Episode 68 – Moran Cerf Ph.D. – The Razor’s Edge of Neuroscience

welcome to the human experience podcast the only podcast designed to fuse your left and right brain hemispheres and feed it the most entertaining and mentally engaging topics on the planet as we approach our ascent please make sure your frontal temporal and occipital lobes are in their full upright position as you take your seats consciousness relax your senses and allow us to take you on a Jim we are the intimate strangers thank you for listening what’s

up folks this is a hugely informative science packed episode with dr. Mohan Cerf his specialty is in the field of neuroscience and the work him and his team are conducting is quite literally at the razor’s edge of where science is and how we are connecting technology to what the brain is capable of this episode is full of a huge amount of information we probably covered a 10-week course in the span of an hour or so so definitely take your time listen

to it I have a feeling that dr. Milan’s work will be gaining some huge momentum soon and really changing the way we look at the brain so I think you guys will really enjoy this episode please get to neuro – hacks comm to find more information about what dr. Cerf and his team are up to find us on twitter at the human XP get to our facebook page also at the human XP there’s a library of content on both of those feeds that we put a massive amount of work into

curating for you guys if you guys like what we’re doing it show us some love by helping cover bandwidth and server costs you can do that by getting to the main the human experiment as usual guys this is an information packed episode that I think you will really truly enjoy thank you guys so much for listening the human experience is diving back into hacking the brain and human performance as we speak to our guests mr. Mohan Cerf

Moe on my good sir welcome to hxp thank you so much uh Moe on you have such an interesting history you grew up in Israel in the 80s and you were recruited into the intelligence unit of the Israeli army when you’re 18 right yes wow that’s that’s fascinating and you you hold a PhD in neuroscience a master’s in philosophy in a bachelors in physics exactly yeah so I mean how did how did this evolve for you how did you go from being a hacker to going into

science and neuroscience and studying philosophy and and what you’re doing now so I was a kid of the 80s and what’s common to a lot of kids of the 80s is that we grew up with computers when I was a young kid computers had only a few options and you just learned how to control and navigate those few options and then as we get more complex started computers so suddenly there was one more component and we learn how to toy with that and it got to the point when I was

a teenager that we just understood computers the same way the people who designed them did as in we knew how to talk with them and I think this meant that we could change things and navigate and manipulate things in the same way so when I was a kid it was mostly adding one more life to the game of King Kong go in increasing your scoring pong but it translated in the same way to being able to also change passwords and change the content of some files remotely and

when internet started becoming a thing we already had some knowledge on how it could and should work so it evolved with that so hacking wasn’t ever a big word that seemed too complex to understand it just seemed like what we do so this is how I evolved the Israeli army is maybe they can breeding place for a lot of Technology in Israel so it’s not surprising that age 18 every Israeli kid goes to the army and the ones who care about

technology and computers end up often being recruited to do intelligence where you find tons of people exactly like you that cared about the same things you did as a kid and now you’re together and it amplifies your skills and your interest and your abilities right so after spending over three years with people like you when you leave it’s kind of intuitive that you go and open a company that uses those skills and tries to do the same thing as a civilian and and the

narrative continues pretty easily and letting sell of to having multiple star companies that are the kind of way that Israel is growing its technology infrastructure and also going to academic world that benefit from the same thing yeah and I mean what would okay so then what would be the parallels of hacking a computer and your current neuroscience research so there’s some similarities that I like to draw between hacking computers and looking at the

brain namely the idea of the black box holding information that you have to penetrate from the outside so hacking a computer means you control some of the inputs that go into it and you observe the outputs and you try to use those in and out to understand the middle component the black boxes inside you can control what inputs you’ve sent to our website you can see what happens and you try to understand how the website was built this is in many ways how

neuroscientists also look at the brain you do something to the person you see what they say and what they respond to and try to understand how their brain works it’s it’s remarkable that we are doing something because the equivalent of neuroscience in the brain would be that you have maybe a thermostat something that measures temperature that you put next to the outside of a computer then you try to use this thermostat to learn what is a the

Internet or what is a you know what is a computer code but somehow even though our tools our thermostats in the same way the thermos let’s look at computers for the brain we still somehow managed to learn something about the brain okay so let’s I mean let’s dig in what I mean what are you guys learning about the brain so I think the last decade or even the last five years have shown us so many things that challenge our understanding of ourselves that what

I focus on right now mostly is looking at the internals of our character and personality and explaining what they are and lend itself to looking at people’s memories people’s emotions people’s dreams and people decision-making process so those are the four things that we wanna understand and ideally what we wanna do is wanna see how the VA decides what to do what memo is manipulate on navigate or influenced your choice what to do how emotions

translate to a choice that is not necessarily entirely under your control and ultimately can we predict what you’re gonna do in the future before you even know about it and then can we change that between the moment your brain knows and the moment you know it’s very interesting so I mean we’re talking about are we talking about predictive programming here are we talking about kind of influencing choice are we or we’re just we’re just discovering the

determining factors of what how we which we choose things so I’ll give you examples from both so one example would be a as simple as we suggested a choice that’s very very trivial like what to have for lunch so you’re about to go to a restaurant and have lunch and the waiter asks you if you want pasta or salad and you dig into your brain and you made a choice and you say say pasta and the question is when did you make this choice who knew what to choose what

parameters did you use to actually make a decision and could I a no before you said the word pasta that you’re gonna say pasta how soon before you said it could I have known and even more so could I have gone to your brain and change something that would make you say salad then the answer to all of those is that we can know before you know that it’s sitting in your brain that we can know sometimes seconds before you know and even before you feel that you made

the answer such as before even ask the question I can already assign some abilities to what you’re going to choose later and we can actually if we know far enough what you’re going to choose we can change things and make you choose otherwise and this ties to a bigger picture which is some choices that you make of any bad for you and after you made them you’re unhappy so we can actually help you learn which choices you’re happy with and which ones you’re

not well let me let me just address what you said about making choices and I mean so so is this a sort of deterministic thing that you’re kind of are you are you judging the principles of free will or are you are you simply analyzing neural pathways out of to a point or brain waves to a point where you’re able to predict what a person is going to choose based on certain things so the concept of a will has been on the table for centuries millennia philosophers for

decades have been asking question about freewill and while we cannot give you the answer that you look for whether or not humans have free will we can definitely challenge one concept which is the concept of the real-time nests of freewill that is you think that you made the choice when you made a choice and we know that the choice was made may be freely but seconds before you knew about the choice so you made the choice to take the pasta and if I asked you when

you would say when I said pasta and we can go into your brain and know fractions of a second before you said pass stylet it’s kind of blurring there and that ended you’re about to say pasta in a second interesting and then and then you mentioned the choices that are good and bad for us I mean how do so the choices like that make us happy the choices that make us sad so I mean what can we talk about that a bit so let’s take simple ones let’s take things that

actually hurt you like smoking so there’s smokers out there and they say if you ask them I don’t want a smoke I wish I didn’t want to but I’m interested in that and it’s rewarding and it’s a attracting me and I just cannot stop so this is a choice the person says I shouldn’t do but I do and that the question is it’s the same brain that says I don’t wanna that and their brain that says stop doing that and do that so the question

is can we amplify the side of the brain that wants to stop at the expense of the one that wants to do and help that one win over the other and the answer is we can we can go there and we can essentially help you control yourself better and that’s a profound thing because control is is not a it’s a physiological thing it’s something that’s in us and we can now manipulate things and help you get access to yourself in a better way

yeah it’s a very profound thing so I mean let’s let’s get deeper with that how are we how are we able to do this I mean what what actual technologies are we using when we discover and use this so in our brain there are mechanisms that are in charge of experiences feeling things going through thoughts and just being exposed to them and there are ones that are more controlling things they’re kind of feedbacks and inputs it’s at the brain so if you want

to simplify it as much as possible you can think about the fourth part of your brain as a part of your brain that is responsible for self-control and for regulation of other parts of the brain so I’ll give an example in the world of emotions for instance and then we can talk about the world of smoking so emotions are something that is in our brain but we don’t really have control over it it kind of happens to us like you don’t say you know someone that I

love is sick I think I should be said now let’s activate that nurse sadness starts happening and you say okay I was set for 10 minutes let’s stop sadness and move on let’s it’s kind of happening to you and you’re exposed to it it dawns on you as if it’s something that you wanted but it’s your brain making things that you are just witnessing right and the question is can we control it can we stop the sadness if we want to or can we

stop the anger everyone – or can we increase the happiness is is there any way for us to access those mechanisms that are in our own brain so how come the brain that’s ours isn’t letting us control everything so we know that you can actually change some things by giving them different inputs we know that the sadness isn’t coming from nowhere it usually based on memories and thoughts that you experience you get inputs that feed to your brain and your brain

responds by sadness so the other question is can we change the inputs or the connections or something that will make you feel less sad and the answer is yes we do it in a very crude way but we’re already learning how it works and what we do is we basically stick electrodes if you want I’m saying it is if it’s metaphorically but we actually do it in a very clear way we stick electrodes people’s brain in areas of the brain that correspond or correlate

nicely with emotions and feelings and then we also put another electrodes in the part of the brain in the front of it that has to do with emotion regulation and we essentially tell a patient here’s your emotions manifested by a sound that we play to you in the womb we wanted to make the sound disappear doing that involves teaching yourself how to make yourself less said even though nothing change in the world whatever bad things made you said are still there but

try to learn how to control your sadness and the person tries various techniques and I can tell you a few of them that work and a few they don’t work but somehow they learn to control this sound in the womb that is just a direct implementation of their experience of sadness and in doing so they actually minimize their sadness and essentially they learned how to access this part of the brain that normally they just expose to a not controlling now this is example

of emotion we do the same thing with what you see that’s out in the world how much you want this additional cigarette and so on basically teaching you how to control yourself better wow this is amazing okay there’s so there’s so much information that I want to kind of want to dig into here so from what I’m hearing you you’re conducting experiments where you put people in a room where you hook up electrodes into certain regions regions of their brain

in which they they control they adjust or control somehow somehow the what the way their brain is functioning so that they feel less sad am i understanding this correctly yes let’s explain the technical part which is by its I think remarkable and then and then suddenly they just learning to control your emotions which is remarkable it’s gonna sound even less remarkable because of the magnitude of the first past so what we do is we partner with

neurosurgeons who work with patients who undergo brain surgery for clinical purposes so imagine that you have epilepsy which means part of your brain a small cell or set of cells in your brain for some reason start speaking by themselves with no reason and they make the entire brain go into an earthquake of speaking without any provocation which effectively means that you lose your consciousness you fall down you shake and for a while you’re not there

and it could be very risky this is epilepsy the solution for that for most patients our medications that help minimize the activity in their brains in the areas that are affected by it so they have no seizures small number of people don’t respond well to medications and for them the only solution is to open their brain and find the exact part of the brain that starts the problem starts the seizure the focus of the onset of the seizure and take

this part out so now the surgeons bring the patient they open their brain and they stick electrodes inside in the areas of the brain that they think are suspected to be the source of the problem and then those wires are connected to a computer and the patient sits there awake for a period of sometimes two weeks while their brain is exposed and there’s wires inside their head waiting to have seizure and the idea is that in the course of those two

weeks that they’re there at some point they’re going to have a seizure and because we now have electrodes inside their head we could actually monitor the seizure as it happens and trace the parts of the brain that started the seizure and exactly which part is responsible for it and then after two weeks after you had a few of those seizures and we’re certain that we know what part of the brain is causing the problem the surgeons gonna take the electrodes

out she’s gonna resect the part of the brain that causes the problem close everything and send you back home seizure free so you’re gonna be fixed all of this is the clinical park that happens regularly in many places all over the globe when there’s patients who have epilepsy and need to have it fixed what we do is we piggyback on this surgery we show up to the place and we tell the patient you know you’re gonna be here now for two

weeks with open brain and electrodes inside we’re coding your brain activity and all you do is just wait to have a seizure which will happen at some point but in between there’s gonna be days and days where nothing happens do you mind letting us ask your question show you movies redo stories talk to you about your feelings decisions in emotions and memories and anything you can tell us about yourself while we have electrodes in your brain so we can actually learn

how the brains of humans work from the inside so this is like hacking into a computer but also having access to the motherboard we have electrodes deep inside a motherboard and we see how the processing happens from the inside and the patients are always very eager to participate they’re sitting there for days and days with us and we conduct a series of studies on them that all ask simple questions with profound answers so we make the person actually choose

pasta or salad but now we can see the cells in his or her brain that come to life seconds before they say pasta and now we know she’s about to say pasta in two seconds so so are we talking about to pre-fund frontal cortex or what region are the of the brain or are we focusing on here so based on the problem patients have we change our electrode locations every time so if the problem seems to come and show itself or the source of the epilepsy seems to emerge

mostly in the middle font area we’ll put electrodes around this area it seems to be the case that most of the times we get a certain set of areas that repeat themselves because both that’s often where the seizure on sets are but also those are the areas that you can actually take out so if the patient comes and they have a problem in a of the brain that’s gonna make them lose their battle to speak if you take it out even though it’s the problematic area we

want to the surgery because you cannot just take it out and them work the same way so only certain patients actually get to go through this procedure and those are the ones that have the epilepsy in locations that we can indeed work with okay okay so I mean in your TED talk you you talk you describe an experiment with a woman watching video clips with these electrodes embedded in her brain kind of like you’re discussing now I mean is

there any certain experiment that I mean was remarkable to you or kind of was game-changing for you that that was expanded your research so to me there are two studies that to me were the most interesting ones out of the variety of studies we ran with those patients one is the simplest study we could have imagined but the results were remarkable and those study where we took the patient and we showed her a variety of images one after the other so she sees a

picture of President Obama then a picture of an Apple computer then a picture of the Eiffel Tower in Paris and just a series of pictures with no particular order or no particular content that’s kind of weave them together just random things and while she sees those pictures we monitor her brain until we find a cell in her brain that comes to life becomes very active when she looks at picture number one let’s say a picture of the Eiffel Tower

so now we see picture of the akhtar one of our eyes cell number 50 fires and then we show the picture again cell fires again we take it out cell stops firing what we learned first is that if we showed this woman any picture of the Eiffel Tower or even said the word Eiffel Tower or just sprayed a smell that reminds of the Eiffel Tower the same cell fires because this cell codes the concept that thought the idea of the Eiffel Tower and doesn’t

respond to a specific picture this is what it means for your brain to think of the icon tower so this was already my cue ball but what I think was the most valuable version of the studies we did was one we told the woman we’re gonna now put in front of your eyes a picture of the Eiffel Tower you’re gonna see it now in front of your wires and we asked you to make this tell that codes the Eiffel Tower not work as in you’re gonna

see a pic your brain is gonna know what it is and we ask it to somehow suppress the thought inside your head such that you won’t think about the thing that is full of your eyes it’s like not thinking of the white bear only that the white bear is in front of you and to make it easier for this woman we basically use the electrodes that’s in her brain to generate a sound in the womb that corresponds to the activity of these cells so essentially we show this woman

how much she is thinking of the white bear so when she sees the white bear the thought of sound of the woman when she doesn’t see it her silence so we kind of take the cell in her brain and make it something that is visible for her she can actually see her thoughts in action and now we tell her you’re gonna see the white bill or the Eiffel Tower in this example then you’re gonna hear the sound of course that correspond to it try to

find a way to suppress this sound essentially to make yourself not see the Eiffel Tower in front of your eyes and the patient’s finds techniques that allows her to essentially learn how to not see things that are out there and this is remarkable as a result by itself but to me it’s more profound because it suggests that the reality that our brain experiences is filtered by our senses and we can actually teach our brain to not see things that are there

oh to see things that are not there with very little training so we think of the world is there and we just get exposed to it but now we know that the wall that’s out there is just a proposal and we can choose whether to see it as it is or not I find this remarkable so you are you’re actually on the cutting edge of this this research and it’s very groundbreaking can you can you describe a little bit about I mean how do you sewn in on one specific cell that is

sending a signal it’s a tiring tiring process of showing so we stick about 60 to 100 electrodes in a person’s brain in the area where they actually have a problem that we hope to capture so we have about 100 at best cells that we’re going to listen to there’s billions and billions of cells in your head so we’re looking at a fraction of what your brain can do and then we start showing you pictures and we show you picture after picture

after picture for many many many minutes and we just hope that at some point one of them is going to trigger one of those cells and surprisingly the yield is actually not too small we do find every now and then a few of those hundred cells respond to a few of those hundred pictures and I should say that we’re not just fishing in a lake with no idea what we’re looking for we kind of know where the electrodes are and what this part of

the brain is responsible for so we try to target these things so if we put electrodes in the brain if if I were to simplify it if we put it right out in the brain in the area of the brain that’s responsible for seeing faces we would try to show you mostly pictures of faces or not just like landmarks or objects hoping that we’re going to capture one of the cells that cares about faces if we put electrodes in the part of your brain that has to do with

memories we would ask you first what things are memorable for you and we’re gonna show you things that are relevant for you so we kind of get you to help us find things this is what’s the mark about about humans they can tell you what they want and you can do that there’s a wired video where you talk about how the brain is the puppeteer and we are simply the agents what what were you saying what do you mean by by that so here’s the meaning and even convince

you that it’s – four of us what I mean by that is that things that we do and say sometimes booing and happening in our brain before we choose to say them or think them and when they come out of our mouth we immediately own them and we say yes of course I wanted it but if I could go inside your brain and change something you would maybe say the opposite and you would still own that so we’re not really the main person that we should believe we should believe the

person inside who made a choice so here is like translating that into something more practical imagine that you go to mouth to a pharmacy store and you’re choosing to buy a toothpaste and there are two options there’s Colgate on the left and crest on the right and you’re now making a choice and you spend five minutes making this choice you look at the package and you look at the price and you look at the Colo and the promotion

and everything and in the end you say definitely Colgate and you put it in your basket and you’re starting to walk through the aisles doors the checkout and you made a choice if I stopped you and I asked you why you chose called you will tell me I liked the taste and I liked the price was a bit cheaper and the package was beautiful and whatever and so you’re gonna give me this would seem to you like it’s your answer now imagine that on the way to the checkout

I snuck into your basket and we placed your toothpaste with the other one you chose Colgate I put Crestor you get it to the checkout and somehow miraculously you don’t notice that you bought the one who didn’t want you pay for it when you go home and when you get home your friend says hey did you get toothpaste you said you’re gonna buy and you say of course and you look at there and there’s Crestor and the guy asked your where you

chose crest why the reality is that if enough time passed for the multimeter choice to the moment you have to explain the choice sometimes we forget metaphorically but also neurologically the choice that was made and we explain the reality that we’re confronted with as if it was our choice and you’re going to start explaining why crest is better than Colgate and why the price was better and what the package you’re gonna tell a different story just because this

is the reality that you’re facing right now not even remembering that when you had the choice you made a different choice so we don’t want to feel like we are out of control we want to feel like we are in control of our choices and making decisions absolutely and we always explain so our brain what’s unique to our brain and it makes sense White’s that case is that we always come up with an answer whatever in reality we are experiencing right now we give it a

stoic then we take the past and we take what we remember about memories and we use that to create a narrative that explains us and it doesn’t really matter to us if the original construct isn’t entirely – we might actually be mistaken but it’s still the reality that we’re gonna weave into a story you don’t really know how it was to be four year old anymore all you have is some residues of residues of memories that you take right now and explain your

story right now as if it was the story that you were when you were four okay okay I’m starting to get the picture here of what you guys are doing have you noticed a difference between people who study meditation and maybe a difference between people who have healthy minds versus unhealthy minds so it’s interesting we look at that in two angles and and they’re both interesting so meditation is something that I don’t practice myself but our work clearly lends itself

to a altered state of consciousness so a lot of people who colonization come to us and say this reminds me of a or B and we try to use their understanding of how it works to explain our results and I think there’s something to it there’s something to having a clear state to being more able to focus on single thoughts to even learn how to really see the world differently I think the people who practice meditation are saying that

they are able to do what we train our patients to do which is learn to focus on some realities and not the others and Co unsee things I think this is this is something that ties to that generally I think that our work looks at the one thing with humans which is consciousness and consciousness has various levels in our lives it has the level of alertness that we have when we wake up in the morning versus the one that we experience when we are sleeping

different same brain different states of consciousness we have the consciousness of a three-year-old three months old baby it’s the same big person that you are when you’re 25 but somehow your brain changes and accordingly the consciousness changes there’s the consciousness that you go to when you are going through meditation in other states of changes the consciousness of you and you’re drunk a consciousness of you when you’re under anesthesia you’re

in all those cases are the same brain just in different states and you can be an entirely different person in your mind based in those states so what we’re trying to get always is to the kernel of what is similar across all of those cases what is really you that doesn’t really change when you make a choice in the morning or in the evening when you’re sleeping or awake when you’re a psycho healthy under anesthesia or not and I think this is what I’m interested

in like who is the real you who is here you’re looking at what is the actual self what comprises the the self of a human being yes and the idea behind it one more sometimes on that is that the belief and we have is that if you touch this coal or this kernel because it relays its information to the other part of the brain that then executes them and believe that they are responsible if you come in between you can actually change people’s behavior

you can take a smoker and make them not want to smoke you can take people and make them want to eat different things healthier you can make a person who set the alarm to 6:00 a.m. who wakes up and then doesn’t want to be up at 6:00 a.m. be more to to the person who set the alarm to 6:00 a.m. so you know the conflict in our brain when you wake up between snoozing for five more minutes or being up like we plan to these are all manifestations of their brain and

maybe I should say one more thing one sentence but then you can ask me if you want more about that we also work with people who seem to be better at this self control and able to control themselves even better and those are typically elite athletes so we work with elite athletes who basically get to a level that they’re say they’re running for ten miles and then they are tired but somehow they have this ability to keep running even though their brain

says I want to stop and somehow most of us stop when we cannot and they continue so we try to understand their brain and see what’s unique to a person whose brain is just even more under his or her control okay yeah yeah let’s let’s keep going with that so what do I mean what is the difference between someone who is an elite performer let’s get into that human performance aspect fantastic so what we seem to think and that’s a common belief among scientists right now

is that there are positive brain that act exact like a muscle that is if they get more feedback and if they get more reward that says that what they do is working the strength and the connections and they become better at this particular task one of those parts is part of your brain that controls your pain and controls your endurance and controls your experiences of the world and this is again this part of the brain that is remarkable and it’s the front of

our brain it’s part of your brain that speaks backwards to emotions and to pain and to memories and and to pretty much everything that our brain does without us being in control and somehow feeds information into them so what we do is we partnered with a big kind of company that has access to athletes and we brought those athletes and they’re known so they’re famous elite athletes we brought them to the lab and we said okay we’re gonna

play a little game with you so imagine an athlete say Kobe Bryant a remarkable basketball player that we didn’t study so I can mention him easily we’ll bring him and we say Kobe we’re gonna put you on a treadmill right now and we’re gonna measure everything that we can measure about you your blood levels your hormones in your body your brain activity your muscle movement everything we can measure and we ask it to walk on the treadmill and we’re gonna control

the speed by which you’re gonna be on a treadmill and we’re gonna make it faster sometimes we’re gonna change the incline we’re gonna do all kinds of things to eat you and we ask you one thing no matter what please don’t stop walking or running just don’t stop would you like a little you guys it’s sure no problem how long is it gonna be we tell the guy you don’t know it’s gonna be maybe 10 minutes maybe 2 hours all you have to do is continue and what we do is

we intentionally increase the speed and make it pretty much impossible so no matter how good Kobe Bryant is as an athlete we can find a speed that will exhaust him after a few minutes of running and and he would want to stop the train and then he would run for say ten minutes at this super fast speed at we set for him and then you would say guys I’m really exhausted where am I gonna stop and we say now now continue we’re gonna tell you when to stop any

guy says ok one more mile and then he says guys I’m really tired what am I gonna stop and we say well continue we’re gonna tell you and essentially at some point he or she breaks I think they just say enough I’m stopping right inter ality is that we actually wanted them to do that we never intended to have them stopped at all what we wanted to do is see at what point they would break and essentially and mostly how their brain looks just before they break and the

reality is that you know when you and I start running I don’t know how good you are as an athlete but let’s say let’s give you the benefit of being a fantastic at it so you run a marathon 26 miles and you can do that and you’re exhausted but you can still do that but then I tell you actually one more mullet on you say are you serious I everything I can do let me say try then you try five more miles in it mile 31 your brain is still the same brain it

says on but somehow there’s a part of your brain that now says no I want to stop then the same brain says no run and the other one says stop and there are in conflict and maybe the conflict in the beginning is managed so the part of the brain that says run is winning but at some point it will lose and the question is can we see this competition in your brain who is really you between those two and if we can see that can we bring

you tomorrow and say ok so here did the same thing it before run but you can look at your brain now and you’re gonna see when you get to the point that you got to yesterday when you were about to stop and when you get there we’re gonna play a sound or turn a light on or somehow indicate to you know that you’re there that we know that you’re in the moment where you’re about to quit and we just ask you now to stay for one more minute at this spot that yesterday you

couldn’t be in and it doesn’t matter it might be that you yesterday urine 31 miles and today after 5 miles you got to this point but all I want is to you for you to get there and stay there a little longer and this is actually training your self-control it’s training you to become better in controlling your pain or your endurance or your ability and it turns out that this is possible to take any person and make them better on that

that domain we can also find people to just start great kids age 7 that just get to a point where they are feeling this desire to stop and they’re able to stay there longer than their friends who are just stopping right away this might be a trait that our brain starts with but it also is a muscle that we can train so this is where we’re going right now so so that feedback you’re finding out that that feedback assists people in

going further and pushing their limits further it helps and it helps in two ways it helps because suddenly you’re not alone like you actually get a feeling that someone is with you and it also helps because it feels like it’s a tangible task that you can manage so it feels that one more minute is always possible you know if you run a 26-mile marathon maybe after my 15 years and you say I don’t they can do it and I don’t think I can make it even – 16 – 17

miles but when you somehow get to mile 26 and you’re maybe half a mile from the finish line you have this boost of power that says oh I can definitely get to the end because it’s there and you can see it and and I think very few people in the world have stopped running at Mile 26.1 somehow people always finish when they get to the very end of the race in the same way I think that our athletes just by getting the feedback that tells

them we know that your feeling is this pain we know that you want to stop but here it is one more minute from this point makes them somehow stay for one more minute and and this is what you need to train this this is how muscles this is are we talking about the neuro plasticity in the brain then and we are we’re stretching that yes so so the explanation of that so we all we can see right now is that kind of the brain getting to this state because we do this

study not with the patients but with regular athletes and so we don’t have electrodes inside their brain just on the surface of their scalp so we can only see kind of activity and interfere from that what happened so we don’t really see the level of plasticity that we want to see but what I would suggest is that this is the case that the cells that are controlling the pain levels let’s let’s let’s simplify it as if the entire experience of running amounts to

pain it says I want to stop when another part of the brain says continue somehow the feedback from the controlling the pain structure he gets more strength and it amounts to more connections being created and more connections between those connections so every connection is a little bit stronger and also has more power things which is actually what you said plasticity just I’m trying to use a word that is not neuro scientifically

but actually imagine a tree that has just one more root being created those woods are actually the connections that the brain is absorbing all this is very very new and different domains of of work yeah it’s okay you know I’m very curious about this idea I mean we’re talking about altered states of consciousness and different brainwave states and I mean have you have you tried using LSD on patients and or psilocybin or MDMA and kind of seeing

where their brain is with these experiments so I did not I feel that the fact that we get to even access the brains of humans is already so unique and surprising that I’m not gonna dare ask for even more then you don’t want to push your limits any further but your feedback is is hitting that buzzer your brain is telling you not to go for any further right but I do know that others do that so I have a few colleagues who do just that and where we have a lot of

knowledge is on using the same readings with animals so I focus on humans because I feel that what’s unique to us is that we can articulate what’s going on in our brain so we can learn a lot more from an experiment on a human then on a mouse but it’s not entirely – because on a mouse you can actually do a lot more things and you can actually scan a lot more brain cells and you can actually put electrodes in a variety of areas that that tell you not just what

happens at the end but also what poses have have been involved in the making of a thought so you can learn a lot more and this is done so there are scientists who look at those altered states of consciousness it’s just that we don’t really know what it means to be a rat that is in a different set of consciousness we’re not sure that that what we call a human experience is what a rat cause right experience it’s very interesting ok so tomorrow I want to

play a little bit of devil’s advocate a little bit of a thought experiment with you ok so if we if we kind of fast forward 20 years from now and you know we’re understanding these behave the ways to kind of adjust be human behavior do you think do you think there would be you know this this sort of mechanism or device that we could create which controls human behavior so that let’s say in in regards to sort of an immoral behavior so let’s say that someone or

something has dictated that committing a certain crime we’re committing a certain action is bad and wrong do you think there could ever be a device that maybe is wearable or injectable maybe a microchip that you inject into your brain where which which would prevent human beings from committing these acts in 2020 15 five years from now so I’m thinking out loud on this so so on the one hand controlling our brains externally is something that I can merely frame in a

way that’s gonna sound to you mundane but it actually is happening all the time and there is a content and communication so when I speak to you right now I control your brain a little bit you choose to let me in but I start changing your brain I often give talks and someone asks me my thoughts about about drugs they say should I shouldn’t do drugs and I say what’s behind our question is but it changes my brain is it okay and I always say that everything

changes our brain love changes our brain our pet breakup changes our brain and talking to me right now changes your brain I make you create connections and in the same so in that sense people that are masters of communication are able to make you do things that you didn’t want to do they play with your emotions that control things and we think that we are in control of our own brain this is kind of the puppet in the capital again we

think that we are in control so we tell our story as if it was me listening and you speaking but the reality is that there’s a little bit of an overlap here and I have some of me in your brain right now that I own I I can change something in your brain and you cannot stop me and saying goes when you talk to me so there is something about communication that actually does what you said it just sounds less alarming but it actually has a very clear kind of

you know a practical aspect to it which is the people we spend time next to and the interactions we choose to have the communication which is to have and the surroundings we create is really important to what kind of brain one I have so if you want to be funny it should be next to funny people if you want to be interesting you should be next interesting people because their brains rather onto yours not just if you say teach me how to be

money just by awesome or theater influenced by the people around you exactly so this is this is not what you wanted to give you kind of asked me but they I know yeah I was gonna say questions yeah so so so taking it to the mall a science fictiony but actually potential reality controlling our prints we have it now a knowledge on ability to control people’s brains regardless of their resistance and I’ll give you example for one thing and and this could

go badly so we know right now the term moments where your brain is less guarded and is more likely to be see like receiving information and responding to it without you being able to stop that and that’s a moment where if you think about it from the point of view of a hacker it’s a moment will you turn all your security is down and you just let every hacker come in and that is our sleep when you go to bed we essentially are not there to stop things from from

getting in right now our brain is not really listening at those moments so it’s pretty safe that the gates are locked but we now know that our windows in your sleep where the brain is open it is listening it sounds that you make in the outside world actually penetrate the brains smells penetrated brain tactile experience penetrates the brain so we know that actually there are moments where the guards are down and you’re listening so now we know that there are

studies done in the last year and a half that show a person going to sleep and someone next to them spraying smells at the right moment and it’s how to find this right window but we now know how to do it so sprays smell at the right time well we Spurs words into the ears at the right time and when they wake up they actually make a choice that they think was theirs or they actually remember something that they think they put there

and it turns out that it was this other person who planted that and that means that we can think of a world where you go to sleep and there’s a device next to your head that whispers the right words or sprays right smells in the right moment and you wake up thinking you always wanted to buy Colgate and turns out that it wasn’t you who wanted it it was me putting it in your brain in your sleep this still is not it’s not science

fiction because we tried it but it’s not science because we also fail as many times as we succeeded but it means that I think the audience and society needs to be aware of that and kind of keep an eye because once something succeeds even once it’s just a matter of finding the tools to fix it all the time and we know that the brain is capable of doing that so now it’s just a matter of who will find the perfect tool and a perfect thing that they can do and this

is really alarming this means someone can you know have you go to sleep a Democrat and wake up Republican I mean this is what happened but you know the level of like a Colgate and Christ must have mice maybe will happen so wow I mean I I feel like there’s so much information that we’re covering so quickly and I appreciate your ability to speak so so fast cut her at all this class that we just caught yeah I know and so I mean okay so

just just to review you know kind of everything that we’ve been talking about for the last 45 minutes or so okay so our our brains are essentially mutable we can change we can change what our brains are doing and we can we can change our brains both in positive and negative ways so in a sense I can influence you to do something that you weren’t maybe intending on doing by introducing a stimulus or something when you are in a susceptible state to influence your

behavior my my on the right track here so so then I mean what does on on a health perspective I mean what what is the research showing to help humans other than just you know quitting smoking I mean what would be the most remarkable advance that that you could say that it could happen with with this with with the studies that you’re you’re doing so I’ll give you I’ll give you a three one-liners so you’ll get everything so one thing we can actually

change your behavior in the way that we mentioned make you stop smoking make you eat healthier food make you choose when to wake up such that you wake up in a better state it make you everything that we can do that comes between you making a choice and we’re helping you make a better one tomorrow that’s version one another thing we can do right now is you can actually go inside your head and find sections of the brain that a decaying that are not

performing as well as they did before imagine someone with Alzheimer whose brain falls apart as they as the structures of the brain are basically they’re not doing what they’re supposed to as they get older we can now learn enough when you’re when you’re young how these parts of the brain work to the point that we can really replicate all the performance of those sections that fall apart such that we know what inputs come in what outputs go out and win

these parts fall apart we essentially come back into your brain then we replace those parts with a chip or a system that basic all it knows is how to look at the inputs and look at the outputs then replicate what this structure that is now not working would have done this is another version of fixing the brain and the third one is actually connecting you to the world such that you will get a better understanding of the world and this is

talking about even experience our human experience is limited to the things that our sensors are able to sense so you know the you right now see what you see in the world and you call this the world but we know that there’s a lot more things out there that are just not captured by your eye because you know I can only see certain amounts of coalos and so you don’t see the Rays of cell phone beams that go from every pocket but right there right so we can out but

your brain if if your eyes could pick that up your brain knows what to do with it so now we can think of enhancing the human experience not by taking your brain and changing it or by replacing faulty parts but by actually fitting into the existing brain more information from the world that just tells you more about what’s out there making your experience so suddenly you will see it more you will smell more you will be able to fill in on molecules of dust

that are on your body that right now are below the threshold of your tactile experience you can actually say others too much dust in the room because I feel it and they ultimate this can go to is that we don’t have to just connect the world that’s out there by editing more census feed into the brain we can actually take things that have no sense to them and fit into the brain here’s what I mean by that when you drive your car to work and your gas

is your car is running empty about to have no gas we right now turn a little light in the car that says out of gas go get gas but this basically is a light that speaks to your eye that speaks to your brain and helps you interpret this slide as I need to get more gas what if you connected this cow to your belly and from your belly to your brain so it will make you feel hungry when I was empty you’re gonna feel hungry or when your

stock portfolio folds down you’re gonna feel pain that’s what late experiences in the world into something that your brain recognizes because we know how pain works in the brain what we need to do is take something in the world and plug it to the brain and have the parent feel the pain of the market or the emptiness of the car fall or anything that we anything that has a signal that we can right now recognize with our sensors just by using our competitive

aspect saying okay when this light turns on the car is empty need to get gas we can translate to a feeling that we’ll know how to respond to because our brain will just feel it fascinating wow that’s I mean it’s it’s truly mind-blowing I mean I carry this is the human experience that kind of we can think about when it comes to you know scientists call this thing human version 2.0 basically not just taking what Mother Nature gave us and saying okay

we’re satisfied with that let’s make sure that this is working well and but actually taking okay well there’s more things we want what about having humans fly the bats fly they have wings we know how to build wings it’s just that Mother Nature didn’t give us wings what if we built wings attached into the body connected to our brain have our brain learn how to control them and suddenly we can fly so all of those things evolution will spend millions of years

creating if it even is advantageous but humans are now able to do it tomorrow right yeah so more on shifting gears a little bit here yeah and this is kind of a personal question I I spent a lot of time using hemispheric synchronization where I mean I’m sure you know what this is right yeah okay so do you notice that there is an improvement with with people who use hemi-sync to kind of have their brain hemispheres communicate so I don’t know

enough to give you the right answer because I worked almost entirely on the opposite of that which is looking at people who don’t have a perfect synchronization I try to think what would be so okay so let me tell you what we do know and maybe we’ll try to think about it anything has to do with how the brain basically keeps time housing crisis is something that we we spend a lot of time looking into and we know that we can toy with it and break it and

we know what happens when we break that we know that we know that if I if I have you you know tap on the table a like a pattern like say tap every every second one tap with both your fingers you’re gonna be pretty much perfectly accurate like your left index finger and your writing fingers how you’re going to tap at the same time there’s gonna be zero or almost no delay between the two fingers because your brain to begin with is perfectly synchronized and when you

send the directive to the left finger and to the right finger it happened in the same time but if you and I set in front of each other and try to tap one second at the time the Favell we’re gonna be far apart because there is no synchronicity between yours and my brain even though we’re talking and we communicate and everything there is something that makes a brain an individual entity but this is current state right now your brain is yours my

brain is mine and they’re far apart and so and they’re not working together even though we have a method called communication to actually kind of create some residue of me in you and you in me but one of my colleagues who looks at consciousness in a very profound way not just try to explain the current state of consciousness but also the future suggests that there shouldn’t be a problem adding a wire going straight from your brain to my brain and if we wire it in

the right place at the right time and we actually control the bandwidth such that communication really will flow from yours then we can have an hemispheric synchronization not between your left and right hemispheres but y’all right in my left then and it we actually not only enhance our ability to communicate and to you know really synchronize behaviors like tapping a finger every one second but potentially it will actually mean

that some information will leak from you to me and me to you such that we will share an experience together Wow one of his Theo is it is right now untestable but suggested a really profound idea is that when we would do that if we will find a way to really plug one brain to another but fully wired not just like using you know reading from one and limiting the other what would happen is that immediately what will emerge is a third entity that will be the sum of

those two and it will think it’s one so the same way you think my left hemisphere and the right hemisphere are both me and there’s only one me and those two things are just sides of my brain it’s not like they left how the left I love the heart and the right of the help thinking that there’s too hard do you think okay we’re part of a heart the same way your brain thinks there’s one plane and you don’t got hemispheric synchronicity as if you’re trying to

kind of improve the connection of the communication between two sides of your own hemisphere once we plug our two brains the new character that will emerge will think of it self as one and it will suddenly you know there’s this the idea of putting it into pieces it would resist the idea of actually cutting out the wire and to say no I’m the whole is me then if you cut the wire it would feel as if you cut the connection between the two hemispheres

now this is another speculation we can’t prove it but all of the theory that you created suggests that this will be a reality that if you take it’s almost like a new type of consciousness exactly right it calls it a to type a new type of consciousness actually quantifies it nicely and in speaks about what it would mean and going back to what we said a few minutes a minute ago it’s something that is hard to try and test in humans but we can actually imagine

doing something like that in some a very very simplified version of a human like a worm called C elegans that has only 304 neurons then we not only know what each of those neurons do but we actually know how to read them and write in to another C elegans so we can actually imagine doing something along the lines of what I just said is totally speculative in science fictiony in the real world and see if this new C elegans that’s actually made out of – thinks

that it’s 1 and suddenly has different ideas of what it means to hibernate or to walk left or right or to eat food suddenly things are going to look different for her total futuristic and science fictiony idea but right now we can’t find any reason to also discard this idea because it makes sense from the neuroscientific perspective Wow Milana i’m truly blown away by this conversation we till we talked for and it’s been an hour almost an hour and I

feel like we’ve covered so much information I just I mean it’s it’s no surprise that you’ve been given awards for your work and grants your work and you know I really I’m really curious to know you know where your work is gonna be in 2 3 4 or 5 even you know even a year from now where you guys are gonna be let’s schedule to talk so since science now advances so fast and I told you about my work but about also the work of 10 other people

who all do something thing I think we should they make it like an annual gathering where we see what happened in the area I’m completely up for that so come on where can people find what you were doing I know you’re running C lab over there what’s the website for that I guess I’m the easiest person to find people always ask if you have a business card and I just say look my name and and there’s everything leads to the same place the lab that we put is called a

neuro hack dot-com yeah so that’s that’s kind of combining the neuro side and the hacking side so neuro – hacks with s in the end com is where we try to put everything we do but we’re always behind so listen to the podcast it’s easier ok so near Nero – max calm is where everyone can find you exactly and yeah Moe on thank you so much for you know lending us your time and and being here really really appreciate everything that you’re doing

and and discussing it with us thank you it was lovely this is the human experience we are gonna get out of here thank you guys so much for listening we will see you guys next week you