Translator: Michele Gianella Reviewer: Alessio Politi
Over the next 18 minutes,
your brain will be repeatedly hacked.
You will always hack yourself, but twice.
But there is more.
These intrusions will have nothing to do
with ethical, legal or politeness questions.
There will be no need for particular authorizations,
or specific questions.
The intrusions won't be visible,
because they happen here, and it's hard to see them.
Or is it?
Nowadays, thanks to new sophisticated fMRI techniques,
it is possible to see and assess a brain and its different functionalities.
But in order to do it, two things are needed:
a brain, which is something that cannot be taken for granted
and recently even not extremely available,
and a RMF scanner,
that is also not so guaranteed -
we could have brought it here today,
we could have seen all your brains in activity.
Because we have plenty of them here,
but no scanner.
So I suggest a system
to take your neurons out of your skull,
without bloodshed.
Please do this:
extend an arm before you.
Very good, this is a perfect representation of a neuron,
the nucleus being the centre of your palm,
and the fingers being the dendrites, getting signals from outside,
processing them through the axon and within an elaboration centre.
If you pull up your sleeve, you can also see the myelin sheath
and the Schwann cells, a bit hairy.
But let's examine in detail
how this fantastic machine works:
So I ask you, now,
to do exactly what I ask you to do.
Everybody gets up, please.
Extend both your arms before you - excellent -
so we can see each other better.
Now move your fingers like this,
and here are the neurons!
These are the neurons responding to a vocal stimulus,
the one coming from me,
and they do it in a very responsive way,
with no cerebral death in the room.
Very well.
Now keep doing exactly what I ask you to do.
Bring your fingers to a halt, put the hands with the backs inwards,
raise your right hand, put it above the left one
join the palms, interlace the fingers
and make sure that the thumb of the left hand -
the left hand, the one which was under the right hand, yes -
must be between the right thumb and the right index;
now extend the indexes and push the fingertips strongly.
Look: these are two neurons
building a synaptic transmission.
Neurons which are responding to a signal,
while others just underwent their first hacker attack,
which was successful if you can’t do this.
(Laughter)
(Applause)
You, I’m sure that -
you imagined to respond
to indications coming from before your eyes,
from images before your eyes,
while your neurons were responding;
but maybe it’s not exactly like that.
Actually, we see what we want to see,
what we expect to see.
Whereas our attention cannot see things
where actions and changes take place
below our threshold of awareness.
This means that we react to stimuli
not from the objective reality that we perceive,
but to the mental image that we create.
A mental image
which generates ideas, or indeed images,
which correlate something from outside
with something inside us,
and which work with someone who is either by our side or against us.
We see what we expect to see.
This means that most of our daily choices
are "freely obliged";
that is, we think on the basis of what we already believe in,
while we feel that we are free to govern our thoughts.
Our hacked system has already made a choice for us,
by relating the reality to our mind.
Our way of relating with the reality
does not always take the most linear, logic and rational path we can imagine;
it takes emotive paths
that are characterised
by heuristics and biases, perceptive fallacies and illusions.
But who's deceiving us, exactly?
Surely someone, or something, from outside:
the market, the information, the advertising;
but also, more often than not, something from within.
And in fact, communication can deceive us,
but also our mind lies - or better, our mind lies to us.
The fact is,
it is that we give to our brain what we strongly want to believe in.
But what does believing mean?
The etymology of “believe” relates to credit.
If we trust our mind,
it is because we give credit to it.
Likewise,
if we trust reality
it is because we believe in what it refers to for us.
Reality and mind, are two of the three sides of the coin.
There is also what I call the third side.
The third side, or the third half,
is that place
where we are "freely obliged" in our own decisions.
It is the place where we spend our relational credit,
not only in our economic relationships,
but also our human ones.
To be obliged, to be freely obliged, means to be "ob-ligati", tied together,
or better tied to our mind, which ties us to its own decisions.
Now let's play a game!
Take the pen and the piece of paper
that you found after the break
in your bag.
Thank you.
As you can see, this is the hardest part of the presentation,
finding the pen in that bag, and a piece of paper.
Pubblic: Is red also fine?
MB: Any colour you like.
Do you have it?
Now, during the game,
on that piece of paper
you can already start writing four numbers in column.
Like that: one, two, three and four.
After each number, in a little while, you will write a fast answer,
as fast as my question will be.
But first let's agree
on what the game rules are.
As all games, there are some rules to stick to.
First rule:
please,
when you figure out in your mind the answer to the question,
write it on that paper.
At the end of the game - I will tell you when the game ends -
read some answers here and there with no changes on what you have written.
This rule can be summed up to “no cheating”.
Is it clear?
Clear.
Second rule: from now on, you can make no more questions.
Is the second rule clear?
Public: Yes!
MB: Yes is an answer, very well.
Third and last rule: from now on,
until the game is over, you can't laugh.
If anyone breaks one or more rules
it's not a problem:
they turn the piece of paper and leave the game up to the others.
Okay, let's start.
Please answer to this question:
how many cigarettes are there in a packet?
Written down?
Second question: how many cigarettes are there in a cigarette packet?
Written down?
Third question: how many cigarettes are there in a new cigarette packet?
Written down?
Fourth and last question.
Please answer to this question:
how many cigarettes are there in this cigarette packet?
Have you answered?
The game is over, you can laugh now
so we get rid of a bit of anxiety;
and mostly, you will laugh heartily
when you see how many times your mind did hack itself.
Let's start from the first question:
how many cigarettes are there in a packet.
What have you answered?
You don’t need to tell me.
These machines are open books, for cognitive hackers like me.
In fact, you or the most of you
felt free to answer generally to this question,
writing numbers from 0 to 20,
or any number from 0 to 20,
or answers like "it depends, I don't know
how many have been smoked before taking it to the stage”,
while you had already been unconsciously obliged
to build an answer
from the association between cigarettes and cigarette packets.
Your already hacked system
was keeping you away from a reality, however realistic and plausible.
In fact, at the question
“how many cigarettes are there in a packet”
how many of you have thought about a packet like this?
Or a packet like that?
No one.
This shows that your system had already been hacked
by what is called confirmation bias.
Second question: how many cigarettes are there in a cigarette packet.
What have you written?
No need to answer. You have already been hacked, right?
Do you remember?
Here, in the path of freely obliging communication -
begun with the naming of the three rules,
although paradoxical, like forcing not to laugh,
and with the first question -
the second question has confirmed the inference
that, if we are talking about cigarette packets
and then we are even asked about cigarette packets,
then I am obviously referring
to images of cigarette packets.
So some of you, or the most of you,
repeated the first answer in the second question
or just slightly fixed it.
This is called
"anchoring and adjustment heuristics".
It is the same which works, for example, when we anchor
to the first price communicated in a commercial negotiation,
or when we try -
well, let's try together to answer to this question:
how many- please provide the most precise possible number -
non-European immigrants did arrived in Italy in 2017?
While you're looking for that number,
your hacked system is keeping away from your answer
the image of a financial broker
who has just moved from Zurich to the City of Milan,
or that of starred non-European, Japanese chef
who has found a stable job in Rome.
This inference, this system of inferences grows with each question
and is reinforced with the third one.
In fact, when we talk about new packets,
what are we referring to?
Well, we refer
to that experience we have about the packets we have seen,
the packets we have experienced.
And so we look for the answer,
or better, our hacker violates our mnemonic systems,
breaks the references of our experience
and makes us write numbers like 10, 20, 25, right?
It does so by picking
the most representative and available things from our memory.
This is called "availability heuristics":
I pick the answer from where I have a particular memory.
So, could I answer 35?
Yes, if I just came back from Australia
and at the duty-free I bought an intact, wrapped packet
containing 35 cigarettes.
But the matter is:
had I answered 19, would you have accepted this answer?
19? Yes!
Yes, if I were able to shift
the limits of my experience of reference
to find a correct answer to the third question,
referring for example to the cigarette packets
legally sold at tobacconists in London.
Now let's look at the fourth question:
how many cigarettes are there in this cigarette packet?
Is it possible to find a correct, right answer to this question?
Or has this chance, after our system has been hacked,
vanished, faded away?
Why? Because there, on that piece of paper,
you started confirming a mental image
which has kept you away
even when you had it right in front of your eyes,
from the reality of the cigarette packets,
Or am I wrong?
Answering correctly to the fourth question
means abandoning the mental image I have of cigarette packets.
It means not listening to the persuasive voice
which answers without even looking at the problem.
It means freeing ourselves from the anchor of our mental maps
which are today represented by those chairs,
but are every day represented
by our decisional modalities we live on,
and being able to control
the violations and the intromissions of those hacking systems,
of those mind control machineries
which come from ourselves.
And indeed it is our mind which forces us
to make freely obliged choices,
and it is our behaviour
which is more and more often in danger
of being hacked by us, even more than we think.
We live with an inner hacker.
So what I'd like us to take home from this experience
three [tips], three programs
to make our dear hacker
more conscious of its limits,
but which also gives us some extra tool
to improve our everyday decisions
in the relational and human area, but also in the economic and social ones,
in what distinguishes you in your professional and everyday life.
First sneaker:
check for all the information,
either coming from outside or created on the inside.
Verify them.
Second sneaker:
make the most of the errors,
because if it's true that our mind makes us "freely obliged",
well let it be at least in a more and more suitable direction,
Last and third sneaker:
of course, avoid smoking,
but also remember to open our mind
and open, also,
and all the cigarette packets that we'll stumble upon in life.
Thank you.
(Applause)