What Now? with Trevor Noah Emily McDonald: Can You Rewire Your Brain?
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Mar 19, 2026 
Emily McDonald, neuroscientist and creator EmOnTheBrain, studies neuroplasticity, addiction, and behavior change. She shares stories about quitting nicotine, how habits and cravings form, and training the brain for peak performance. Conversations touch on where neuroscience and spiritual practices meet, perception as brain construction, and simple first steps to shift self-talk and identity.
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Visualize Your Best Self Facing Specific Challenges
- Try visualizing your best self handling a specific challenge to train the pre-motor areas and reduce stress reactions.
- Emily recommends vivid resilience visualizations athletes and NASA use to pre-plan responses to obstacles.
Act Like Your Future Self To Close The Gap
- Do anchor who-you-want-to-be and compare habits to that identity to motivate change.
- Emily quit vaping by visualizing her future successful self who didn’t vape, closing the gap between current and desired identity.
How Emily Quit Vaping With Disgust Conditioning
- Emily shared she was addicted to nicotine and stopped by teaching her brain to feel disgust for vaping.
- She kept vapes in her car, created a pause before use, and sat with the gross feeling to retrain associations.
