Dr. Moran Cerf

Professor, Neuroscience & Business, Kellogg School of Management Northwestern University

Moran Cerf is a professor of neuroscience and business at the Kellogg School of Management. Dr. Cerf is also a member of the institute on complex systems, and a visiting faculty at the MIT Media Lab. His research uses methods from neuroscience to understand the underlying mechanisms of our psychology, behavior changes, emotion, decision making and dreams. His works address questions such as: "How are conscious percepts formed in our brain?", "How can we control our emotions?" and "Which brain mechanisms determine if we find content engaging?" Recently, his focus has been on the neural mechanisms that underlie decision-making, thereby offering a new perspective on predicting future choices and investigating how much free will we have in our decisions. In his acclaimed work, Prof. Cerf studies patients undergoing brain-surgery by recording the activity of individual nerve cells using electrodes implanted in the patient's brain. Thus, his work offers a novel way to understand our psyche by observing the brain directly from within.