The Resilient Mind - Free Will, Choices and Changing Memories: Rewriting Your Life’s Story - Moran Cerf

Episode Date: January 15, 2025

Moran Cerf is a neuroscientist, business professor, investor, and former white-hat hacker. He is the founder of Think-Alike and B-Cube and the host and curator of PopTech, one of the top five leading conferences in the world.Take action and strengthen your mind with The Resilient Mind Journal. Get your free digital copy today: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Download Now⁠⁠This episode was created in partnership with Tom Bilyeu. Subscribe to Tom Bilyeu’s channel for more inspiring speeches:https://www.youtube.com/c/TomBilyeu Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome to the Resilient Mind podcast. In this episode, you will be listening to Free Will, Choices and Changing Memories with Moran Surf. Get access to the Resilient Mind Journal by clicking the link in the show notes. Enjoy. In a way, there's an application to free will, right? We live life thinking we make decisions all the time and are responsible for our decisions and also kind of determined and defined by those. So if I ask you what do you want to have for lunch and I offer you five different things,

and you make a choice, then your choice is somehow your identity. This is like what you care about. And if I told you right now that I could predict what you're going to choose an hour before you made a choice, a day, 20 years before, it kind of takes away some of our identity in a way, but also kind of gives us meaning because it says, okay, there's actually a narrative that we carry with us throughout life. And now the choice has become really something that defines who we are,

not just the moment of, but as a person in the world. So I always cared about like free will, understanding it, predicting it, and also using it to change things. So if you think that, okay, all my choices are kind of determined, do I have any meaning to my life? The answer is they're not determined. We do have control over them, and that's what makes us kind of human. So there's like two kind of moments that need to be addressed.

One is whether we do actually have this moment of spark that happens when the choice is totally arbitrary and we have like a choice, I do believe that we have that free will. kind of a toss of a coin where something gets determined. But what's interesting is the moment where I become aware of the free will choice, as in, I ask you, you're sitting in a restaurant

and I ask you, do you want the fish or the steak? There's this moment. Like you have two options. And now you're about to make a choice. What do you want? Steak, for sure. You had a second now where you had kind of to look at all the options.

I gave you only two and make a decision. So now at some point, if I asked you, when did you make the choice? You would say, well, maybe as soon as I finished the sentence, maybe I would say a fraction of a second afterwards. The question is, A, how far 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? And most importantly, what's the gap between the moment you would tell me that's the moment I chose

and the moment that you actually chose? And apparently there is a gap. And this gap is what we call the illusion of free will. The moment where you say, that's the moment. This is T0. This is when it happened. And I can look at your brain and say, you know what? actually here we already knew that you're going to choose.

Or even if you want to take it one first ever, we can actually stimulate your brain and make you choose this thing. And I would tell you and say, who made the choice? And you say, I definitely make the choice myself. This was my decision. And I say, well, you know what? Here's me zapping your brain before making you say fish. Here's me zapping your brain.

What do you zap it with? Transcranial magnetic simulation? So this is not me, but there are people who do this. So what would you do? Can you really do the steak fish one? The only demo that I saw was one person basically having a little box and they have buttons and have to choose whether you want to press the left or the right button, and people sit there,

and they press left, right, left, left, for like 10 minutes. And then someone asked them, was it your choice, which button to press at any point? And then you zoom out and you see a person sitting with a TMS, like this machine that looks at the brain, and basically playing like a puppeteer, left, right, right, left. Get the fuck out of here.

That's real? That's real. And what's interesting, isn't that you can do that. This is not surprising. We know that we can actually zap your brain and make you move your head. What's surprising is that you would tell me it was my choice. Like you would believe that it was your decision.

You wouldn't question. Oh, wow. What you did was your decision. And this to me is the interesting part that we kind of have this way with our brain to always defend it. And always say, whatever I did, I wanted to do. If I made this thing, it wasn't my choice.

And now we know that it wasn't necessarily your choice, that things affected you, the things made you do what you did, and you will always claim that it was your decision so we can actually show you that you're not really fully controlled. How do people respond when you show them? Funny. They mostly try to defend free will. So they try to argue with me.

And, you know, I showed them the video of me changing thing. And they say, no, no, no. We have this experiment where we bring them to the lab, and we just tell them things. We say, okay, what do you want to eat after the experiment? Whether you want to sit here or there? We don't really tell them anything. Just say, take decisions. Like, sit here or there. Do you want this pen or that pen? Do you want the light on or off? And then we asked them after the experiment, how many choices do you made? The people who experienced us toying with their free will think that they made hundreds of choices. They made about 14. But they really feel that, okay, I had so many choices, I controlled everything. This was my decision.

they kind of try to grasp into the idea of free will and say, I had a lot of choices in my life and I made them. They become a little more religious. They become a little bit more ethical. A lot of things happen to you when you feel that what's in question is your identity. So here's the idea. I feel that there's a lot of things that affect our decisions. The temperature in the room, the height of the chair,

the weight of the book we're holding, a lot of things. And this is studied by a lot of people in many, many ways that show time and again that you can actually change a person's behavior. And we can list those things, so someone can take them and now have a kind of list of things that they can apply if they want to have better interactions with people, what temperature should the room be, what they should do. So we know that. We know that thing. And in the same time, we still live life as if it's our decisions entirely. So we know that I can trick you by making the price of the food $6.99 rather than 7, and you would think that's six, not seven.

That's like the simplest one in the book. And all of us know it, and it still works. taking that to a larger scale, we know that there's hundreds of thousands of biases that affect our brain, and even if I tell you what they are, you will still work the same way. So Freewheel is becoming interesting to me

when we learn all of those things, and we say, okay, then who am I, kind of? Who's in charge? Who's the puppeteer in this example? And the reality is that there are, what we learn is that there are more than one papatil in our brain. There's many, many.

And every day, one at the gar, wakes up. And so one day we're this guy, one day with this guy, and they're kind of vying for dominance, they fight and they compete, they kind of make a decision together, they vote, and ultimately we protect the person who spoke last and we say, this is who I am. And to me, what's interesting is that we can now actually show all the characters, we can show them fighting, we can tell you that there's more people in your brain, and in doing so, we can actually allow you to really manifest different sides of yours. So you know maybe that you're making better choices in the morning and I make the address in the evening.

You might know that you're making better decisions when you're hungry and I'm when I'm full, when you're talking to your friends, when you're alone. So we can now profile your brain. So I would say what we do with a lot of people who are kind of senior positions in companies that want to actually make decisions better, we have a protocol that's a little bit tedious

so it's not easy to do it, but I'll tell you what it is, and then you can think of ways to maybe try it yourself. So we have them basically walk for a week with a diary and make choices and just write them down. So tell us, okay, you know, I had this fish or the steak, for lunch and I chose this and this is how I chose. And they also write whether they were happy or not with the choice. Now, this is done

the way they would do it normally, but we also add one more thing. We put EEG cap on their head. All day. For more than 24 hours. So they walk with something that measures their brain activity. And there's moments where we have to replace the batteries. There's a lot of gaps there. But altogether we have them walk through life with

both living life the way they do and reflect on the choices, but also have us look at our brain. And what we do at the end of the three days one week as long as they would do that. It's kind of uncomfortable and embarrassing sometimes. We asked them to kind of look at all the choices and tell us which ones were good, which ones were bred.

And then we look at their brains and we see what was their brain looking like, what did it look like when they made choices that they were happy with? And we sometimes see that there are things in their brain that are kind of repeated. So maybe they make choices more using this part of the brain. I'm trying to simplify it but looking at part of the brain that are more emotional rather than rational. We see that they activate more parts of the brain that are buried deep inside that has to do with reflection rather than thinking. And we tell them, you know, here's what we learn about you.

You are better in this and that state. So that's one thing. So it's kind of not easy to apply because you still have to have this thing on your head. So not everyone can do that, but at least people in senior positions who feel that, you know, the socials are critical, come to us and they say, okay, help me. I want to know who I am better. Now, what about the study you did where you've got the cyclist on the bike? They're going hard, hard, hard, hard, hard. and you watch for certain brain states

where you know, okay, they're going to quit. And then you use that information over time to get them to delay quitting farther and farther. So behind that lies the idea that the brain is kind of like a muscle. And specifically there's a part of the brain that we really care about. It's the part that's doing self-control. So if you think about it, a simple way to look at it,

is that you start running. You go running. The first mile, your legs say, let's run. And the brain controls themselves, let's run. And another part with then says no problem at all. After one mile, your legs say, it's a little bit painful, but the parts say the other brain that controls them and say, keep going.

After 10 miles, the legs say, I want to quit. And the other part say, no, keep going. And there's like a battle there. And at some point, you're going to break. Now, when you're going to break depends on a lot of things, your muscles, but it also depends on this kind of control coming from the front of your brain that overrides your experience, your pain.

And if we can see this moment where you break, the moment where you stop, despite the fact that you can do a little more, we can come back to you and tomorrow and say, let's do the same thing you did yesterday. Have you run? Only this time when you get to the moment when we see that you're about to break, we're going to play a sound. We're going to tell you that we can see that you're about to break.

And we ask you to just continue for one more minute at this moment that is beyond where you did yesterday. In that moment, how do you appeal to them? Is it like, come on, motherfucker, like, you got this? That's basically, it's right. There's a question in sports for a while. Why is it that people do better when they play home game versus outside game? What is it about your mom being in the audience that makes you win the game?

In theory, they shouldn't matter. Like, throwing the basketball should be the same. But somehow we know that if your friends are there, if you're feeling better, we know that people do better when they're already kind of winning. There's a lot of things that affect our brain. What we try to understand right now is, where is it in the brain? What is this part of the brain that gets better

when your emotions are highlighted or heightened? And now we're seeing it. We all face those moments. when the alarm buses at 6 a.m., we set the alarm at 10 p.m. And suddenly in the morning we're different people. Like, we're not the person who wants to wake up anymore. And it's the same brain that set the alarm at 10 p.m.

But now suddenly at 6 am, we're not the same guy. This is a moment like that. We have to make a choice. When we're going running, when we're about to eat the cake, there's like a tasty cake and we're on a diet. And we say, oh, I shouldn't eat the cake, but there's a conflict. And now is the moment where those two parts of the brain come to life. And the more you know about yourself,

the more you're aware of those situations, the better you can do in controlling them. And the more you know about yourself, you can do better in all of those tasks. And that's kind of the ultimate thing. That's why we're here. We're giving you the knowledge. And once you know it doesn't work anymore, once you know that 699 isn't seven, it's harder for you to work. So just knowing is enough for people to do better.

To know that it's in your capacity to change. And that's what we want. So all we need to do is we need to communicate science in tangible way so people would know all the options. I said that there's 100,000 of options, but there are actually a couple of hundreds of biases that we humans have. I can give you an example in a second. Once you know them, they don't work anymore. So the job of scientists is to just translate the knowledge of the brain

into words that they can be then spoken to an audience who then lives by them. And that's it. So all we need to do is just do this. Speak to people and list that biases. Then it doesn't work anymore. Then at least when it happens, you become a little bit better in controlling that. That's all we need.

It's pretty simple. Once you know, it doesn't work. To give you the full story, I'm finishing my PhD, I just decide what I do next. am I continuing in science? Do I go back to being a hacker? This is like a moment of a folk in my life. And suddenly comes this moment

where the end of my five-year PhD is getting a lot of attention, but all wrong. My career hinges on this thing. Then I have suddenly an option to actually own this thing and become this dream expert even though it's based on a lie.

So I was fortunate enough to have enough checks balances that I didn't really have to go far with that. So here's the interesting reflection that I have right now. So I knew it's impossible to look at people's dreams and I knew that I kind of set it in a sleepy state and created this like amazing story for people, the scientists are now recording dreams. And the mistake was to leave this, to say, you know, it's not possible. I'm not going to own this thing, even though the world cares about it. So if anything can be learned from this thing,

is that the world really wanted to have people recall dreams because that's why it's such a big thing, because people cared about it. It's dreams are interesting. And I went and I said, it's impossible, and I want to kill this story. This was a mistake. Interesting.

Three years later, I'm sitting at home now 2013, and I got a call from BBC again. BBC were the first ones to kind of let the story go away. And they called me again, and they say, Professor Serf, we wanted you to comment on Dreamer, recording and the possibility of doing that. And I say, guys, are you kidding me? We've done me that. This is not true.

Like, let's not even begin going there. And I said, no, no, no. We know that you cannot do that. But we wanted to comment on the work of Professor Kamitani from Japan, who's doing it right now. So someone in Japan didn't know that it was impossible. He just didn't hear me going anywhere public and saying it's impossible. So he just did it.

So three years after I said it was impossible, someone did it. And two years after that, I joined. So now half the thing we do in my lab is actually looking at people's dreams. So we, the mistake I made wasn't to say that something is possible when it was not. It was to say that something was impossible before I knew that. Because I think that science is all about going to those dark places and trying to find it's impossible. My mistake was to say it was impossible before I was sure about that. So I should have said, we don't know yet, we didn't do it yet, but we should investigate.

I was quick to say, I didn't do it, it's impossible. So I delayed things by three years. Five years after, I'm doing it right now. dreams is something that I was told not to study now that's what I do in my lab every day now I'm never saying something is impossible before I'm certain that it's impossible wow I love that I'd love it even more if you if you would go so far as to say nothing is truly impossible then you'd really have me I'll go with that so that like you mentioned that I teach screenwriter and I screenwriting and I work with TV the reason I do that is because I feel that the best ideas for my research come from those hours with the kids write play with the fellows at the American Film Institute who writes science fiction from movies that inspired me like The Matrix.

You mentioned that. This inspired us. We are kids of 1999. What happened then affected us. Star Trek affected my dad's generation. The best paper that I ever written has a thousand of citation. The episode of Limit List that I worked on

last week and came out has 5 million people watching it. And those are the kids who are going to be me in 20 years. And if they think, oh, this is maybe possible, they're going to do that. You ask me how to change behavior. This is how.

To know what the possibilities are. Your brain goes with you, and it carries all of the history in the form of memories. All you have from what happened before you is stored in the form of memories, and they're not accurate, and they're kind of compressed.

So that's all you have about the past. You have no idea in the future, even though your brain tries to predict it all the time. This is what dreams are for, this is what decisions are for. You try to kind of simulate a future and make predictions. You don't know what's going on.

All you have is this kind of sliver of reality which is the present, which is all you have, and you control everything that happens there. The nice thing about the present is that actually it interacts with everything in your brain and you can change things. What we learned in the last five years

is that memories are different in how they work. And if I had to summarize it in one sentence, they change every time we use them. So if you have a memory stored here of what you had for lunch yesterday, and I ask you, what did you have for lunch? you basically open the memory right now and you tell me a story, but whatever happens right now goes into the story and you save it differently.

And if I ask you tomorrow what you had for lunch, you'll open the modified version. So every time I ask you the same question, you open a different version, which means you can actually change the past. You can actually change your experience of things. This is why therapy works. You go, your girlfriend breaks up with you, you go to the therapist, she asks you, what happened, you tell the story, she intervenes, you save it differently. You ask you a week after.

What happened? You tell a different story. After five meetings, you have a different version of the reality. And that is powerful because it means that we control the narrative that we have. We don't really have to be kind of confound to the story that we experience. We can actually change it. This is what the brain is for, to simulate and change and adjust and synthesize better version of life. We can make ourselves happy.

We can make bad things look better. We can control things and it's all by virtue of just telling a story, looking it differently, and saving it again. It's as simple as that. We have the ability to actually change the story all the time. So learning is one way to do that. Thinking and reflecting about ourselves and another way to do that. Having more experiences allows us to do that. We know all of these now.

So suddenly there's kind of essence to this self-help book that we read when we're kids, and we know how to implement that. So motivation is a word, right? It's a label that we put a set of events in our brain. What you actually want is the outcome of that. you want to do things when it's hard. So I think that there are a few kind of things that we know work. One is evidence of past successes.

If I see if I see it and I go back to your memories and I reframe them as successes, suddenly the current event that's the same is a success. So I think that one thing is like having success stories and identification stories. As in you find there's all the people out there. There was a person that is like you that had similar experience and chose the thing that you want to choose. find this person or these people, and it's going to rub into you. So I get asked by my students often, how do I become funnier?

How do I become smarter? And my one tip that I give them all the time is surrounding yourself by people that you want to be like. You want to be funny? Just sit next to comedians. Just go to the same room they are and just sit next to them. It's going to rub on to you by osmosis. Because it's just the environment that is around us that really changes everything. And other people said that before, but I'll tell you the neuroscience behind it.

we know now that brains interact with each other through language in a way that synchronizes the brains so when I talk to you right now if you're engaged with what I say it means that if we scan our brain right now our brains are going to look alike more than yours and someone on the street that isn't here so two people in the same room as soon as they kind of interact their brains literally start kind of if you want pulsing in the same way parts of the brain light up in the same way part shut down So we actually are affecting. This is how we affect each other. This is how communication made humans who they are.

This is the one thing that makes us better than all the animals because we are able to communicate using language, affect each other's brain and create narrative that don't exist together. We both believe in things that we've never seen before, like God or ideas that's like democracy or money. Like those things we invented and we can communicate them and create this image in people's brains and they all share this thing. So in the same way, if you surround yourself by people that you want to,

be like you hear them communicate, they change your brain, and it's going to rub onto you. You're going to actually become funnier. If you sit and listen to funny people next to you, you're actually more motivated if you're next to people that are motivated. The next version of that, if you cannot find them, if you're sitting right now in a rural part of Alaska and you can't just find yourself in Los Angeles with the people you want to be with, is to actually just look at them on videos, on books. And that's the way our brain basically gets content and change. So changing brains happen in many, many ways, but the easiest one that everyone can try is to say what kind of world I want to be in and bring this world to you in the form of

movies, stories, TV shows, or people. That's the ways to kind of get things that you want next to you. Thank you for tuning in. Continue strengthening your mind by listening to our other episodes.