The Human Experience · Episode

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

A conversation with Moran Cerf Ph.D.

Moran Cerf Ph.D. is a professor of neuroscience and business at the Kellogg School of Management and the neuroscience program at Northwestern university. He studies patients undergoing brain-surgery to examine…

Published
August 7, 2016
Runtime
1:00:38
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Moran Cerf Ph.D. is a professor of neuroscience and business at the Kellogg School of Management and the neuroscience program at Northwestern university. He studies patients undergoing brain-surgery to examine behavior, emotion, decision making and dreams. This is done by directly recording the activity of individual nerve cells using electrodes implanted in the patient’s brain for clinical purposes. Dr. Cerf is a also a member of the institute on complex systems. Dr. Cerf holds a Ph.D in neuroscience from Caltech, as well as an MA in Philosophy and a B.Sc in Physics from Tel-Aviv University.

Cerf_Moran_0913

Cerf’s research uses methods from neuroscience to understand the underlying mechanisms of our psychology. His works address questions such as: “How are conscious percepts formed in our brain?”, “How can we control our emotions?” and “Which brain mechanisms determine if we find content interesting and engaging?”. Recently, his focus has been on the neural mechanisms that underlie decision-making, thereby offering a new perspective on predicting future choices and investigating how much free will we have in our decisions.

Dr. Cerf holds multiple patents and his works have been published in wide-circulation academic journals such asNature, as well as popular science journals such as Scientific American Mind, Wired, New Scientist and more. Additionally, his work has been portrayed in numerous media and cultural outlets such as CNN, BBC, Bloomberg, NPR, Time, MSNBC, and dozens of others. He has been featured in venues such as the Venice Art Biennial and China’s Art, Science and Technolgoy association, and has contributed to magazines such as Forbes, The Atlantic, Inc., and others.

He has made much of his research accessible to the general public via his public talks at TED, PopTech, Google Zeitgeist, DLD and other venues, gathering millions of views and a large following.

He was the beneficiary of several awards and grants for his work, including the Instructional improvement grant, and the prestigious president scholarship for excellent Ph.D. He was recently named one of the “40 leading professors below 40”.

Prior to his academic career, Dr. Cerf spent nearly a decade in industry, holding positions in computers security (as a hacker), pharmaceutical, telecom, Fashion, software development, and innovations development.

Additionally, Dr. Cerf is the Alfred P. Sloan professor at theAmerican Film Institute (AFI), where he teaches an annual screenwriting class on science in films, and is a consultant to various Hollywood films and TV shows.

He is left handed.

In this episode we spoke to Dr. Moran Cerf about the cutting edge research his team is conducting on the brain and its practical uses. This is an information loaded episode that will ask you to explore the future of human consciousness and how technology impacts the brain 

This conversation will inform, entertain and enthrall you. 

FIND TRANSCRIPT HERE

Find Moran and his work Visit neuro-hacks.com.

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Transcript

A full transcript has been published for this conversation.

Click here for transcript

Ideas worth returning to

Quotes

Five substantial excerpts from the published transcript, lightly edited for clarity without changing their meaning.

  1. “We can translate activity in an emotion-regulation region of the brain into sound and ask a patient to make the sound disappear. The upsetting circumstances remain unchanged, but the person experiments with ways to regulate sadness. Neurofeedback turns an otherwise invisible process into information a person can hear and learn to influence.”
    From the conversation
  2. “After a choice is imposed or changed, people often explain the result as though they selected it themselves. They may suddenly describe why Crest is better than Colgate even after originally choosing Colgate. The mind dislikes feeling out of control, so it constructs a coherent story around the reality it now faces.”
    From the conversation
  3. “The same brain supports very different states of consciousness: waking and sleep, infancy and adulthood, meditation, intoxication, and anesthesia. Consciousness is not one fixed setting attached to one unchanging person. As the brain’s state and development change, the character and availability of conscious experience change with them.”
    From the conversation
  4. “Smell and touch can penetrate the sleeping brain during windows when its usual guards are down. Recent studies have identified moments when an odor presented to a sleeping person is still processed. The challenge is timing: influence depends not only on the stimulus but on delivering it during the right stage of sleep.”
    From the conversation
  5. “If we understand the inputs, outputs, and function of a damaged brain circuit, we may be able to replace part of its work with a device that reproduces the missing transformation. That is one approach to repair. Another is connecting the person more effectively to the world so perception and action can bypass the damaged pathway.”
    From the conversation

About the guest

Moran Cerf Ph.D.

Moran Cerf Ph.D. is a professor of neuroscience and business at the Kellogg School of Management and the neuroscience program at Northwestern university. He studies patients undergoing brain-surgery to examine behavior, emotion, decision making and dreams. This is done by directly recording the activity of individual nerve cells using electrodes implanted in the patient’s brain for clinical purposes. Dr. Cerf is a also a member of the institute on complex systems. Dr. Cerf holds a Ph.D in neuroscience from Caltech, as well as an MA in Philosophy and a B.Sc in Physics from Tel-Aviv University.

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