In recent decades, Prof. Itzhak Fried has devoted himself to some of the most profound questions of human existence - from free will to the nature of evil - all while maintaining a particularly close connection with the minds of his patients and research subjects. Today, he is directing that inquiry toward the "hybrid brain" - the fusion of human cognition and machine intelligence.
Fried, who enjoyed a distinguished career at UCLA and is one of the world’s foremost experts in brain stimulation, recently received an intriguing appointment from Reichman University in Herzliya. He has been recruited to establish and head a new center for applied brain research. "This institute will explore the interface between brain intelligence and artificial intelligence," he says in an interview with Globes.
On the road to a hybrid brain
This interface is not just a metaphor. "Technologies already on the horizon will, in the future, enable us to read information directly from the brain and write information back into it - bypassing the senses altogether," he says. "A few weeks ago, I visited Elon Musk’s company Neuralink, which has developed a chip that is implanted in the brain, extracts as much data from it as possible, and then, using a suite of artificial intelligence algorithms, reprograms the brain itself. It sounds like science fiction, but that is the goal."
You’re describing a future in which humans have a hybrid brain - part human and composed of neurons, and part computational and made of silicon.
"Even today, AI writes information into our brains, but it does so through our senses. The aim is to reach a point where we can do this in a way that bypasses the senses. The main difference in such an experience is that we won’t necessarily know what is ours and what came from the computer. But the truth is, even today, we’re not always sure."
The illusion of free will
One of the most complex questions that arises from Fried’s research is the question of free will. His work has shown just how much our behavior is generated by the brain rather than by conscious intention. "We had a patient who started laughing whenever we stimulated a particular point in her brain. What was strange was not only that she laughed, but that she was convinced that the situation was genuinely funny. She said to us, ‘Don't you see how hilarious this device you’re holding is?’" Fried recalls. This case ultimately led to a seminal article published in the scientific journal "Nature."
What do you conclude from this about free will?
"You may have heard of the researcher Benjamin Libet, who demonstrated that the intention to perform a certain movement can be detected in brain activity before a person is aware that they are about to perform it. These findings deeply troubled him. He wondered, ‘Do we not have free will at all? Is it all an illusion?’ But in the end, he proposed a resolution: while the mind may not choose to perform an action, it can suppress it. In other words, the mind has a kind of veto power. As he put it, ‘We may not have free will, but we do have some free won’t.’"
Fried isn’t sure how much this question bothers him in the first place. "Some people say, ‘If this is how I act, then this is who I am. So why should it matter whether the mind became aware of it before the body did or vice versa?’"
Fried’s research has shown that it is possible to actually touch free will itself. During one of the surgeries he performed, he stimulated an area of the brain that, as he describes it, "made the patient want to do all sorts of things that he wouldn’t necessarily think, either beforehand or afterward, he would want to do."
A significant share of modern illnesses are viewed as disorders of "will": addictions, suicide, obesity, OCD. Could direct intervention in the brain’s "will" area be the key to treating these disorders?
"Today we already use electrical and magnetic stimulation to treat severe depression, and among the effects is the restoration of the will to live. There are also efforts to treat very severe cases of addiction. Obesity has also been studied in people with a genetic defect that causes extreme obesity. I once spoke to the researcher who was leading this study, and he told me that he implanted brain pacemakers in patients and observed terrific results in suppressing their desire to eat. But at a certain point, when the patients really wanted to eat, they turned off the device.
"So what's happening here? We have a desire and then a desire that overrides that desire? Is it the ‘real’ self that turns off the pacemaker, or is it perhaps the ‘real’ self who chose to have the pacemaker implanted, while the disorder whose genetic origin is known compelled them to switch it off?
"Our desire to act upon our desires raises very profound questions."
Memories of Jennifer Aniston
In your research, you were able to evoke the same specific memory in a patient over and over again, each time you stimulated the same point in the brain. Do we really have "memory libraries" stored in our brains?
"In epilepsy patients, when we stimulate the posterior temporal region, a very specific memory will sometimes surface. We even discovered that there are sometimes individual neurons that respond to a particular concept, or even to a specific person. We originally called it the ‘Jennifer Aniston neuron,’ because the image used in the experiment was of her."
The experiment showed that when a person was shown a picture of the actress, the neuron associated with her responded before the person became consciously aware of what they were seeing. "And when we later monitor that patient’s sleep, we can sometimes detect, with a certain degree of probability, that they dreamed about Jennifer Aniston, because that same cell fires."
So maybe in the future we’ll see some kind of "memory pacemaker" that will be able to summon our favorite memories on demand, erase unpleasant ones, and generally improve our memories?
"From a scientific standpoint, what you’re saying isn’t that far-fetched. We already understand how something like that could work, in principle. We think it may not be a bad idea that if someone carries a traumatic memory, we could erase it, alter it, or at least weaken it. We’re not there yet in the clinical world, but we’re starting to touch on it in the research world.
"In our field, it takes 20 years for what we discover in the lab to make its way into everyday life. That means people usually don’t fully grasp how advanced the technology is and what it can already do."
We witnessed this, for example, before generative AI software burst onto the public sphere around 2022. Researchers already knew what the bots could do, but it came as a surprise for the general public. Fried expects such surprises in the field of brain stimulation.
Sleep well to keep your memory sharp
When Fried isn't opening skulls, he studies, among other things, the relationship between memory and sleep. His work helped identify the phase of sleep during which the day’s memories are embedded in long-term memory. "This actually happens not while we are dreaming, as many initially thought, but during the very deep stages of sleep, which are characterized by slow and synchronized brain waves.
"Today, it is possible to stimulate the brain by applying a gentle, painless electrical current to the skull, thereby improving the synchronization of brain waves during the deep sleep stage, and, hopefully, improving memory."
Is this intended for people with memory disorders, or for everyone?
"From a regulatory perspective, treatments always begin with patients who have a clinical condition. At present, there is no approved indication for enhancing cognition in healthy individuals. What we can do is identify, through existing tests, people with mild memory impairment who are likely to progress to severe dementia, and we are already permitted to treat them.
"There are drugs for this today, and drugs too are invasive, so why not use brain stimulation to improve memory? It probably won’t cure the disease, but brain stimulation using implanted electrodes for Parkinson’s doesn’t cure the disease either. What it can do is give people an additional decade of meaningful function once drug treatment has been exhausted. So why should Parkinson’s be treated this way, but not dementia?
"In the future, when we can measure brain activity with high precision and stimulate it just as precisely from the outside, we may be able to do this non-invasively, and then expand the use of these products to much broader segments of the population."
You also found that people can process sound while they sleep. Does that mean that if someone tells us something at night, we’ll remember it the next day?
"The auditory neurons do work during sleep, although the feedback from the frontal lobe - the part that assigns meaning to what we hear - is apparently missing. There are studies that show that if you teach a certain piece of text with one type of music in the background, and another text with different music, and then play only one of these musical tracks at night, the next day you’ll remember the text associated with that track better than the other one. Perhaps this could become a way to strengthen positive memories over negative ones."
The surgery coming to Israel
Of all the interventions currently being explored in the lab, which one is closest to the market?
"At the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference, where the field’s major trends are set, the takeaway was that neurotech will be one of the leading domains in the medical and business world in the coming years. But now the goal is to find the killer app."
The reference is not to an app that kills people, that’s easy enough in this field, but to one that, as soon as it hits the market, instantly proves indispensable, and whose widespread adoption propels the entire field forward.
"Right now, the stated aim of most companies in the field is to enable people who are completely paralyzed, including those who have lost the ability to communicate, to express themselves directly from their brains to a computer," says Fried. "The main differences between companies today lie in the level of invasiveness. Neuralink wants to implant 100 ultra-thin threads in the brain, so tiny they’re almost invisible, which would deliver information from 1,000 neurons. That is an extraordinary amount of information and processing it will be extremely challenging.
"It’s difficult to compete with direct implantation in terms of accuracy and the speed of receiving information, but a company called Synchron is implanting a device inside a blood vessel leading to the brain, which records the activity not of specific neurons but of certain areas of the brain. This information is less accurate, but there will be many more patients who are willing to participate in such an experiment. One level above that is stimulation from the scalp and there is evidence that quite a lot can be achieved with that as well."
Meanwhile, in Israel, the first operation to implant electrodes using the method in which Fried specializes was performed a few weeks ago at Hadassah Hospital. "Ichilov is expected to adopt it as well," he says. "The extent to which the technology is implemented will ultimately depend on the health coverage package, as this technology is not cheap but its potential to transform the lives of patients with epilepsy and Parkinson’s is substantial, and it may also have relevance for post-traumatic stress disorder, a condition of profound significance for Israel today."
"We’re not built for that much information"
The institute Fried is founding at Reichman University will explore more than direct brain stimulation and hybrid brains. "We’re bringing together people from different disciplines to examine all kinds of aspects of the interaction between AI and the human brain. We will learn from the brain how AI can be improved, and vice versa."
Cybersecurity is also a relevant field in this context. "Ultimately, the brain is still a component with weaknesses, vulnerable to information. Therefore, malicious actors could exploit these weaknesses to inject harmful information. The fundamental question is how we optimize the information and how we control what enters the algorithms and brains. Information is the raw material on which both the brain and artificial intelligence operate, and it is also their product."
The problem of evil is one of the topics that has preoccupied Fried for the past three decades. In 1997, he published a seminal article on the subject in "The Lancet," and in 2021 he edited a book on the phenomenon titled The Brains That Pull the Triggers.
Fried examined the forces that enable "ordinary" people to join violent groups and commit horrific acts - a pattern he termed Syndrome E. His conclusion was that this process involves the cerebral cortex, precisely the part of the brain we associate with humanity and higher ideals. Fried described a process in which the first act of murder or abuse elicits strong emotional reactions in the perpetrator. But once they discover that such responses are unwelcome in their environment, they gradually learn to suppress those emotional signals, using the conceptual and ideological part of the brain.
"In recent years, we have seen that Syndrome E is spreading into virtual communities, meaning there is almost no limit to the number of people the syndrome can affect. At the same time, the overwhelming volume of information in the world fuels polarization - complete empathy within one’s own group and a complete absence of empathy outside it. To some extent, this reflects the brain’s vulnerability to information. We’re not built for that much information."
Is it possible to develop a cure for this?
"The cure is education. No one will take a pill to prevent themselves from becoming a murderous ideologue. But perhaps understanding the biological mechanisms can help develop educational tools."
"A magnet for scientists"
Fried does not yet know exactly which researchers he will recruit to the institute, but he does know that he is looking for a multidisciplinary team: "AI experts, psychologists, neuroscientists and also people who can manage the interface with industry. If, let’s say, we want to develop robots that are driven by the power of human thought, and I’m very much in favor of that, we will obviously also need engineers and even lawyers, who can define the boundaries of human responsibility.
"Scientists and doctors from Israel are leaving at a rate we have never seen before. It is a devastating erosion of Israel’s national value that has been unfolding over the past two years.
"Part of the idea behind establishing the institute is to create a magnet that will bring some of these people back to the country or prevent them from leaving, by establishing a research environment that is liberal and open."
Published by Globes, Israel business news - en.globes.co.il - on December 17, 2025.
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