Moran Cerf: The next generation of technology will be more remarkable than we can imagine

You used to be a professional hacker, using your knowledge of technology to help improve digital safety. Can humans learn to “hack” their own brains, learning “tricks" to improve their quality of life?
The word ‘hack’ is now used too broadly. Basically, whenever someone does anything that is not the basic use of a tool or a code they apply the world ‘hack’ to it. I am more conservative on my use of the word: hackers are real people who find a-typical uses that require a novel way to see an existing problem using a different lens and apply technical skills that are not trivial to replicate to manipulate a system. Accordingly,

we are now getting very good at hacking the brain.

Essentially, we are now in a world where we understand some of the basic mechanisms of the brain, and some pathways and signatures of its operations. Once we learn how those operate and we learn that the brain is made of various independent systems that communicate with each other as ‘black boxes’ we can start fooling those by feeding inputs from one to another that we generate ourselves. This is technically not new, but the implications are grandiose. It means that our brain doesn’t know where things it experiences come from and it changes entirely its operation based on triggers that we generate. Effectively, we now have all sorts of tools to change your behavior, to make a mouse fall asleep or wake up merely with our decisions, to make some mechanisms in your brain work as if we are a puppeteer moving a puppet on strings. We can really change things in many ways. Now

of course this can be used for good or evil.

And I think the next step is for society as a whole to start thinking about the meaning of these advances and decide if we are ok with this being a tool that is accessible to anyone, in what capacity, and how we monitor its use for good. It could be as simple as stopping marketing companies from delivering campaigns that generate bad habits in consumers that are later hard to overcome, to the question of whether we are supportive of erasing memories in people (even if those are traumatic memories that the person wants to eliminate), or whether we are OK with creating long-term changes in someone’s brain that may solve a momentary problem but could end up having different long-term effects. The closer neuroscience is to hang those options, the faster we should be in also putting checks and balances to how they get used.