Welcome to the show, and today will be a little bit of a departure from the music interviews that I've been doing. And there will be, of course, more music episodes upcoming, but also more episodes like this that I've done. And I'll continue to do so make sure to subscribe to the show so you don't miss any future episodes. Now, my guest today is Dr. Moran Cerf. And he has degrees in philosophy, physics and neuroscience. And he's used to it used to be with a computer hacker, and he used to rob
banks. And now he's in the hacking brains. And he's used his understanding and deciphering of computer codes to understand the brain and crack that code. And he's doing some really cutting edge research with brains, neuroscience and dreams. And we're just going to scratch the surface of everything in this interview. But a lot of this stuff sounds like something out of a sci fi movie. And Dr. Cerf is actually consulted with Hollywood, on movies and TV shows, including
Dr. Robot and limitless. So get ready. This is a fascinating conversation and prepare to have your mind blown. Please welcome Dr. Moran Cerf to the Czech shoe podcast. How are you doing?
Wonderful, thank you. It's pleasure to be here.
Great. Yeah, well, I've done a little bit of research on you, and you're fascinating guy you're doing you're studying some fascinating things, doing cutting edge research. But let's start a little bit at the beginning. If I could, if we could tell people a little bit about your background, with the bank robbing and the hacking and all that stuff. I'm sure you've told the story a million times. But it's so fascinating.
Sure. I mean, I think that no matter what I do in my life, I will always be known as the former hacker, or the stories of its bank robbing are going to be the first thing I'm gonna introduce to it. So I'm owning it, right? Yeah, I was a child of the 80s. And his child of the 80s. I grew up with computers, kind of as they became a household item, I had one and I learned to operate them. And quick kind of cut to the chase, I became a hacker, so I knew how to tinker with the
inside of computers. And it became useful when I turned 18 and joined the Israeli intelligence. So as an Israeli kid, at age 18, you go to the Israeli army, I was acquitted to the intelligence. And my skills as a hacker became useful. So for four years in the Israeli military, I got to hone those skills and practice them in a much, you know, bigger setup. Yeah, sorry, budgets.
So you're robbing banks. And not only through computers, but also you physically wind into banks and robbed them, but it's part of the government the government's hired you then how does this legal because you don't want we're actually breaking the law, right?
When I finished the army, I started a company and the company was doing the same thing as civilians. So then we would be hired by banks, or by the government, FBI and stuff like that. And the way it works is that the board of the bank, let's say hires you and says we want to make sure that our bank of monies, a client's money is safe. So we're going to hire you a team of hackers to try to break into our own bank without anyone else other than board
knowing about it. And when you succeed, you tell us how we did it so we can actually change something in the security so we would be hired to rob a bank by the owners of the bank but no one else knew. So from the perspective of the bank owners it was legal but from a business perspective, this was a typical
bank robbery. So we would come to the bank either physically or mostly virtually and transfer money from one account to another or change some numbers or show that we can actually get data from the inside and then help the bank secure themselves better so the bad guys wouldn't be able to come in
so when you physically went in there Did you rob it with a gun or are you just like manipulate the teller because some of the stuff you called the teller and you you asked for the password and they said she says no, I can't do that. And then you call the next day and you say okay, good job I'm the head of security so now give me the password and then you tricked her
Yeah, so I think that hacking is a broad term for everything from going into the bank physically and trying to take something to going virtually to phone calls human intelligence and so on. We did all of those I think that the most sexy stories are the ones where we actually came to the bank in person and pretended to be bank robbers old fashioned Those were the kind of we did it very few times.
Did you have a gun though? or How did you What did you use?
There are some rules even even when you pretend to hack a bank Yeah, to make some rules so we picked a branches that have only one teller so they want to be kind of fitting our customer fee. Okay also let the guards security guards know in advance that so the only the bank teller would be not on the in and would actually kind of go through the Call but everyone else was aware of what's going on there. We also had, you know, kind of lawyers letter that we're ready to pull. If someone says, Hey,
what's going on? It's like, you know, the police comes, which happened not once. And you have to explain like, no, it's actually a pretend bank robbery. We're just doing it to test security. We had all the repertoire of things you can imagine happen when you try to do it, but at the same time, it was relatively safe.
Okay, but you get you got to get a little bit of an adrenaline rush for that, right?
seemingly. I mean, that I mean, so don't try it at home. Like one sentence. All right, yeah. It's scary no matter what, because you never know. And you know, once you say the word, it's a bank robbery. And once you start the process, there's stress in the air. And that's as good as it gets from the perspective of everyone else. But you it's a real bank robbery, they don't know that it's like a test. And that's the only way you can prepare them.
So after you kind of finish the heck can you explain to them they actually find it useful? Because now they know how they would act? If it were really what to do. But it's a pretty intense moment.
I bet. Yeah. So then you meet this neuroscientist, Dr. Francis Crick, as I know it says name? Yes. And that's the guy that changed your life because he was saying, well, you're studying hacking, but why not study hacking of the brain? That's the most important thing you could hack. So it talked about him he, you said, He's your idol.
Yeah, he was my idol way before I met him in person, I actually went to meet him because I came as like a fanboy to see him giving a talk. But his story was that he himself was a hacker during World War Two, a different type of hacking different types of machinery, but he was kind of hacking into the German radar system during the war. And when the war ended, he said, what do you do with those skills afterwards? Like, what what does a hacker do when they're
unemployed? And he was recruited by James Watson, who was a biologist? Who told him Look, there's this molecule that I'm looking at Tesla's letters hgtc in a similar code. Do you know how to make sense of that, and then taking his skills as a hacker applying them to biology, he was able to decode the human genome, and essentially was the guy who discovered the DNA is
the double helix of DNA. Yeah, yeah. Francis Crick. That's amazing.
is the second name out of the sorry, Jackie Watson. And Crick said Francis, right, right. What something Creek with a team that decoded the DNA. And, and this was applying hacking skills to biology and working it out later years after he became a neuroscientist. And when he met me, and learned, I'm doing basically in his mind the same thing, hacking into systems. But doing it only for the service of
security. He said, Forget about security, take those skills, bring them to the world of neuroscience, you will find a lot of uses for those that can help the world and that was basically the transition from hacking into vaults of banks to hacking into our inner vault that Yeah, our innovation.
Amazing. Yeah. And so before we get into all the amazing research that you're doing one more thing I wanted to point out if you could talk about just a little bit about the movie and TV work stuff that you do like your consultant with your with Mr. Robot and the limitless show, and don't here Ancient Aliens as well.
I was once this was nothing This was once I was interviewed there in kind of in somehow became involved with how they think about things, could I try to change the way the show's course goes? I tried to take the word alien from the show and make it about science. Okay, so this was my involvement. So I guess so I was I was a grad student at Caltech in Los Angeles, which is conveniently
close to Hollywood. And oftentimes, you will have Hollywood producers show up at Caltech and pick a scientist and ask him or her to help them with the movie, they would say, you know, we have this TV show house, in house, they put some chemicals into a jar, and we have a line that says, Put chemical name here, put quantities here, and we don't know what it is, I mean, the scientists to come in to kind of say, this would be benzodiazepine, 20. cc. So we
did. And I signed up to do that first for, I think, one or two TV shows, and I did a good job. And they said, Well, you know, you can if you're interested in
film, you have good ideas. You don't just like putting the, you know, quantities where we need to, but also giving us ideas for how the science could work forward, would you want to do that as a permanent position, and I started doing it for the Academy, a film for now over a decade, where every now and then they would send me a script for a movie or a pilot TV or so and they say, look, we have science there. Can you make sure it's accurate? Can you help us figure
out how it works? And sometimes it's critical for the narrative of the show. Sometimes they say, well, we don't have the show ends, we need the scientists to actually figure out, dragged us can figure it out. And here's the plot and certain saboteurs do that.
Yeah. And so with limitless, I think you'd finished the the ending of the first season and they loved it so much. Like actually we're going to put that on season two, and we're going to stretch the show out. We loved it. So that's really cool. So do you get it, you don't get a writing credit for that. If you
You know, I once went to see the filming of a show that I put the kind of I mean, you know, at the end is like a few words here and there. It's not like you kind of have big input. But I asked myself the same question because one time I went to the filming of a show that I put a lot of science in. And I kind of saw that the director actually makes the show and none of the things I said
were actually in there. So you know, I spent so much time kind of putting all of those kind of details in the show and like really making sure that this drug goes with that drug and that, like the numbers work out, how can we something to show so that we don't need it, in a sense of why do you even kind of
make me go through. So really making sure it's works, it says sort of you can put in the credit a science advisor, everyone would be able to kind of go to you if there's questions, but I think that what's interesting, and that would be my last sentence on that if you could go into a one hour monologue just sure sure is that the world becomes more interested in that, as in there are now people who would pause Mr. Robot on one frame, and they would magnify it, and they will
try to read the text on the screen to make sure that it actually makes sense. And if you know, if you have like a game of thrones character that has a Starbucks mug on the table, that's right, your watch that they're gonna go up in arms. So sure directors are starting to move to really caring about that. And even if there's like a moment where they coming up pens over a screen, they would bring me in, they say we want to look at the screen, and make sure that the text on the screen
makes sense. And if we use some jargon on kind of the background of a conversation, you're going to put the jargon that would make sense to someone who kind of magnifies that and stops that and it goes to extreme levels of you know, the, what's the stars alignment in the night where the two people kiss, because it
happened in 1920. And you want to make sure that it's like the right constellation that comes with a really started to go into the desert, it's a lot of fun to think about those things.
Yeah, that's really cool. So now let's talk about your your, your research your with education, and learning. So you say that, you know, brains learn differently. And this was an interesting place, I worked in education for 17 years, and probably didn't need 17 years to figure this out. But you say
school systems are outdated. And because they're putting all the brains of, you know, people in one room and just hoping that they learn but you're saying that it would be better to separate kids by learning styles. And rather than age and geography that's really interesting. Talk about that.
I agree. And I should say it's about kit, it's about anyone or people who listen to you right now, your audience, they have different ways of understanding you and some people may be understand it better when you say things compared to when I say things, some people understand it only when they pause and think about it in the continuous. So every person has a different learning profile. And we kind of went to the average one that we know how
to work with best. And we created a system that works with that. And we throw out a lot of people who don't operate the same way. So so the concrete example with kids, for instance, is that some kids get things really, really fast, when you tell them right away, but then they need a lot of time to really practice that themselves
to actually cement it. And some kids the opposite, they don't understand it, when you tell them they actually have to practice in play and make mistakes, and then they get it themselves. So just just those two examples, there are different styles of learning, but you put them in the same class and you broadcast to them the same way. And it will work perfectly for one but totally horrible for the other one, and it's gonna lead to outcomes that are bad, but you don't know how
to operate it. Another suggestion that we had was to actually try to learn each student's profile, and then match them with the perfect teacher or perfect teaching style. Now that's a change of a lot of things. Because right now the school system operates by
yours. Basically, if your six year old, six year olds, if you're 77 year olds, no one says let's take the nine year old six year old and seven year olds that learn the same way and put them together in class, because we think that it's ages matters. And we learned that it's not true, but we didn't change.
Yeah, that's it. Well, hopefully they can figure that out at some point because I think you're right, I think it really needs a rehaul the whole thing. So that's again, that's a whole nother hour. But let's talk about now freewill. You've talked a lot about this. Explain this example. This is really interesting to me that there are more dentists named dentist or dentists sorry named dentists. That is what that is so fascinating to me. Why explain why that is.
So this is an example for something that neuroscientists would call embodied cognition. It's a name for a field that boils down to the fact that things in the environment leak into our thinking and affect our behavior. Specifically, there are a lot more than you would expect. Dentists whose first name is Dennis. Now, of course, we can see quickly what's the connection here, dentists and dentists sound the same and somehow this leads to more dentists choosing to be dentist.
Now if you ask any swagalicious be a dentist, they would not say well, my name sounded like a dentist. They would tell you a story about them. Always caring about medicine and helping people and teeth were interesting for them. They will
tell you a story. The reality is that most likely what happened was the person's name was Dennis when they walked in the world and suddenly they heard someone calling their name so they looked and say so you called me and they said, Oh no, you're talking about dental Nevermind, they just started calling my name and they kept moving on. And then another time they heard about themselves and they looked in, it turns out to someone like
a dentist. So they just heard about dentistry a lot more than the average, because it was silly, and it sounded like their name, so they just paid more attention. In the end, when they turn 25. And they choose a profession, the dentistry option is just more cylinder brain because they heard about it much, much more. They think that there are a lot more dentists out there, because they just hear about them. We all went and heard the word dentist, but we just ignored it. And they paid
attention to it. And that's why they actually choose freely to become dentists. But the proportions of the options have different, so they still have a little bit more awareness. And to kind of take it to the bigger picture. We all have this experience with our life where things sound like us, and we pay more attention to them. Or they're affecting us because it's colder in the womb we're at and it affects our mood. And we are a little bit meaner because the temperature is affecting our
mood. And we don't notice that we don't say well, I'm a little bit more mean to you. Because I'm shivering, we would think that we're just mean to you because you're not nice. But actually it's other things that leak into our perception, we change our thinking. I'll give you another example. It will be last one because again, we can go into an hour talk about condition. when Hurricane Sandy happened a few years ago, we looked at people who donated money to actually kind of help
the the relief afterwards. Then it turned out that other people we gave money had a name that said sounded similar to Sandy people It sounded like Sandra and, and Sally, so it's just that the hooligan itself has a name. And all the people whose name sounded like it, we can kind of pay more attention to it, it sounded like someone
talks to them. And so they cared more, and they gave more money and so on, which is kind of strange, because we enable weekends alphabetically, kind of arbitrarily, we don't say, well, this weekend is going to eat Louisiana, let's see what name is mostly prominent Louisiana and named again, that's name so most people lose their attention. We cannot think of policies like independent of
people's psychology. But it turns out that the name of a hurricane will change a lot as to what people do to give money to help the relief. And we could start thinking about it and actually change policies accordingly.
That's fascinating. And then not not use experiments like this with people, right, where they think that they're making the decision. But you're manipulating things in the lab right?
Many times. So this is the kind of bread and butter of experiments trying to make your brain do things behind your back. Now, of course, there's philosophy here, what is your back versus what's your brain, but the point is that you will give us one answer. And we will know that the answer that you give is kind of flawed or incomplete. And we will actually have a better answer that comes
from your brain. And we will pit them against each other and understand why is it people come up with answers that are not true to actions that they made without knowing what drives their actions? That's the kind of setup that we use for most of our experiments.
Yeah, so and talk about this with like emotions and pain, like if someone's going, you're talking about someone going running, you know, for the first mile, their legs hurt, and then they just keep pushing themselves, like emotion can heighten. You know, like why sports teams do better at home. But like I had a navy seal on my show, and he was explaining like, you know, motivations Bs, and then our, you know, our brains don't want to do anything. So we have to, like
kind of override our brains. And so how do you do? How do people because it's so hard to control emotions, but you're kind of doing research and experiments on how to teach people how to better have control of emotions.
So there are many ways Thanks, I'll give you one. And then if you want, we can elaborate. So one of expenses we do is expanded, just ask this exact question. And that is, what's the connection between our brain and our body, when it comes to moments that are difficult, is a, an example that will resonate with your audience easily. I would say that if you went to the gym, and worked really, really hard, at
the end, you'll be sore. Because your brain knows that this feeling of soreness happened after you went to the gym, it can create the connection between Okay, I exercise a lot. That's why I feel so you would ignore this pain and you would actually, you know, flag it is like a good thing or is a way
that things work. And if you woke up this morning, this morning, with the same pain that you would feel after the gym without going to the gym for the same pain, you would be allowed to go to a doctor and you say something is wrong. Because even though it's the same pain, the fact that you have a reason for that, that you know, okay, it's caused by this action is going to go away tomorrow allows you to essentially frame this pain
as a positive thing. So if you just woke up and you felt pain, without any reason for it without having been to the gym now before you would think my body's failing me to do something about it. This suggests that the way our brain perceives pain changes the entire experience to it being negative to it being positive to the pain could be positive, if you're associated with the body's working out, me being stronger. Take it to the extreme. Many times when we do things our body says I Unlike
it, let's stop. And your ability to frame the story differently allows you to continue or to stop. So for example, if you run a marathon, surely at some point, whether you're an athlete that exercise for that all your life or not, around mile 20, you would be in pain, and your brain is going to tell you please stop. That's the natural, normal, kind of rational, make sense? Answer to your body not doing something that it's used
to doing. It's It's not easy, you're you're burning a lot of calories more than the usual, your body's actually exercising and stretching its limits, it will tell you to stop. Because you say to yourself, I know what causes this pain, I know what my goal is, I know that it's not going to kill me, you can actually tell your body to continue and do things even though it asked you to stop. And this ability is something that
you can train for. So we can take athletes or navy seals, or any person CEOs, and train them to not make their stronger body work for them, but make their brain control the body differently. So we can help you keep working when you a feeling that you want to stop or control your emotions, when you feel that they take over or in the context of the athletes that we work with in a study, we actually try to break their body and try to see when is the moment that their brain tells
their body, let's stop. And we try to tell them. Look, we're gonna now read the activity from your brain. In those moments, when you're about to quit when you say I can't do it anymore. And we're just going to tell you that we know that you're there. And we'll ask you to spend one more minute in this state. So just train your brain to continue running, lifting weights and cycling for one extra minute. After the moment that your brain wanted to quit.
It doesn't matter if it took you 10 minutes or 20 minutes are based on your muscles, it will take you different times. But when you get to this moment, we're going to train you to stay there for longer. And this will train your brain to endure the pain a little longer. And let's change the game for athletes. Yeah, no,
that's exactly what the Navy SEAL guy was saying with the with the hell weeks he'd say like, okay, just you know, let me just go one more minute. And he's always like pushing himself one more, he doesn't say okay, I'm gonna run another 20 miles. He's like, Alright, let me just run for one more minute. And then it's just like, you just keep doing that. So that's kind of like a way to trick your brain in a way,
I can tell you the opposite, which is I was a soldier for many years in the Israeli military, one of the ways to break us was to basically tell us, Okay, one more minute that it's like, just pause for one more minute, we're going to get to this a milestone, and that's we're gonna, that's when we're going to stop. And just when you get there, they say, actually, three moments. So the fact that you kind of get your brain used to Okay, I can summon all my energy and keep it together for 60 more
seconds. And then someone pulls the rug and says, actually, it's going to be 180 more seconds is much harder for your brain than if they just told you, you're gonna run out four more minutes. The fact that you kind of like, sitting in this place where you frame the milestone as the end, then you put all your energy and then you ask for more can
actually break you. So it's either way like you can lie to yourself and make your brain do more things, or someone else can lie to you and break you just by kind of changing the end posts repeatedly.
Yeah. And so I mean, there is neuroscience behind this. And then the other thing you talk about is like, if people want to be funnier if they want to be smarter, more successful is surround themselves with people that are like that. And I've heard a lot of like, you know, psycho life coaches and things say this, but there is some science behind this as well.
Right? So I think that there's kind of like a, you know, a lot of coaches who say something like you're the sum of the five people around the rise, kind of the, the essential, similar idea, a little less quantitative. So what we did is neuroscientists, we started to look at the synchrony between the brains of people. So you and I, right now, we've been talking for a few
minutes. Something about the communication isn't just transferring information from your brain to my brain by using acoustics and it translates over the Internet to sound on my head and then it becomes percept in my mind, we actually also align our brains by a speaker to doc my brain immediately tries to align itself and we kind of go into the same speed I probably made you speak a little faster than your usual He made you speak a little slower than usual because we start with different
paces. Mine is kind of a little bit hectic because I have different accents. So immediately forced you to kind of do things differently. Whether you look at me or look away when I talk actually kind of is coded in my brain is what I'm saying in this moment is resonated with him or not. And even without paying attention to it. My brain says okay, this sentence didn't work out say it again differently, because the person kind of looked confused. All of those cues that happened.
They actually are subliminal like we don't really say Oh, he is confused. Let me say it again a second time with different words. We just learned to incorporate them and work with them. But they lead to our brains overtime when we interact synchronizing, we learn to speak each other's language better. We Learn to use the same metaphors we learned to basically what we
call shell reality. Now we do it with two people, the two brands synchronize, you add a third person, all three brands synchronize all combinations, 121323, you start doing it with larger populations, positions become more alike. And if you can't do that, if you can't really become like the population, you usually stand out, you people say that you have less empathy, or that you weird, or that you have some
kind of elitist behavior. So people who are not able to are perceived by the community is somehow an outlier, for better and for worse. Now, all of this to say that those cues change our brains, not just by us learning things. cognitively, you teach me something, I'm learning it, but also over some kind of a small slice of information. And that's when I say that if you want to be funnier, you don't have to just learn to be funny by reading a book of 1000 Jewish jokes and
memorize them. That's one way it will take things cognitively. But to be funny involves also timing, and knowing how to change your voice and take a pause before you give the punchline. And that's something that you will learn by being next to comedians. In this case for a while you will see him do it and you will learn it in turn, internalize it without knowing that you're learning it, you just kind of start doing it because your brain waves
synchronized. And you'll become a better comedian, because you're next to comedians. And it's true for if you're next to people that are on time, you will internalize their thinking of how time works. And you will be more on time without saying Okay, I need to leave home 10 minutes earlier than I used to, because I now learned that this is the way you will just see that they do it. They leave home earlier, and it will start doing it with them. And suddenly you're much more on time without
knowing what happened. And it's still for many, many trades that are happening to us without us coming to you saying I'm going to now become that, huh?
Yeah. And I think you talked about how people, it takes eight times of repetition for the brain to be rewired? Like it takes eight times for if you see a commercial for then it's kind of like hardwired in your brain. Yeah,
there's a study by a colleague of mine, he showed that, you know, it's average, like some people need n equal one, just one repetition over the wires, the younger you are, the fewer kind of petitions you need, but the average was eight. So at times you you kind of see a pairing of associations a and V together, is when your brain says, You know what, I'm going to actually create a set of neurons that will code this
association as one. So every time you see George Clooney, you will think of Nespresso, I think that's the right pairing of like a spokesperson is right product, eight times have you seen them will actually take the cluster of yours in your brain that code George Clooney, and the cluster of cells that code Nespresso, create a third cluster, they're just fires for the two of them
together. And suddenly, when you see one of the two, the same cells fire, so your brain created a mapping of two items into one.
Okay, and so then so and then we're talking about memories. So memories can change over time, and you talk about how that's like, that's why therapy works, is, you know, you're you're, we're controlling the narrative. And then when you keep telling the story, it changes every time you tell it, because you're going to remember the most recent time that you told it. So by telling it in therapy, and then kind of reshaping it, that's how therapy works is that
you said it perfectly, I couldn't say better, so I let it let it simmer the way you did. I think that the best analogy that I can think of is a telephone game. Only it's happening in our brain with ourselves. So you know, different games, you tell someone something, and they tell someone else, and then someone else and it kind of keeps changing, because every time someone uses it, they modify a little bit. And by the time you get to number 10, it might be a
different story. This is what's happening in our brain all the time, we have a memory we, whenever we talk about this memory, or we use it, we open it, and we use it to tell a story to our therapist, but also we expose it to information leakage from the therapist from our mindset at that moment, and then we overwrite the original. But then tomorrow, if someone asks us about the same Emily, we won't load the original, we're going to load the over written version that was modified the
day after. And then we're going to again, allow it to be modified and maybe changed and overwrite it again and again. So the more we use the memory, the more it's changed. And that's a feature of our brain or the bug that allows us to actually take that memories, and instead of just reliving them again and again, and just going through the same trauma without getting out of it, to actually expose the trauma to some information from the outside world that
allows us to change it. So after 810 20 repetitions 10 sessions with a therapist, you can still remember that you were in the tank exploded or that your girlfriend dumped you. But instead of just reliving the moment again and again and not being able to get out of it. You can look at the memory from far away and say, okay, yes, the deck exploded and my friends
were hurt. But here's some way for me to be able to move on with my life without just constantly smelling the smell of the burning, or releasing the images or political, the ex girlfriend to not just keep saying Why did she leave me I can't move on. I'm stuck there but actually say okay, there are ways for me to move on. That's a feature of our brain that allows us to work out and move away from things without totally, really them all the time. But couldn't
it be worked in the same way negatively, like, if you have a breakup with somebody, and then you're telling people that, you know, you're the victim in this, it was all her fault, and maybe you're shaping it in a in a in an untruthful way and making it worse on yourself and making her you know, making it seem more, you know, traumatic than it really was, rather than trying to. Yeah, so it can work out I think,
I think that opening remember, we I painted it in a good way. Because I think the role of therapists is to be the positive nudges. So you go to your therapist, you tell them the story of the exploding tank, if they're good therapists, they would know that right now your memory is malleable and available for
discussions. And they will introduce ways to look at it differently that will allow you to see it better and overwrite with the vegetation, a bad therapist or bad friends or can have bad experiences will lead you to maybe amplify and sit in worst light. And I think that, of course, we rely on our human brains desire to get better. So the assumption is that every time you open it, you try to
help yourself get better. And this changes the internal view, or if you cannot get help from friends, therapists, any service that can help you and their job, if they're good is to do that to say, hey, let's not just keep telling you, it's actually your fault that she left you and you're responsible for that and you deserve it and like make it worse, but actually tell you Okay, there is a light in the tunnel and get better. You're right, we the valence of things
looking better. There's only because I assume that people are making an effort. But if you're not making an effort to get it better, you can easily spiral into worse thoughts.
Yeah, okay, that's good to know. Um, now let's talk about also about memory. So obviously, you do work with the brains now, I've been told that memories are not actually stored in the brain that they're stored in the body. Like for people with organ transplants, you know, like, my dad wrote a book about this stuff. And, you know, there was a lady that was she was a lesbian, and then she got a heart transplant, and then she became straight. So it's Do you are you familiar with this
topic? Or like, what do you think of this,
you took me away from out of my comfort zone? No, definitely where in the brain, our memory is stored. When when you store memories in the brain. Now, what you're saying, which is kind of new, a thing is that there are things that are stored outside of the brain, in the form of genetic material. So we know that they're kind of stories of like, epi a kind of basic epigenetics, when a parent inheritances inherits to their offspring, some traits in the
genetic material. So things that turn into genetic material that are actually in the kind of periphery of the cells move from the parents of the kids. And, and that's kind of like getting a little bit of interest right now from scientists. Because, you know, the the classical genetics said that you don't move traits to your offsprings outside of ones that are coded in your DNA. So if you get to talk to your kid want to be born in a tattoo, because the tools are not part of your genetics,
DNA, this is the assumption. Now we know that there are some things in the form of, for instance, learning and memories that actually aren't part of your DNA, but they do transform from parents to kids, but it's still very, very mechanical. It's like it's not, it's not spiritual, it's not that like you really can have a you know, some soul transfers from one to another. Those are things that we can actually quantify and
find tangible. And the research there is relatively new, it's less than 10 years in, and it's kind of very, a, I would say, not sexy, when it comes to what actually gets transferred from like the parents, the kids, it's not that we find that you know, you really can have a change.
Things that you learn in your life, like you learn history and your son is born knowing history, it's not at the level of like, really knowledge, it's more like a, the example that is often used is one where a baby monkey that's born on day one, it's never seen a snake in its life. So it doesn't know that it needs to be afraid of snakes. Yet, if you show this the monkey a picture of a snake, it's people dilated heart starts racing. So it definitely
exhibits signs of fear. And the assumption is that the parents learned to be afraid of snakes because they actually saw a snake attacking another monkey and it became like a thing. And they coded this information in some way in their material that they actually delivered to the offering such as the offering is born without knowing what it a snake is or why it's afraid of
being afraid of that. And this translates to actually over time, a neural pathway so we can have, you know, set the set up for the baby to already have a pathway that and it's kind of shown that you know, humans generally are more afraid of darkness than of light, or have loud sounds, then of quiet time as babies like you've never heard loud sound but you already bought presumably Over genetics, we passed from one day to another, the fact that darkness is riskier than light for
humans. And that's why you're born with a setting that is a little bit more probabilistically likely to be afraid of darkness as a baby. Even though you've never really experienced that, you know, bad things happen when it's dark compared to the good things because our light in our senses are not as heightened. Right. But I think that then put into a little bit, we don't know that you know that you can actually change entirely a personality with like, small modifications of that nature.
How did you Was it a camera review? did this experiment or you were talking about experiment with the rats and learning the maze and how they transfer? How do you transfer the knowledge of that maze to the next rat? What explain that,
right. So this is a study by a colleague of mine that works with rats, I do only human work, okay. And with rats, you can do a lot more things than you can do with humans for two reasons. First, we know a lot of other brains like their smaller brains, and we map to pretty much everything genetically, and at the level of neuron. And also, they're kind of similar to one another, you can genetically engineer a rat with a specific condition, it
works well. And you can also open their brain and do things you cannot do with humans, clinically. So the classical study that I think you talk about is one way to take fret one, you put the rat in a maze, and the veterans navigate the maze and find a cheese at the end. And she does it maybe 10 times. And at some point, she gets to a level where she just knows the maze. And we can actually find in her brain, the exact mapping of the maze, there are cells in the brain called
place cells. And you can see it directly gets to a T section. And a cell lights up and tells her to go right and she gets another one in the cell lights up and tells it to go left. So you can actually see the mapping of the maze, in the red spring, such that the rat can navigate the maze perfectly in like one girl, she just goes the reason she stopped running to the to the cheese perfectly. Now you find this mapping in the brain, if they can use that, it's never
been to the maze. It's a rat, it has the same cells that code places and location and movement. But it's never actually used them in this particular maze. So it doesn't know the race, when you start zapping the new rats brain in the order and sequence of the maps sales. So you basically trigger this new reps to think about making a right or making a left hand Right, right, again, left, left, straight left, and so on. So you kind of zapped the
brain. And the rep essentially gets the feeling that she should go right go left straight and zone without even knowing why. And then you drop it in the maze, then she just reactivates the map that is in her brain. And she basically act as if she knows how to get from the beginning to the end in one go without having ever been there. So effectively what he did is he took a memory from one rat, and you put it in the other rats
brain. And it's now know something and after it actually does it once it cements him in his brain. So now it's just know that this image that she has in her mind actually maps to the real world. And from then on, she can just navigate the maze perfectly. So you move the memory from one entity to another. There is no theoretical reasoning why this wouldn't work with humans, or any other animals. We just have not tried it yet.
Okay, but so one thing that you have done now let's talk about your work with dreams. So I think originally you said recording dreams was impossible. And but then I think they the press kind of twisted your words. And you said that they said that you said it was possible. But then some scientists in Japan figured it out and because he didn't know was impossible. And now you're working with him and then explain your work on dreams. It's fascinating stuff.
So this, of course, is one of my favorite topics right now. It's kind of what I spend all my time these days. So I will have to really work out to stop myself from spending the next half an hour just talking about that. But I will say the following dreams are fascinating to humans. Since the dawn of time, you can find a pictures of dreams on hieroglyphs in caves 5000 years ago. And if you go to any historical records, like the Bible, a mythology, it's all about dreams affecting our
lives. And if you don't want to go fall into history you can go to today. And if you wake up one morning and tell your ex your girlfriend that you learned about your ex girlfriend, you will see that they will respond to dreams as if they're real. Like they would say How could you do about your ex girlfriend a What did you love me? You say it wasn't my choice. It's a dream. It just happened to me.
But somehow you will be blamed in the real world for your dreams, or they say is that we in the real world think that dreams are meaningful. And we attribute a lot of function to them like as if they mean something that drives our awake
behavior. And it's so much so that a lot of psychology relies on dreams as a key aspect of who we are in Freud and Carl Jung and others, in the last 100 years have made an entire kind of discipline out of asking people to wake up in the morning and tell the therapist what their dreams are about and having the therapist and the person together tried to come up with a reasoning behind that.
But here's the flaw that kind of pulls the rug out of everything that Freud did and in a way kind of changes the entire narrative. The stories that people tell when they wake up are flawed. They're not really the dreams story. They're the story that you tell when you wake up and try to pick residues of the dream and make meaning out of them.
Because you can't remember the whole thing. Is that what it is right? You can't
remember and you use the language of your awake self. I'll give you a concrete example that will make it easy. In the 1910s, where people were asked about their dreams, most people describe their dreams in black and white. Why? Because movies were in black and white back then. And people thought a dream is kind of like a movie or something in my head. How do movies look? Well, they look in
black and white. So that's how it means my dreams were in 1950, when movies started having coalos, everyone immediately shifted to decide their dreams in color. No one told them now you should. But it's like, again, they thought, okay, dreams are like movies, movies are in color. So I guess my dreams are in color. Which means that we don't know if the dreams in your head are in color and
black and white. But we know is that you use the language of your awake self, which is language of color, or black and white, and you describe your dreams. And there are many examples like this one that show that people's reporting of their dreams is not flawed in that they lie. It's just not really existing. The Dream itself, it's actually saying the awake person's interpretation of a dream already. And it's useful.
I think Freud was right, that it's meaningful to see why they even come up with this story. Rather than that story. Why do you choose black and white rather than color to tell your story, but it's also confusing because it's incomplete. Fast forward to the last 10 years neuroscientist like myself, were able to actually look at the dreams while you're sleeping. So we don't have to ask you any question. We don't need you to
tell your story. We can look at your brain while you're sleeping, and extract the dream from your brain directly. And then we can ask your questions when you wake up And see why is it that you forget some bout what is it that you forget? Or how do you tell a story compared to how your brain tells a story, we can start still asking questions, but we also have access to the source. That's a big change. And this is only step one, which is to read the dreams, we're doing a good job
in getting there. We're still not as good as you can imagine. We don't really kind of have a DVD. Which beautiful. Yeah, so
it's not so what is it? It's because it's not a video of the person's dream? Is it? Is it text or is it's I mean, what have you mapped out.
So what we basically do is before you go to sleep, we look at your brain and this is now my work. So we work with patients who undergo brain surgery. And they have electrodes inside their brain, right while they're operated on for clinical purposes. So we have access to a human being with open brain identical HDInsight that's just a set up
that would work. So now that the electrodes in your brain we will come to you and say Chuck I'm going to now show you 1000 pictures one after the other a picture of an NFL player a picture of I'm just looking at the pictures behind you record a picture of a kind of the Abbey Road A me records, crossword crossword, whatever it can have it I could think would be in your mind. And I'll just show you those on the other while I record your brain activity. And at some point, I'll show you the
Beatles record. And suddenly, I would see once a lining up. Aha, we found in Jack's brain, the cell that codes the concept of The Beatles, when you think of the Beatles, this cell is the memory of the Beatles, okay, find another cell that codes the the image of Nirvana, I'm just going to now go with a so it's
different for each person. It's it's an individual mapping for each person, it wouldn't be the same for you.
And even even you across multiple days, you might shift them and move them around. But at that moment, we know exactly that. Today, this is the mike tyson sell in chalk sprint, okay, for the next couple of hours, not gonna move. So once we map the flow of those, we have to go to sleep. And we might give you a task that will increase the chances of you dreaming of Mike Tyson. But it doesn't really matter.
You go to sleep. And if during the night when you sleep in your specific moment, which is this moment where we think dreams are most likely to happen. It's called the REM sleep. If at that moment, this is Mike Tyson said lights up, we will know that you in your mind right now are thinking mike tyson now we wouldn't know if you think you're mike tyson wearing a white pants or is he fully dressed? Or does he have to say
we don't know what you see. But we know that the concept of Mike Tyson is activated in your mind. And if immediately after you think of your mom, we will not think of your mom. So we can build a narrative that's building a story. Not with visuals, but with kind of entities or percepts. We call them concepts one after the other like this, this this this.
And this. Sometimes it's enough to have a clue as to what was the story like if you told me that you went with your mom to Paris A few years ago, and I see that in your dream, you have yourself, your mom, you have the Eiffel Tower, you have a budget kind of lighting up in this sequence, I could suggest that maybe it's you're dreaming now about your journey with your mom to Paris. I wouldn't know if it's true. But if you wake up and tell me in my dreams, I was actually with my mum in London
seeing the Big Bang. I would say that's interesting. I think that he was in Paris. He uses a European example with a landmark. It's like the the parallel of the Eiffel Tower. So why is it changing? And I will just ask you a question and I used it but now we have at least a clue as to what we think. happen in your brain. So it's it's far from being perfect. But it's a big step compared to nothing. Yeah. So, what, 10 years ago?
Yeah, so what it because when people like you said they're having brain surgery, so they already have their brains are open, you can put these electrodes in. And I thought you said something about you can control or stimulate the brain while they're dreaming. And people can actually take control of their dreams and be in charge. How does that work?
So we finished box one, which is reading dreams. Yeah, reading them I mentioned like now Yeah, now we can move to box two, which is now taking my hacking skills to the hacking skills, oh, yeah, of neuroscience, and say, okay, it's not enough to just read whatever is in the vault. Let's see if we can actually change something in the vault. I mean, what we're doing right now is you're trying to do both use cues to the outside world to
actually navigate your dream. So it could be as simple as spraying a smell into your nose in the right moment in your dream. So it will change the course of the dream and take you suddenly to thinking about the NFL rather than about Mike Tyson. Just by activating a different memory. That's that's the easy one using sound or smell or cues that are easy, because I
like how you did the the smoker thing where people who are addicted to smoking, you spray a sulfur smell. And then they wake up and they're like, I don't actually want to smoke anymore, because they've associated the nicotine with the rotten egg smell.
A study by a colleague of mine and Ozzie where she basically did exactly that she she was the one who pioneered this method, where you take a person, you wait for them to get to the right moment where your brain is eavesdropping or listening to the outside world. And then you activate a percept. In this case, smoking by smelling by spraying the smell
of nicotine. And then immediately after you pair it with the smell of rotten eggs, this particular example, h2 s that was the specific a compound that makes the brain says smoking bad. If you do it enough times in the right moment that the brain creates this conditioning so that when you wake up, you don't really have the desire to smoke anymore. Because somehow in your brain, the smoking is now associated with a bad thing for why it actually decays and comes back.
So that's one example. It's using olfaction, like smells to change behavior. The more extreme version, which you just said, is what we're doing right now mostly, it's actually using an invasive thing. So you're sleeping, and we have a big magnetic coil. It's called transcranial magnetic stimulator that we can put next to your forehead and turn it on, then it creates electric current that essentially activates brain cells in a specific frequency.
And we learned that if you activated a gamma frequency, which turns on the cells in the front of your brain, it essentially wakes up your executive function, which means that you're in your dream right now. And we wake up your consciousness, but we don't wake you up. So you are still asleep. You're still dreaming. It's just that you aware now of the fact that you're dreaming, which brings into a state called lucid dreams. But yes, you're kind of sitting down you say, Wait,
wait. It's not real. The fact that I'm in a Buckingham Palace right now isn't real, but it is Buckingham Palace for the sake of this movie. And I'm the main character. So I want to have the Queen of England come in and have tea with me, because it's your movie director. Once you say it, boom, the Queen of England enters the room, and she sits next to you and you having
tea. And if you want James Bond to join you, you can bring James Bond or if you want to, you know, bring a your grandmother who died 10 years ago and have a chat with her after she is no longer with us, you can do that. And it would be as real as it gets. Because it's your brain creating the imagery. It will not feel to you like you puppeteering her like it will be her words coming at you, even though it will be your brain putting the words in her mouth.
But for your perspective, you will have a chat with Grandma, which you can do otherwise. And so even though it's a short experience, because then you wake up and it's over. It's the ultimate virtual reality, because you can actually bring anyone and for the time being, it feels as if it is yes. And that is the power of lucid living that way now activating it before was something that only very few people can actually experience if they were lucky enough to have this
naturally happened to them. We can give pretty much everyone this experience every night whenever they
have a dream. So possibly someday in the future, I can walk into a lucid dreaming store. And I could say I want to be Russell Wilson and win the Super Bowl. And you can program my brain until like I'm dreaming lucid dreaming and I'm winning the Super Bowl.
It's I would say it wouldn't be a stone it would be in your home. So most people will just that will you before you go to sleep, you will kind of say tonight I want to either have a Super Bowl dream and I want to be on this team and I want the team to win and so on and the machine will know that you're in the right spot and just kind of bring you to this state and you can now get into your dream. Or it could be an entire you know, operation where you can ask a to have a dream by
Steven Spielberg. And they will direct your dream for you like you just go to sleep and you say I want a surprise science fiction experience that some famous director give me and I'll wake up in a colony on mass and we'll do things I want to say because it's It's this will be kind of the a good way to frame what I just said that we're speaking enthusiastic about all
the positives of that. But I want to make it clear to anyone who listens to you right now or watches this video, that it could easily be a double edged sword which is it could be that instead of you having Spielberg direct your dream, it will be someone from Google directing a dream and in the dream, they will make you buy more and crunch in the morning after so it could easily become a marketing tool for invasive kind of no Gods a implant. The idea is that you will have no way to stop.
Yeah, because Will you talk about these people putting chips in their brain? I love your analogy, by the way, you're saying? Well, you know, if you put this chip in your brain, and it can help you make make you smarter and make you you know, manipulate the stock market better, more people will do that. It's just like having breast implants. That's like you
want the advantage. So people because like when you think about a chip in your brain, I mean, it's kind of scary, because if somebody hacks that, rather than than just I mean, it could be more nefarious than just google trying to sell you something, it could be somebody trying to get you to kill somebody or something. So it could talk about these chips. And the brain is this something that's going to happen in my lifetime.
It's already existing. So there's already in the US about 40,000 people that have a neural implant in their brain. Now these people have it because they have a clinical reason. So if you have Parkinson's or if you need a deep brain stimulation or epilepsy, you can go to the doctor, the doctor will put a neural implant in your brain in the area that is damaged. And this device will help you
navigate reality. So if you have epilepsy, for example, and usually there's one part of the brain that starts speaking, and provoking activity without any kind of prompt, and this leads to a seizure, you can have a device right now that figures out that there's a signal that is not supposed to be there. And it counters that by kind of putting a counter signal and stops it and contains it. That's helpful when it comes to
epilepsy. But it also means that there's a device inside people's brain that does something now this device needs to get upgrades every couple of months. So it has this kind of code, it constantly asks a server nearby. Is there a firmware upgrade? And if yes, download it, I can easily as a hacker come and pretend to be the server, you will ask me the question once a week, hey, do you have a firmware update? And I would say yes, there is, here it is. And I'm now going to download into
your chip firmware update. It says, don't just stop seizures, but also once every day, make the person a wake up while they're asleep. And I just just disrupted your cycle forever, which will lead to you know, feeling depressed and having a hard time. So this is just an easy way to totally screw someone's life. In a very simple
update. Of course, I can go further and further I can disrupt your memories, I can wake you up into lucid dreaming whenever I want or navigate your emotions negatively whenever I want. Or when we get better in detecting where in your brain is the desire to do something bad. We can actually Manchurian Candidate style, make you do something bad. That's kind of the world we live in right now with photos of people having in
your brain. When companies offer better devices, and more positive things not just helping you clinically but actually making you have access to Wikipedia in your mind and you just have the entire world's knowledge in your head. No one would want that not remembering that the same firmware upgrades that we spoke about in the epilepsy chip could be used to give you false Wikipedia data and suddenly you just have fake news in your mind.
That's scary stuff. So how do they regulate that that's like an I guess that becomes an ethical dilemma then
I think that's maybe the most important sentence that I would say to your audience right now no one talks about it and thinks about it. Because it's more like a scientists exercise and we believe in some companies are interested in that. The only way someone's gonna do something about it is if your audience says you know what, I want it regulated or I don't like this or I want to ask this question of my Congresswoman and have their take an opinion on that
right now. It's basically your podcast and another podcast to talk about that because it's not here right now. So it's kind of in the future and in the future, who knows? But it's going to be fast because we put it it's possible right now. So from zero to 0.1 is a big leap from 0.1 to one is fast in that sense? It's important that people not just you and I think about it and ask questions about it and define how it will look because that's a citizens role not a scientist role.
Yeah, I mean so it is scary but so some of the things that the positives obviously like you said it so is it actually curing Parkinson's and it can it work with other things I think you said that it could possibly cure deafness and blindness and maybe Alzheimer's.
So different kind of solutions but but along the same kind of category so it so there's a question of like what the cure means it's like philosophical question like you can live your entire life not having a tremor anymore because the cheap will always contain the tremor and we make you. So you still have Parkinson's as a chip off, you will start, right? Yeah, but forever I will contain
it. So it doesn't look like on the outside like you have it, it's kind of like a concrete and May, you may have cancer everyday in your body that your body takes care of and stops. Do you have cancer? No, because we didn't let it metastasize. So you you, in theory, we have cancer all the time, it just you don't really have the disease, because your body regulates that. In that sense, those people that have the chip, they have Parkinson's, because it's
still there. But they managed to live life entirely without experiencing the Parkinson. And I think you alluded to other chips, which is something that a lot of scientists are building that target different things. So Parkinson's is in the brain. But a blindness is in the eye typically. So if you have a retinal problem that makes your eye not do its job, it can't take photons from the world and turn them into the into the
brain. But your brain is intact, we can now build retinal implant, which is a device that we put where your eyes are, it does the same thing. It takes photons from the world. And it translates them to the language of the brain, which is chemical signaling. And it sends it right to the visual cortex where the brain expects the eyes to send signals to, and then the brain
does its job. And from your perspective, you see, you don't even know that the seeing came from our device that processed information differently, because when it gets to your brain, it
feels the same way. So this is something that's now under clinical trials, retinal implants, taking people who lost their sight and getting the sight back, we already have gotten implants, very popular with a lot of patients, right, lost their hearing, because their ears the work, we put the device next to the ears, the biological ears, that does the
same thing. It takes compressions of molecules in the air and change those into electric signal that goes into the nerve that essentially drives signals into the auditory cortex. And after a few months of having that people learn to care, again, not even realizing that the hearing didn't come from the ear, it came from the implant, but it did the same thing it took was signal and turn it into brain signal.
And so this could be used to help treat mental illness and addiction and all those things to
better match everything that we know how to isolate in the brain, we can build a device that deals with that. The challenges are that sometimes the problems are not easy to pinpoint, like depression could be a lot of things not working. So it's not as kind of easy as we know where the ears are, and we can do something about it. So we still have to learn in some of the things are not even brain problems. They're their genetics
problems. So we have to kind of figure out, so not everything is easy, it's like not the right word. But like not everything is isolated in we can figure out what the problem is and fix that. And some things are also very deep inside the brain. So if you have a problem in some structures that are deep inside, it's harder for us to get there. So the ears are pointing out, and the auditory cortex is at the surface of your brain so we
can easily get into it. If you have problems, we're in the, say, a amygdala, you actually have to open the brain and start digging inside and going all the way to the center of your brain with me Got our seats. So it becomes also a neurosurgical challenge. Okay, dealing with the identifying the one who is getting there, and actually regulation, do we want to do it?
Okay. And then one thing I think I don't think I've ever heard you talk about, but I'm curious, how much role does hormones. What does that because hormones is a big part of emotions and all this stuff. I mean, does that how does that work with the word research that you're doing? Are you triggers parts of the brain that would cause testosterone is like a drug? So if they're I mean, if you're triggering parts of the brain that would that affect the hormones are? Can you manipulate that at all?
So I will say that the example that the analogy that will help, I think everyone understand is that if you think of the brain like a cow, the hormones are the guess. So like, yes, so you have the entire cow in all the wise right place. But if you don't have gas, it won't work. And when you have to guess, it also needs to get to a place you can take a car and just like pull a bucket of gas everywhere, and only a few drops, we go into the oil tank or into the gas tank, and
he didn't do anything. So it's not just like flood the brain with the dopamine and things will work out the dopamine hits to go to the right areas of the brain to actually not just cause damage, but actually do the right thing. So if you think of the brain, we think of it as like a brain, but actually the brain has different structures. And in structures, it has different types of neurons and each neuron uses different molecules, serotonin, dopamine, and acetylcholine and all of
those to work it out. So all of those things work together and an imbalance in any of those. If you if you have too much smiling on one neuron, you have Alzheimer, if you have too little dopamine you might have Parkinson's if you have too much you might be addicted to more likely to be addicted. So it's a balance between the car chassis, the outside layer, everything you know being correctly wired and also having the gas and the oil and the water in the right tank so they are in the right
balance. So they will work all of those together make you think right.
Okay. Wow, fascinating stuff. What About I told my dad that because he wrote a book about a lot of this, the ultimate reality stuff. And he was really curious what your thoughts were on out of body experiences like, occur when when people are asleep and or near death experiences or when they use drugs or there's other ways to induce this kind of stuff. What do you what is the neuroscience behind this, and
it will be a little boring, but I'll give it to you know, it's
fascinating.
So it's not, there's, there's very little mysticism there, which I think when people talk about expenses, they can imagine, okay, I die, and my body is floating like a cartoon character we like. That's not what we see in the science. But we see a lot of things that suggests that the brain looks for narratives that solve problems in that way. For example, there's a famous study, even though it's famous, I forget the name of the author, its sole author, I think, is his
name. But I might change that, if I'm wrong. And I'm giving credit someone that's not the right guy. And he took people patients in the sense that we have, which is patients undergoing brain surgery electrodes in their brain, for clinical purposes. But he's zapped their brain and he happens to be that the electrodes were sitting in the right location to create this out of body experience. And when you set the brain, the person reported thinking that they see themselves if their eyes were
like feet behind. And they said, I see. And I see myself from outside, and I'm not in my body. And I see my body. And when I raise my hand, I see their hand from the back, like they kind of they kind of had this experience. Now it was all manufactured, it was not true, of course, they're in their body, when somehow their brain was able to create entire image of themselves out of the body
thing themselves. There was an experiment that was done recently by I think it was a Google team, where they took people and had them well, VR goggles. And what you see the VR goggles, is what comes is a feed from a camera, and the camera was actually sitting to your right. So basically, you saw yourself. So you raise your hand, what you saw is a guy raising his hand with a little
delay. And even though everyone view it was them, like they kind of did this, and they saw the guy doing this, somehow the fact that you saw yourself from the outside, and you had a different perspective, like you said, for your profile, made people act to the person in the movie differently. So if someone came in federal and tickled you,
people did not laugh. Because from their perspective, they felt the tingling in their body, but they saw it in their eyes, as if someone else in their brain was able to do what's called the binding of the tactile experience with the visual experience. And they felt as if another guy is being tickled. And it's not them, even though they felt it was them, or this to say is the brain to
actually feel in the moment. It needs to combine the senses with a lot of other actions with the feelings with with the experiences internally. And it's very easy to fool the brain and break those and make people think that they're out of their body, or that they're not
themselves and so on. There's a disorder that's known, that happens often, to people under stress, where they, for moment have this thing, Oliver Sacks loaded in his book, The Man Who mistook his wife for a hat, but a person who basically set in a bed and kept falling out of the
bed in a hospital. And when the doctors came, he reported that there's an object in his bed that he wants to get out of his bed, and he found himself on the floor, and the object was his leg, he somehow lost the ability to think that his leg is his, and he tried to throw the leg in his body followed. But it's a disorder that could happen to people, in certain situations, where you lose the connection to your body. One of them is to say that, that ask thinking of myself as one is an option, it's
the most reliable one. It's the one that we mostly having, but it could easily be dissociated. And it happens when we're sick. And when we're taking all kinds of hallucinogenic drugs, we actually feel out of body. The non mystical part is that it's not likely to actually out of your body, and it's like, it's actually a mechanical thing we can explain. But for the perspective of the person, it's the same, you feel for a second that you're not in your body, but that your body is just an
option. It's a container, and your mind is elsewhere. And it has a lot of kind of cognitive outcomes, you actually think differently when you're not thinking that you're confined to your body when you're high, or when we stimulate your brain.
Wow, yeah, it's fascinating stuff. And then I think we talked a little bit about this, but like, you have this, what is it called the brain interface, brain machine interface? Like you think of something and then the machine does it for I think you kind of it was this kind of like the monkey experiment where the monkey had an artificial arm that was connected to electrodes, and then they took the artificial arm away. And then he unlearned how to use his real arm.
Right? So this particular one was done by a colleague of mine, Andy Schwartz at University of Pittsburgh, we're doing it with humans, the same idea but the idea is prevalent right now, a lot of companies are trying to make it into a product and all the big tech companies are after that, and they hire my students to work on that because the world
wants that. And the idea is that when you grab a cup of cup of coffee with your hand, it was your brain who sent the order to the arm to raise and to the fingers to lock on the coffee and all of that is starting in your brain and in theory, If I had access to your brain, I could read the entire instruction and know exactly that you're now telling your arm to move forward and you're not telling your fingers to wrap
around the coffee. And if I can read it perfectly, I can actually activate a robotic arm instead of your arm to do the same thing. And if it's really, really a challenging tasks like lifting a piano, instead of having you do this, I can pick a train. And you would think I want to lift the piano and move it from here to here. But a crane would move instead and
grab the piano and move it. And this will take us into a world where you can control everything in your mind, you could control of course, little devices that will, you know, move coffee for you or move pianos, but you can also fly an airplane like a drone from far away just with your mind, or drive your car by thoughts, you will just think I need to go left and the car would go left to there's no need for you to kind of say I need to
go, I want to go left. Let's turn this wheel and turn it left and so on, all you need to know is I want to be there in the car, we'll just take this stuff and move in the right direction. And you can even go to a world where you say I want to email Chuck right now. And I want to tell him this thing. instead of you having to kind of actively having to press compose and put a subject and typing or like a lot of actions happen for me to just do what I already know I want to do I want to tell you,
Chuck, I love you. Why don't just immediately have the email being sent. Because I always thought the thought like now it's just like acting on it, which is a waste of energy. So every time you can think something, the British interface will just turn it into action
and make it happen. We know how to do it, we know how to read the productivity and find instructions, we just need to find instructions now for everything for the letter i l o v e, y o u so we can instead of you typing kind of one by one keyboard key pressed by key press, we can just take your thought I love you and make it into an action. But at the same time, it can be used to operate everything in the world. What is your kind of question alluded to was that we don't know what it
does to our brain atrophy. Like if we never have to think the thought i l o u l o v e Hmm. Why are you maybe we lose something and in the example that Andy Schwartz had in Pittsburgh, after the monkey didn't use his arm to grab a marshmallow this example for a while, the brain said I guess we don't know how to control this arm with the same brain says we used to before. So let's now dedicated the brain cells to control the robotic arm. And we'll find new
cells to control my own arm. And suddenly your brain actually changes, then you either get a third arm because your brain just kind of picks new cells and says From now on, those cells are gonna control the biological arm. And those cells will control the robotic arm. Or it might the opposite might say we now no longer control the arm because we don't need it. And suddenly, you will try to move the arm and they just want to be a cell that controls it.
Wow, fascinating stuff. It's like a lot of the stuff you're talking about. It's like a science fiction movie. I mean, are they making movies about this kind of stuff? I guess I guess probably they already have. But we
started with meeting me a helping Hollywood a. Yeah, there's a lot of a lot of filmmakers that call me with ideas of how to take our work and make it into science fiction. I bet in the next couple of years, you will see some of them
yeah, so wait, explain the clear this up for me with the inception movie, they reached out to you? Did you say yes or no at that point, though. This was
something we this was a TV series. So the series Okay, yeah, there was a TV series called limitless that came after the movie. And it's nice to be done. Because the movie is a complete story. The TV series starts where the movie ends, same characters are there. It's just like a continuing TV series. And what the TV series, the movie and the book that came even before the movie, all don't do is they don't explain how the drugs actually work. So there's kind of a drug that makes you
smarter and better. But they gloss over how it works. But the TV series guys said we want to actually end by explaining it. And you're going to be the one finding out how and so all the constraints, here's what happened in the movie is up in the book is what are the opinion in TV series? So we have all those things that it can or cannot do that in mind, solid for us come up with an answer. And this is what I did. And
that's exciting for you. They're great stuff. Well, I always end each episode with a charity or nonprofit Can people donate to your research? Or do you have another charity that you want to promote here at the end?
So far, of course, scientists always need a lot of support. And if anyone wants, I'm the easiest guy to find. You know, if you just look my name, there's tons of videos, and I have a website. And I will be competing. I think that the this specific projects that I think are mostly useful right now for the world, the ones that we kind of glossed over that that I said was the most important thing, which is ways to actually stop us from doing
it in a commercial way. So I think the scientist in my lab have figured out ways to do things. And then it's being taken by commercial entities that wants to make it into products and those products could have very good uses, like helping people have better dreams but also could be used to make you buy more products without your guts. I think that Because a lot of companies are working on the applications, I think there should be some research done on the other aspects. How can we protect
ourselves? How can you make sure that no one gets no brain? In this? There's little research. So if anyone cares about that, that's where I would put all the ask, okay, help us like kind of work, sponsor the subjects of or actually do analysis on finding ways, which will help us protect our brains from hackers coming in, or people using us against our way.
Okay. Is there? Is that on your website, a place where people could? It is,
and I think that it's so novel, because we spent all this time developing it that there's very little, but if someone hears you right now, they just needed to me. You know, let's let's make it into a keyword. I want to save the world. This would be the title. Okay. All right. I would love to do it.
All right. Well, thank you so much. It's been fascinating stuff. Really interesting. People should like they, like you said, Google your website, and you have much more many more videos on YouTube. They're fascinating to watch. So I appreciate you taking the time with me.
It was a pleasure. Thank you for doing it.
All right. Thank you. Goodbye. Bye, bye. Well, was your mind blown. I think it's exciting and scary all at the same time. Curing Parkinson's and deafness is amazing. But having someone hack into our brains is really scary. So definitely some ethical dilemmas with this stuff. And if you want to learn more, you can watch other interviews and talks that he's done on YouTube, or click the link in the show notes for his website. And there's a lot of information on there as
well. If you enjoyed this interview, make sure to subscribe to the show wherever you listen or watch if you're on YouTube, and that way you won't miss any future episodes. You can also follow me on social media. And of course your likes, comments and shares on all this stuff will help support the show. And finally, if you have a couple extra minutes, you can write your review on Apple podcasts and that will help
people find the show. So thank you so much for your taking the time to listen and have a great rest of your day and remember to shoot for the moon.