's interesting. I think that
he was in Paris. He uses aEuropean example with a
landmark. It's like the theparallel of the Eiffel Tower. So
why is it changing? And I willjust ask you a question and I
used it but now we have at leasta clue as to what we think.
happen in your brain. So it'sit's far from being perfect. But

(45:02):
it's a big step compared tonothing. Yeah. So, what, 10
years ago?

Yeah, so what it because when people like you
said they're having brainsurgery, so they already have
their brains are open, you canput these electrodes in. And I
thought you said something aboutyou can control or stimulate the
brain while they're dreaming.
And people can actually takecontrol of their dreams and be
in charge. How does that work?

So we finished box one, which is reading
dreams. Yeah, reading them Imentioned like now Yeah, now we
can move to box two, which isnow taking my hacking skills to
the hacking skills, oh, yeah, ofneuroscience, and say, okay,
it's not enough to just readwhatever is in the vault. Let's
see if we can actually changesomething in the vault. I mean,
what we're doing right now isyou're trying to do both use
cues to the outside world toactually navigate your dream. So

(45:44):
it could be as simple asspraying a smell into your nose
in the right moment in yourdream. So it will change the
course of the dream and take yousuddenly to thinking about the
NFL rather than about MikeTyson. Just by activating a
different memory. That's that'sthe easy one using sound or
smell or cues that are easy,because I

like how you did the the smoker thing where
people who are addicted tosmoking, you spray a sulfur
smell. And then they wake up andthey're like, I don't actually
want to smoke anymore, becausethey've associated the nicotine
with the rotten egg smell.

A study by a colleague of mine and Ozzie
where she basically did exactlythat she she was the one who
pioneered this method, where youtake a person, you wait for them
to get to the right moment whereyour brain is eavesdropping or
listening to the outside world.
And then you activate a percept.
In this case, smoking bysmelling by spraying the smell
of nicotine. And thenimmediately after you pair it
with the smell of rotten eggs,this particular example, h2 s

(46:38):
that was the specific a compoundthat makes the brain says
smoking bad. If you do it enoughtimes in the right moment that
the brain creates thisconditioning so that when you
wake up, you don't really havethe desire to smoke anymore.
Because somehow in your brain,the smoking is now associated
with a bad thing for why itactually decays and comes back.
So that's one example. It'susing olfaction, like smells to

(46:59):
change behavior. The moreextreme version, which you just
said, is what we're doing rightnow mostly, it's actually using
an invasive thing. So you'resleeping, and we have a big
magnetic coil. It's calledtranscranial magnetic stimulator
that we can put next to yourforehead and turn it on, then it
creates electric current thatessentially activates brain
cells in a specific frequency.
And we learned that if youactivated a gamma frequency,

(47:21):
which turns on the cells in thefront of your brain, it
essentially wakes up yourexecutive function, which means
that you're in your dream rightnow. And we wake up your
consciousness, but we don't wakeyou up. So you are still asleep.
You're still dreaming. It's justthat you aware now of the fact
that you're dreaming, whichbrings into a state called lucid

(47:45):
dreams. But yes, you're kind ofsitting down you say, Wait,
wait. It's not real. The factthat I'm in a Buckingham Palace
right now isn't real, but it isBuckingham Palace for the sake
of this movie. And I'm the maincharacter. So I want to have the
Queen of England come in andhave tea with me, because it's
your movie director. Once yousay it, boom, the Queen of

(48:07):
England enters the room, and shesits next to you and you having
tea. And if you want James Bondto join you, you can bring James
Bond or if you want to, youknow, bring a your grandmother
who died 10 years ago and have achat with her after she is no
longer with us, you can do that.
And it would be as real as itgets. Because it's your brain
creating the imagery. It willnot feel to you like you

(48:29):
puppeteering her like it will beher words coming at you, even
though it will be your brainputting the words in her mouth.
But for your perspective, youwill have a chat with Grandma,
which you can do otherwise. Andso even though it's a short
experience, because then youwake up and it's over. It's the
ultimate virtual reality,because you can actually bring
anyone and for the time being,it feels as if it is yes. And

(48:50):
that is the power of lucidliving that way now activating
it before was something thatonly very few people can
actually experience if they werelucky enough to have this
naturally happened to them. Wecan give pretty much everyone
this experience every nightwhenever they

have a dream. So possibly someday in the future,
I can walk into a lucid dreamingstore. And I could say I want to
be Russell Wilson and win theSuper Bowl. And you can program
my brain until like I'm dreaminglucid dreaming and I'm winning
the Super Bowl.

It's I would say it wouldn't be a stone it would
be in your home. So most peoplewill just that will you before
you go to sleep, you will kindof say tonight I want to either
have a Super Bowl dream and Iwant to be on this team and I
want the team to win and so onand the machine will know that
you're in the right spot andjust kind of bring you to this
state and you can now get intoyour dream. Or it could be an

(49:40):
entire you know, operation whereyou can ask a to have a dream by
Steven Spielberg. And they willdirect your dream for you like
you just go to sleep and you sayI want a surprise science
fiction experience that somefamous director give me and I'll
wake up in a colony on mass andwe'll do things I want to say
because it's It's this will bekind of the a good way to frame

(50:03):
what I just said that we'respeaking enthusiastic about all
the positives of that. But Iwant to make it clear to anyone
who listens to you right now orwatches this video, that it
could easily be a double edgedsword which is it could be that
instead of you having Spielbergdirect your dream, it will be
someone from Google directing adream and in the dream, they
will make you buy more andcrunch in the morning after so

(50:26):
it could easily become amarketing tool for invasive kind
of no Gods a implant. The ideais that you will have no way to
stop.

Yeah, because Will you talk about these people
putting chips in their brain? Ilove your analogy, by the way,
you're saying? Well, you know,if you put this chip in your
brain, and it can help you makemake you smarter and make you
you know, manipulate the stockmarket better, more people will
do that. It's just like havingbreast implants. That's like you
want the advantage. So peoplebecause like when you think

(50:56):
about a chip in your brain, Imean, it's kind of scary,
because if somebody hacks that,rather than than just I mean, it
could be more nefarious thanjust google trying to sell you
something, it could be somebodytrying to get you to kill
somebody or something. So itcould talk about these chips.
And the brain is this somethingthat's going to happen in my
lifetime.

It's already existing. So there's already in
the US about 40,000 people thathave a neural implant in their
brain. Now these people have itbecause they have a clinical
reason. So if you haveParkinson's or if you need a
deep brain stimulation orepilepsy, you can go to the
doctor, the doctor will put aneural implant in your brain in
the area that is damaged. Andthis device will help you

(51:36):
navigate reality. So if you haveepilepsy, for example, and
usually there's one part of thebrain that starts speaking, and
provoking activity without anykind of prompt, and this leads
to a seizure, you can have adevice right now that figures
out that there's a signal thatis not supposed to be there. And
it counters that by kind ofputting a counter signal and
stops it and contains it. That'shelpful when it comes to

(51:57):
epilepsy. But it also means thatthere's a device inside people's
brain that does something nowthis device needs to get
upgrades every couple of months.
So it has this kind of code, itconstantly asks a server nearby.
Is there a firmware upgrade? Andif yes, download it, I can
easily as a hacker come andpretend to be the server, you
will ask me the question once aweek, hey, do you have a
firmware update? And I would sayyes, there is, here it is. And
I'm now going to download intoyour chip firmware update. It

(52:20):
says, don't just stop seizures,but also once every day, make
the person a wake up whilethey're asleep. And I just just
disrupted your cycle forever,which will lead to you know,
feeling depressed and having ahard time. So this is just an
easy way to totally screwsomeone's life. In a very simple

(52:42):
update. Of course, I can gofurther and further I can
disrupt your memories, I canwake you up into lucid dreaming
whenever I want or navigate youremotions negatively whenever I
want. Or when we get better indetecting where in your brain is
the desire to do something bad.
We can actually ManchurianCandidate style, make you do

(53:03):
something bad. That's kind ofthe world we live in right now
with photos of people having inyour brain. When companies offer
better devices, and morepositive things not just helping
you clinically but actuallymaking you have access to
Wikipedia in your mind and youjust have the entire world's
knowledge in your head. No onewould want that not remembering

(53:23):
that the same firmware upgradesthat we spoke about in the
epilepsy chip could be used togive you false Wikipedia data
and suddenly you just have fakenews in your mind.

That's scary stuff.
So how do they regulate thatthat's like an I guess that
becomes an ethical dilemma then

I think that's maybe the most important
sentence that I would say toyour audience right now no one
talks about it and thinks aboutit. Because it's more like a
scientists exercise and webelieve in some companies are
interested in that. The only waysomeone's gonna do something
about it is if your audiencesays you know what, I want it
regulated or I don't like thisor I want to ask this question

(54:02):
of my Congresswoman and havetheir take an opinion on that
right now. It's basically yourpodcast and another podcast to
talk about that because it's nothere right now. So it's kind of
in the future and in the future,who knows? But it's going to be
fast because we put it it'spossible right now. So from zero
to 0.1 is a big leap from 0.1 toone is fast in that sense? It's

(54:23):
important that people not justyou and I think about it and ask
questions about it and definehow it will look because that's
a citizens role not a scientistrole.

Yeah, I mean so it is scary but so some of the
things that the positivesobviously like you said it so is
it actually curing Parkinson'sand it can it work with other
things I think you said that itcould possibly cure deafness and
blindness and maybe Alzheimer's.

So different kind of solutions but but along
the same kind of category so itso there's a question of like
what the cure means it's likephilosophical question like you
can live your entire life nothaving a tremor anymore because
the cheap will always containthe tremor and we make you. So
you still have Parkinson's as achip off, you will start, right?
Yeah, but forever I will containit. So it doesn't look like on

(55:10):
the outside like you have it,it's kind of like a concrete and
May, you may have cancereveryday in your body that your
body takes care of and stops. Doyou have cancer? No, because we
didn't let it metastasize. Soyou you, in theory, we have
cancer all the time, it just youdon't really have the disease,
because your body regulatesthat. In that sense, those
people that have the chip, theyhave Parkinson's, because it's

(55:31):
still there. But they managed tolive life entirely without
experiencing the Parkinson. AndI think you alluded to other
chips, which is something that alot of scientists are building
that target different things. SoParkinson's is in the brain. But
a blindness is in the eyetypically. So if you have a
retinal problem that makes youreye not do its job, it can't

(55:52):
take photons from the world andturn them into the into the
brain. But your brain is intact,we can now build retinal
implant, which is a device thatwe put where your eyes are, it
does the same thing. It takesphotons from the world. And it
translates them to the languageof the brain, which is chemical
signaling. And it sends it rightto the visual cortex where the
brain expects the eyes to sendsignals to, and then the brain

(56:14):
does its job. And from yourperspective, you see, you don't
even know that the seeing camefrom our device that processed
information differently, becausewhen it gets to your brain, it
feels the same way. So this issomething that's now under
clinical trials, retinalimplants, taking people who lost
their sight and getting thesight back, we already have
gotten implants, very popularwith a lot of patients, right,

(56:34):
lost their hearing, becausetheir ears the work, we put the
device next to the ears, thebiological ears, that does the
same thing. It takescompressions of molecules in the
air and change those intoelectric signal that goes into
the nerve that essentiallydrives signals into the auditory
cortex. And after a few monthsof having that people learn to
care, again, not even realizingthat the hearing didn't come

(56:56):
from the ear, it came from theimplant, but it did the same
thing it took was signal andturn it into brain signal.

And so this could be used to help treat mental
illness and addiction and allthose things to

better match everything that we know how to
isolate in the brain, we canbuild a device that deals with
that. The challenges are thatsometimes the problems are not
easy to pinpoint, likedepression could be a lot of
things not working. So it's notas kind of easy as we know where
the ears are, and we can dosomething about it. So we still
have to learn in some of thethings are not even brain

(57:30):
problems. They're their geneticsproblems. So we have to kind of
figure out, so not everything iseasy, it's like not the right
word. But like not everything isisolated in we can figure out
what the problem is and fixthat. And some things are also
very deep inside the brain. Soif you have a problem in some
structures that are deep inside,it's harder for us to get there.
So the ears are pointing out,and the auditory cortex is at

(57:51):
the surface of your brain so wecan easily get into it. If you
have problems, we're in the,say, a amygdala, you actually
have to open the brain and startdigging inside and going all the
way to the center of your brainwith me Got our seats. So it
becomes also a neurosurgicalchallenge. Okay, dealing with
the identifying the one who isgetting there, and actually

(58:11):
regulation, do we want to do it?

Okay. And then one thing I think I don't think I've
ever heard you talk about, butI'm curious, how much role does
hormones. What does that becausehormones is a big part of
emotions and all this stuff. Imean, does that how does that
work with the word research thatyou're doing? Are you triggers
parts of the brain that wouldcause testosterone is like a
drug? So if they're I mean, ifyou're triggering parts of the

(58:34):
brain that would that affect thehormones are? Can you manipulate
that at all?

So I will say that the example that the
analogy that will help, I thinkeveryone understand is that if
you think of the brain like acow, the hormones are the guess.
So like, yes, so you have theentire cow in all the wise right
place. But if you don't havegas, it won't work. And when you
have to guess, it also needs toget to a place you can take a
car and just like pull a bucketof gas everywhere, and only a

(58:59):
few drops, we go into the oiltank or into the gas tank, and
he didn't do anything. So it'snot just like flood the brain
with the dopamine and thingswill work out the dopamine hits
to go to the right areas of thebrain to actually not just cause
damage, but actually do theright thing. So if you think of
the brain, we think of it aslike a brain, but actually the
brain has different structures.
And in structures, it hasdifferent types of neurons and

(59:21):
each neuron uses differentmolecules, serotonin, dopamine,
and acetylcholine and all ofthose to work it out. So all of
those things work together andan imbalance in any of those. If
you if you have too much smilingon one neuron, you have
Alzheimer, if you have toolittle dopamine you might have
Parkinson's if you have too muchyou might be addicted to more
likely to be addicted. So it's abalance between the car chassis,

(59:41):
the outside layer, everythingyou know being correctly wired
and also having the gas and theoil and the water in the right
tank so they are in the rightbalance. So they will work all
of those together make you thinkright.

Okay. Wow, fascinating stuff. What About I
told my dad that because hewrote a book about a lot of
this, the ultimate realitystuff. And he was really curious
what your thoughts were on outof body experiences like, occur
when when people are asleep andor near death experiences or
when they use drugs or there'sother ways to induce this kind
of stuff. What do you what isthe neuroscience behind this,
and

Dr. Moran Cerf (01:00:19):
it will be a little boring, but I'll give it
to you know, it's

Chuck Shute (01:00:22):
fascinating.

So it's not, there's, there's very little
mysticism there, which I thinkwhen people talk about expenses,
they can imagine, okay, I die,and my body is floating like a
cartoon character we like.
That's not what we see in thescience. But we see a lot of
things that suggests that thebrain looks for narratives that
solve problems in that way. Forexample, there's a famous study,
even though it's famous, Iforget the name of the author,

(01:00:44):
its sole author, I think, is hisname. But I might change that,
if I'm wrong. And I'm givingcredit someone that's not the
right guy. And he took peoplepatients in the sense that we
have, which is patientsundergoing brain surgery
electrodes in their brain, forclinical purposes. But he's
zapped their brain and hehappens to be that the
electrodes were sitting in theright location to create this
out of body experience. And whenyou set the brain, the person

(01:01:06):
reported thinking that they seethemselves if their eyes were
like feet behind. And they said,I see. And I see myself from
outside, and I'm not in my body.
And I see my body. And when Iraise my hand, I see their hand
from the back, like they kind ofthey kind of had this
experience. Now it was allmanufactured, it was not true,
of course, they're in theirbody, when somehow their brain

(01:01:28):
was able to create entire imageof themselves out of the body
thing themselves. There was anexperiment that was done
recently by I think it was aGoogle team, where they took
people and had them well, VRgoggles. And what you see the VR
goggles, is what comes is a feedfrom a camera, and the camera
was actually sitting to yourright. So basically, you saw

(01:01:49):
yourself. So you raise yourhand, what you saw is a guy
raising his hand with a littledelay. And even though everyone
view it was them, like they kindof did this, and they saw the
guy doing this, somehow the factthat you saw yourself from the
outside, and you had a differentperspective, like you said, for
your profile, made people act tothe person in the movie
differently. So if someone camein federal and tickled you,

(01:02:11):
people did not laugh. Becausefrom their perspective, they
felt the tingling in their body,but they saw it in their eyes,
as if someone else in theirbrain was able to do what's
called the binding of thetactile experience with the
visual experience. And they feltas if another guy is being
tickled. And it's not them, eventhough they felt it was them, or

(01:02:32):
this to say is the brain toactually feel in the moment. It
needs to combine the senses witha lot of other actions with the
feelings with with theexperiences internally. And it's
very easy to fool the brain andbreak those and make people
think that they're out of theirbody, or that they're not
themselves and so on. There's adisorder that's known, that
happens often, to people understress, where they, for moment

(01:02:56):
have this thing, Oliver Sacksloaded in his book, The Man Who
mistook his wife for a hat, buta person who basically set in a
bed and kept falling out of thebed in a hospital. And when the
doctors came, he reported thatthere's an object in his bed
that he wants to get out of hisbed, and he found himself on the
floor, and the object was hisleg, he somehow lost the ability
to think that his leg is his,and he tried to throw the leg in

(01:03:16):
his body followed. But it's adisorder that could happen to
people, in certain situations,where you lose the connection to
your body. One of them is to saythat, that ask thinking of
myself as one is an option, it'sthe most reliable one. It's the
one that we mostly having, butit could easily be dissociated.
And it happens when we're sick.
And when we're taking all kindsof hallucinogenic drugs, we

(01:03:38):
actually feel out of body. Thenon mystical part is that it's
not likely to actually out ofyour body, and it's like, it's
actually a mechanical thing wecan explain. But for the
perspective of the person, it'sthe same, you feel for a second
that you're not in your body,but that your body is just an
option. It's a container, andyour mind is elsewhere. And it
has a lot of kind of cognitiveoutcomes, you actually think

(01:03:58):
differently when you're notthinking that you're confined to
your body when you're high, orwhen we stimulate your brain.

Wow, yeah, it's fascinating stuff. And then I
think we talked a little bitabout this, but like, you have
this, what is it called thebrain interface, brain machine
interface? Like you think ofsomething and then the machine
does it for I think you kind ofit was this kind of like the
monkey experiment where themonkey had an artificial arm
that was connected toelectrodes, and then they took
the artificial arm away. Andthen he unlearned how to use his

(01:04:28):
real arm.

Right? So this particular one was done by a
colleague of mine, Andy Schwartzat University of Pittsburgh,
we're doing it with humans, thesame idea but the idea is
prevalent right now, a lot ofcompanies are trying to make it
into a product and all the bigtech companies are after that,
and they hire my students towork on that because the world
wants that. And the idea is thatwhen you grab a cup of cup of

(01:04:51):
coffee with your hand, it wasyour brain who sent the order to
the arm to raise and to thefingers to lock on the coffee
and all of that is starting inyour brain and in theory, If I
had access to your brain, Icould read the entire
instruction and know exactlythat you're now telling your arm
to move forward and you're nottelling your fingers to wrap
around the coffee. And if I canread it perfectly, I can

(01:05:11):
actually activate a robotic arminstead of your arm to do the
same thing. And if it's really,really a challenging tasks like
lifting a piano, instead ofhaving you do this, I can pick a
train. And you would think Iwant to lift the piano and move
it from here to here. But acrane would move instead and
grab the piano and move it. Andthis will take us into a world
where you can control everythingin your mind, you could control

(01:05:34):
of course, little devices thatwill, you know, move coffee for
you or move pianos, but you canalso fly an airplane like a
drone from far away just withyour mind, or drive your car by
thoughts, you will just think Ineed to go left and the car
would go left to there's no needfor you to kind of say I need to
go, I want to go left. Let'sturn this wheel and turn it left
and so on, all you need to knowis I want to be there in the

(01:05:56):
car, we'll just take this stuffand move in the right direction.
And you can even go to a worldwhere you say I want to email
Chuck right now. And I want totell him this thing. instead of
you having to kind of activelyhaving to press compose and put
a subject and typing or like alot of actions happen for me to
just do what I already know Iwant to do I want to tell you,
Chuck, I love you. Why don'tjust immediately have the email

(01:06:18):
being sent. Because I alwaysthought the thought like now
it's just like acting on it,which is a waste of energy. So
every time you can thinksomething, the British interface
will just turn it into actionand make it happen. We know how
to do it, we know how to readthe productivity and find
instructions, we just need tofind instructions now for
everything for the letter i l ov e, y o u so we can instead of

(01:06:40):
you typing kind of one by onekeyboard key pressed by key
press, we can just take yourthought I love you and make it
into an action. But at the sametime, it can be used to operate
everything in the world. What isyour kind of question alluded to
was that we don't know what itdoes to our brain atrophy. Like
if we never have to think thethought i l o u l o v e Hmm. Why

(01:07:04):
are you maybe we lose somethingand in the example that Andy
Schwartz had in Pittsburgh,after the monkey didn't use his
arm to grab a marshmallow thisexample for a while, the brain
said I guess we don't know howto control this arm with the
same brain says we used tobefore. So let's now dedicated
the brain cells to control therobotic arm. And we'll find new
cells to control my own arm. Andsuddenly your brain actually

(01:07:25):
changes, then you either get athird arm because your brain
just kind of picks new cells andsays From now on, those cells
are gonna control the biologicalarm. And those cells will
control the robotic arm. Or itmight the opposite might say we
now no longer control the armbecause we don't need it. And
suddenly, you will try to movethe arm and they just want to be
a cell that controls it.

Wow, fascinating stuff. It's like a lot of the
stuff you're talking about. It'slike a science fiction movie. I
mean, are they making moviesabout this kind of stuff? I
guess I guess probably theyalready have. But we

started with meeting me a helping Hollywood
a. Yeah, there's a lot of a lotof filmmakers that call me with
ideas of how to take our workand make it into science
fiction. I bet in the nextcouple of years, you will see
some of them

yeah, so wait, explain the clear this up for me
with the inception movie, theyreached out to you? Did you say
yes or no at that point, though.
This was

something we this was a TV series. So the
series Okay, yeah, there was aTV series called limitless that
came after the movie. And it'snice to be done. Because the
movie is a complete story. TheTV series starts where the movie
ends, same characters are there.
It's just like a continuing TVseries. And what the TV series,
the movie and the book that cameeven before the movie, all don't

(01:08:34):
do is they don't explain how thedrugs actually work. So there's
kind of a drug that makes yousmarter and better. But they
gloss over how it works. But theTV series guys said we want to
actually end by explaining it.
And you're going to be the onefinding out how and so all the
constraints, here's whathappened in the movie is up in
the book is what are the opinionin TV series? So we have all

(01:08:55):
those things that it can orcannot do that in mind, solid
for us come up with an answer.
And this is what I did. And

that's exciting for you. They're great stuff. Well,
I always end each episode with acharity or nonprofit Can people
donate to your research? Or doyou have another charity that
you want to promote here at theend?

So far, of course, scientists always need a
lot of support. And if anyonewants, I'm the easiest guy to
find. You know, if you just lookmy name, there's tons of videos,
and I have a website. And I willbe competing. I think that the
this specific projects that Ithink are mostly useful right
now for the world, the ones thatwe kind of glossed over that

(01:09:33):
that I said was the mostimportant thing, which is ways
to actually stop us from doingit in a commercial way. So I
think the scientist in my labhave figured out ways to do
things. And then it's beingtaken by commercial entities
that wants to make it intoproducts and those products
could have very good uses, likehelping people have better

(01:09:55):
dreams but also could be used tomake you buy more products
without your guts. I think thatBecause a lot of companies are
working on the applications, Ithink there should be some
research done on the otheraspects. How can we protect
ourselves? How can you make surethat no one gets no brain? In
this? There's little research.
So if anyone cares about that,that's where I would put all the
ask, okay, help us like kind ofwork, sponsor the subjects of or

(01:10:18):
actually do analysis on findingways, which will help us protect
our brains from hackers comingin, or people using us against
our way.

Okay. Is there? Is that on your website, a place
where people could? It is,

and I think that it's so novel, because we spent
all this time developing it thatthere's very little, but if
someone hears you right now,they just needed to me. You
know, let's let's make it into akeyword. I want to save the
world. This would be the title.
Okay. All right. I would love todo it.

All right. Well, thank you so much. It's been
fascinating stuff. Reallyinteresting. People should like
they, like you said, Google yourwebsite, and you have much more
many more videos on YouTube.
They're fascinating to watch. SoI appreciate you taking the time
with me.

It was a pleasure. Thank you for doing
it.

All right. Thank you. Goodbye. Bye, bye. Well,
was your mind blown. I thinkit's exciting and scary all at
the same time. CuringParkinson's and deafness is
amazing. But having someone hackinto our brains is really scary.
So definitely some ethicaldilemmas with this stuff. And if
you want to learn more, you canwatch other interviews and talks

(01:11:26):
that he's done on YouTube, orclick the link in the show notes
for his website. And there's alot of information on there as
well. If you enjoyed thisinterview, make sure to
subscribe to the show whereveryou listen or watch if you're on
YouTube, and that way you won'tmiss any future episodes. You
can also follow me on socialmedia. And of course your likes,
comments and shares on all thisstuff will help support the

(01:11:47):
show. And finally, if you have acouple extra minutes, you can
write your review on Applepodcasts and that will help
people find the show. So thankyou so much for your taking the
time to listen and have a greatrest of your day and remember to
shoot for the moon.

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