Tech Titans: Hidden Rules of the Brain with Moran Cerf, Neuroscientist and Professor

(Guest (Neuroscientist) at 00:00:00) So if you're about to go in a big negotiation meeting, having access to the odor, which you can buy it on Amazon and spray it in the room, no one's gonna notice, but it makes everyone be a little less aggressive. Right? Actually, if the meeting is all about getting people to reach a common ground and so on, you can induce a level of kind of testosterone decrease just by spraying the right scent in the room. And there's more and more of that. I'll just give you an example.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:31) I'm sorry. I don't think I've ever laughed this hard in an interview before. Oh my goodness. The visuals running through my mind. Like, if I'm gonna negotiate a deal, just spraying, you know, get all these really strong investor men and just spray the odor in there, and they all turn into sobbing.

(Guest (Neuroscientist) at 00:00:50) Or start crying in concert.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:56) So the way that this got started was I was doing an interview on these guys who created this concept called Promise Theory to organize swarms of artificial intelligence. And they started finding that they were acting like ants, and they went on this whole tangent. And my thought was, okay, I understand that the ants are all receiving this signal and they're taking these actions. But if you walk up to an individual ant and ask them, they're probably gonna shrug at you and be like, I don't know. I'm just doing what I wanna do. And then I was wondering, like, do humans work like that? Is that a potential for how humans work? And is anyone studying this model? We did research. We found you, and I wanna know how you got involved with studying this.

(Guest (Neuroscientist) at 00:01:43) And the games begin. So I'll say that there's a body of research, all, I would say, 10 years old, that looks at activity of groups generally before we get to humans. I'm kind of building towards the climax in a second. So they looked at some animals that operate in concert as if they have a single mind at the same time, while we know that each of them is an individual. And now I can start the climax, which is we found that typically for a leader to take the course and separate, you need to have at least one of the following things that work for them. Either they have to be considered by others as an authority. Like everyone says, yeah, there's a CEO, but there's this one dude that everyone knows, he knows everything about the company because he's been here the longest or he's the smartest or he knows the code perfectly. Or in the past year, twice he made the right choice and we remember that. It's the guy that even though everyone thought left, he thought right and it was right. There needs to be something like that that works. And the ideal thing is, of course, if they're charismatic or if they're funny, if they have one more thing that works for them that says not just the authority, but also the ability to essentially create motion. And those are the things that apparently apply to bees and birds and fish, but also to humans.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:12) Interesting. Okay. So, you know, what's fun is that as you were talking about, like, in the corporate world, you can get the group to shift and have that shift be disconnected from reality. And then that group runs into reality, and everything comes crashing down.

(Guest (Neuroscientist) at 00:03:32) Exactly. And I think that the interesting thing to me is that in many cases, it's not the person that has the official authority that drives this thing. It's the person who sees reality the way it is. You know, you have a lot of cases, totally different domain now, but kind of similar, where you have, say, a disease, and it requires the modern medicine approach to be different. If you ask me to elaborate one sentence, I know that I'm hijacking this thing. I'll say that this kind of creates a thought process that some companies should consider, which is do you wanna hire people that think the same? In which case, there's a good chance that if someone has a good idea, then it will be easy for them to rally everyone behind that. Or a diverse team where you say, you know what? I want a lot of ideas. It's likely that no one's gonna wanna follow anyone else because they're all gonna have a team of rivals, we call it. But maybe there's a chance that a good idea would come. And the answer to that, to kind of give the audience a quick narrative, is it very much depends on the task and the type of company. If your company is Ferrari and you're in the pit stop and your job is to change the tires and put gas in as fast as possible, you might want the entire 10 people who replace the tires to be pretty much the same brain duplicated 10 times. So when I do this, you put the scalpel in my hand because you read my mind before you even did it and you already know what I'm gonna ask for, and it's just working in concert perfectly. But if you're in the marketing department of Chase and your job is to think of new ideas to sell a bank, then you might want 10 different thoughts that when someone says an idea, you're gonna have one from left, one from right, one from the opposite, and you'll essentially have a broader spectrum. So based on the task, you might want diversity or conformity.

(Guest (Neuroscientist) at 00:05:22) You really can change structures of thinking in large scale. And also financially, it's a whole different game where my friends and colleagues from neuroscience spend a lot of their time writing grants, basically begging for money. If you talk to the head of, we started with Chase, I think, let's now make it Bank of America, and you prove to them that there's something meaningful, then the checks have two more zeros in them, and all they require is like one phone call and they just are okay with that. You wanted me to tell you about the unique thing in neuroscience? So I will kind of explain the mystery that I put as a spoiler earlier that something is different about our neuroscience work.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:04) Yeah. What is that? What are you doing?

(Guest (Neuroscientist) at 00:06:06) The title is we put neural implants in people's brains. So that's the headline. And what it means is we work with humans who undergo brain surgery and agree to let us put a chip inside their head or electrodes inside their brain while their skull is open for clinical purposes and essentially decode their thoughts while they're awake and behaving. So we can see exactly how they think about money or how they make decisions or how they deal with failure and so on. That's extremely unusual. Most neuroscientists either study animals where you can open their brain and look inside because they're not humans. Or if they wanna study humans, they do it with imaging. So they look at fMRI or EEG, they look at the outside of the brain and try to infer what's going on inside. It's extremely unusual to have a person who agrees to let you drill a hole in their skull and put electrodes inside and see how they think.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:02) To what level of detail?

(Guest (Neuroscientist) at 00:07:03) So there's two groups that compete, but the answer is, I'll tell you what the other thing is and then I'll, so one is to read and decode dreams, one is to write. That's the big question. Can we have Joel go to sleep and say, I would love in my dream to, you know, my grandma died, and I wish I could see her one more time and say goodbye to her in the dream. That's one group. And our group does something totally different. We, first when you're awake, scan your brain and show you hundreds or thousands of pictures of people you know or places you know. And at some point, we're gonna show you a picture of your, say, girlfriend, and a cell would light up. So one of the cells that we look at will light up and say, hey, we showed you a picture of your girlfriend. This cell lit up. Maybe this cell codes the concept of your girlfriend. Let's try to show you other pictures of your girlfriend or other women. And if the cell only lights up to pictures of your girlfriend, we basically say we found a cell in your brain that is coding the concept of your girlfriend. It's part of a network, but it's one that actually does that. And now we know that if you go to sleep and this lights up, then you're seeing your girlfriend. So we would know that you're seeing your girlfriend. I wouldn't know if she's wearing a blue skirt or a red skirt or I wouldn't know what you actually see, but I would know the story. So I can say Joel is seeing girlfriend, the Eiffel Tower, pasta and red wine. I can conjure an idea that he and his girlfriend are going to Paris to have dinner, but I wouldn't know that. I would kind of make up this from concepts. So if you take what we can do and what the group in Japan can do, we can maybe get the full narrative, both what it is and how it looks.

(Guest (Neuroscientist) at 00:08:36) You want anything to drink? Wait here for a few minutes, we're gonna call you to start the experiment. Okay. So Joel sits in the waiting room and waits to be called. But really, the experiment began. And the experiment began the moment someone shook your hand. What happens is that in this video camera that they had in the room, they saw that most people, within a minute from the time that someone shook their hand, they take their hand that was shaken and they bring it something like this close to the nose. I'm not sure if there's video in the podcast, but if there isn't, I'm just gonna say you basically take your hand and you bring it close enough to your nose without paying attention to it so you can take a sniff and to mix your smell with the smell of the other person who shook your hand. And what's nice about this is it's fully controlled. So if you're a straight male and the person who shakes your hand is a female, you do that. If it's another male, you don't do that. If the person shakes your left hand rather than your right hand, you will bring your left hand to the nose. If the person who shakes your hand wears a glove, you won't do that. So it's really a classical controlled experiment. But what you do is you take someone you find attractive, you mix your two hands, you basically rub it onto each other, smells that you can't really name. It's odorless. It's pheromones. So they smell to something to your brain, but they don't smell like something you can name to you. Like, you can't say, oh, it's lemon. It's just a whiff of basically chemicals that your brain says something about this match is good or not. And afterwards, you might say, I find her attractive. I find him charming and so on. But partly, it was your ant brain that used the same thing that your dogs or your rats or gerbils use to, that's kind of number one. I'll give you a second one to totally land the point that smells are critical for us. So if you're about to go in a big negotiation meeting, having access to the odor, which you can buy it on Amazon and spray it in the room, no one's gonna notice, but it makes everyone be a little less aggressive. Right? Actually, if the meeting is all about getting people to reach a common ground and so on, you can induce a level of kind of testosterone decrease just by spraying the right smell in the room. And there's more and more of that. I'll just give you an example.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:04) I'm sorry. I don't think I've ever laughed this hard in an interview before. Oh my goodness. The visuals running through my mind. Like, if I'm gonna negotiate a deal, just spraying, you know, get all these really strong investor men and just spray the odor in there, and they all turn into sobbing.

(Guest (Neuroscientist) at 00:11:23) Or start crying in concert. So that's not new. I think what's new is the understanding that we have that it actually can be useful in business. It could be useful in negotiation, in exchanges. We knew for a while that the temperature in the room makes a difference. I think that I heard anecdotally that when politicians have the presidential debates, think of like Biden, Trump, Trump, Kamala, Trump, Hillary in the last several years, the teams that kind of lay out the exact, you know, will they stand or sit? Will it be 20-second response and so on? Also debate fiercely the temperature in the room because it creates level of anger, it creates levels of aggression, it keeps you more alert and awake. So they debate that as part of the discussion because they know it impacts the exchanges. I think at the same level, you can start saying, okay, what will be the smell in the room? What will be the odors that we allow or not allow? And since right now it's fair game, you should definitely use it for your own advantage. So whether we care about it or not, we live in a world where it's very visual. People use not just cues from content but also from other elements to judge a candidate. Let's take care of that. And temperature is an easy one because we know a lot about it and it's easy to kind of dial up and down. Smells a little bit harder. But if anything is happening in your boardroom, you have people come and so on, you can do whatever you want. I think, you know, there's a field in neuroscience, totally your intention, so feel free to steer me back if you think that I'm all over the place. There's a domain in neuroscience and psychology called embodied cognition. And if your audience has, say, millions of people who have been with us on this 20-minute journey right now, even though they listen to it in different locations, different time zones and so on, their brains are aligned with our brains right now. And if an idea comes here that is particularly useful, we just changed millions of brains in a way that will spread to other brains.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:20) That's big. Okay. I know we're coming up on time here, but I'm gonna rephrase the question because I'm getting better questions now. Alright. So I hear you. The new question, I look at the ants, and I see them. They're obviously building to some sort of goal, and they all end up building this thing, whatever it may be. And I can say, okay, I know when a group of ants gets together, they build towards this ultimate outcome. So if you ask me the question, what are the ants building? I'll be able to tell you because I'm an ant expert and so on and so forth. If I am standing on the moon and I am looking and I'm an alien and I am looking down at the humans, tell me what are the humans building?

(Guest (Neuroscientist) at 00:14:13) So I'll give you vague and concrete. Vague is order. We're building order. We're taking mess, large scale mess, and we're organizing it. That is, from the outside, what humans have done. And a more concrete one is building intelligence. That is, if someone looked at what happened to the world from, you know, let's say, nearly 5 billion years ago or 14 billion, if you go to the beginning of time, the world became more organized, especially on our neck of the woods, not just by putting the cups back in the shelf, but generally, we're countering everything that evolution says should be true with one kind of activity, which is organization. To make it very visceral to people. That is what humans are. That's what consciousness is. Somehow, our brains have this magical thing, which is they are more organized and our planet is more organized than you would have if you just let things happen randomly. This defies all the rules. It makes religious people believe that there is God. It makes scientists who don't believe in God say that statistics kind of have a way of favoring solutions that are evolutionarily fit. And I try to think how should we organize the salt and pepper. And can I do it? Can I move one piece and make it organized? And when you think of it, maybe it gives a little bit of sense of mission or meaning to people's jobs, which is we are helping organize. That's what it looks like on the outside, and specifically in our modern day, it's information. We organize information.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:53) Thank you so much for listening, and if you found this episode useful, please share it with a friend or colleague who you think would get value from it. And if you have topics that you'd like to hear discussed on the podcast, either add me on LinkedIn or send me an email, [email protected]. Every time I get an email or LinkedIn message, it absolutely makes my day and inspires me to keep going.