How Our Brains are Wired Together with Moran Cerf, Neuroscientist & Professor

Description

If you understand this about your brain, you’ll be unstoppable. Today, we're talking to Moran Cerf, neuroscientist and professor, about why the hidden signals shaping human behavior have more in common with ants and fish than we'd like to admit, how smell — not vision — may be the most underestimated force behind the decisions we make, why brains in the same room quietly synchronize whether their owners agree or not, and what it actually means when an alien looking down from the moon asks what the humans are building. All of this right here, right now, on the Modern CTO Podcast! 00:00 — Introduction: What are the humans building? 01:12 — How animal swarms (birds, fish, ants) move without a leader 03:40 — What it actually takes to shift an organization's direction 05:31 — The AI board experiment: what happens when no one knows it's AI 06:40 — Homophily vs. diversity: who should you hire? 07:44 — The Ferrari pit crew vs. the Chase marketing team 09:00 — Why failed leaders make better hires 11:26 — How Moran ended up as a neuroscientist in a business school 14:50 — Neural implants: reading thoughts from open brains 16:00 — How epilepsy surgery became a window into human decision-making 18:41 — What neuroscience learns from 7 open-brain patients a year 19:33 — How dreams work — and whether they can be read 20:10 — Writing dreams: can science plant a specific dream in your mind? 23:31 — Smell as the tool for dream direction (and why sound fails) 25:30 — One practical tip for better dreams tonight 28:17 — Do humans receive signals like ants do? 29:06 — The handshake pheromone study (you've been doing this your whole life) 33:50 — How human tears chemically suppress testosterone in others 35:49 — Using environmental signals in negotiations and leadership 40:05 — Embodied cognition: how temperature, weight, and room size shape your thoughts 42:52 — Why Zoom makes you less creative (and what to do about it) 44:13 — Six sponges in a room: how brains synchronize without trying 49:11 — "What are the humans building?" — Jo