Neuroscientist REVEALS How To Reprogram Your Mind WHILE YOU SLEEP For Success! | Moran Cerf

Tom: Everyone, welcome to Impact Theory. You are here because you believe, as I do, that human potential is almost unlimited. You know that having potential is not the same as doing something with it. Our goal with this program and this company is to introduce you to the people and ideas that will help you execute

your

dreams. Alright. Today's guest is a hacker turned

neuroscientist

. He is a fascinating mix of a wide variety of disciplines and this diversity has led him to explore some promising, if non-traditional, ways of researching the brain, such as opening the skull and looking inside

while

the person is still alive.

What he has discovered is so interesting it makes my eyes bleed and has made him a sought-after leading speaker and thinker who is influencing academia and business in equal measure. His education is a wonderful source of joy and includes a PhD in neuroscience from Caltech and an MA in Philosophy and a BA in Physics from Tel Aviv University. He is a visiting faculty member at the MIT Media Lab and his work has been published in such prestigious academic journals as Nature, the world's highest-ranking journal, as well as widely distributed publications such as Scientific American Mind, Wired, and New Scientist.

He was named one of the 40 Outstanding Teachers Under 40 and his groundbreaking work has earned him praise and attention from around the world, including Hollywood, where he has been cast as a consultant and collaborator on hit shows like Mr. Robot, my favorite. . , Unlimited, Bull, Falling Water and Ancient Aliens. He is also the Alfred P. Sloan Professor at the American Film Institute, where he teaches a screenwriting course on science and film. He holds multiple patents and is a multi-time national storytelling champion whose talks have earned him millions of views. Please help me welcome the professor of neuroscience and business at the Kellogg's School of Management and the neuroscience program at Northwestern University, the neurosurgeon who broke into a bank and robbed it, Dr.

Moran Cerf. Moran: Thank you. Tom: Thank you very much for joining us. I think the only reasonable place to start is to ask him, what does it feel like to rob a bank? Moran: He feels extraordinary. I think… I'm trying to go back to the memory of doing it the first time. It's something that you before and after

your

life is... Tom: How many times have you robbed a bank? Moran: I robbed a bank the way you mean, which is to say, I broke into one and stole the cash, four times, and I stole money practically dozens of times.

Tom: Stealing money was practically your job. Morán: Correct. Tom: Tell us how you end up breaking into a bank and robbing it. Moran: There are several people right now whose job it is to break into banks and steal money online. This is a job called pen tester. The bank's board of directors hires him to try to find ways to steal money online. This is common. There are some banks that would also allow you to try to test physical security, which would mean going there and seeing if the cameras are pointing in the right place, if someone left a sticky note with the password on the computer, and also going and saying, "Hey, Give me your money".

It's not that popular among hackers because they're usually very good at it, but every once in a

while

you'll hear about a group of hackers who will try to get us to be among the ones who did it. Let's see if we can rob the bank like the Westerners did. Tom: How do you end up becoming a

neuroscientist

then? Your work was pretty sexy. Not that it was very boring. You were robbing banks and hacking computers. Moran: The story involved many characters who influenced it, but I would say that the person who influenced me the most is Francis Crick, who at the time is perhaps the most influential neuroscientist studying consciousness in San Diego and who I met when I was a hacker, so I was doing something totally different in my life, and I spent an evening with him.

Tonight, he heard about my career and said that his job is basically looking at the black box, seeing what goes in, what comes out, and learning how it works. This is what hackers do. He said, "Think about using that in something that will be much more valuable to the world than looking at the brain." The brain is this black box. Instead of trying to crack the code, try to see how people behave, understand what they do, and learn how their brain works to make this happen. It took me two years to apply the advice, but... Tom: You're talking about Francis Crick of Crick and Watson, the people who discovered the double helix of DNA, which is quite interesting.

Honestly, tell us about the research. I didn't realize how recently he was active. It seemed a little more decent to me. You have called him your idol. What was it about him in particular that made him your idol? Moran: First of all, he addressed interesting questions, right, because a lot of scientists try to do the same thing many, many times just to accumulate more knowledge about the same problem. He wasn't that kind of person. He really tried to look at all the things that I was told when he was a kid, the interesting things in science, but you should never study them until you get the Nobel Prize.

Studying dreams, consciousness, whether there are aliens out there, free will, all the interesting things we thought about as kids but are told when we enter academia, never touch this at least until you get a Nobel Prize. He was researching all of that stuff and really diving into it, so I felt like this was what was interesting. Tom: You actually made a list when you started your… Was it your PhD? You made the list of important questions that I think I want to explore. Moran: The first day I had this sticky note on my refrigerator with all the things I wanted to do if I ever got a PhD.

Among those things were the things I mentioned. Tom: Okay. Let's look at them piece by piece. I'm certainly really fascinated by free will, and I assume you followed Sam Harris in terms of his talk about free will and everything he's done about it. What is it that attracts you to free will? Why are you interested? Moran: I think in some ways there is an application to free will, right? We live life thinking that we make decisions all the time and we are responsible for our decisions and also determined and defined by them. If I ask you what you want for lunch and I offer you five different things and you choose, then your choice is in some way your identity.

This is what matters to you. If I told you right now that I could predict what you were going to choose an hour before you made a choice, one day, 20 years before, it kind of takes away part of our identity, but it also gives us meaning because it says Well, actually There is a narrative that we carry with us throughout life. Now, choice has really become something that defines who we are, not just in the moment but as a person in the world. I always worry about free will, understanding it, predicting it and also using it to change things.

If you think that, okay, determine if I have any meaning in my life... I'm sorry. They are not determined, we do have control over them and that is what makes us human. Tom: Do you think we have free will or do you think the way we think about them is totally different. We have to completely reimagine it. Morgan: There are two types of moments that need to be addressed. One is whether we really have this spark moment that happens when the choice is totally arbitrary and we have a choice. I think we have that free will, a coin toss where something is determined.

What's interesting is the moment when we realize the free will choice, as in I'm asking you... I'm asking you if you want the fish or the steak right now, as if you have two options. Now you are about to make a decision. What do you want? Tom: Steak for sure. Morgan: Now you had a second in which you had to look at all the options, I gave you only two and make a decision. Now, at some point, if I asked you when you made the decision, you would say, "Well, maybe as soon as I finished the sentence." Maybe you would say a split second later.

The question is: A, how long before did we know the answer to that? Also, was there anything I could have said differently that would have made you say the fish? The most important thing is what is the gap between the moment you would tell me is the moment you chose and the moment you actually chose. Apparently, there is a gap and this gap is what we call the illusion of free will. The moment you say that's the moment, that's when it happened. I can look at your brain and say, “You know what? Actually here, your dinner is the one you are going to choose.” Or even if you want to go one step further, we can stimulate your brain and make you choose this.

I would tell you and say, "Who made the decision?" You say, "I have to make the decision myself. This was my decision." I was like, "Well, you know what? Here I am messing with your brain's performance by making you say fish." Tom: What are you with? Transcranial magnetic stimulation? Morgan: Yeah. This isn't for me, but there are people who... Tom: Yeah, so what would you do? Can you really make the steak and fish one? Morgan: The only demo I saw was a person who basically had a little box and it had buttons and he had to choose whether he wanted to press left or right.

People sit there and press left, right, right, left, left, left for about 10 minutes. Then someone asked them what their choice is, which button to press at any time. They would say of course and then you walk away and see a person sitting with PMS like this machine looking at the brain. They are basically playing as a; left, right, right, left. Tom: Get out of here. This is real? Morgan: That's real. The interesting thing is not that you can do that. This is not surprising. We know we can destroy your brain and make you move your head.

The surprising thing is that you told me it was my choice as if you believed it was your decision. You wouldn't question the fact that what you did was your decision. For me, this was an interesting part that we can have this way with our brain to always defend it. In other words, whatever he did, he wanted to do. If I do this, it was my choice. Now we know it wasn't necessarily your choice. That things got to you, that things forced you to do what you did, and you will always claim that it was your decision so that we can show you that you're actually not completely...

Tom: How do people respond when you show it to them? Morgan: Funny. They mostly try to defend free will, so they try to argue with me. I showed them the video of me telling things. They say, no, no, no. We have this experiment where we take them to the lab and we just tell them things. We say, "Okay, what do you want to eat after the experiment? Where do you want to sit, here or there?" We ask them to make decisions and we don't really tell them anything. Just say make decisions, like sit here or there?

Do you want this pen or that pen? Do you want the light to be on or off? Then we asked them after the experiments how many decisions did you make? People who saw us playing with their free will think they made hundreds of decisions. They made about 14 but they really feel like, okay, I had to make decisions, I control everything, this was my decision, you can't try to hold on to ideal free will and say, "I had a lot of decisions in my life." and I made them." They become a little more religious. They become a little more ethical.

A lot of things happen to you when you feel like what's in question is your identity. Tom: That's very interesting. I've heard a lot of these studies and I haven't heard where they literally play the conga and if they did it left and right. I've seen one where you know they're about to do it before them, so you turn on the buttons essentially to make them beep and tell them not to press. , which is really funny, but I didn't know about that one. It's so interesting. Okay, so you're a guy with a deep background in narrative, you teach a screenwriting course, for God's sake.

Help me understand how you know. that you can manipulate the brain and still believe in free will. It sounds like you believe in free will and how it is tied to your own narrative. Moran: Here's the idea. .The temperature of the room, the height of the chair, the weight of the book we are holding; a lot of things. This is studied by many people in many, many ways that show over and over again that you can really change a person's behavior. We can list those things so someone can take them and now have a list of things that they can apply if they want to have better interactions with people, what temperature the room should be, what they should do.

We know. We know that thing. At the same time, we still live life as if they were entirely our decisions. We know I can trick you by making the price of the meal 6.99 instead of 7 and you'd think it's 6, not 7, like the simplest one in the book. We all know it and it still works. If we take that to a larger scale, we know that there are hundreds of thousands of biases that affect our brains and even if I told you what they were, they would still work the same way. Free will becomes interesting to me whenWe learn all those things and say, "Okay.

So who am I?" Who is in charge? Who is the puppeteer in this example? The reality is that... what we learn is that there is more than one puppet master in our brain. There are many, many. Every day, another guy wakes up, and one day with this guy, one day with this guy, and they're competing for dominance. They fight and compete. You make a decision together, you vote, and ultimately we protect the person who spoke last and say, "This is who I am." For me, the most interesting thing is that now we can see all of his characters.

We can show them fighting. We can tell you that there are more people in your brain. By doing so, we can really allow them to bring out different sides of themselves so that they know that maybe they are making better decisions in the morning and for me to make those decisions in the evening. You may know that you are making better decisions when you are hungry and I am when I am full; when you talk to friends, when you are alone. Now we can profile your brain. Tom: If someone is looking at us right now and thinking, “Okay, wait.

Do I make better decisions when I'm hungry or full, night or day? What are you looking for and what can they look for at home? Morgan: I would say that what we do with a lot of people in leadership positions in companies who really want to make better decisions is that we have a protocol that is a little tedious. It's not easy to do, but I'll tell you what it is and then you can think of ways to try it yourself. Basically, we have them walk around for a week with a journal, make decisions, and just write them down.

Tell us how I had this fish or this steak for lunch and I chose this and this is how I chose it. They also write whether they were happy or not with the choice. Now, this is done like you wouldn't normally do it, but we also added one more thing. We put an EEG cap on their heads... Tom: All day? Morgan:…for more than 24 hours. They walk around with something that measures their brain activity. There are times when they have to replace the battery. There are some gaps there. In all, we make them walk through life living life as they do and reflecting on their choices, but they also make us look at their brain.

What we do at the end of the three days, a week, as long as they do that… Sometimes it's awkward and embarrassing. We ask you to look at all the options and tell us which ones were good and which ones were bad. Then we look at their brains and see what the words look like in their brains. What was it like when you made decisions you were happy with? Sometimes we see that there are things in their brain that repeat themselves, so maybe they made decisions more using this part of the brain. I'm just trying to simplify it by looking at the part of the brain that is more emotional than rational.

We see that they activate more parts of the brain that are buried deep and that have to do with reflection rather than thinking. We tell them, “This is what we learned about you. You are better in this state and that state.” That's one thing. It's not easy to apply because you still have to keep this in your head. Not everyone can do that. At least the people in high-level positions who feel so critical come to us and say, “Okay, help me. I want to know who I am better.” Tom: Now, what about those studies you did where you have the rider on the bike, they go hard, hard, hard, hard, hard, and you look at certain brain states where you know, "Okay, they're going to leave it." ".

Then, it uses that information over time to get them to delay quitting smoking longer and longer. How does it work? Morgan: Behind that is the idea that the brain is a kind of muscle, and specifically, there is a part of the brain that really matters to us. It's the part that does self-control. If you think about it simply, you start running, the first mile, your legs say, let's run, and the brain controls them, so let's run. , and there's another part of the brain that says it's okay. After a mile, your legs say they hurt a little, but the part of the other brain that controls them tells you to keep going. legs say I want to quit and the other part says no, keep going.

It's like there's a battle there and at some point you're going to break. Now, when you are going to break depends on many things, on your muscles, but it also depends on this control that comes from the front of your brain and that overrides your experience, your pain. If we can see that moment when you break, the moment when you stop even though you can do a little more, we can come back to you tomorrow and say, “Let's do the same thing you did yesterday. You have run? Only this time when you get to the point where we see that you're about to break, we're going to play a sound.

We will tell him that we can see that he is about to break and ask him to continue for one more minute in this moment that is beyond what he did yesterday.” Tom: What, at that point, how do they attract you? Is it like, come on, motherfucker, like you got this or... Moran: That's basically it? There has been a question in sports for some time: why do people do better when they play at home than when they play away? What is it about your mother being in the audience that makes you win the game? In theory, it doesn't matter, since throwing the ball should be the same.

Somehow we know that if your friends are there, if you feel better, we know that people do better when they say, "Oh, they're winning." There are many things that affect our brain. What we're trying to understand now is where it is in his brain. What is this part of the brain that improves when your emotions are highlighted or intensified? Now we are seeing it. Tom: That's the life you're talking about now. Boys and girls at home, I tell you that there is a banality in being an entrepreneur. There is a willingness to suffer for being an entrepreneur, for being a great mother.

Whatever you are trying to do, suffering is involved. Literally, it's about being able to extend your breakpoint. When I read... Moran: What I'm going to say is that we all face those moments when the alarm goes off at 6 a.m. We set it at 10 p.m. and suddenly in the morning we are different people, as if we are no longer the person who wants to wake up. It is the same brain that sets the alarm for 10:00 p.m. but now, suddenly, it's 6 a.m. We are not the same guy. This is the moment like that. We have to make a decision when we are going to run, when we are about to eat a cake.

There is like a delicious cake and we are on a diet. We say, oh, I shouldn't eat the cake, but there's a conflict. Now is the time when those two parts of the brain come to life. The more you know about yourself and the more aware you are of those situations, the better you will be able to control them. The more you know about yourself, the better you can do at all of those tasks. That's the last thing. That's why we are here. We are giving you the knowledge. Once you know it, it doesn't work anymore.

Once you know that 6.99 is not 7, it's harder to make it work. Just knowing is enough for people to do better. Know that you are within your ability to change. That's what we want. Tom: How can someone become more self-aware? How do you begin to identify those things that are particular to you in order to expand your breaking point or to be able to refute whatever it is? Moran: All they need to do is communicate the science in a tangible way so people know all the options. I said there are hundreds and thousands of options, but in reality there are a couple hundred biases that we humans have.

I can give you examples in a second. Once you know them, they no longer work. The scientist's job is simply to translate the brain's knowledge into words that can then be communicated to an audience who will then live in that moment, and that's it. All you need to do is do this. Talk to people and list their prejudices. Then it doesn't work anymore. At least when this happens, you manage to control it a little better. That's all we need. It's pretty simple. Once you know it, it doesn't work. Tom: Let's use an example from your life.

I love this story, by the way. You are about to be published in Nature. It's your first big break in science and this will really establish your career. Then someone wakes you up from a nap and you basically say, "Yes, recording dreams is possible." You can't take it back. You say, "Wait, wait, that's not what I meant." He goes crazy. The part I love is Christopher Nolan calls you and says, “Hey, I just made this movie, Inception. Now you're the guy who records dreams. I want you to come with me and do a world tour,” which would be a great break for you and you would just be… I’m sure money and certainly notoriety and you had to think about it.

Even though you knew that going essentially means reinforcing this opinion that I don't actually agree with, turning it down meant that I had passed up that opportunity. What happened in the 24 hours before giving the answer? Moran: To tell you the full story, I'm finishing up my PhD. I haven't decided what I would do next. Will I continue in science? Am I a hacker again? This is like a moment in my life and suddenly there's this moment where the end of my five-year PhD is getting a lot of attention, but it's all wrong; my obstacle course of this thing.

Then suddenly I have the option to own this and become a dream expert, even though it's based on a lie. I was lucky enough to have enough checks and balances and didn't have to go too far with it, so here's the interesting reflection I have now. I knew it was impossible to look at people's dreams and I said it in dream state and created this amazing story for people that scientists are now recording dreams. The mistake was leaving this. Saying it's not possible, I'm not going to own this even if the world cares. If there's one thing to learn from this, it's that the world really wanted people to record dreams because that's why it's so important, because people care.

Dreams are interesting. I went and said it's impossible and I want to kill the story. This was a mistake. Three years later, I'm sitting at home, now in 2013, and I got a call from the BBC again. The BBC was the first to let the story go. They called me back and said, “Professor Cerf, we wanted you to comment on dream recording and the possibility of doing it.” I said, “Guys, are you kidding me? I'm done with that. “This isn’t too much… Let’s not even start going there.” They said, “No, no. We know you're going to do that.

We want you to comment on the work of Professor Kamitani from Japan who is doing it right now.” Someone in Japan didn't know it was impossible. He just didn't hear me go anywhere public and say it's impossible, so he just did it. Three years after I said it was impossible, someone did it and two years later I joined. Now half of what I do in life is look at people's dreams. The mistake I made was not simply saying something is possible when it is not. It was saying something was impossible before I realized it because I think science is about going to those dark places and trying to find what's impossible.

My mistake was saying it was impossible before I was sure. I should have said we don't know yet, we haven't done it yet, but we should investigate. I was quick to say “I didn't do it, it's impossible”, so I delayed things for three years. Five years later, I'm doing it right now. Tom: Dude, can I shake your hand? I love that, because most people can't look at something like that and say that the mistake I made was actually in the opposite direction and that I should have been bolder. I should have made a wiser proclamation. So joining the team is great.

Moran: Dreams is something I was told not to study. That's what I do in my life every day. Now I never say something is possible before I'm sure it's impossible. Tom: I love that. I would love it even more if you would go so far as to say that nothing is truly impossible. Then you'd really have me. Moran: I will go with you. You mentioned that I teach screenwriting and work with television. The reason I do this is because I feel like the best ideas for my research come from those hours with kids writing plays, with American Film Institute fellows writing science fiction, from movies that inspired me like The Matrix .

You mentioned that this has inspired us. We are children of 1999. What happened then affected us. Star Trek affected my father's generation. The best article I've ever written has thousands of citations. The episode of Limitless that I worked on last week that came out has five million people watching it. Those are the kids I will be in 20 years. If they think, oh, maybe this is possible, they will do it. You are asking me how to change his behavior. That is how. To know what the possibilities are. Tom: I love that. Here are the people who watch the show, know my story very, very well, and now I'm tearing it down because it's so important.

I'm not an example of what happens when innate talent meets hard work. I am an example of what happens to a human being every time they work hard because I didn't show early signs of promise. I got a 990 on my SAT exams. I was taking it twice. I don't qualify for men or anything like that. I have an average IQ. It's like none of my raw materials are very impressive, but I work hard.I work hard over a very long period of time. By doing so, I completely transformed my life and

mind

to the point where now people just assume I'm smart.

The same people who looked at me 20 years ago didn't assume I was smart, but now they do. The reason it's so important to have this conversation with a neuroscientist is that it all comes down to me, to the narrative that you tell yourself, when I was undereducated and lost and on the verge of depression and all that. , it was because the narrative that I told myself that I was a victim of something. Once I let go of the victim mentality and realized that I can do anything I put my

mind

to, now it's a spiritual thing, right?

If you really believe you can do anything you set your mind to, how do you spend your time? It's a spiritual question. I once said, “Okay, I'm going to dedicate my time to self-improvement. "I'm going to see how far I can manipulate my own brain." I began researching the brain to understand what is malleable and what is not; learning about myelin. If you don't even know what myelin is, thinking you've already maxed it out is fucking crazy. Investigating the brain, figuring out the anatomical mechanisms at play, and coming up with, well, this comes down to self-narrative.

If I tell myself that dreams can be recorded, then you really can't, because I'll stop doing it. When you talk about never saying something is impossible when you're not really sure, what I start thinking about is thinking big, like thinking really big and looking at the Matrix and saying, "Okay, either that level of virtual reality is really possible or stopping bullets is really possible," whatever it is that's taken away. Time travel was one of the things on your list. The promise I make to people who watch the show is that by watching it they will achieve more than they would if they didn't watch it.

One of the key reasons is that you will finally understand that if you don't think big, that's your fault. The only reason you are not thinking big is because you are afraid, because there is nothing in the machinations of the brain, there is nothing in what has come before you in science, nothing that would lead you to believe what you currently think you believe. is. impossible actually it is. Moran: Let me say this in the words of neuroscience. I love it, so that's how I'm going to say it. Your brain goes with you and carries the whole story in the form of memories.

Everything you have of what happened before you is stored in the form of memories and they are inaccurate and compressed. That's just about the past. You have no idea about the future even though your brain tries to predict it all the time. That's what dreams are for. That's what decisions are for. You try to simulate the future and make predictions. You don't know what's happening. All you have is this portion of reality that is the present, which is all you have, and you control everything that happens there. The great thing about the present is that it actually interacts with everything in your brain and you can change things.

What we have learned in the last five years is that memories work differently. If I have to sum it up in one sentence, they change every time you use them. If you have a memory stored here or what you had for lunch yesterday and I ask you what you had for lunch, you basically open them. Right now you tell me a story, but whatever happens now enters the story and you tell it differently. If I ask you what you had for lunch tomorrow, you will open the modified version. Every time I ask you the same question, you open a different version, which means you can change the past.

In fact, you can change your experience of things. That's why therapy works. Your girlfriend breaks up with you, you go to a therapist, she asks you what happened. You tell the story, she intervenes, you tell it in a different way. A week after what happened, you tell a different story. After five meetings, you have a different version of reality. That's powerful because it means we control the narrative we have. We really don't have to confuse ourselves with the history we live. In fact, we can change it. That's what the brain is for, to simulate, change, adjust and synthesize a better version of life.

We can make ourselves happy. We can make bad things look better. We can control things and everything just by telling a story, seeing it differently and saving it again. It's as simple as that. We have the ability to change a story all the time. Learning is one way to do it. Thinking and reflecting on ourselves is another way to do it. Having more experiences allows us to do that. We know all this now. Suddenly, there is substance in this self-help book we read as kids and we know how to implement it. I become a preacher but...

Tom: No, but I love it, I love it, and I hope people listen to your sermon because, well, the most important thing that anyone who strives to be

success

ful needs to know is the narrative that you tell yourself. yourself. About yourself is the most important thing you have. If you tell yourself a story of struggle, inadequacy, not being good enough, failure, etc., that will be reinforced because that literally becomes your identity. Going back to what you said at the beginning, you have people justifying why they made some decision, right? When you said do you want fish or steak, man, inside I thought that my narrative as a human being is that I'm the one who chooses the steak, right?

I know that's not even difficult. It would have been easier if you said steak or pie because I'm actually the guy who chooses steak over pie. It's as if that were pure narrative. That's what I want to tell myself. The breakthrough in my life, the breakthrough on a map of my timeline, if I were to put a demarcation point, is the day I stopped thinking of myself as smart because I wasn't, and started thinking of myself as An apprentice. That changed everything because now the narrative I was reinforcing, the memories I was pulling out by changing a little bit and then putting them back in, revolved around reimagining myself as someone who learns faster than other people, who is willing to learn, who will put to work. time and effort to learn.

It became this identity that was antifragile, right, because now you could tell me I was stupid and it didn't matter. It didn't hurt me. It just forced me to learn more. The reason I shook your hand earlier is because it really touches me when you say I was wrong about that. I should have done this. Any time people can say that, they can just acknowledge a mistake and see a better solution, it's someone who is polishing their self-image in a way that is antifragile and the more they look at that failure, the more they try to get to a place even better. address.

It's really amazing. Alright. I want to ask you all the questions that you ask me that I don't have answers to and I hope... because I get asked these questions a lot. Alright. Number one, how can I get more motivation? It's the only thing because I've never lacked motivation. I don't know how to help people. Morán: Hard. That's how I would think about it. Motivation is a word, right? It is a label we put, a set of events in our brain. What you really want is the result of that. You want to do things when it's done.

I think there are some things that we know work. One is evidence of past

success

es. If I tell them and go back to their memories and reframe them as successes, suddenly the current event that is the same is a success. I think it's one thing to have stories of success and identification. There are a lot of people out there. There was a person like you who had a similar experience and chose what you wanted to choose. Find this person or these people and it will infect you. My students often ask me how I can become funnier, how I can become smarter.

What I give them all the time is to surround yourself with people you want to be like. Do you want to be funny? He just

sleep

s next to the comedians. Just walk into the same room as them and sit with them. It will infect you by osmosis because it is the environment around us that really changes everything. Other people have said that before but I'll tell you what the neuroscience behind it is. We now know that brains interact with each other through language in a way that synchronizes them. When I'm talking to you right now, if you're committed to what I'm saying, it means that if we scan our brains right now, our brains will be more similar than yours and someone on the street who isn't here. .

Two people in the same room, as soon as they interact, their brains literally start beating, if you will, the same way. Part of your brain turns on in the same way and others turn off. This is how we affect each other. This is how communication made humans who they are. This is the only thing that makes us better than all other animals because we can communicate using language, affect each other's brains, and create narratives that only exist together. We both believe in things we've never seen before, like God or ideas like democracy or money, like those things we invent, we can communicate them and create this image in people's brains, and everyone shares this.

In the same way, if you surround yourself with people you want to be like, you listen to them communicate, they change your brain and that will infect you. In fact, you will become funnier if you sit and listen to fun people next to you. In fact, you will be more motivated if you are next to motivated people. The next version of that, if you can't find them, if you're sitting right now in rural Alaska and you can't just run into people in Los Angeles that you want to be with, is to just look for See them in videos, in books.

Basically, this is how our brain becomes content and changes. Brain shifting happens in many, many ways, but the easiest one anyone can try is to say what kind of world I want to be in and bring it to you in the form of movies, stories, TV shows, all people. Those are the ways to get the things you want at your side. Tom: Do you think that when you do that you're entering into a repetitive pattern of brain activation that ultimately connects you? Moran: You actually change your brain. We didn't mention that the science behind it matches up in terms of what we do.

We put electrodes on people's brains and watch their brains while things happen to them. In fact, we see it in action. We see how the brain changes when people communicate. We see what the brain looks like. When you watch a movie, we see how your brain aligns with the movie. When you tell another person the story of the movie, their brain aligns with yours but also with the brain of the director of the movie. Communication is this mechanism by which information flows between brains and changes the brain. Actually, if you want to take it a step further, this is also how we change ourselves because we do it all the time.

You drive your car or walk to work and you are alone with yourself and you communicate, you also change your brain. You consolidate the things you want to be more like and suppress the things you don't want to. We always talk. Those voices, those are basically the other characters in our brains talking to each other. You can choose which ones to give more weight to so that you become the best person you want to be. In fact, we now play with things that change behavior during the night when you

sleep

as follows. This is another new thing from the last 10 years in neuroscience that was finally discovered: you can learn to change and transfer overnight.

If you look at the night and go to sleep for eight hours, it's not a uniform experience. In reality, it's not just about falling asleep and spending eight hours in the same state. You actually have phases. We call them stages and cycles. There are different things happening in them and one of them is the scenario you are dreaming about. This is when our brain basically simulates future options and shows us a movie of things that could happen and allows us to live them, thinking about the realities, the ultimate virtual reality. In fact, we live life thinking we're there, thinking what it would be like to live with her in Alaska or quit our job and move to Vancouver.

That experience really filled us with emotions and then we woke up with the answer of what to do. This is a stage. There is another stage that is really interesting, stages 3 and 4 of sleep. We call it slow wave sleep. It's a stage of the night when your brain essentially takes all of the experiences from the previous day, waits for them, and chooses which ones to keep and which ones to eliminate. If you think about life throughout the day, there are many, many moments that you call present. About every second and a half you have a different present and then it goes to the past.

It becomes a memory. You go to the next moment, you live it and then you store it in memory. Then, when you go to sleep, your brain analyzes those 50,000 moments you had. He says, okay. When I walk from home to the bank, I had 20 of those moments. They are not really important. I should compress them into one. Keep only one. Remove the others. When I kissed her, it was a moment that I want to remember every fraction of, so I want to keep them all individually as a great stock of experiences. Your brain does it. You are in a slow wave sleep during this mode.

You choose between all of them and choose the ones that are important. What we have learned in the last five years, 10 years, is that actuallyYou can do things at this stage. When you are sleeping, it will make you change the pointer. We can choose to have you focus on the walk to the bank instead of the kiss, and by doing so we're basically making you strengthen those memories at the expense of everyone else. We do this using smells or sounds that we reproduce in your ears. At the right moment, the smell of... Tom: You judge that right moment because you're actually looking like Moran: It has to be done.

The important thing is that you can't do that at home. You can't just spray the scent and do it all the time. You have to do it at the right time because if you just spray it in the room, it's going to wash away. You have to target the brain at the right time, but then the brain will say: I smell this. This means that I want to focus on this moment and strengthen it. What the experiments we and others are doing right now show is that you can actually make a person learn things while they sleep.

In fact, you can change his behavior. You can have them choose to focus on different behaviors they want to change and wake up without doing these things. You can really do things. The classic experiment that was very popular in the last three years from 2015 was people coming to the lab, smoking, and wanting to sleep. They go to sleep for two hours. The experiment simply waits for the moment when your brain is in this state where you are listening to the outside world and reassessing life. They spray the smell of nicotine into their nose causing their brain to think, okay, of all the memories I have, let's focus on the ones that have to do with smoking.

Then right after, they bombard the brain with a rotten egg smell which basically causes the brain to rewire itself and take in nicotine and connect it to bad experiences. Do that a few times. When they sleep, they wake up and have no idea what happened. Then all of a sudden they say, "I really don't want to smoke anymore." In fact, for a few days they changed their behavior. They don't want to smoke because they don't know what happened. They just came, took a nap, woke up and didn't want to smoke. This is the shift in behavioral neuroscience.

You find the moment, hit the brain with it, change the wiring, and the person wakes up as a different person. Tom: That's amazing. Are people scared by that, whether for better or worse? Moran: The answer is yes, but they shouldn't. I have an analogy that will be the way I see it. Go back 406 years ago, 1610. Galileo Galilea points his telescope at Jupiter's moons and looks at the orbit and expected it to go in one direction, but it doesn't. He goes another way. He tries to understand what is happening there. The only way to solve the equation is to realign the planets of our galaxy, the Milky Way, and specifically the solar system, putting the sun in the center and placing Earth as planet number three in the system that for him is that of The humanity.

What does it mean? That we are just one more planet among many? We are not the center. It seems horrible to him. It changes everything. The equations require it and he does it. By doing so, he basically allows us to see the wide universe. Suddenly we see that the universe is much larger than we imagined and we can explore it. Over the next 400 years, we saw more of the universe and learned a lot about what's out there. Now in the same way, in the last five years, we are beginning to understand that in our own brain there are many, many voices and we are not the most important one.

We are not even the center. We are just one more voice of many in our heads and we are the ones we think are the most important. In reality, the silent ones who don't really speak to us are the center of our universe. Now this to us, again, feels like a kind of humanity. What does it mean I'm not the center of my own universe? The reality is that this will allow us to understand the most important and interesting thing in the universe, which is us. I think that's a deep understanding. Yes, it is scary that we are not responsible for the decisions that happen to us, that we are creating a narrative based on things that we do not actually have full control over.

That is our beauty because now we can explore more things in our brain and learn how things happen, and maybe we will understand how to become better people. Tom: It's really interesting. Moran: Somehow I ended up being a preacher tonight. I have no idea how it happened but I'm going to accept it. Tom: Yes, please. Preach now about self-deception, how it essentially feels like the layer that we see is also the voice... to use your vernacular, the voice that we see as we are trying to improvise this narrative based on these decisions that are made by the quiet voices.

How can we leverage that to just tell ourselves a more empowering story or to get the silent voices to do what we want them to do that's more in line with our goals? Very specifically with self-deception, how can it become a tool that we are consciously using to propel ourselves forward? Moran: It is a tool with which we are deceiving ourselves, but we have to change the border from affirmation to a positive one. A set of deceptions sounds like a bad thing. This is our brain's way of saving us. This is our brain... it is. Reality is still not lived as it is.

In reality, these are mechanisms that our brain created to optimize the world. We know that our eyes offer us only a small fraction of all the things in the world but we call this reality. We know that our nose smells only what is here, and our nose smells where the smells are. The smells are down here and our noses are up here. We don't even smell... We don't have it on. All of those things may not... Our brain tricks us. It always offers us a reality that is not true. Brilliant. This allows us to have a different vision of the universe that we can create ourselves.

On the one hand, we want to know what's out there. That's why we have x-ray sensors and ultraviolet sensors because we want to really know what all the light rays are that are out there that our eyes can't see. That's why we develop all those smart tools to listen to things that are beyond the frequencies our ears can pick up. We want to know what's out there, but our brain, through years of illusion, created this set of delusions we call reality in a way that is perfect for us. It allows us to live life in a comfortable way.

Tom: One of the things you talked about in relation to self-deception is that people are very bad at understanding what they want and if they are intentionally deceiving themselves, intentionally deceiving you as a researcher. One thing I get asked a lot is whether someone wants to feel fulfilled. They want to find a career they love. They want to start a company but they don't know what. How can people come to understand what they want? Moran: I would say the best way is to be aware. Note the meaning as you take note. What you actually see when you look at people's brains is that it takes few repetitions of a message for the brain to rewire and now solidify.

We can show it to you eight times. Tom: Eight? Moran: It varies but that's the area. We show him this person next to this item eight times, and the first time he sees this person, this cell lights up in his brain. The cell phone, code Tiger Woods, lights up when you see Tiger Woods. They show you Gillette, another cell lights up. We start by showing the two of them together, after eight replays of seeing them together, suddenly Tiger Woods' cell phone also encrypts Gillette and Gillette's cell phone encrypts Tiger Woods. Suddenly, the cell phone and that's it.

Eight repetitions is too little. This is the amount of time that commercials have to run on TV before you say, "Okay, now I know this is the... That means it's very easy to put things in our brains that we're going to change." Now that we also learned that these numbers are quite small, we can also see what times of day we know there are times of day when it is even three times. Tom: Why do you think it has to do with this? Is that a circadian rhythm thing? Is it a food-related alert level like...? It surprises me.

Moran: All of the above has many clocks, so to speak. There is an environment. In a way, it's simple. Neuroscience demonstrates what we can do behaviorally very easily: simply pay attention, learn, surround ourselves with people we care about, and decide when we want to be fooled and when we don't. I want to be fooled. I think this historian I really like said that a hundred years ago the biggest threats to humanity were famine, plagues, and war. Basically, it's over. Those are no longer a threat to us. If someone is hungry right now it is because politically we want them to be hungry.

There should not be hunger in the world, but there is for reasons beyond us. Basically, we conquered the things we should be... right now, it's a lot scarier. You're much more likely to die from overeating than from undereating, right? Diabetes is a much bigger threat to us than malnutrition. In that sense, I think we conquered many things. Now we are at the level where we start playing God. We are starting to think about what we can do to the body to improve it. We have privileges. We are focusing on happiness and what would make us happy.

We are extending life to its limit and now we are realizing that the only thing we don't know how to address is not the extension of life but the quality of life. Many of us will live to be 150, you and I, but we may spend the last 50 years without reaching that age. Our bodies will be there, but our brains will basically not be able to think. A group of neuroscientists, and I'm helping a little bit, but it's a project that's out of my reach and they're trying to figure it out. This is really the science fiction aspect.

The way to fix it is not by fixing the brain using drugs but by placing components of it. What we're doing now... Tom: With synthetic biology or... Moran: Yeah, with chips you basically take a chip and... There's a positive brain almost like a bridge, so things come from within and are processed and exited. A lot of things could go in, a lot of things could go out, but it makes finite sense. There is a table of millions of things that could go in, and it is clear to them what comes out. The idea is that when you start to decline, when your Alzheimer's arises, we will put electrodes in your brain and we will learn what the internal glances and perspectives are like, and we will learn that as you are declining and when you get to the state where you really are no longer there, we are going to eliminate the biological part of the brain that failed.

In its place we are going to put a chip. That chip will now take the input from here. Now you can open it up to questions like am I still me, if any of those chips slip through... Tom: Is that being worked on right now? Moran: He's already working with rats. With rats, you can induce Alzheimer's and then replace the defective parts with chips that do the mapping. They do it here in Los Angeles guys from USC. Tom: Man, you're really getting... It's, A, exciting. B, you're opening Pandora's Box like this is crazy. I love this program.

Moran: Yes, in the end we should talk about ethics. Whatever you tell me... Tom: Let's talk about ethics. Moran: …because there is an interesting part. I spend my time, half my days, in business school. This could be seen as really selling your soul to the devil by helping people sell [inaudible 00:48:37] and grind overnight a person who is in phase three of their night. You can bombard their brain with crunches and they will wake up and want to crunch instead of less. Tom: Can we change that to crossbars? Morán: Please. The idea is that right now there is like a war in which neuroscientists are separating themselves and finding things.

They are figuring out how to change behavior overnight. We are learning how we can change your biome and make you a different person by playing with the gut bacteria that make you different. We know how smell affects your behavior. We can make you like this woman, not that one, by playing with different smells. There are many things happening and no one has control of them because the authorities are slow. It takes them a while to create policies. The people who are really fast are entrepreneurs and marketing departments. They are really fast. They find out and say, okay, let's apply that.

My students, the MBA students, are the ones who say, "Hmm, that's interesting." My job…and this is why I feel it's important to say it here, is to remind those students how bad they felt when they saw 6.99. They say, "Oh, come on. I feel like I'm being taught. Someone tells me it's $6.99 to trick me, but I want it to be the right price of $7. I would know. Why are they playing with me..." In 20 years, you will be the guy who sets the price of an item and you will also have the option to go for 6.99 and have one person buy or you can say I'm going to be the best person.

I'm not going to try to play with all those prejudices and change things. I think this is the reality that we have to have right now because scientists are going to offer us many tools to dogood or evil and we, as a society, have to choose how to play with them. Tom: Can I give you what I think is the right answer now? I'm talking to the guy from business school and the neuroscientist here. As an entrepreneur, as someone who has created a particular food company, the answer I came to was because I'm trying to convince you to buy, and what I realized is that we live in an era where companies have an obligation. , a moral obligation in my opinion, a moral obligation to make products worth using.

If you're making a product that truly delivers value, and that's so important, and yes, I get it, who determines value? I honestly think companies should be able to look themselves in the eye and say, I think this product is good for you. Morán: One hundred percent. Tom: If you think it's good for the person you're selling it to, then using the tools and techniques to get people to buy it makes sense to me. It all comes down to what you're pushing and promoting because if you're... Think about policymakers who are trying to get adoption of even simple policies like STD testing or, in any case, things that are good, not just for that person. but for society as a whole.

You have to sell it. You have to make people believe in it. As long as that's good for you, I think making people believe in it is fine. Moran: I think as scientists we have to explore the world. That's why we're here to look at all the options and include the ones that will be good for you and the ones that will be bad for you, and then you'll really understand how to make a better decision for yourself. Tom: That's good. One last question for you. What impact do you want to have in the world? Moran: The only thing I do really well is finding ways to take complex ideas and turn them into something tangible for everyone.

This is the impact I want to be. I want to find ways, movies, conversations, products, students so that everyone has the choice. I want everyone in the world to know enough so they can make a decision for themselves. Tom: I love it. Moran, thank you very much… Moran: Thank you very much. Tom: ...for coming on the show, man. That was incredible. Guys, I think we're all thinking the same thing right now. Where can we find you online? Moran: I have a website that I built in the last few weeks and I think it's pretty good. It has my name,

moran

cerf

.com, but, of course, I have so many stories that I told and students who carry the message there.

If you're just looking for ideas, you'll find me somewhere buried in them. Tom: Good. Well, I can tell you from experience that if you put his name on YouTube, you will get a treasure trove of amazing talks. Look at them all. They are incredible. I hope you had as much fun with this man as I did. I promise you that I will work to get it back for the second round. It's weird that I say that on the spot, but I'm telling you I might go for the second round. That will be amazing. I had a lot of fun picking this man's brain, the diverse way he approaches it.

Everything he does is incredible. You will see it as you immerse yourself in his world. Watch the talks and listen to him move from topic to topic. He can go deep into business and really like practical business, marketing, and then turn it around and show you pictures of a real brain with electrodes and what they're learning from that. It's absolutely amazing. I have rarely seen a human being who can so quickly and beautifully cross the line between academia and business. Anyone who wants to be on the cutting edge of what's happening in marketing will want to seek it out.

It's absolutely phenomenal. From one storyteller to another, as someone who believes in the power of story, my friend, you have a unique ability to do this. It's absolutely incredible. Check it out at Moth Storytelling. See the stories that earned you the awards. They are incredible. Alright, guys. This is a weekly program. If you're not following me yet, you better be @tombilyeu. Beat him. We are doing really interesting things on my social networks. If you're not already following impact theory, do so. It's @impacttheory. Guys, as you know, this is a weekly show, so make sure to subscribe, hit rock bottom.

See you next week, my friends. Be legendary. Take care. Thank you so much. What a pleasure man. Hello everyone. Thank you very much for joining us for another episode of Impact Theory. If this content adds value to your life, our only request is that you go to iTunes and Stitcher and rate and review. Not only does that help us build this community that, at the end of the day, is all that matters to us, but it also helps us get even more amazing guests here to share their knowledge with all of us. Thank you guys very much for being part of this community and until next time.

Be legendary, my friends. How did we do it? If you rate this transcript a 3 or less, this agent will not work on your future orders.