MORAN CERF Wants to Get Inside YOUR HEAD
I’VE KNOWN MORAN CERF LESS than 24 hours when I start to worry he’s controlling my mind.
To be fair, he’s been messing with my thoughts for a while before we finally sit down at Soho House in early December for drinks. Over the previous weeks, I’ve listened to him on podcasts and interviews as I’ve gone about my life. As I walk, headphoned, across the Northwestern campus where we both teach, I hear him talk about the possibility of directly connecting brains to machines. Cruising down the Edens, I hear him talk about influencing dreams through smells. Riding the moving walkway to Concourse C at O’Hare, I hear him wonder why April Fools’ Day is the one time when we treat the world with the skepticism it’s due. The 42-year-old neuroscientist has a 100-mile-anhour French-Israeli accent, a gift for storytelling, and the ability to make me stop in the middle of the sidewalk and wonder if anything is real.
CERF talks about influencing DREAMS through SMELLS.
One of the first things Moran Cerf tells me, just minutes after we’ve greeted each other, is that when straight men and women shake hands upon meeting, they have a subconscious instinct to sniff their own hand afterward. (Keep in mind this was back in December, another human epoch.) This is regardless of whether the people are interested in each other, or available, or whether one is 19 and the other 85. A gay man would sniff his hand after meeting another man, and so on. I’m smiling and nodding, asking follow-up questions, but I’m also racking my brain, trying to remember what I did after we shook hands. It’s not so much that I’d be embarrassed if I did this thing — the fact that I’m a straight woman is not a well-kept secret — but rather that whatever I did, when I thought we were simply greeting each other, Cerf has absolutely noticed it. And in the past 10 minutes, what else have I done to betray skepticism, nervousness, insecurity, vanity, distraction?
Before Cerf went into science, he was a hacker. (“Hackers are anarchists,” he tells me — an observation that becomes more relevant the more I learn about him.) Essentially, his job now is to hack the human brain. I relate, in a small way. Part of being a fiction writer is taking note of other people’s body language and appearance and behavior — existing in the world simultaneously as participant and as vampire. But where I observe people for loose inspiration, Cerf is gathering data. And while I appreciate a
