Most people don't think advertising changes their behavior, but the numbers say the opposite. We're surprisingly naive about how easily influenced the human bra

Most people don't think advertising changes their behavior, but the numbers say the opposite. We're surprisingly naive about how easily influenced the human brain is. For this reason I'm extremely careful about what kinds of friends I keep. I might not have much control over how they influence me, but I can control the kinds of people I hang out with. The science of consciousness suggests, with the caveat that it's very early days, that we don't actually have free will, and are we really just the sum of our past environments and genetics interacting with our current environment. Your genetics and past are immutable, but your current environment can be changed, and that's likely the best chance you have of putting the future "you" on a good course. So watch what kind of inputs you feed into your brain computer, because those will determine the outputs. (I don't like to dwell on the no free will part, I find it useful to pretend I have an "I" and a free will, even if it may not be true.)