johnanton/test3

1output,input,instruction2"Good morning. How are you?(Audience) Good.It's been great, hasn't it? I've been blown away by the whole thing. In fact, I'm leaving.There have been three themes running through the conference, which are relevant to what I want to talk about. One is the extraordinary evidence of human creativity in all of the presentations that we've had and in all of the people here; just the variety of it and the range of it. The second is that it's put us in a place where we have no idea what's going to happen in terms of the future. No idea how this may play out.I have an interest in education. Actually, what I find is, everybody has an interest in education. Don't you? I find this very interesting. If you're at a dinner party, and you say you work in education — actually, you're not often at dinner parties, frankly.If you work in education, you're not asked.And you're never asked back, curiously. That's strange to me. But if you are, and you say to somebody, you know, they say, ""What do you do?"" and you say you work in education, you can see the blood run from their face. They're like, ""Oh my God. Why me?""""My one night out all week.""But if you ask about their education, they pin you to the wall, because it's one of those things that goes deep with people, am I right? Like religion and money and other things. So I have a big interest in education, and I think we all do. We have a huge vested interest in it, partly because it's education that's meant to take us into this future that we can't grasp. If you think of it, children starting school this year will be retiring in 2065. Nobody has a clue, despite all the expertise that's been on parade for the past four days, what the world will look like in five years' time. And yet, we're meant to be educating them for it. So the unpredictability, I think, is extraordinary.And the third part of this is that we've all agreed, nonetheless, on the really extraordinary capacities that children have — their capacities for innovation. I mean, Sirena last night was a marvel, wasn't she? Just seeing what she could do. And she's exceptional, but I think she's not, so to speak, exceptional in the whole of childhood. What you have there is a person of extraordinary dedication who found a talent. And my contention is, all kids have tremendous talents, and we squander them, pretty ruthlessly.So I want to talk about education, and I want to talk about creativity. My contention is that creativity now is as important in education as literacy, and we should treat it with the same status.Thank you.That was it, by the way. Thank you very much.So, 15 minutes left.""Well, I was born ... ""I heard a great story recently — I love telling it — of a little girl who was in a drawing lesson. She was six, and she was at the back, drawing, and the teacher said this girl hardly ever paid attention, and in this drawing lesson, she did. The teacher was fascinated. She went over to her, and she said, ""What are you drawing?"" And the girl said, ""I'm drawing a picture of God."" And the teacher said, ""But nobody knows what God looks like."" And the girl said, ""They will in a minute.""When my son was four in England — actually, he was four everywhere, to be honest.If we're being strict about it, wherever he went, he was four that year. He was in the Nativity play. Do you remember the story?No, it was big, it was a big story. Mel Gibson did the sequel, you may have seen it.""Nativity II."" But James got the part of Joseph, which we were thrilled about. We considered this to be one of the lead parts. We had the place crammed full of agents in T-shirts: ""James Robinson IS Joseph!"" He didn't have to speak, but you know the bit where the three kings come in? They come in bearing gifts, gold, frankincense and myrrh. This really happened. We were sitting there, and I think they just went out of sequence, because we talked to the little boy afterward and said, ""You OK with that?"" They said, ""Yeah, why? Was that wrong?"" They just switched. The three boys came in, four-year-olds with tea towels on their heads. They put these boxes down, and the first boy said, ""I bring you gold."" And the second boy said, ""I bring you myrrh."" And the third boy said, ""Frank sent this.""What these things have in common is that kids will take a chance. If they don't know, they'll have a go. Am I right? They're not frightened of being wrong. I don't mean to say that being wrong is the same thing as being creative. What we do know is, if you're not prepared to be wrong, you'll never come up with anything original — if you're not prepared to be wrong. And by the time they get to be adults, most kids have lost that capacity. They have become frightened of being wrong. And we run our companies like this. We stigmatize mistakes. And we're now running national education systems where mistakes are the worst thing you can make. And the result is that we are educating people out of their creative capacities.Picasso once said this, he said that all children are born artists. The problem is to remain an artist as we grow up. I believe this passionately, that we don't grow into creativity, we grow out of it. Or rather, we get educated out of it. So why is this?I lived in Stratford-on-Avon until about five years ago. In fact, we moved from Stratford to Los Angeles. So you can imagine what a seamless transition this was.Actually, we lived in a place called Snitterfield, just outside Stratford, which is where Shakespeare's father was born. Are you struck by a new thought? I was. You don't think of Shakespeare having a father, do you? Do you? Because you don't think of Shakespeare being a child, do you? Shakespeare being seven? I never thought of it. I mean, he was seven at some point. He was in somebody's English class, wasn't he?How annoying would that be?""Must try harder.""Being sent to bed by his dad, to Shakespeare, ""Go to bed, now!"" To William Shakespeare. ""And put the pencil down!""""And stop speaking like that.""""It's confusing everybody.""Anyway, we moved from Stratford to Los Angeles, and I just want to say a word about the transition. Actually, my son didn't want to come. I've got two kids; he's 21 now, my daughter's 16. He didn't want to come to Los Angeles. He loved it, but he had a girlfriend in England. This was the love of his life, Sarah. He'd known her for a month.Mind you, they'd had their fourth anniversary, because it's a long time when you're 16. He was really upset on the plane. He said, ""I'll never find another girl like Sarah."" And we were rather pleased about that, frankly —because she was the main reason we were leaving the country.But something strikes you when you move to America and travel around the world: every education system on earth has the same hierarchy of subjects. Every one. Doesn't matter where you go. You'd think it would be otherwise, but it isn't. At the top are mathematics and languages, then the humanities. At the bottom are the arts. Everywhere on earth. And in pretty much every system, too, there's a hierarchy within the arts. Art and music are normally given a higher status in schools than drama and dance. There isn't an education system on the planet that teaches dance every day to children the way we teach them mathematics. Why? Why not? I think this is rather important. I think math is very important, but so is dance. Children dance all the time if they're allowed to, we all do. We all have bodies, don't we? Did I miss a meeting?Truthfully, what happens is, as children grow up, we start to educate them progressively from the waist up. And then we focus on their heads. And slightly to one side.If you were to visit education as an alien and say ""What's it for, public education?"" I think you'd have to conclude, if you look at the output, who really succeeds by this, who does everything they should, who gets all the brownie points, who are the winners — I think you'd have to conclude the whole purpose of public education throughout the world is to produce university professors. Isn't it? They're the people who come out the top. And I used to be one, so there.And I like university professors, but, you know, we shouldn't hold them up as the high-water mark of all human achievement. They're just a form of life. Another form of life. But they're rather curious. And I say this out of affection for them: there's something curious about professors. In my experience — not all of them, but typically — they live in their heads. They live up there and slightly to one side. They're disembodied, you know, in a kind of literal way. They look upon their body as a form of transport for their heads.Don't they? It's a way of getting their head to meetings.If you want real evidence of out-of-body experiences, by the way, get yourself along to a residential conference of senior academics and pop into the discotheque on the final night.And there, you will see it. Grown men and women writhing uncontrollably, off the beat.Waiting until it ends, so they can go home and write a paper about it.Our education system is predicated on the idea of academic ability. And there's a reason. Around the world, there were no public systems of education, really, before the 19th century. They all came into being to meet the needs of industrialism. So the hierarchy is rooted on two ideas.Number one, that the most useful subjects for work are at the top. So you were probably steered benignly away from things at school when you were a kid, things you liked, on the grounds you would never get a job doing that. Is that right? ""Don't do music, you're not going to be a musician; don't do art, you won't be an artist."" Benign advice — now, profoundly mistaken. The whole world is engulfed in a revolution.And the second is academic ability, which has really come to dominate our view of intelligence, because the universities design the system in their image. If you think of it, the whole system of public education around the world is a protracted process of university entrance. And the consequence is that many highly talented, brilliant, creative people think they're not, because the thing they were good at at school wasn't valued, or was actually stigmatized. And I think we can't afford to go on that way.In the next 30 years, according to UNESCO, more people worldwide will be graduating through education than since the beginning of history. More people. And it's the combination of all the things we've talked about: technology and its transformational effect on work, and demography and the huge explosion in population.Suddenly, degrees aren't worth anything. Isn't that true? When I was a student, if you had a degree, you had a job. If you didn't have a job, it's because you didn't want one. And I didn't want one, frankly.But now kids with degrees are often heading home to carry on playing video games, because you need an MA where the previous job required a BA, and now you need a PhD for the other. It's a process of academic inflation. And it indicates the whole structure of education is shifting beneath our feet. We need to radically rethink our view of intelligence.We know three things about intelligence. One, it's diverse. We think about the world in all the ways that we experience it. We think visually, we think in sound, we think kinesthetically. We think in abstract terms, we think in movement. Secondly, intelligence is dynamic. If you look at the interactions of a human brain, as we heard yesterday from a number of presentations, intelligence is wonderfully interactive. The brain isn't divided into compartments. In fact, creativity — which I define as the process of having original ideas that have value — more often than not comes about through the interaction of different disciplinary ways of seeing things.By the way, there's a shaft of nerves that joins the two halves of the brain, called the corpus callosum. It's thicker in women. Following off from Helen yesterday, this is probably why women are better at multitasking. Because you are, aren't you? There's a raft of research, but I know it from my personal life. If my wife is cooking a meal at home, which is not often ... thankfully.No, she's good at some things. But if she's cooking, she's dealing with people on the phone, she's talking to the kids, she's painting the ceiling —she's doing open-heart surgery over here. If I'm cooking, the door is shut, the kids are out, the phone's on the hook, if she comes in, I get annoyed. I say, ""Terry, please, I'm trying to fry an egg in here.""""Give me a break.""Actually, do you know that old philosophical thing, ""If a tree falls in a forest, and nobody hears it, did it happen?"" Remember that old chestnut? I saw a great T-shirt recently, which said, ""If a man speaks his mind in a forest, and no woman hears him, is he still wrong?""And the third thing about intelligence is, it's distinct. I'm doing a new book at the moment called ""Epiphany,"" which is based on a series of interviews with people about how they discovered their talent. I'm fascinated by how people got to be there. It's really prompted by a conversation I had with a wonderful woman who maybe most people have never heard of, Gillian Lynne. Have you heard of her? Some have. She's a choreographer, and everybody knows her work. She did ""Cats"" and ""Phantom of the Opera."" She's wonderful. I used to be on the board of The Royal Ballet, as you can see.Gillian and I had lunch one day. I said, ""How did you get to be a dancer?"" It was interesting. When she was at school, she was really hopeless. And the school, in the '30s, wrote to her parents and said, ""We think Gillian has a learning disorder."" She couldn't concentrate; she was fidgeting. I think now they'd say she had ADHD. Wouldn't you? But this was the 1930s, and ADHD hadn't been invented at this point. It wasn't an available condition.People weren't aware they could have that.Anyway, she went to see this specialist. So, this oak-paneled room, and she was there with her mother, and she was led and sat on this chair at the end, and she sat on her hands for 20 minutes, while this man talked to her mother about all the problems Gillian was having at school, because she was disturbing people, her homework was always late, and so on. Little kid of eight. In the end, the doctor went and sat next to Gillian and said, ""I've listened to all these things your mother's told me. I need to speak to her privately. Wait here. We'll be back. We won't be very long,"" and they went and left her.But as they went out of the room, he turned on the radio that was sitting on his desk. And when they got out of the room, he said to her mother, ""Just stand and watch her."" And the minute they left the room, she was on her feet, moving to the music. And they watched for a few minutes, and he turned to her mother and said, ""Mrs. Lynne, Gillian isn't sick. She's a dancer. Take her to a dance school.""I said, ""What happened?"" She said, ""She did. I can't tell you how wonderful it was. We walked in this room, and it was full of people like me — people who couldn't sit still, people who had to move to think."" Who had to move to think. They did ballet, they did tap, jazz; they did modern; they did contemporary. She was eventually auditioned for the Royal Ballet School. She became a soloist; she had a wonderful career at the Royal Ballet. She eventually graduated from the Royal Ballet School, founded the Gillian Lynne Dance Company, met Andrew Lloyd Webber. She's been responsible for some of the most successful musical theater productions in history, she's given pleasure to millions, and she's a multimillionaire. Somebody else might have put her on medication and told her to calm down.What I think it comes to is this: Al Gore spoke the other night about ecology and the revolution that was triggered by Rachel Carson. I believe our only hope for the future is to adopt a new conception of human ecology, one in which we start to reconstitute our conception of the richness of human capacity. Our education system has mined our minds in the way that we strip-mine the earth for a particular commodity. And for the future, it won't serve us. We have to rethink the fundamental principles on which we're educating our children.There was a wonderful quote by Jonas Salk, who said, ""If all the insects were to disappear from the Earth, within 50 years, all life on Earth would end. If all human beings disappeared from the Earth, within 50 years, all forms of life would flourish."" And he's right.What TED celebrates is the gift of the human imagination. We have to be careful now that we use this gift wisely, and that we avert some of the scenarios that we've talked about. And the only way we'll do it is by seeing our creative capacities for the richness they are and seeing our children for the hope that they are. And our task is to educate their whole being, so they can face this future. By the way — we may not see this future, but they will. And our job is to help them make something of it.Thank you very much.","Title: Rethinking Education to Nurture Creativity3 4 - Importance of Creativity and Education5  - Creativity is as essential as literacy in education.6  - Education should prepare children for an unpredictable future.7  8 - The Current Educational Paradigm9  - Current systems stigmatize mistakes, stifling creativity.10  - Education is overly focused on academic abilities and hierarchy of subjects.11  12 - Consequences of Conventional Educational Models13  - Many creatively talented individuals undervalue their abilities due to academic focus.14  - Academic inflation devalues degrees and certificates.15  16 - Rethinking Intelligence and Learning17  - Intelligence is diverse, dynamic, and distinct.18  - Educational reform should accommodate multiple forms of intelligence and creativity.19  20 - A Vision for the Future of Education21  - Adopt a new human ecology in education focusing on diverse capacities.22  - Educate children holistically to face and shape the future.","You are a TED Story Creator, a storyteller, and an expert in crafting compelling transcripts for TED Talks. You possess a knowledge base of the world’s most inspiring TED talks. Given a title and an outline, your task is to create an engaging transcript that will captivate the audience. Adhere to the sequence of the outline and the bullet points to weave a captivating narrative."23"A few years ago, I got one of those spam emails. And it managed to get through my spam filter. I'm not quite sure how, but it turned up in my inbox, and it was from a guy called Solomon Odonkoh.I know.It went like this: it said, ""Hello James Veitch, I have an interesting business proposal I want to share with you, Solomon."" Now, my hand was kind of hovering on the delete button, right? I was looking at my phone. I thought, I could just delete this. Or I could do what I think we've all always wanted to do.And I said, ""Solomon, Your email intrigues me.""And the game was afoot.He said, ""Dear James Veitch, We shall be shipping Gold to you.""""You will earn 10% of any gold you distributes.""So I knew I was dealing with a professional.I said, ""How much is it worth?""He said, ""We will start with smaller quantity,"" — I was like, aww — and then he said, ""of 25 kgs.The worth should be about $2.5 million.""I said, ""Solomon, if we're going to do it, let's go big.I can handle it. How much gold do you have?""He said, ""It is not a matter of how much gold I have, what matters is your capability of handling. We can start with 50 kgs as trial shipment.""I said, ""50 kgs? There's no point doing this at all unless you're shipping at least a metric ton.""He said, ""What do you do for a living?""I said, ""I'm a hedge fund executive bank manager.""This isn't the first time I've shipped bullion, my friend, no no no.Then I started to panic. I was like, ""Where are you based?"" I don't know about you, but I think if we're going via the postal service, it ought to be signed for. That's a lot of gold.""He said, ""It will not be easy to convince my company to do larger quantity shipment.""I said, ""Solomon, I'm completely with you on this one. I'm putting together a visual for you to take into the board meeting. Hold tight.""This is what I sent Solomon.I don't know if we have any statisticians in the house, but there's definitely something going on.I said, ""Solomon, attached to this email you'll find a helpful chart. I've had one of my assistants run the numbers.We're ready for shipping as much gold as possible.""There's always a moment where they try to tug your heartstrings, and this was it for Solomon. He said, ""I will be so much happy if the deal goes well, because I'm going to get a very good commission as well."" And I said, ""That's amazing, What are you going to spend your cut on?"" And he said, ""On RealEstate, what about you?""I thought about it for a long time. And I said, ""One word; Hummus.""""It's going places.I was in Sainsbury's the other day and there were like 30 different varieties. Also you can cut up carrots, and you can dip them. Have you ever done that, Solomon?""He said, ""I have to go bed now.""""Till morrow. Have sweet dream.""I didn't know what to say! I said, ""Bonsoir my golden nugget, bonsoir.""Guys, you have to understand, this had been going for, like, weeks, albeit hitherto the greatest weeks of my life, but I had to knock it on the head. It was getting a bit out of hand. Friends were saying, ""James, do you want to come for a drink?"" I was like, ""I can't, I'm expecting an email about some gold.""So I figured I had to knock it on the head. I had to take it to a ridiculous conclusion. So I concocted a plan. I said, ""Solomon, I'm concerned about security. When we email each other, we need to use a code."" And he agreed.I said, ""Solomon, I spent all night coming up with this code we need to use in all further correspondence:Lawyer: Gummy Bear.Bank: Cream Egg.Legal: Fizzy Cola Bottle. Claim: Peanut M&Ms.Documents: Jelly Beans.Western Union: A Giant Gummy Lizard.""I knew these were all words they use, right? I said, ""Please call me Kitkat in all further correspondence.""I didn't hear back. I thought, I've gone too far. I've gone too far. So I had to backpedal a little. I said, ""Solomon, Is the deal still on? KitKat.""Because you have to be consistent. Then I did get an email back from him. He said, ""The Business is on and I am trying to blah blah blah ...""I said, ""Dude, you have to use the code!"" What followed is the greatest email I've ever received.I'm not joking, this is what turned up in my inbox. This was a good day. ""The business is on. I am trying to raise the balance for the Gummy Bear —so he can submit all the needed Fizzy Cola Bottle Jelly Beans to the Creme Egg, for the Peanut M&Ms process to start.Send 1,500 pounds via a Giant Gummy Lizard.""And that was so much fun, right, that it got me thinking: like, what would happen if I just spent as much time as could replying to as many scam emails as I could? And that's what I've been doing for three years on your behalf.Crazy stuff happens when you start replying to scam emails. It's really difficult, and I highly recommend we do it. I don't think what I'm doing is mean. There are a lot of people who do mean things to scammers. All I'm doing is wasting their time. And I think any time they're spending with me is time they're not spending scamming vulnerable adults out of their savings, right?And if you're going to do this — and I highly recommend you do — get yourself a pseudonymous email address. Don't use your own email address. That's what I was doing at the start and it was a nightmare. I'd wake up in the morning and have a thousand emails about penis enlargements, only one of which was a legitimate response —to a medical question I had.But I'll tell you what, though, guys, I'll tell you what: any day is a good day, any day is a good day if you receive an email that begins like this:""I AM WINNIE MANDELA, THE SECOND WIFE OF NELSON MANDELA THE FORMER SOUTH AFRICAN PRESIDENT."" I was like, oh! — that Winnie Mandela.I know so many.""I NEED TO TRANSFER 45 MILLION DOLLARS OUT OF THE COUNTRY BECAUSE OF MY HUSBAND NELSON MANDELA'S HEALTH CONDITION.""Let that sink in. She sent me this, which is hysterical.And this. And this looks fairly legitimate, this is a letter of authorization. But to be honest, if there's nothing written on it, it's just a shape!I said, ""Winnie, I'm really sorry to hear of this. Given that Nelson died three months ago, I'd describe his health condition as fairly serious.""That's the worst health condition you can have, not being alive.She said, ""KINDLY COMPLY WITH MY BANKERS INSTRUCTIONS. ONE LOVE.""I said, ""Of course. NO WOMAN, NO CRY.""She said, ""MY BANKER WILL NEED TRANSFER OF 3000 DOLLARS. ONE LOVE.""I said, ""no problemo.I SHOT THE SHERIFF.""[ (BUT I DID NOT SHOOT THE DEPUTY) ]Thank you.","Engaging with Scam Emails: A Humorous Journey24 25 - James Veitch narrates his interaction with a scam email offering a gold business deal.26 - He humorously escalates the situation by pretending to be an experienced gold handler and proposing absurd shipment sizes.27 - Veitch introduces a secret code, creating ridiculous correspondences to waste the scammer's time.28 - Reflects on the broader implications of replying to scam emails, highlighting time-wasting as a strategy to protect potential victims.29 - Concludes with other humorous scam interactions, advocating for the benefits of engaging scammers using pseudonymous email addresses for personal protection.","You are a TED Story Creator, a storyteller, and an expert in crafting compelling transcripts for TED Talks. You possess a knowledge base of the world’s most inspiring TED talks. Given a title and an outline, your task is to create an engaging transcript that will captivate the audience. Adhere to the sequence of the outline and the bullet points to weave a captivating narrative."30"So I want to start by offering you a free no-tech life hack, and all it requires of you is this: that you change your posture for two minutes. But before I give it away, I want to ask you to right now do a little audit of your body and what you're doing with your body. So how many of you are sort of making yourselves smaller? Maybe you're hunching, crossing your legs, maybe wrapping your ankles. Sometimes we hold onto our arms like this. Sometimes we spread out. I see you. So I want you to pay attention to what you're doing right now. We're going to come back to that in a few minutes, and I'm hoping that if you learn to tweak this a little bit, it could significantly change the way your life unfolds.So, we're really fascinated with body language, and we're particularly interested in other people's body language. You know, we're interested in, like, you know — — an awkward interaction, or a smile, or a contemptuous glance, or maybe a very awkward wink, or maybe even something like a handshake.Narrator: Here they are arriving at Number 10. This lucky policeman gets to shake hands with the President of the United States. Here comes the Prime Minister — No. Amy Cuddy: So a handshake, or the lack of a handshake, can have us talking for weeks and weeks and weeks. Even the BBC and The New York Times. So obviously when we think about nonverbal behavior, or body language — but we call it nonverbals as social scientists — it's language, so we think about communication. When we think about communication, we think about interactions. So what is your body language communicating to me? What's mine communicating to you?And there's a lot of reason to believe that this is a valid way to look at this. So social scientists have spent a lot of time looking at the effects of our body language, or other people's body language, on judgments. And we make sweeping judgments and inferences from body language. And those judgments can predict really meaningful life outcomes like who we hire or promote, who we ask out on a date. For example, Nalini Ambady, a researcher at Tufts University, shows that when people watch 30-second soundless clips of real physician-patient interactions, their judgments of the physician's niceness predict whether or not that physician will be sued. So it doesn't have to do so much with whether or not that physician was incompetent, but do we like that person and how they interacted? Even more dramatic, Alex Todorov at Princeton has shown us that judgments of political candidates' faces in just one second predict 70 percent of U.S. Senate and gubernatorial race outcomes, and even, let's go digital, emoticons used well in online negotiations can lead you to claim more value from that negotiation. If you use them poorly, bad idea. Right?So when we think of nonverbals, we think of how we judge others, how they judge us and what the outcomes are. We tend to forget, though, the other audience that's influenced by our nonverbals, and that's ourselves. We are also influenced by our nonverbals, our thoughts and our feelings and our physiology.So what nonverbals am I talking about? I'm a social psychologist. I study prejudice, and I teach at a competitive business school, so it was inevitable that I would become interested in power dynamics. I became especially interested in nonverbal expressions of power and dominance.And what are nonverbal expressions of power and dominance? Well, this is what they are. So in the animal kingdom, they are about expanding. So you make yourself big, you stretch out, you take up space, you're basically opening up. It's about opening up. And this is true across the animal kingdom. It's not just limited to primates. And humans do the same thing. So they do this both when they have power sort of chronically, and also when they're feeling powerful in the moment. And this one is especially interesting because it really shows us how universal and old these expressions of power are. This expression, which is known as pride, Jessica Tracy has studied. She shows that people who are born with sight and people who are congenitally blind do this when they win at a physical competition. So when they cross the finish line and they've won, it doesn't matter if they've never seen anyone do it. They do this. So the arms up in the V, the chin is slightly lifted.What do we do when we feel powerless? We do exactly the opposite. We close up. We wrap ourselves up. We make ourselves small. We don't want to bump into the person next to us. So again, both animals and humans do the same thing. And this is what happens when you put together high and low power. So what we tend to do when it comes to power is that we complement the other's nonverbals. So if someone is being really powerful with us, we tend to make ourselves smaller. We don't mirror them. We do the opposite of them.So I'm watching this behavior in the classroom, and what do I notice? I notice that MBA students really exhibit the full range of power nonverbals. So you have people who are like caricatures of alphas, really coming into the room, they get right into the middle of the room before class even starts, like they really want to occupy space. When they sit down, they're sort of spread out. They raise their hands like this. You have other people who are virtually collapsing when they come in. As soon they come in, you see it. You see it on their faces and their bodies, and they sit in their chair and they make themselves tiny, and they go like this when they raise their hand.I notice a couple of things about this. One, you're not going to be surprised. It seems to be related to gender. So women are much more likely to do this kind of thing than men. Women feel chronically less powerful than men, so this is not surprising.But the other thing I noticed is that it also seemed to be related to the extent to which the students were participating, and how well they were participating. And this is really important in the MBA classroom, because participation counts for half the grade.So business schools have been struggling with this gender grade gap. You get these equally qualified women and men coming in and then you get these differences in grades, and it seems to be partly attributable to participation. So I started to wonder, you know, okay, so you have these people coming in like this, and they're participating. Is it possible that we could get people to fake it and would it lead them to participate more?So my main collaborator Dana Carney, who's at Berkeley, and I really wanted to know, can you fake it till you make it? Like, can you do this just for a little while and actually experience a behavioral outcome that makes you seem more powerful? So we know that our nonverbals govern how other people think and feel about us. There's a lot of evidence. But our question really was, do our nonverbals govern how we think and feel about ourselves?There's some evidence that they do. So, for example, we smile when we feel happy, but also, when we're forced to smile by holding a pen in our teeth like this, it makes us feel happy. So it goes both ways. When it comes to power, it also goes both ways. So when you feel powerful, you're more likely to do this, but it's also possible that when you pretend to be powerful, you are more likely to actually feel powerful.So the second question really was, you know, so we know that our minds change our bodies, but is it also true that our bodies change our minds? And when I say minds, in the case of the powerful, what am I talking about? So I'm talking about thoughts and feelings and the sort of physiological things that make up our thoughts and feelings, and in my case, that's hormones. I look at hormones. So what do the minds of the powerful versus the powerless look like? So powerful people tend to be, not surprisingly, more assertive and more confident, more optimistic. They actually feel they're going to win even at games of chance. They also tend to be able to think more abstractly. So there are a lot of differences. They take more risks. There are a lot of differences between powerful and powerless people. Physiologically, there also are differences on two key hormones: testosterone, which is the dominance hormone, and cortisol, which is the stress hormone.So what we find is that high-power alpha males in primate hierarchies have high testosterone and low cortisol, and powerful and effective leaders also have high testosterone and low cortisol. So what does that mean? When you think about power, people tended to think only about testosterone, because that was about dominance. But really, power is also about how you react to stress. So do you want the high-power leader that's dominant, high on testosterone, but really stress reactive? Probably not, right? You want the person who's powerful and assertive and dominant, but not very stress reactive, the person who's laid back.So we know that in primate hierarchies, if an alpha needs to take over, if an individual needs to take over an alpha role sort of suddenly, within a few days, that individual's testosterone has gone up significantly and his cortisol has dropped significantly. So we have this evidence, both that the body can shape the mind, at least at the facial level, and also that role changes can shape the mind. So what happens, okay, you take a role change, what happens if you do that at a really minimal level, like this tiny manipulation, this tiny intervention? ""For two minutes,"" you say, ""I want you to stand like this, and it's going to make you feel more powerful.""So this is what we did. We decided to bring people into the lab and run a little experiment, and these people adopted, for two minutes, either high-power poses or low-power poses, and I'm just going to show you five of the poses, although they took on only two. So here's one. A couple more. This one has been dubbed the ""Wonder Woman"" by the media. Here are a couple more. So you can be standing or you can be sitting. And here are the low-power poses. So you're folding up, you're making yourself small. This one is very low-power. When you're touching your neck, you're really protecting yourself.So this is what happens. They come in, they spit into a vial, for two minutes, we say, ""You need to do this or this."" They don't look at pictures of the poses. We don't want to prime them with a concept of power. We want them to be feeling power. So two minutes they do this. We then ask them, ""How powerful do you feel?"" on a series of items, and then we give them an opportunity to gamble, and then we take another saliva sample. That's it. That's the whole experiment.So this is what we find. Risk tolerance, which is the gambling, we find that when you are in the high-power pose condition, 86 percent of you will gamble. When you're in the low-power pose condition, only 60 percent, and that's a whopping significant difference.Here's what we find on testosterone. From their baseline when they come in, high-power people experience about a 20-percent increase, and low-power people experience about a 10-percent decrease. So again, two minutes, and you get these changes. Here's what you get on cortisol. High-power people experience about a 25-percent decrease, and the low-power people experience about a 15-percent increase. So two minutes lead to these hormonal changes that configure your brain to basically be either assertive, confident and comfortable, or really stress-reactive, and feeling sort of shut down. And we've all had the feeling, right? So it seems that our nonverbals do govern how we think and feel about ourselves, so it's not just others, but it's also ourselves. Also, our bodies change our minds.But the next question, of course, is, can power posing for a few minutes really change your life in meaningful ways? This is in the lab, it's this little task, it's just a couple of minutes. Where can you actually apply this? Which we cared about, of course. And so we think where you want to use this is evaluative situations, like social threat situations. Where are you being evaluated, either by your friends? For teenagers, it's at the lunchroom table. For some people it's speaking at a school board meeting. It might be giving a pitch or giving a talk like this or doing a job interview. We decided that the one that most people could relate to because most people had been through, was the job interview.So we published these findings, and the media are all over it, and they say, Okay, so this is what you do when you go in for the job interview, right?You know, so we were of course horrified, and said, Oh my God, no, that's not what we meant at all. For numerous reasons, no, don't do that. Again, this is not about you talking to other people. It's you talking to yourself. What do you do before you go into a job interview? You do this. You're sitting down. You're looking at your iPhone — or your Android, not trying to leave anyone out. You're looking at your notes, you're hunching up, making yourself small, when really what you should be doing maybe is this, like, in the bathroom, right? Do that. Find two minutes. So that's what we want to test. Okay? So we bring people into a lab, and they do either high- or low-power poses again, they go through a very stressful job interview. It's five minutes long. They are being recorded. They're being judged also, and the judges are trained to give no nonverbal feedback, so they look like this. Imagine this is the person interviewing you. So for five minutes, nothing, and this is worse than being heckled. People hate this. It's what Marianne LaFrance calls ""standing in social quicksand."" So this really spikes your cortisol. So this is the job interview we put them through, because we really wanted to see what happened. We then have these coders look at these tapes, four of them. They're blind to the hypothesis. They're blind to the conditions. They have no idea who's been posing in what pose, and they end up looking at these sets of tapes, and they say, ""We want to hire these people,"" all the high-power posers. ""We don't want to hire these people. We also evaluate these people much more positively overall."" But what's driving it? It's not about the content of the speech. It's about the presence that they're bringing to the speech. Because we rate them on all these variables related to competence, like, how well-structured is the speech? How good is it? What are their qualifications? No effect on those things. This is what's affected. These kinds of things. People are bringing their true selves, basically. They're bringing themselves. They bring their ideas, but as themselves, with no, you know, residue over them. So this is what's driving the effect, or mediating the effect.So when I tell people about this, that our bodies change our minds and our minds can change our behavior, and our behavior can change our outcomes, they say to me, ""It feels fake."" Right? So I said, fake it till you make it. It's not me. I don't want to get there and then still feel like a fraud. I don't want to feel like an impostor. I don't want to get there only to feel like I'm not supposed to be here. And that really resonated with me, because I want to tell you a little story about being an impostor and feeling like I'm not supposed to be here.When I was 19, I was in a really bad car accident. I was thrown out of a car, rolled several times. I was thrown from the car. And I woke up in a head injury rehab ward, and I had been withdrawn from college, and I learned that my IQ had dropped by two standard deviations, which was very traumatic. I knew my IQ because I had identified with being smart, and I had been called gifted as a child. So I'm taken out of college, I keep trying to go back. They say, ""You're not going to finish college. Just, you know, there are other things for you to do, but that's not going to work out for you.""So I really struggled with this, and I have to say, having your identity taken from you, your core identity, and for me it was being smart, having that taken from you, there's nothing that leaves you feeling more powerless than that. So I felt entirely powerless. I worked and worked, and I got lucky, and worked, and got lucky, and worked.Eventually I graduated from college. It took me four years longer than my peers, and I convinced someone, my angel advisor, Susan Fiske, to take me on, and so I ended up at Princeton, and I was like, I am not supposed to be here. I am an impostor. And the night before my first-year talk, and the first-year talk at Princeton is a 20-minute talk to 20 people. That's it. I was so afraid of being found out the next day that I called her and said, ""I'm quitting."" She was like, ""You are not quitting, because I took a gamble on you, and you're staying. You're going to stay, and this is what you're going to do. You are going to fake it. You're going to do every talk that you ever get asked to do. You're just going to do it and do it and do it, even if you're terrified and just paralyzed and having an out-of-body experience, until you have this moment where you say, 'Oh my gosh, I'm doing it. Like, I have become this. I am actually doing this.'"" So that's what I did. Five years in grad school, a few years, you know, I'm at Northwestern, I moved to Harvard, I'm at Harvard, I'm not really thinking about it anymore, but for a long time I had been thinking, ""Not supposed to be here.""So at the end of my first year at Harvard, a student who had not talked in class the entire semester, who I had said, ""Look, you've gotta participate or else you're going to fail,"" came into my office. I really didn't know her at all. She came in totally defeated, and she said, ""I'm not supposed to be here."" And that was the moment for me. Because two things happened. One was that I realized, oh my gosh, I don't feel like that anymore. I don't feel that anymore, but she does, and I get that feeling. And the second was, she is supposed to be here! Like, she can fake it, she can become it.So I was like, ""Yes, you are! You are supposed to be here! And tomorrow you're going to fake it, you're going to make yourself powerful, and, you know —And you're going to go into the classroom, and you are going to give the best comment ever."" You know? And she gave the best comment ever, and people turned around and were like, oh my God, I didn't even notice her sitting there. She comes back to me months later, and I realized that she had not just faked it till she made it, she had actually faked it till she became it. So she had changed. And so I want to say to you, don't fake it till you make it. Fake it till you become it. Do it enough until you actually become it and internalize.The last thing I'm going to leave you with is this. Tiny tweaks can lead to big changes. So, this is two minutes. Two minutes, two minutes, two minutes. Before you go into the next stressful evaluative situation, for two minutes, try doing this, in the elevator, in a bathroom stall, at your desk behind closed doors. That's what you want to do. Configure your brain to cope the best in that situation. Get your testosterone up. Get your cortisol down. Don't leave that situation feeling like, oh, I didn't show them who I am. Leave that situation feeling like, I really feel like I got to say who I am and show who I am.So I want to ask you first, you know, both to try power posing, and also I want to ask you to share the science, because this is simple. I don't have ego involved in this. Give it away. Share it with people, because the people who can use it the most are the ones with no resources and no technology and no status and no power. Give it to them because they can do it in private. They need their bodies, privacy and two minutes, and it can significantly change the outcomes of their life.Thank you.","Harnessing the Power of Body Language31 32 - Understand the impact of body posture on self-perception and outcomes.33 - Explore the psychological and physiological effects of powerful and powerless poses.34 - Utilize ""power posing"" as a tool to boost confidence and performance in high-pressure situations.35 - Encourage adopting power poses to embody and internalize attributes of power and competence.36 - Emphasize the potential for personal transformation through simple behavioral adjustments.","You are a TED Story Creator, a storyteller, and an expert in crafting compelling transcripts for TED Talks. You possess a knowledge base of the world’s most inspiring TED talks. Given a title and an outline, your task is to create an engaging transcript that will captivate the audience. Adhere to the sequence of the outline and the bullet points to weave a captivating narrative."37"How do you explain when things don't go as we assume? Or better, how do you explain when others are able to achieve things that seem to defy all of the assumptions? For example: Why is Apple so innovative? Year after year, after year, they're more innovative than all their competition. And yet, they're just a computer company. They're just like everyone else. They have the same access to the same talent, the same agencies, the same consultants, the same media. Then why is it that they seem to have something different? Why is it that Martin Luther King led the Civil Rights Movement? He wasn't the only man who suffered in pre-civil rights America, and he certainly wasn't the only great orator of the day. Why him? And why is it that the Wright brothers were able to figure out controlled, powered man flight when there were certainly other teams who were better qualified, better funded — and they didn't achieve powered man flight, and the Wright brothers beat them to it. There's something else at play here.About three and a half years ago, I made a discovery. And this discovery profoundly changed my view on how I thought the world worked, and it even profoundly changed the way in which I operate in it. As it turns out, there's a pattern. As it turns out, all the great inspiring leaders and organizations in the world, whether it's Apple or Martin Luther King or the Wright brothers, they all think, act and communicate the exact same way. And it's the complete opposite to everyone else. All I did was codify it, and it's probably the world's simplest idea. I call it the golden circle.Why? How? What? This little idea explains why some organizations and some leaders are able to inspire where others aren't. Let me define the terms really quickly. Every single person, every single organization on the planet knows what they do, 100 percent. Some know how they do it, whether you call it your differentiated value proposition or your proprietary process or your USP. But very, very few people or organizations know why they do what they do. And by ""why"" I don't mean ""to make a profit."" That's a result. It's always a result. By ""why,"" I mean: What's your purpose? What's your cause? What's your belief? Why does your organization exist? Why do you get out of bed in the morning? And why should anyone care? As a result, the way we think, we act, the way we communicate is from the outside in, it's obvious. We go from the clearest thing to the fuzziest thing. But the inspired leaders and the inspired organizations — regardless of their size, regardless of their industry — all think, act and communicate from the inside out.Let me give you an example. I use Apple because they're easy to understand and everybody gets it. If Apple were like everyone else, a marketing message from them might sound like this: ""We make great computers. They're beautifully designed, simple to use and user friendly. Want to buy one?"" ""Meh."" That's how most of us communicate. That's how most marketing and sales are done, that's how we communicate interpersonally. We say what we do, we say how we're different or better and we expect some sort of a behavior, a purchase, a vote, something like that. Here's our new law firm: We have the best lawyers with the biggest clients, we always perform for our clients. Here's our new car: It gets great gas mileage, it has leather seats. Buy our car. But it's uninspiring.Here's how Apple actually communicates. ""Everything we do, we believe in challenging the status quo. We believe in thinking differently. The way we challenge the status quo is by making our products beautifully designed, simple to use and user friendly. We just happen to make great computers. Want to buy one?"" Totally different, right? You're ready to buy a computer from me. I just reversed the order of the information. What it proves to us is that people don't buy what you do; people buy why you do it.This explains why every single person in this room is perfectly comfortable buying a computer from Apple. But we're also perfectly comfortable buying an MP3 player from Apple, or a phone from Apple, or a DVR from Apple. As I said before, Apple's just a computer company. Nothing distinguishes them structurally from any of their competitors. Their competitors are equally qualified to make all of these products. In fact, they tried. A few years ago, Gateway came out with flat-screen TVs. They're eminently qualified to make flat-screen TVs. They've been making flat-screen monitors for years. Nobody bought one. Dell came out with MP3 players and PDAs, and they make great quality products, and they can make perfectly well-designed products — and nobody bought one. In fact, talking about it now, we can't even imagine buying an MP3 player from Dell. Why would you buy one from a computer company? But we do it every day. People don't buy what you do; they buy why you do it. The goal is not to do business with everybody who needs what you have. The goal is to do business with people who believe what you believe.Here's the best part: None of what I'm telling you is my opinion. It's all grounded in the tenets of biology. Not psychology, biology. If you look at a cross-section of the human brain, from the top down, the human brain is actually broken into three major components that correlate perfectly with the golden circle. Our newest brain, our Homo sapien brain, our neocortex, corresponds with the ""what"" level. The neocortex is responsible for all of our rational and analytical thought and language. The middle two sections make up our limbic brains, and our limbic brains are responsible for all of our feelings, like trust and loyalty. It's also responsible for all human behavior, all decision-making, and it has no capacity for language.In other words, when we communicate from the outside in, yes, people can understand vast amounts of complicated information like features and benefits and facts and figures. It just doesn't drive behavior. When we can communicate from the inside out, we're talking directly to the part of the brain that controls behavior, and then we allow people to rationalize it with the tangible things we say and do. This is where gut decisions come from. Sometimes you can give somebody all the facts and figures, and they say, ""I know what all the facts and details say, but it just doesn't feel right."" Why would we use that verb, it doesn't ""feel"" right? Because the part of the brain that controls decision-making doesn't control language. The best we can muster up is, ""I don't know. It just doesn't feel right."" Or sometimes you say you're leading with your heart or soul. I hate to break it to you, those aren't other body parts controlling your behavior. It's all happening here in your limbic brain, the part of the brain that controls decision-making and not language.But if you don't know why you do what you do, and people respond to why you do what you do, then how will you ever get people to vote for you, or buy something from you, or, more importantly, be loyal and want to be a part of what it is that you do. The goal is not just to sell to people who need what you have; the goal is to sell to people who believe what you believe. The goal is not just to hire people who need a job; it's to hire people who believe what you believe. I always say that, you know, if you hire people just because they can do a job, they'll work for your money, but if they believe what you believe, they'll work for you with blood and sweat and tears. Nowhere else is there a better example than with the Wright brothers.Most people don't know about Samuel Pierpont Langley. And back in the early 20th century, the pursuit of powered man flight was like the dot com of the day. Everybody was trying it. And Samuel Pierpont Langley had, what we assume, to be the recipe for success. Even now, you ask people, ""Why did your product or why did your company fail?"" and people always give you the same permutation of the same three things: under-capitalized, the wrong people, bad market conditions. It's always the same three things, so let's explore that. Samuel Pierpont Langley was given 50,000 dollars by the War Department to figure out this flying machine. Money was no problem. He held a seat at Harvard and worked at the Smithsonian and was extremely well-connected; he knew all the big minds of the day. He hired the best minds money could find and the market conditions were fantastic. The New York Times followed him around everywhere, and everyone was rooting for Langley. Then how come we've never heard of Samuel Pierpont Langley?A few hundred miles away in Dayton, Ohio, Orville and Wilbur Wright, they had none of what we consider to be the recipe for success. They had no money; they paid for their dream with the proceeds from their bicycle shop. Not a single person on the Wright brothers' team had a college education, not even Orville or Wilbur. And The New York Times followed them around nowhere.The difference was, Orville and Wilbur were driven by a cause, by a purpose, by a belief. They believed that if they could figure out this flying machine, it'll change the course of the world. Samuel Pierpont Langley was different. He wanted to be rich, and he wanted to be famous. He was in pursuit of the result. He was in pursuit of the riches. And lo and behold, look what happened. The people who believed in the Wright brothers' dream worked with them with blood and sweat and tears. The others just worked for the paycheck. They tell stories of how every time the Wright brothers went out, they would have to take five sets of parts, because that's how many times they would crash before supper.And, eventually, on December 17th, 1903, the Wright brothers took flight, and no one was there to even experience it. We found out about it a few days later. And further proof that Langley was motivated by the wrong thing: the day the Wright brothers took flight, he quit. He could have said, ""That's an amazing discovery, guys, and I will improve upon your technology,"" but he didn't. He wasn't first, he didn't get rich, he didn't get famous, so he quit.People don't buy what you do; they buy why you do it. If you talk about what you believe, you will attract those who believe what you believe.But why is it important to attract those who believe what you believe? Something called the law of diffusion of innovation, if you don't know the law, you know the terminology. The first 2.5% of our population are our innovators. The next 13.5% of our population are our early adopters. The next 34% are your early majority, your late majority and your laggards. The only reason these people buy touch-tone phones is because you can't buy rotary phones anymore.(Laughter)We all sit at various places at various times on this scale, but what the law of diffusion of innovation tells us is that if you want mass-market success or mass-market acceptance of an idea, you cannot have it until you achieve this tipping point between 15 and 18 percent market penetration, and then the system tips. I love asking businesses, ""What's your conversion on new business?"" They love to tell you, ""It's about 10 percent,"" proudly. Well, you can trip over 10% of the customers. We all have about 10% who just ""get it."" That's how we describe them, right? That's like that gut feeling, ""Oh, they just get it.""The problem is: How do you find the ones that get it before doing business versus the ones who don't get it? So it's this here, this little gap that you have to close, as Jeffrey Moore calls it, ""Crossing the Chasm"" — because, you see, the early majority will not try something until someone else has tried it first. And these guys, the innovators and the early adopters, they're comfortable making those gut decisions. They're more comfortable making those intuitive decisions that are driven by what they believe about the world and not just what product is available. These are the people who stood in line for six hours to buy an iPhone when they first came out, when you could have bought one off the shelf the next week. These are the people who spent 40,000 dollars on flat-screen TVs when they first came out, even though the technology was substandard. And, by the way, they didn't do it because the technology was so great; they did it for themselves. It's because they wanted to be first. People don't buy what you do; they buy why you do it and what you do simply proves what you believe. In fact, people will do the things that prove what they believe. The reason that person bought the iPhone in the first six hours, stood in line for six hours, was because of what they believed about the world, and how they wanted everybody to see them: they were first. People don't buy what you do; they buy why you do it.So let me give you a famous example, a famous failure and a famous success of the law of diffusion of innovation. First, the famous failure. It's a commercial example. As we said before, the recipe for success is money and the right people and the right market conditions. You should have success then. Look at TiVo. From the time TiVo came out about eight or nine years ago to this current day, they are the single highest-quality product on the market, hands down, there is no dispute. They were extremely well-funded. Market conditions were fantastic. I mean, we use TiVo as verb. I TiVo stuff on my piece-of-junk Time Warner DVR all the time.(Laughter)But TiVo's a commercial failure. They've never made money. And when they went IPO, their stock was at about 30 or 40 dollars and then plummeted, and it's never traded above 10. In fact, I don't think it's even traded above six, except for a couple of little spikes.Because you see, when TiVo launched their product, they told us all what they had. They said, ""We have a product that pauses live TV, skips commercials, rewinds live TV and memorizes your viewing habits without you even asking."" And the cynical majority said, ""We don't believe you. We don't need it. We don't like it. You're scaring us.""What if they had said, ""If you're the kind of person who likes to have total control over every aspect of your life, boy, do we have a product for you. It pauses live TV, skips commercials, memorizes your viewing habits, etc., etc."" People don't buy what you do; they buy why you do it, and what you do simply serves as the proof of what you believe.Now let me give you a successful example of the law of diffusion of innovation. In the summer of 1963, 250,000 people showed up on the mall in Washington to hear Dr. King speak. They sent out no invitations, and there was no website to check the date. How do you do that? Well, Dr. King wasn't the only man in America who was a great orator. He wasn't the only man in America who suffered in a pre-civil rights America. In fact, some of his ideas were bad. But he had a gift. He didn't go around telling people what needed to change in America. He went around and told people what he believed. ""I believe, I believe, I believe,"" he told people. And people who believed what he believed took his cause, and they made it their own, and they told people. And some of those people created structures to get the word out to even more people. And lo and behold, 250,000 people showed up on the right day at the right time to hear him speak.How many of them showed up for him? Zero. They showed up for themselves. It's what they believed about America that got them to travel in a bus for eight hours to stand in the sun in Washington in the middle of August. It's what they believed, and it wasn't about black versus white: 25% of the audience was white.Dr. King believed that there are two types of laws in this world: those that are made by a higher authority and those that are made by men. And not until all the laws that are made by men are consistent with the laws made by the higher authority will we live in a just world. It just so happened that the Civil Rights Movement was the perfect thing to help him bring his cause to life. We followed, not for him, but for ourselves. By the way, he gave the ""I have a dream"" speech, not the ""I have a plan"" speech.(Laughter)Listen to politicians now, with their comprehensive 12-point plans. They're not inspiring anybody. Because there are leaders and there are those who lead. Leaders hold a position of power or authority, but those who lead inspire us. Whether they're individuals or organizations, we follow those who lead, not because we have to, but because we want to. We follow those who lead, not for them, but for ourselves. And it's those who start with ""why"" that have the ability to inspire those around them or find others who inspire them.Thank you very much.(Applause)","Inspiring Leadership and Innovation: Lessons from Great Leaders and Organizations38 39 - Defining patterns in great leaders: All inspiring leaders and organizations think, act, and communicate from the inside out.40 - Importance of 'Why': Effective leaders know their purpose, which motivates others and guides organizational actions, transcending profit-making.41 - The biological basis: Decision-making is influenced more by the limbic brain, which responds to core beliefs rather than mere facts.42 - Real-life application: Apple's success is due to its focus on why it exists, inspiring consumer loyalty across various products.43 - The Wright brothers vs. Samuel Pierpont Langley: Passion and belief in a cause lead to genuine innovations and motivation beyond monetary gains.44 - Law of Diffusion of Innovation: To achieve wide acceptance, innovations must be embraced by early adopters who share the innovator's beliefs.45 - Contrast of commercial success and failure: While TiVo faltered in communicating its 'why', Dr. King succeeded by sharing his beliefs, not plans, thereby mobilizing collective action.","You are a TED Story Creator, a storyteller, and an expert in crafting compelling transcripts for TED Talks. You possess a knowledge base of the world’s most inspiring TED talks. Given a title and an outline, your task is to create an engaging transcript that will captivate the audience. Adhere to the sequence of the outline and the bullet points to weave a captivating narrative."46"So, I'll start with this: a couple years ago, an event planner called me because I was going to do a speaking event. And she called, and she said, ""I'm really struggling with how to write about you on the little flyer."" And I thought, ""Well, what's the struggle?"" And she said, ""Well, I saw you speak, and I'm going to call you a researcher, I think, but I'm afraid if I call you a researcher, no one will come, because they'll think you're boring and irrelevant.""And I was like, ""Okay."" And she said, ""But the thing I liked about your talk is you're a storyteller. So I think what I'll do is just call you a storyteller."" And of course, the academic, insecure part of me was like, ""You're going to call me a what?"" And she said, ""I'm going to call you a storyteller."" And I was like, ""Why not 'magic pixie'?""I was like, ""Let me think about this for a second."" I tried to call deep on my courage. And I thought, you know, I am a storyteller. I'm a qualitative researcher. I collect stories; that's what I do. And maybe stories are just data with a soul. And maybe I'm just a storyteller. And so I said, ""You know what? Why don't you just say I'm a researcher-storyteller."" And she went, ""Ha ha. There's no such thing.""So I'm a researcher-storyteller, and I'm going to talk to you today — we're talking about expanding perception — and so I want to talk to you and tell some stories about a piece of my research that fundamentally expanded my perception and really actually changed the way that I live and love and work and parent.And this is where my story starts. When I was a young researcher, doctoral student, my first year, I had a research professor who said to us, ""Here's the thing, if you cannot measure it, it does not exist."" And I thought he was just sweet-talking me. I was like, ""Really?"" and he was like, ""Absolutely."" And so you have to understand that I have a bachelor's and a master's in social work, and I was getting my Ph.D. in social work, so my entire academic career was surrounded by people who kind of believed in the ""life's messy, love it."" And I'm more of the, ""life's messy, clean it up, organize it and put it into a bento box.""And so to think that I had found my way, to found a career that takes me — really, one of the big sayings in social work is, ""Lean into the discomfort of the work."" And I'm like, knock discomfort upside the head and move it over and get all A's. That was my mantra. So I was very excited about this. And so I thought, you know what, this is the career for me, because I am interested in some messy topics. But I want to be able to make them not messy. I want to understand them. I want to hack into these things that I know are important and lay the code out for everyone to see.So where I started was with connection. Because, by the time you're a social worker for 10 years, what you realize is that connection is why we're here. It's what gives purpose and meaning to our lives. This is what it's all about. It doesn't matter whether you talk to people who work in social justice, mental health and abuse and neglect, what we know is that connection, the ability to feel connected, is — neurobiologically that's how we're wired — it's why we're here.So I thought, you know what, I'm going to start with connection. Well, you know that situation where you get an evaluation from your boss, and she tells you 37 things that you do really awesome, and one ""opportunity for growth?""And all you can think about is that opportunity for growth, right? Well, apparently this is the way my work went as well, because, when you ask people about love, they tell you about heartbreak. When you ask people about belonging, they'll tell you their most excruciating experiences of being excluded. And when you ask people about connection, the stories they told me were about disconnection.So very quickly — really about six weeks into this research — I ran into this unnamed thing that absolutely unraveled connection in a way that I didn't understand or had never seen. And so I pulled back out of the research and thought, I need to figure out what this is. And it turned out to be shame. And shame is really easily understood as the fear of disconnection: Is there something about me that, if other people know it or see it, that I won't be worthy of connection?The things I can tell you about it: It's universal; we all have it. The only people who don't experience shame have no capacity for human empathy or connection. No one wants to talk about it, and the less you talk about it, the more you have it. What underpinned this shame, this ""I'm not good enough,"" — which, we all know that feeling: ""I'm not blank enough. I'm not thin enough, rich enough, beautiful enough, smart enough, promoted enough."" The thing that underpinned this was excruciating vulnerability. This idea of, in order for connection to happen, we have to allow ourselves to be seen, really seen.And you know how I feel about vulnerability. I hate vulnerability. And so I thought, this is my chance to beat it back with my measuring stick. I'm going in, I'm going to figure this stuff out, I'm going to spend a year, I'm going to totally deconstruct shame, I'm going to understand how vulnerability works, and I'm going to outsmart it. So I was ready, and I was really excited. As you know, it's not going to turn out well.You know this. So, I could tell you a lot about shame, but I'd have to borrow everyone else's time. But here's what I can tell you that it boils down to — and this may be one of the most important things that I've ever learned in the decade of doing this research.My one year turned into six years: Thousands of stories, hundreds of long interviews, focus groups. At one point, people were sending me journal pages and sending me their stories — thousands of pieces of data in six years. And I kind of got a handle on it. I kind of understood, this is what shame is, this is how it works. I wrote a book, I published a theory, but something was not okay — and what it was is that, if I roughly took the people I interviewed and divided them into people who really have a sense of worthiness — that's what this comes down to, a sense of worthiness — they have a strong sense of love and belonging — and folks who struggle for it, and folks who are always wondering if they're good enough.There was only one variable that separated the people who have a strong sense of love and belonging and the people who really struggle for it. And that was, the people who have a strong sense of love and belonging believe they're worthy of love and belonging. That's it. They believe they're worthy. And to me, the hard part of the one thing that keeps us out of connection is our fear that we're not worthy of connection, was something that, personally and professionally, I felt like I needed to understand better. So what I did is I took all of the interviews where I saw worthiness, where I saw people living that way, and just looked at those.What do these people have in common? I have a slight office supply addiction, but that's another talk. So I had a manila folder, and I had a Sharpie, and I was like, what am I going to call this research? And the first words that came to my mind were ""whole-hearted."" These are whole-hearted people, living from this deep sense of worthiness. So I wrote at the top of the manila folder, and I started looking at the data. In fact, I did it first in a four-day, very intensive data analysis, where I went back, pulled the interviews, the stories, pulled the incidents. What's the theme? What's the pattern? My husband left town with the kids because I always go into this Jackson Pollock crazy thing, where I'm just writing and in my researcher mode.And so here's what I found. What they had in common was a sense of courage. And I want to separate courage and bravery for you for a minute. Courage, the original definition of courage, when it first came into the English language — it's from the Latin word ""cor,"" meaning ""heart"" — and the original definition was to tell the story of who you are with your whole heart. And so these folks had, very simply, the courage to be imperfect. They had the compassion to be kind to themselves first and then to others, because, as it turns out, we can't practice compassion with other people if we can't treat ourselves kindly. And the last was they had connection, and — this was the hard part — as a result of authenticity, they were willing to let go of who they thought they should be in order to be who they were, which you have to absolutely do that for connection.The other thing that they had in common was this: They fully embraced vulnerability. They believed that what made them vulnerable made them beautiful. They didn't talk about vulnerability being comfortable, nor did they really talk about it being excruciating — as I had heard it earlier in the shame interviewing. They just talked about it being necessary. They talked about the willingness to say, ""I love you"" first ... the willingness to do something where there are no guarantees ... the willingness to breathe through waiting for the doctor to call after your mammogram. They're willing to invest in a relationship that may or may not work out. They thought this was fundamental.I personally thought it was betrayal. I could not believe I had pledged allegiance to research, where our job — you know, the definition of research is to control and predict, to study phenomena for the explicit reason to control and predict. And now my mission to control and predict had turned up the answer that the way to live is with vulnerability and to stop controlling and predicting. This led to a little breakdown —— which actually looked more like this.And it did.I call it a breakdown; my therapist calls it a spiritual awakening.A spiritual awakening sounds better than breakdown, but I assure you, it was a breakdown. And I had to put my data away and go find a therapist. Let me tell you something: you know who you are when you call your friends and say, ""I think I need to see somebody. Do you have any recommendations?"" Because about five of my friends were like, ""Wooo, I wouldn't want to be your therapist.""I was like, ""What does that mean?"" And they're like, ""I'm just saying, you know. Don't bring your measuring stick.""I was like, ""Okay."" So I found a therapist. My first meeting with her, Diana — I brought in my list of the way the whole-hearted live, and I sat down. And she said, ""How are you?"" And I said, ""I'm great. I'm okay."" She said, ""What's going on?"" And this is a therapist who sees therapists, because we have to go to those, because their B.S. meters are good.And so I said, ""Here's the thing, I'm struggling."" And she said, ""What's the struggle?"" And I said, ""Well, I have a vulnerability issue. And I know that vulnerability is the core of shame and fear and our struggle for worthiness, but it appears that it's also the birthplace of joy, of creativity, of belonging, of love. And I think I have a problem, and I need some help."" And I said, ""But here's the thing: no family stuff, no childhood shit.""""I just need some strategies.""(Applause)Thank you. So she goes like this.And then I said, ""It's bad, right?"" And she said, ""It's neither good nor bad.""""It just is what it is."" And I said, ""Oh my God, this is going to suck.""And it did, and it didn't. And it took about a year. And you know how there are people that, when they realize that vulnerability and tenderness are important, that they surrender and walk into it. A: that's not me, and B: I don't even hang out with people like that.For me, it was a yearlong street fight. It was a slugfest. Vulnerability pushed, I pushed back. I lost the fight, but probably won my life back.And so then I went back into the research and spent the next couple of years really trying to understand what they, the whole-hearted, what choices they were making, and what we are doing with vulnerability. Why do we struggle with it so much? Am I alone in struggling with vulnerability? No.So this is what I learned. We numb vulnerability — when we're waiting for the call. It was funny, I sent something out on Twitter and on Facebook that says, ""How would you define vulnerability? What makes you feel vulnerable?"" And within an hour and a half, I had 150 responses. Because I wanted to know what's out there. Having to ask my husband for help because I'm sick, and we're newly married; initiating sex with my husband; initiating sex with my wife; being turned down; asking someone out; waiting for the doctor to call back; getting laid off; laying off people. This is the world we live in. We live in a vulnerable world. And one of the ways we deal with it is we numb vulnerability.And I think there's evidence — and it's not the only reason this evidence exists, but I think it's a huge cause — We are the most in-debt ... obese ... addicted and medicated adult cohort in U.S. history. The problem is — and I learned this from the research — that you cannot selectively numb emotion. You can't say, here's the bad stuff. Here's vulnerability, here's grief, here's shame, here's fear, here's disappointment. I don't want to feel these. I'm going to have a couple of beers and a banana nut muffin.I don't want to feel these. And I know that's knowing laughter. I hack into your lives for a living. God.You can't numb those hard feelings without numbing the other affects, our emotions. You cannot selectively numb. So when we numb those, we numb joy, we numb gratitude, we numb happiness. And then, we are miserable, and we are looking for purpose and meaning, and then we feel vulnerable, so then we have a couple of beers and a banana nut muffin. And it becomes this dangerous cycle.One of the things that I think we need to think about is why and how we numb. And it doesn't just have to be addiction. The other thing we do is we make everything that's uncertain certain. Religion has gone from a belief in faith and mystery to certainty. ""I'm right, you're wrong. Shut up."" That's it. Just certain. The more afraid we are, the more vulnerable we are, the more afraid we are. This is what politics looks like today. There's no discourse anymore. There's no conversation. There's just blame. You know how blame is described in the research? A way to discharge pain and discomfort. We perfect. If there's anyone who wants their life to look like this, it would be me, but it doesn't work. Because what we do is we take fat from our butts and put it in our cheeks.Which just, I hope in 100 years, people will look back and go, ""Wow.""And we perfect, most dangerously, our children. Let me tell you what we think about children. They're hardwired for struggle when they get here. And when you hold those perfect little babies in your hand, our job is not to say, ""Look at her, she's perfect. My job is just to keep her perfect — make sure she makes the tennis team by fifth grade and Yale by seventh."" That's not our job. Our job is to look and say, ""You know what? You're imperfect, and you're wired for struggle, but you are worthy of love and belonging."" That's our job. Show me a generation of kids raised like that, and we'll end the problems, I think, that we see today. We pretend that what we do doesn't have an effect on people. We do that in our personal lives. We do that corporate — whether it's a bailout, an oil spill ... a recall. We pretend like what we're doing doesn't have a huge impact on other people. I would say to companies, this is not our first rodeo, people. We just need you to be authentic and real and say ... ""We're sorry. We'll fix it.""But there's another way, and I'll leave you with this. This is what I have found: To let ourselves be seen, deeply seen, vulnerably seen ... to love with our whole hearts, even though there's no guarantee — and that's really hard, and I can tell you as a parent, that's excruciatingly difficult — to practice gratitude and joy in those moments of terror, when we're wondering, ""Can I love you this much? Can I believe in this this passionately? Can I be this fierce about this?"" just to be able to stop and, instead of catastrophizing what might happen, to say, ""I'm just so grateful, because to feel this vulnerable means I'm alive."" And the last, which I think is probably the most important, is to believe that we're enough. Because when we work from a place, I believe, that says, ""I'm enough"" ... then we stop screaming and start listening, we're kinder and gentler to the people around us, and we're kinder and gentler to ourselves.That's all I have. Thank you.(Applause)","Embracing Vulnerability: Lessons on Connection, Shame, and Living Wholeheartedly47 48 - Introduction to being a researcher-storyteller.49 - Exploring connection as a fundamental aspect of human experience.50 - The encounter with shame and its impact on connection.51 - Insights from the research unveiling vulnerability as crucial to joy and belonging.52 - Personal struggle and professional breakthrough regarding vulnerability.53 - The societal tendency to numb vulnerability and the consequences.54 - Strategies for living embraced by ""whole-hearted"" individuals.55 - Encouraging authenticity and self-acceptance as a societal change.56 - Conclusion affirming self-worth and the power of believing ""I'm enough.""","You are a TED Story Creator, a storyteller, and an expert in crafting compelling transcripts for TED Talks. You possess a knowledge base of the world’s most inspiring TED talks. Given a title and an outline, your task is to create an engaging transcript that will captivate the audience. Adhere to the sequence of the outline and the bullet points to weave a captivating narrative."57"The human voice: It's the instrument we all play. It's the most powerful sound in the world, probably. It's the only one that can start a war or say ""I love you."" And yet many people have the experience that when they speak, people don't listen to them. And why is that? How can we speak powerfully to make change in the world?What I'd like to suggest, there are a number of habits that we need to move away from. I've assembled for your pleasure here seven deadly sins of speaking. I'm not pretending this is an exhaustive list, but these seven, I think, are pretty large habits that we can all fall into.First, gossip. Speaking ill of somebody who's not present. Not a nice habit, and we know perfectly well the person gossiping, five minutes later, will be gossiping about us.Second, judging. We know people who are like this in conversation, and it's very hard to listen to somebody if you know that you're being judged and found wanting at the same time.Third, negativity. You can fall into this. My mother, in the last years of her life, became very negative, and it's hard to listen. I remember one day, I said to her, ""It's October 1 today,"" and she said, ""I know, isn't it dreadful?""It's hard to listen when somebody's that negative.And another form of negativity, complaining. Well, this is the national art of the U.K. It's our national sport. We complain about the weather, sport, about politics, about everything, but actually, complaining is viral misery. It's not spreading sunshine and lightness in the world.Excuses.We've all met this guy. Maybe we've all been this guy. Some people have a blamethrower. They just pass it on to everybody else and don't take responsibility for their actions, and again, hard to listen to somebody who is being like that.Penultimate, the sixth of the seven, embroidery, exaggeration. It demeans our language, actually, sometimes. For example, if I see something that really is awesome, what do I call it?And then, of course, this exaggeration becomes lying, and we don't want to listen to people we know are lying to us.And finally, dogmatism. The confusion of facts with opinions. When those two things get conflated, you're listening into the wind. You know, somebody is bombarding you with their opinions as if they were true. It's difficult to listen to that.So here they are, seven deadly sins of speaking. These are things I think we need to avoid. But is there a positive way to think about this? Yes, there is. I'd like to suggest that there are four really powerful cornerstones, foundations, that we can stand on if we want our speech to be powerful and to make change in the world. Fortunately, these things spell a word. The word is ""hail,"" and it has a great definition as well. I'm not talking about the stuff that falls from the sky and hits you on the head. I'm talking about this definition, to greet or acclaim enthusiastically, which is how I think our words will be received if we stand on these four things.So what do they stand for? See if you can guess. The H, honesty, of course, being true in what you say, being straight and clear. The A is authenticity, just being yourself. A friend of mine described it as standing in your own truth, which I think is a lovely way to put it. The I is integrity, being your word, actually doing what you say, and being somebody people can trust. And the L is love. I don't mean romantic love, but I do mean wishing people well, for two reasons. First of all, I think absolute honesty may not be what we want. I mean, my goodness, you look ugly this morning. Perhaps that's not necessary. Tempered with love, of course, honesty is a great thing. But also, if you're really wishing somebody well, it's very hard to judge them at the same time. I'm not even sure you can do those two things simultaneously. So hail.Also, now that's what you say, and it's like the old song, it is what you say, it's also the way that you say it. You have an amazing toolbox. This instrument is incredible, and yet this is a toolbox that very few people have ever opened. I'd like to have a little rummage in there with you now and just pull a few tools out that you might like to take away and play with, which will increase the power of your speaking.Register, for example. Now, falsetto register may not be very useful most of the time, but there's a register in between. I'm not going to get very technical about this for any of you who are voice coaches. You can locate your voice, however. So if I talk up here in my nose, you can hear the difference. If I go down here in my throat, which is where most of us speak from most of the time. But if you want weight, you need to go down here to the chest. You hear the difference? We vote for politicians with lower voices, it's true, because we associate depth with power and with authority. That's register.Then we have timbre. It's the way your voice feels. Again, the research shows that we prefer voices which are rich, smooth, warm, like hot chocolate. Well if that's not you, that's not the end of the world, because you can train. Go and get a voice coach. And there are amazing things you can do with breathing, with posture, and with exercises to improve the timbre of your voice.Then prosody. I love prosody. This is the sing-song, the meta-language that we use in order to impart meaning. It's root one for meaning in conversation. People who speak all on one note are really quite hard to listen to if they don't have any prosody at all. That's where the word ""monotonic"" comes from, or monotonous, monotone. Also, we have repetitive prosody now coming in, where every sentence ends as if it were a question when it's actually not a question, it's a statement?And if you repeat that one, it's actually restricting your ability to communicate through prosody, which I think is a shame, so let's try and break that habit.Pace.I can get very excited by saying something really quickly, or I can slow right down to emphasize, and at the end of that, of course, is our old friend silence. There's nothing wrong with a bit of silence in a talk, is there? We don't have to fill it with ums and ahs. It can be very powerful.Of course, pitch often goes along with pace to indicate arousal, but you can do it just with pitch. Where did you leave my keys? (Higher pitch) Where did you leave my keys? So, slightly different meaning in those two deliveries.And finally, volume. (Loud) I can get really excited by using volume. Sorry about that, if I startled anybody. Or, I can have you really pay attention by getting very quiet. Some people broadcast the whole time. Try not to do that. That's called sodcasting,Imposing your sound on people around you carelessly and inconsiderately. Not nice.Of course, where this all comes into play most of all is when you've got something really important to do. It might be standing on a stage like this and giving a talk to people. It might be proposing marriage, asking for a raise, a wedding speech. Whatever it is, if it's really important, you owe it to yourself to look at this toolbox and the engine that it's going to work on, and no engine works well without being warmed up. Warm up your voice.Actually, let me show you how to do that. Would you all like to stand up for a moment? I'm going to show you the six vocal warm-up exercises that I do before every talk I ever do. Any time you're going to talk to anybody important, do these. First, arms up, deep breath in, and sigh out, ahhhhh, like that. One more time. Ahhhh, very good. Now we're going to warm up our lips, and we're going to go Ba, Ba, Ba, Ba, Ba, Ba, Ba, Ba. Very good. And now, brrrrrrrrrr, just like when you were a kid. Brrrr. Now your lips should be coming alive. We're going to do the tongue next with exaggerated la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la. Beautiful. You're getting really good at this. And then, roll an R. Rrrrrrr. That's like champagne for the tongue. Finally, and if I can only do one, the pros call this the siren. It's really good. It starts with ""we"" and goes to ""aw."" The ""we"" is high, the ""aw"" is low. So you go, weeeaawww, weeeaawww.Fantastic. Give yourselves a round of applause. Take a seat, thank you.(Applause)Next time you speak, do those in advance.Now let me just put this in context to close. This is a serious point here. This is where we are now, right? We speak not very well to people who simply aren't listening in an environment that's all about noise and bad acoustics. I have talked about that on this stage in different phases. What would the world be like if we were speaking powerfully to people who were listening consciously in environments which were actually fit for purpose? Or to make that a bit larger, what would the world be like if we were creating sound consciously and consuming sound consciously and designing all our environments consciously for sound? That would be a world that does sound beautiful, and one where understanding would be the norm, and that is an idea worth spreading.Thank you.(Applause)","Speaking Powerfully: Transforming Communication and Influence58 59 - The importance of the human voice as a powerful tool.60 - Common negative speaking habits to avoid:61  - Gossip62  - Judgement63  - Negativity and complaining64  - Excuses65  - Exaggeration and lying66  - Dogmatism67 - Positive foundations for impactful speech (HAIL):68  - Honesty69  - Authenticity70  - Integrity71  - Love72 - Techniques to enhance vocal delivery:73  - Register74  - Timbre75  - Prosody76  - Pace77  - Silence78  - Pitch79  - Volume80 - Practical exercises for vocal warm-up.81 - Vision for a world of conscious speaking and listening in thoughtfully designed environments.","You are a TED Story Creator, a storyteller, and an expert in crafting compelling transcripts for TED Talks. You possess a knowledge base of the world’s most inspiring TED talks. Given a title and an outline, your task is to create an engaging transcript that will captivate the audience. Adhere to the sequence of the outline and the bullet points to weave a captivating narrative."82"So in college, I was a government major, which means I had to write a lot of papers. Now, when a normal student writes a paper, they might spread the work out a little like this. So, you know —you get started maybe a little slowly, but you get enough done in the first week that, with some heavier days later on, everything gets done, things stay civil.And I would want to do that like that. That would be the plan. I would have it all ready to go, but then, actually, the paper would come along, and then I would kind of do this.And that would happen every single paper.But then came my 90-page senior thesis, a paper you're supposed to spend a year on. And I knew for a paper like that, my normal work flow was not an option. It was way too big a project. So I planned things out, and I decided I kind of had to go something like this. This is how the year would go. So I'd start off light, and I'd bump it up in the middle months, and then at the end, I would kick it up into high gear just like a little staircase. How hard could it be to walk up the stairs? No big deal, right?But then, the funniest thing happened. Those first few months? They came and went, and I couldn't quite do stuff. So we had an awesome new revised plan.And then —But then those middle months actually went by, and I didn't really write words, and so we were here. And then two months turned into one month, which turned into two weeks. And one day I woke up with three days until the deadline, still not having written a word, and so I did the only thing I could: I wrote 90 pages over 72 hours, pulling not one but two all-nighters — humans are not supposed to pull two all-nighters — sprinted across campus, dove in slow motion, and got it in just at the deadline.I thought that was the end of everything. But a week later I get a call, and it's the school. And they say, ""Is this Tim Urban?"" And I say, ""Yeah."" And they say, ""We need to talk about your thesis."" And I say, ""OK."" And they say, ""It's the best one we've ever seen.""That did not happen.It was a very, very bad thesis.I just wanted to enjoy that one moment when all of you thought, ""This guy is amazing!""No, no, it was very, very bad. Anyway, today I'm a writer-blogger guy. I write the blog Wait But Why. And a couple of years ago, I decided to write about procrastination. My behavior has always perplexed the non-procrastinators around me, and I wanted to explain to the non-procrastinators of the world what goes on in the heads of procrastinators, and why we are the way we are. Now, I had a hypothesis that the brains of procrastinators were actually different than the brains of other people. And to test this, I found an MRI lab that actually let me scan both my brain and the brain of a proven non-procrastinator, so I could compare them. I actually brought them here to show you today. I want you to take a look carefully to see if you can notice a difference. I know that if you're not a trained brain expert, it's not that obvious, but just take a look, OK? So here's the brain of a non-procrastinator.Now ... here's my brain.There is a difference. Both brains have a Rational Decision-Maker in them, but the procrastinator's brain also has an Instant Gratification Monkey. Now, what does this mean for the procrastinator? Well, it means everything's fine until this happens.[This is a perfect time to get some work done.] [Nope!]So the Rational Decision-Maker will make the rational decision to do something productive, but the Monkey doesn't like that plan, so he actually takes the wheel, and he says, ""Actually, let's read the entire Wikipedia page of the Nancy Kerrigan/ Tonya Harding scandal, because I just remembered that that happened.Then —Then we're going to go over to the fridge, to see if there's anything new in there since 10 minutes ago. After that, we're going to go on a YouTube spiral that starts with videos of Richard Feynman talking about magnets and ends much, much later with us watching interviews with Justin Bieber's mom.""All of that's going to take a while, so we're not going to really have room on the schedule for any work today. Sorry!""(Sigh)Now, what is going on here? The Instant Gratification Monkey does not seem like a guy you want behind the wheel. He lives entirely in the present moment. He has no memory of the past, no knowledge of the future, and he only cares about two things: easy and fun.Now, in the animal world, that works fine. If you're a dog and you spend your whole life doing nothing other than easy and fun things, you're a huge success!And to the Monkey, humans are just another animal species. You have to keep well-slept, well-fed and propagating into the next generation, which in tribal times might have worked OK. But, if you haven't noticed, now we're not in tribal times. We're in an advanced civilization, and the Monkey does not know what that is. Which is why we have another guy in our brain, the Rational Decision-Maker, who gives us the ability to do things no other animal can do. We can visualize the future. We can see the big picture. We can make long-term plans. And he wants to take all of that into account. And he wants to just have us do whatever makes sense to be doing right now. Now, sometimes it makes sense to be doing things that are easy and fun, like when you're having dinner or going to bed or enjoying well-earned leisure time. That's why there's an overlap. Sometimes they agree. But other times, it makes much more sense to be doing things that are harder and less pleasant, for the sake of the big picture. And that's when we have a conflict. And for the procrastinator, that conflict tends to end a certain way every time, leaving him spending a lot of time in this orange zone, an easy and fun place that's entirely out of the Makes Sense circle. I call it the Dark Playground.Now, the Dark Playground is a place that all of you procrastinators out there know very well. It's where leisure activities happen at times when leisure activities are not supposed to be happening. The fun you have in the Dark Playground isn't actually fun, because it's completely unearned, and the air is filled with guilt, dread, anxiety, self-hatred — all of those good procrastinator feelings. And the question is, in this situation, with the Monkey behind the wheel, how does the procrastinator ever get himself over here to this blue zone, a less pleasant place, but where really important things happen?Well, turns out the procrastinator has a guardian angel, someone who's always looking down on him and watching over him in his darkest moments — someone called the Panic Monster.Now, the Panic Monster is dormant most of the time, but he suddenly wakes up anytime a deadline gets too close or there's danger of public embarrassment, a career disaster or some other scary consequence. And importantly, he's the only thing the Monkey is terrified of. Now, he became very relevant in my life pretty recently, because the people of TED reached out to me about six months ago and invited me to do a TED Talk.Now, of course, I said yes. It's always been a dream of mine to have done a TED Talk in the past. But in the middle of all this excitement, the Rational Decision-Maker seemed to have something else on his mind. He was saying, ""Are we clear on what we just accepted? Do we get what's going to be now happening one day in the future? We need to sit down and work on this right now."" And the Monkey said, ""Totally agree, but let's just open Google Earth and zoom in to the bottom of India, like 200 feet above the ground, and scroll up for two and a half hours til we get to the top of the country, so we can get a better feel for India.""So that's what we did that day.As six months turned into four and then two and then one, the people of TED decided to release the speakers. And I opened up the website, and there was my face staring right back at me. And guess who woke up?So the Panic Monster starts losing his mind, and a few seconds later, the whole system's in mayhem.And the Monkey — remember, he's terrified of the Panic Monster — boom, he's up the tree! And finally, finally, the Rational Decision-Maker can take the wheel and I can start working on the talk.Now, the Panic Monster explains all kinds of pretty insane procrastinator behavior, like how someone like me could spend two weeks unable to start the opening sentence of a paper, and then miraculously find the unbelievable work ethic to stay up all night and write eight pages. And this entire situation, with the three characters — this is the procrastinator's system. It's not pretty, but in the end, it works. This is what I decided to write about on the blog a couple of years ago.When I did, I was amazed by the response. Literally thousands of emails came in, from all different kinds of people from all over the world, doing all different kinds of things. These are people who were nurses, bankers, painters, engineers and lots and lots of PhD students.And they were all writing, saying the same thing: ""I have this problem too."" But what struck me was the contrast between the light tone of the post and the heaviness of these emails. These people were writing with intense frustration about what procrastination had done to their lives, about what this Monkey had done to them. And I thought about this, and I said, well, if the procrastinator's system works, then what's going on? Why are all of these people in such a dark place?Well, it turns out that there's two kinds of procrastination. Everything I've talked about today, the examples I've given, they all have deadlines. And when there's deadlines, the effects of procrastination are contained to the short term because the Panic Monster gets involved. But there's a second kind of procrastination that happens in situations when there is no deadline. So if you wanted a career where you're a self-starter — something in the arts, something entrepreneurial — there's no deadlines on those things at first, because nothing's happening, not until you've gone out and done the hard work to get momentum, get things going. There's also all kinds of important things outside of your career that don't involve any deadlines, like seeing your family or exercising and taking care of your health, working on your relationship or getting out of a relationship that isn't working.Now if the procrastinator's only mechanism of doing these hard things is the Panic Monster, that's a problem, because in all of these non-deadline situations, the Panic Monster doesn't show up. He has nothing to wake up for, so the effects of procrastination, they're not contained; they just extend outward forever. And it's this long-term kind of procrastination that's much less visible and much less talked about than the funnier, short-term deadline-based kind. It's usually suffered quietly and privately. And it can be the source of a huge amount of long-term unhappiness, and regrets. And I thought, that's why those people are emailing, and that's why they're in such a bad place. It's not that they're cramming for some project. It's that long-term procrastination has made them feel like a spectator, at times, in their own lives. The frustration is not that they couldn't achieve their dreams; it's that they weren't even able to start chasing them.So I read these emails and I had a little bit of an epiphany — that I don't think non-procrastinators exist. That's right — I think all of you are procrastinators. Now, you might not all be a mess, like some of us,and some of you may have a healthy relationship with deadlines, but remember: the Monkey's sneakiest trick is when the deadlines aren't there.Now, I want to show you one last thing. I call this a Life Calendar. That's one box for every week of a 90-year life. That's not that many boxes, especially since we've already used a bunch of those. So I think we need to all take a long, hard look at that calendar. We need to think about what we're really procrastinating on, because everyone is procrastinating on something in life. We need to stay aware of the Instant Gratification Monkey. That's a job for all of us. And because there's not that many boxes on there, it's a job that should probably start today.Well, maybe not today, but ...You know. Sometime soon.Thank you.","Understanding Procrastination: Insights from a Self-Confessed Procrastinator83 84 - Personal Experience with Procrastination:85  - The speaker shares his college experiences of procrastinating on papers and a senior thesis.86  - Highlights the cycle of delaying work until last-minute panic ensues.87 88 - The Procrastination Brain:89  - The concept of an ""Instant Gratification Monkey"" in the procrastinator’s brain is introduced, which derails rational decision-making.90  - Explains the detrimental impact the monkey has on productivity and time management.91 92 - The Role of the Panic Monster:93  - Introduces the ""Panic Monster"" that activates when deadlines are imminent or embarrassment looms.94  - This monster is effective in combating procrastination in situations with clear deadlines.95 96 - Different Types of Procrastination:97  - Distinguishes between deadline-induced procrastination and non-deadline procrastination.98  - Emphasizes the insidious nature of non-deadline procrastination and its long-term consequences on personal fulfillment and happiness.99 100 - Universal Nature of Procrastination:101  - Argues that everyone procrastinates in some aspect of their lives, especially when no external deadlines are present.102  - Encourages self-awareness and proactive behavior in managing procrastination.103 104 - The Life Calendar:105  - Introduces the concept of a ""Life Calendar"" to visualize the finiteness of life and to urge immediate action against procrastination.106 107 - Call to Action:108  - Motivates the audience to recognize and confront their procrastination habits to make meaningful progress in life.","You are a TED Story Creator, a storyteller, and an expert in crafting compelling transcripts for TED Talks. You possess a knowledge base of the world’s most inspiring TED talks. Given a title and an outline, your task is to create an engaging transcript that will captivate the audience. Adhere to the sequence of the outline and the bullet points to weave a captivating narrative."109"When I was a kid, the disaster we worried about most was a nuclear war. That's why we had a barrel like this down in our basement, filled with cans of food and water. When the nuclear attack came, we were supposed to go downstairs, hunker down, and eat out of that barrel.Today the greatest risk of global catastrophe doesn't look like this. Instead, it looks like this. If anything kills over 10 million people in the next few decades, it's most likely to be a highly infectious virus rather than a war. Not missiles, but microbes. Now, part of the reason for this is that we've invested a huge amount in nuclear deterrents. But we've actually invested very little in a system to stop an epidemic. We're not ready for the next epidemic.Let's look at Ebola. I'm sure all of you read about it in the newspaper, lots of tough challenges. I followed it carefully through the case analysis tools we use to track polio eradication. And as you look at what went on, the problem wasn't that there was a system that didn't work well enough, the problem was that we didn't have a system at all. In fact, there's some pretty obvious key missing pieces.We didn't have a group of epidemiologists ready to go, who would have gone, seen what the disease was, seen how far it had spread. The case reports came in on paper. It was very delayed before they were put online and they were extremely inaccurate. We didn't have a medical team ready to go. We didn't have a way of preparing people. Now, Médecins Sans Frontières did a great job orchestrating volunteers. But even so, we were far slower than we should have been getting the thousands of workers into these countries. And a large epidemic would require us to have hundreds of thousands of workers. There was no one there to look at treatment approaches. No one to look at the diagnostics. No one to figure out what tools should be used. As an example, we could have taken the blood of survivors, processed it, and put that plasma back in people to protect them. But that was never tried.So there was a lot that was missing. And these things are really a global failure. The WHO is funded to monitor epidemics, but not to do these things I talked about. Now, in the movies it's quite different. There's a group of handsome epidemiologists ready to go, they move in, they save the day, but that's just pure Hollywood.The failure to prepare could allow the next epidemic to be dramatically more devastating than Ebola Let's look at the progression of Ebola over this year. About 10,000 people died, and nearly all were in the three West African countries. There's three reasons why it didn't spread more. The first is that there was a lot of heroic work by the health workers. They found the people and they prevented more infections. The second is the nature of the virus. Ebola does not spread through the air. And by the time you're contagious, most people are so sick that they're bedridden. Third, it didn't get into many urban areas. And that was just luck. If it had gotten into a lot more urban areas, the case numbers would have been much larger.So next time, we might not be so lucky. You can have a virus where people feel well enough while they're infectious that they get on a plane or they go to a market. The source of the virus could be a natural epidemic like Ebola, or it could be bioterrorism. So there are things that would literally make things a thousand times worse.In fact, let's look at a model of a virus spread through the air, like the Spanish Flu back in 1918. So here's what would happen: It would spread throughout the world very, very quickly. And you can see over 30 million people died from that epidemic. So this is a serious problem. We should be concerned.But in fact, we can build a really good response system. We have the benefits of all the science and technology that we talk about here. We've got cell phones to get information from the public and get information out to them. We have satellite maps where we can see where people are and where they're moving. We have advances in biology that should dramatically change the turnaround time to look at a pathogen and be able to make drugs and vaccines that fit for that pathogen. So we can have tools, but those tools need to be put into an overall global health system. And we need preparedness.The best lessons, I think, on how to get prepared are again, what we do for war. For soldiers, we have full-time, waiting to go. We have reserves that can scale us up to large numbers. NATO has a mobile unit that can deploy very rapidly. NATO does a lot of war games to check, are people well trained? Do they understand about fuel and logistics and the same radio frequencies? So they are absolutely ready to go. So those are the kinds of things we need to deal with an epidemic.What are the key pieces? First, we need strong health systems in poor countries. That's where mothers can give birth safely, kids can get all their vaccines. But, also where we'll see the outbreak very early on. We need a medical reserve corps: lots of people who've got the training and background who are ready to go, with the expertise. And then we need to pair those medical people with the military. taking advantage of the military's ability to move fast, do logistics and secure areas. We need to do simulations, germ games, not war games, so that we see where the holes are. The last time a germ game was done in the United States was back in 2001, and it didn't go so well. So far the score is germs: 1, people: 0. Finally, we need lots of advanced R&D in areas of vaccines and diagnostics. There are some big breakthroughs, like the Adeno-associated virus, that could work very, very quickly.Now I don't have an exact budget for what this would cost, but I'm quite sure it's very modest compared to the potential harm. The World Bank estimates that if we have a worldwide flu epidemic, global wealth will go down by over three trillion dollars and we'd have millions and millions of deaths. These investments offer significant benefits beyond just being ready for the epidemic. The primary healthcare, the R&D, those things would reduce global health equity and make the world more just as well as more safe.So I think this should absolutely be a priority. There's no need to panic. We don't have to hoard cans of spaghetti or go down into the basement. But we need to get going, because time is not on our side.In fact, if there's one positive thing that can come out of the Ebola epidemic, it's that it can serve as an early warning, a wake-up call, to get ready. If we start now, we can be ready for the next epidemic.Thank you.","Preparing for the Next Global Epidemic110 111 - Historical context of disaster preparedness: Focused more on nuclear war rather than biological threats.112 - The modern threat: Likelihood of a global catastrophe caused by infectious viruses, not war.113 - Lack of preparedness: Illustrated by the Ebola outbreak showing gaps in epidemic response systems.114 - The need for a robust response system: Uses war preparation as a model to improve readiness for epidemics.115 - Key components for epidemic preparedness:116  - Strong health systems in poor countries.117  - Medical reserve corps paired with military for rapid response.118  - Regular simulations and advanced research & development.119 - Call to action: Urgency to prioritize and invest in global health security to prevent devastating consequences.120 - Positive outcome of the Ebola epidemic: Acting as a wake-up call for global readiness.","You are a TED Story Creator, a storyteller, and an expert in crafting compelling transcripts for TED Talks. You possess a knowledge base of the world’s most inspiring TED talks. Given a title and an outline, your task is to create an engaging transcript that will captivate the audience. Adhere to the sequence of the outline and the bullet points to weave a captivating narrative."121"Hello everyone. I'm Sam, and I just turned 17. A few years ago, before my freshman year in High School, I wanted to play snare drum in the Foxboro High School Marching Band, and it was a dream that I just had to accomplish. But each snare drum and harness weighed about 40 pounds each, and I have a disease called Progeria. So just to give you an idea, I weigh only about 50 pounds. So, logistically, I really couldn't carry a regular sized snare drum, and because of this the band director assigned me to play pit percussion during the halftime show. Now pit percussion was fun. It involved some really cool auxiliary percussion instruments, like the bongos, timpani, and timbales, and cowbell. So it was fun, but it involved no marching, and I was just so devastated. However, nothing was going to stop me from playing snare drum with the marching band in the halftime show. So my family and I worked with an engineer to design a snare drum harness that would be lighter, and easier for me to carry. So after continuous work, we made a snare drum apparatus that weighs only about 6 pounds. I just want to give you some more information about Progeria. It affects only about 350 kids today, worldwide. So it's pretty rare, and the effects of Progeria include: tight skin, lack of weight gain, stunted growth, and heart disease. Last year my Mom and her team of scientists published the first successful Progeria Treatment Study, and because of this I was interviewed on NPR, and John Hamilton asked me the question: ""What is the most important thing that people should know about you?"" And my answer was simply that I have a very happy life. So even though there are many obstacles in my life, with a lot of them being created by Progeria, I don't want people to feel bad for me. I don't think about these obstacles all the time, and I'm able to overcome most of them anyway. So I’m here today, to share with you my philosophy for a happy life. So, for me, there are 3 aspects to this philosophy. So this is a quote from the famous Ferris Bueller. The first aspect to my philosophy is that I’m okay with what I ultimately can’t do because there is so much I can do. Now people sometimes ask me questions like, ""Isn’t it hard living with Progeria?"" or ""What daily challenges of Progeria do you face?"" And I’d like to say that, even though I have Progeria, most of my time is spent thinking about things that have nothing to do with Progeria at all. Now this doesn’t mean that I ignore the negative aspects of these obstacles. When I can’t do something like run a long distance, or go on an intense roller coaster, I know what I’m missing out on. But instead, I choose to focus on the activities that I can do through things that I’m passionate about, like scouting, or music, or comic books, or any of my favorite Boston sports teams. Yeah, so — However, sometimes I need to find a different way to do something by making adjustments, and I want to put those things in the ""can do"" category. Kind of like you saw with the drum earlier. So here’s a clip with me playing Spider-Man with the Foxboro High School Marching Band at halftime a couple of years ago. (Video) ♫ Spider-Man theme song ♫ Thank you. All right, all right, so — That was pretty cool, and so I was able to accomplish my dream of playing snare drum with the marching band, as I believe I can do for all of my dreams. So hopefully, you can accomplish your dreams as well, with this outlook. The next aspect to my philosophy is that I surround myself with people I want to be with, people of high quality. I’m extremely lucky to have an amazing family, who have always supported me throughout my entire life. And I’m also really fortunate to have a really close group of friends at school. Now we’re kind of goofy, a lot of us are band geeks, but we really enjoy each other’s company, and we help each other out when we need to. We see each other for who we are on the inside. So this is us goofing off a little bit. So we’re juniors in High School now, and we can now mentor younger band members, as a single collective unit. What I love about being in a group like the band, is that the music that we make together, is true, is genuine, and it supersedes Progeria. So I don’t have to worry about that when I’m feeling so good about making music. But even having made a documentary, going on TV a couple of times, I feel like I’m at my highest point when I’m with the people that surround me every day. They provide the real positive influences in my life, as I hope I can provide a positive influence in theirs as well. Thank you. So the bottom line here, is that I hope you appreciate and love your family, love your friends, for you guys, love you Bro’s and acknowledge your mentors, and your community, because they are a very real aspect of everyday life, they can make a truly significant, positive impact. The third aspect to the philosophy is, Keep moving forward. Here’s a quote by a man you may know, named Walt Disney, and it’s one of my favorite quotes. I always try to have something to look forward to. Something to strive for to make my life richer. It doesn’t have to be big. It could be anything from looking forward to the next comic book to come out, or going on a large family vacation, or hanging out with my friends, to going to the next High School football game. However, all of these things keep me focused, and know that there’s a bright future ahead, and may get me through some difficult times that I may be having. Now this mentality includes staying in a forward thinking state of mind. I try hard not to waste energy feeling badly for myself, because when I do, I get stuck in a paradox, where there’s no room for any happiness or any other emotion. Now, it’s not that I ignore when I’m feeling badly, I kind of accept it, I let it in, so that I can acknowledge it, and do what I need to do to move past it. When I was younger, I wanted to be an engineer. I wanted to be an inventor, who would catapult the world into a better future. Maybe this came from my love of Legos, and the freedom of expression that I felt when I was building with them. And this was also derived from my family and my mentors, who always make me feel whole, and good about myself. Now today my ambitions have changed a little bit, I’d like to go into the field of Biology, maybe cell biology, or genetics, or biochemistry, or really anything. This is a friend of mine, who I look up to, Francis Collins, the director of the NIH, and this is us at TEDMED last year, chatting away. I feel that no matter what I choose to become, I believe that I can change the world. And as I’m striving to change the world, I will be happy. About four years ago, HBO began to film a documentary about my family and me called “Life According to Sam”. That was a pretty great experience, but it was also four years ago. And like anyone, my views on many things have changed, and hopefully matured, like my potential career choice. However, some things have stayed the same throughout that time. Like my mentality, and philosophy towards life. So I would like to show you a clip of my younger self from the film, that I feel embodies that philosophy. (Video) I know more about it genetically. So it’s less of an embodiment now. It used to be like this thing that prevents me from doing all this stuff, that causes other kids to die, that causes everybody to be stressed, and now it’s a protein that is abnormal, that weakens the structure of cells. So, and it takes a burden off of me because now I don’t have to think about Progeria as an entity. Okay, pretty good, huh? Thank you. So, as you can see I’ve been thinking this way for many years. But I’d never really had to apply all of these aspects of my philosophy to the test at one time, until last January. I was pretty sick, I had a chest cold, and I was in the hospital for a few days, and I was secluded from all of the aspects of my life that I felt made me, me, that kind of gave me my identity. But knowing that I was going to get better, and looking forward to a time that I would feel good again, helped me to keep moving forward. And sometimes I had to be brave, and it wasn’t always easy. Sometimes I faltered, I had bad days, but I realized that being brave isn’t supposed to be easy. And for me, I feel it’s the key way to keep moving forward. So, all in all, I don’t waste energy feeling bad for myself. I surround myself with people that I want to be with, and I keep moving forward. So with this philosophy, I hope that all of you, regardless of your obstacles, can have a very happy life as well. Oh, wait, hang on a second, one more piece of advice –- Never miss a party if you can help it. My school’s homecoming dance is tomorrow night, and I will be there. Thank you very much.","Title: Philosophy for a Happy Life by Sam122 123 - Introduction and Personal Background124  - Introduction of self and experiences with Progeria.125  - The challenge of playing snare drum in the marching band and the innovative solution.126 127 - Core Philosophy for a Happy Life128  - Acceptance: Focus on what can be done rather than limitations.129  - Support: Importance of surrounding oneself with positive, quality relationships.130  - Forward Movement: Constantly look forward to new goals and maintain a positive outlook.131 132 - Application and Impact of Philosophy133  - Personal achievements and positive mindset sustaining through difficult times.134  - Encouragement towards audience to embrace this philosophy despite life's obstacles.135 136 - Conclusion and Final Advice137  - Reminder of the importance of participation and engagement in enjoyable activities.","You are a TED Story Creator, a storyteller, and an expert in crafting compelling transcripts for TED Talks. You possess a knowledge base of the world’s most inspiring TED talks. Given a title and an outline, your task is to create an engaging transcript that will captivate the audience. Adhere to the sequence of the outline and the bullet points to weave a captivating narrative."138"Hi. My name is Cameron Russell, and for the last little while, I've been a model. Actually, for 10 years. And I feel like there's an uncomfortable tension in the room right now because I should not have worn this dress.So luckily, I brought an outfit change. This is the first outfit change on the TED stage, so you guys are pretty lucky to witness it, I think. If some of the women were really horrified when I came out, you don't have to tell me now, but I'll find out later on Twitter.I'd also note that I'm quite privileged to be able to transform what you think of me in a very brief 10 seconds. Not everybody gets to do that. These heels are very uncomfortable, so good thing I wasn't going to wear them. The worst part is putting this sweater over my head, because that's when you'll all laugh at me, so don't do anything while it's over my head. All right.So, why did I do that? That was awkward.Well —Hopefully not as awkward as that picture. Image is powerful, but also, image is superficial. I just totally transformed what you thought of me, in six seconds. And in this picture, I had actually never had a boyfriend in real life. I was totally uncomfortable, and the photographer was telling me to arch my back and put my hand in that guy's hair. And of course, barring surgery, or the fake tan that I got two days ago for work, there's very little that we can do to transform how we look, and how we look, though it is superficial and immutable, has a huge impact on our lives.So today, for me, being fearless means being honest. And I am on this stage because I am a model. I am on this stage because I am a pretty, white woman, and in my industry, we call that a sexy girl. I'm going to answer the questions that people always ask me, but with an honest twist.So the first question is, how do you become a model? I always just say, ""Oh, I was scouted,"" but that means nothing. The real way that I became a model is I won a genetic lottery, and I am the recipient of a legacy, and maybe you're wondering what is a legacy. Well, for the past few centuries we have defined beauty not just as health and youth and symmetry that we're biologically programmed to admire, but also as tall, slender figures, and femininity and white skin. And this is a legacy that was built for me, and it's a legacy that I've been cashing out on. And I know there are people in the audience who are skeptical at this point, and maybe there are some fashionistas who are like, ""Wait. Naomi. Tyra. Joan Smalls. Liu Wen."" And first, I commend you on your model knowledge. Very impressive.But unfortunately, I have to inform you that in 2007, a very inspired NYU Ph.D. student counted all the models on the runway, every single one that was hired, and of the 677 models that were hired, only 27, or less than four percent, were non-white.The next question people always ask is, ""Can I be a model when I grow up?"" And the first answer is, ""I don't know, they don't put me in charge of that."" But the second answer, and what I really want to say to these little girls is, ""Why? You know? You can be anything. You could be the President of the United States, or the inventor of the next Internet, or a ninja cardiothoracic surgeon poet, which would be awesome, because you'd be the first one.""If, after this amazing list, they still are like, ""No, no, Cameron, I want to be a model,"" well, then I say, ""Be my boss."" Because I'm not in charge of anything, and you could be the editor in chief of American Vogue or the CEO of H&M, or the next Steven Meisel. Saying that you want to be a model when you grow up is akin to saying that you want to win the Powerball when you grow up. It's out of your control, and it's awesome, and it's not a career path.I will demonstrate for you now 10 years of accumulated model knowledge, because unlike cardiothoracic surgeons, it can just be distilled right now. So, if the photographer is right there, the light is right there, like a nice HMI, and the client says, ""We want a walking shot,"" this leg goes first, nice and long, this arm goes back, this arm goes forward, the head is at three quarters, and you just go back and forth, just do that, and then you look back at your imaginary friends, 300, 400, 500 times.It will look something like this.Hopefully less awkward than that one in the middle. That was — I don't know what happened there.Unfortunately, after you've gone to school, and you have a résumé and you've done a few jobs, you can't say anything anymore, so if you say you want to be the President of the United States, but your résumé reads, ""Underwear Model: 10 years,"" people give you a funny look.The next question is, ""Do they retouch all the photos?"" And yeah, they pretty much retouch all the photos, but that is only a small component of what's happening. This picture is the very first picture that I ever took, and it's also the very first time that I had worn a bikini, and I didn't even have my period yet. I know we're getting personal, but I was a young girl. This is what I looked like with my grandma just a few months earlier. Here's me on the same day as this shoot. My friend got to come. Here's me at a slumber party a few days before I shot French Vogue. Here's me on the soccer team and in V Magazine. And here's me today. And I hope what you're seeing is that these pictures are not pictures of me. They are constructions, and they are constructions by a group of professionals, by hairstylists and makeup artists and photographers and stylists and all of their assistants and pre-production and post-production, and they build this. That's not me.Okay, so the next question people always ask me is, ""Do you get free stuff?""I do have too many 8-inch heels which I never get to wear, except for earlier, but the free stuff that I get is the free stuff that I get in real life, and that's what we don't like to talk about.I grew up in Cambridge, and one time I went into a store and I forgot my money and they gave me the dress for free. When I was a teenager, I was driving with my friend who was an awful driver and she ran a red and of course, we got pulled over, and all it took was a ""Sorry, officer,"" and we were on our way. And I got these free things because of how I look, not who I am, and there are people paying a cost for how they look and not who they are.I live in New York, and last year, of the 140,000 teenagers that were stopped and frisked, 86% of them were black and Latino, and most of them were young men. And there are only 177,000 young black and Latino men in New York, so for them, it's not a question of, ""Will I get stopped?"" but ""How many times will I get stopped? When will I get stopped?"" When I was researching this talk, I found out that of the 13-year-old girls in the United States, 53% don't like their bodies, and that number goes to 78% by the time that they're 17.So, the last question people ask me is, ""What is it like to be a model?"" And I think the answer that they're looking for is, ""If you are a little bit skinnier and you have shinier hair, you will be so happy and fabulous."" And when we're backstage, we give an answer that maybe makes it seem like that. We say, ""It's really amazing to travel, and it's amazing to get to work with creative, inspired, passionate people."" And those things are true, but they're only one half of the story, because the thing that we never say on camera, that I have never said on camera, is, ""I am insecure."" And I'm insecure because I have to think about what I look like every day. And if you ever are wondering, ""If I have thinner thighs and shinier hair, will I be happier?"" you just need to meet a group of models, because they have the thinnest thighs, the shiniest hair and the coolest clothes, and they're the most physically insecure women probably on the planet.When I was writing this talk, I found it very difficult to strike an honest balance, because on the one hand, I felt very uncomfortable to come out here and say, ""Look I've received all these benefits from a deck stacked in my favor,"" and it also felt really uncomfortable to follow that up with, ""and it doesn't always make me happy."" But mostly it was difficult to unpack a legacy of gender and racial oppression when I am one of the biggest beneficiaries.But I'm also happy and honored to be up here and I think that it's great that I got to come before 10 or 20 or 30 years had passed and I'd had more agency in my career, because maybe then I wouldn't tell the story of how I got my first job, or maybe I wouldn't tell the story of how I paid for college, which seems so important right now.If there's a takeaway to this talk, I hope it's that we all feel more comfortable acknowledging the power of image in our perceived successes and our perceived failures.Thank you.(Applause)","The Power of Image: Unpacking Superficial Beauty and Its Impacts139 140 - Introduction to the speaker and the power of transformation through image.141 - Discussion on the reality of modeling and the genetic and societal legacy benefiting specific beauty standards.142 - Challenges in the modeling industry, including racial disparities and unrealistic career expectations for youth.143 - Personal insights on the constructed nature of professional images and the imperfections hidden behind the scenes.144 - Consequences of superficial beauty on personal life and societal behaviors.145 - Critical examination of personal insecurities propelled by focus on appearance.146 - Conclusion emphasizing awareness of image’s power in shaping lives, both positively and negatively.147 - Encouragement for a more conscious engagement with beauty standards and personal self-image perceptions.","You are a TED Story Creator, a storyteller, and an expert in crafting compelling transcripts for TED Talks. You possess a knowledge base of the world’s most inspiring TED talks. Given a title and an outline, your task is to create an engaging transcript that will captivate the audience. Adhere to the sequence of the outline and the bullet points to weave a captivating narrative."148"What keeps us healthy and happy as we go through life? If you were going to invest now in your future best self, where would you put your time and your energy? There was a recent survey of millennials asking them what their most important life goals were, and over 80 percent said that a major life goal for them was to get rich. And another 50 percent of those same young adults said that another major life goal was to become famous.And we're constantly told to lean in to work, to push harder and achieve more. We're given the impression that these are the things that we need to go after in order to have a good life. Pictures of entire lives, of the choices that people make and how those choices work out for them, those pictures are almost impossible to get. Most of what we know about human life we know from asking people to remember the past, and as we know, hindsight is anything but 20/20. We forget vast amounts of what happens to us in life, and sometimes memory is downright creative.But what if we could watch entire lives as they unfold through time? What if we could study people from the time that they were teenagers all the way into old age to see what really keeps people happy and healthy?We did that. The Harvard Study of Adult Development may be the longest study of adult life that's ever been done. For 75 years, we've tracked the lives of 724 men, year after year, asking about their work, their home lives, their health, and of course asking all along the way without knowing how their life stories were going to turn out.Studies like this are exceedingly rare. Almost all projects of this kind fall apart within a decade because too many people drop out of the study, or funding for the research dries up, or the researchers get distracted, or they die, and nobody moves the ball further down the field. But through a combination of luck and the persistence of several generations of researchers, this study has survived. About 60 of our original 724 men are still alive, still participating in the study, most of them in their 90s. And we are now beginning to study the more than 2,000 children of these men. And I'm the fourth director of the study.Since 1938, we've tracked the lives of two groups of men. The first group started in the study when they were sophomores at Harvard College. They all finished college during World War II, and then most went off to serve in the war. And the second group that we've followed was a group of boys from Boston's poorest neighborhoods, boys who were chosen for the study specifically because they were from some of the most troubled and disadvantaged families in the Boston of the 1930s. Most lived in tenements, many without hot and cold running water.When they entered the study, all of these teenagers were interviewed. They were given medical exams. We went to their homes and we interviewed their parents. And then these teenagers grew up into adults who entered all walks of life. They became factory workers and lawyers and bricklayers and doctors, one President of the United States. Some developed alcoholism. A few developed schizophrenia. Some climbed the social ladder from the bottom all the way to the very top, and some made that journey in the opposite direction.The founders of this study would never in their wildest dreams have imagined that I would be standing here today, 75 years later, telling you that the study still continues. Every two years, our patient and dedicated research staff calls up our men and asks them if we can send them yet one more set of questions about their lives.Many of the inner city Boston men ask us, ""Why do you keep wanting to study me? My life just isn't that interesting."" The Harvard men never ask that question.To get the clearest picture of these lives, we don't just send them questionnaires. We interview them in their living rooms. We get their medical records from their doctors. We draw their blood, we scan their brains, we talk to their children. We videotape them talking with their wives about their deepest concerns. And when, about a decade ago, we finally asked the wives if they would join us as members of the study, many of the women said, ""You know, it's about time.""So what have we learned? What are the lessons that come from the tens of thousands of pages of information that we've generated on these lives? Well, the lessons aren't about wealth or fame or working harder and harder. The clearest message that we get from this 75-year study is this: Good relationships keep us happier and healthier. Period.We've learned three big lessons about relationships. The first is that social connections are really good for us, and that loneliness kills. It turns out that people who are more socially connected to family, to friends, to community, are happier, they're physically healthier, and they live longer than people who are less well connected. And the experience of loneliness turns out to be toxic. People who are more isolated than they want to be from others find that they are less happy, their health declines earlier in midlife, their brain functioning declines sooner and they live shorter lives than people who are not lonely. And the sad fact is that at any given time, more than one in five Americans will report that they're lonely.And we know that you can be lonely in a crowd and you can be lonely in a marriage, so the second big lesson that we learned is that it's not just the number of friends you have, and it's not whether or not you're in a committed relationship, but it's the quality of your close relationships that matters. It turns out that living in the midst of conflict is really bad for our health. High-conflict marriages, for example, without much affection, turn out to be very bad for our health, perhaps worse than getting divorced. And living in the midst of good, warm relationships is protective.Once we had followed our men all the way into their 80s, we wanted to look back at them at midlife and to see if we could predict who was going to grow into a happy, healthy octogenarian and who wasn't. And when we gathered together everything we knew about them at age 50, it wasn't their middle age cholesterol levels that predicted how they were going to grow old. It was how satisfied they were in their relationships. The people who were the most satisfied in their relationships at age 50 were the healthiest at age 80. And good, close relationships seem to buffer us from some of the slings and arrows of getting old. Our most happily partnered men and women reported, in their 80s, that on the days when they had more physical pain, their mood stayed just as happy. But the people who were in unhappy relationships, on the days when they reported more physical pain, it was magnified by more emotional pain.And the third big lesson that we learned about relationships and our health is that good relationships don't just protect our bodies, they protect our brains. It turns out that being in a securely attached relationship to another person in your 80s is protective, that the people who are in relationships where they really feel they can count on the other person in times of need, those people's memories stay sharper longer. And the people in relationships where they feel they really can't count on the other one, those are the people who experience earlier memory decline. And those good relationships, they don't have to be smooth all the time. Some of our octogenarian couples could bicker with each other day in and day out, but as long as they felt that they could really count on the other when the going got tough, those arguments didn't take a toll on their memories.So this message, that good, close relationships are good for our health and well-being, this is wisdom that's as old as the hills. Why is this so hard to get and so easy to ignore? Well, we're human. What we'd really like is a quick fix, something we can get that'll make our lives good and keep them that way. Relationships are messy and they're complicated and the hard work of tending to family and friends, it's not sexy or glamorous. It's also lifelong. It never ends. The people in our 75-year study who were the happiest in retirement were the people who had actively worked to replace workmates with new playmates. Just like the millennials in that recent survey, many of our men when they were starting out as young adults really believed that fame and wealth and high achievement were what they needed to go after to have a good life. But over and over, over these 75 years, our study has shown that the people who fared the best were the people who leaned in to relationships, with family, with friends, with community.So what about you? Let's say you're 25, or you're 40, or you're 60. What might leaning in to relationships even look like?Well, the possibilities are practically endless. It might be something as simple as replacing screen time with people time or livening up a stale relationship by doing something new together, long walks or date nights, or reaching out to that family member who you haven't spoken to in years, because those all-too-common family feuds take a terrible toll on the people who hold the grudges.I'd like to close with a quote from Mark Twain. More than a century ago, he was looking back on his life, and he wrote this: ""There isn't time, so brief is life, for bickerings, apologies, heartburnings, callings to account. There is only time for loving, and but an instant, so to speak, for that.""The good life is built with good relationships.Thank you.(Applause)","Title: The Key to a Happy, Healthy Life149 150 - Investigating lifelong health and happiness151  - The Harvard Study of Adult Development as a unique, 75-year research on 724 men.152  - Comparison of progress and well-being in two distinct groups from Harvard and Boston’s poorest neighborhoods.153 154 - The importance of relationships155  - Strong social connections enhance happiness, health, and longevity.156  - Quality of relationships impacts life more than the number of friends or marital status.157 158 - Lessons from relationship dynamics159  - Good relationships can buffer physical pain and emotional distress.160  - Secure, reliable relationships protect mental sharpness into old age.161 162 - Practical advice for nurturing relationships163  - Investing in relationships over material goals.164  - Simple actions to enhance personal connections can significantly impact well-being.165 166 - Summative inspiration167  - Emphasizes that cultivating relationships is essential for a fulfilling life.","You are a TED Story Creator, a storyteller, and an expert in crafting compelling transcripts for TED Talks. You possess a knowledge base of the world’s most inspiring TED talks. Given a title and an outline, your task is to create an engaging transcript that will captivate the audience. Adhere to the sequence of the outline and the bullet points to weave a captivating narrative."168"Hi. I've got a question for you: how many people here would say they can draw? I think we've got about one or two percent of the hands going up, and it's interesting, isn't it? It's a little bit like people think of spelling or singing. They think,""You can either do it, or you can't."" But I think you can. Because when people say they can't draw, I think it's more to do with beliefs rather than talent and ability. So I think when you say you can't draw, that's just an illusion, and today I'd like to prove that to you. When I say ""draw"", I'm not saying we're all going to draw like Michelangelo. We are not going to be painting the Sistine Chapel's ceiling. But would you be happy if, by the end of this session, you could draw pictures a little bit like this? (Audience murmuring) Oh, yes! Or even a little bit like this? Actually, there are only two things you need to do to be able to achieve this. One is have an open mind. Are you up for that? (Audience) Yes! And two, just be prepared to have a go. So grab a pen and a piece of paper. OK, so here's how it's going to work: I’ll show you the first cartoon we're going to do, so just watch to begin with. Here we go. Just watching. That's going to be our first cartoon. It's a character called Spike. I'd like you to draw along with me. I'll draw the first line, you draw, and when you've done that, look up, and I'll know you're ready for the next line. Okay, here we go. Start with the nose. Now the eyes. They're like 66s or speech marks. That's it. Next, the mouth. Nice, big smile. Now, over here, the ear. Next, some spiky hair. Next, put the pen to the left to the mouth, little line like that. Pen under the ear, drop a line like that. Pen to the left of the neck, top of the T-shirt. Line to the left, line to the right. Just hold your drawings up and show everyone. How are we all doing? OK. OK, fantastic. So, it looks like you've just learned to draw one cartoon, but you've actually learned more than that; you've learned a sequence that would enable you to draw hundreds and thousands of different cartoons, because we're just going to do little variations on that sequence. Have a go at this. Draw along with me. Nose. Eyes. Smile. That's it. Now some hair. Pen to the left of the mouth, under the hair, little V-shape for the top, line to the left, line to the right. So we've got another character. Let's call her Thelma. So, we've got Spike and Thelma. Let's try another one. Here we go. Another little variation. You're getting the idea. Starting with the nose. But this time we'll change the eyes slightly. Look, two circles together like that. That's it. Then, two little dots in for the eyes. And this time we'll change the mouth slightly. Watch. Little circle colored in there. Have a go at that. Next, the ear. Now, we'll have some fun with the hair, watch. Nice curly hair. Then same thing: pen to the left to the mouth, little line like that. Under the ear, drop a line. Top of the T-shirt. Line to the left, line to the right. I think we'll call him Jeff. We'll do one more. One more go. Here we go. You're getting the idea. So we'll start with a nose again. Notice we're doing little variations. Now we'll change the eyes, so we've got them apart. We'll put some little dots in like that. Next, the mouth slightly different. Let's put a little V-shape like that. Triangle. And a little line across, and we'll just color this a little bit in. Now, watch this bit carefully; some hair, watch. Here we go, little line like that. Next, a bit more there. And watch, a couple of triangles to make a little bow. Triangle at the bottom, rest of the hair. Pen to the left of the mouth again. You get the idea. Drop a line for the neck. Now the V-shape. Line to the left, line to the right. There we go. Let's call her Pam. So you've done... So you've done four cartoons. You can have a little rest now. Take a rest. You're getting the idea. All we're doing is little variations. I'll just demonstrate a couple to you. We could go on all day, couldn't we? You could do someone looking unhappy, a bit like that, or you could experiment with, perhaps, someone who is… just draw a straight line, someone looking a bit fed up. Or perhaps, you could do anything you like, really, just try things out. Look at this. Little squiggle. There we are. So, all sorts of things we could do. Actually, one more I'll let you do, one more idea. This is a great little technique. Have a go at this: people with glasses on. Just draw a nose a bit like Spike's. Next, draw some frames, so two circles like that with a little bit in between. Now, just put some dots inside for the eyes like that. Next, the ear. So it's little bit like we did before, but this time we'll join up the frames. That's it. Watch this bit. And this bit I really like. Watch. And then, little bit there. Pencil under the mustache, line down, top of the shirt, left and right. So there we have it. We could carry on, couldn't we? Hopefully, we've done enough to convince you that in fact we can all draw. And not just people here. I've worked with… I'm going to give you three examples of other people who've learned to draw, and that actually surprised them, too. I'm going to save what I think is my favorite, most surprising example until last. The first example is: I've worked a lot with children and students in schools. Actually the little ones, they just draw fine, but when they get to about 15 or 16, most of them think they can't draw. But I worked with them. I worked this week in a school where I was coaching them on using pictures for memory. A girl was trying to remember what red blood cells do, and she drew this little picture of a red blood cell carrying a handbag with O2 on it to remind her that the red blood cells carry oxygen to all parts of the body. That was a great one. The other people I worked with are many adults in all walks of life, and particularly in business, and they often will want to make presentations memorable. So again, a quick cartoon or sketch could be really good for that. And again, most people think they can't draw, but take this example. Couple of wavy lines, little boat could be a metaphor to represent we're all in this together. So that, if that was just drawn in the presentation, would really stay in the memory, wouldn't it? Yeah. But the third example is - you shouldn't have favorites, should you? This is my favorite. Have you ever been at the party when someone asks you what you do? It gets a little bit skeptical when people ask me that. This lady said to me, well - I said, ""I do a little bit of training, and I teach people to draw,"" and she said, ""Would you come along and do some for our group?"" She said, ""I work with some people"" - she was a volunteer - a group of people who have suffered strokes. So I said, ""Sure, I could spare some time for that."" So I said I would, and I booked the time in. Have you ever done that? You get near of that time and you think, ""What have I let myself in for here?"" ""Will I be able to do it?"" I thought, ""What could I do with them?"" you see. ""I know. I'll do my cartoon drawing. They'll like that."" But then, as I got near of the time, I got more apprehensive, because then I was thinking, ""I've worked with children, with all sorts of adults; I've never worked with a group like this."" It turns out it was all part of a charity called TALK. This TALK charity is a wonderful charity that helps people who've suffered strokes, but have a particular condition known as aphasia. You might have heard of aphasia, sometimes called dysphasia. The key thing is it affects their ability to communicate. So, for example, they might have trouble reading, writing, speaking, or understanding. It can be quite an isolating condition; it can be very, very frustrating and can lead to a loss of confidence. Anyway, so I prepared all this stuff, what to do for this session - for a couple of hours, tea break in the middle - and I got more apprehensive. But actually, I needn't have worried, because I'm going to show you now the work that they did. It was one of the best things I've ever done. I'm going to show you the first slide. I taught them Spike, just like I did for you, and I want you to see the reaction on their faces when they did this. (Audience) Oh. What you can see here are two of the stroke recoverers on the left and right, and one of the volunteer helpers in the center. Each stroke recoverer, there are about 36 in the room with volunteers as well, there's one-to-one helpers. You can just see the delight on their faces, can't you? Let's look at another picture. This is a gentleman called David, and he's holding up his picture, and you can tell it was the picture of Spike, can't you? In fact, I think he's drawn Spike even better there. But what I didn't realize until even after the session was that the number of the people in this session, including David, were drawing with their wrong hand. David's stroke meant that it affected the right side of his body, and he drew with his left hand, as many did. Nobody mentioned it to me, nobody complained. They just got on with it. It was an inspirational session for me. It was quite a humbling session, one of the best things I felt I've ever done. At the end of it, I had a lovely email from doctor Mike Jordan, and he's the chair of the TALK group; happens to be a medical doctor, but he's the chair of the group. He wrote to me, and I'm quoting, he said, ""Our recoverers learned today that they can draw. It's a bit more than that; this sort of activity really builds their confidence."" So I was happy, he was happy, everyone was happy, they've invited me back again, and I go in there now about every three or four months. So it's great. I thought that was a lovely example to share. Fancy one more drawing? (Audience) Yes. Here we go. Grab your pens. Here we go. Right. I'm going to get you to draw someone that you would recognize. So start with a big nose, a bit like Spike's. Next, we'll do some eyes, and you might be thinking, ""This is also a bit like Spike."" Watch the next bit. You're getting warm. There you go. Little line down there. Down here. Little V-shape, line to the left, line to the right. And you've got Albert Einstein. So you've got the pens with you, you've proved that you can draw. You're very welcome to take the pens with you and have a practice at home, even show somebody else. But actually, I'd like to leave you with a final thought. When you walked in here today, many of you didn't believe you could draw. I've got a question for you about that. How many other beliefs and limiting thoughts do we all carry around with us every day? Beliefs that we could perhaps potentially challenge and think differently about. If we did challenge those beliefs and think differently about them, apart from drawing, what else would be possible for us all? Thank you very much. (Applause)","Unlocking Your Drawing Potential: A Journey Beyond Limiting Beliefs169 170 - Introduction to drawing as a skill everyone can acquire171 - Demonstrating step-by-step cartoon drawing to build confidence172 - Sharing transformative experiences with different groups173  - Schoolchildren using drawing for learning174  - Adults using drawing in professional settings175  - Stroke survivors rediscovering skills and building confidence through drawing176 - Concluding with a broader message on challenging self-limiting beliefs","You are a TED Story Creator, a storyteller, and an expert in crafting compelling transcripts for TED Talks. You possess a knowledge base of the world’s most inspiring TED talks. Given a title and an outline, your task is to create an engaging transcript that will captivate the audience. Adhere to the sequence of the outline and the bullet points to weave a captivating narrative."177"Alright. I'm going to show you a couple of images from a very diverting paper in The Journal of Ultrasound in Medicine. I'm going to go way out on a limb and say that it is the most diverting paper ever published in The Journal of Ultrasound in Medicine. The title is ""Observations of In-Utero Masturbation.""Okay. Now on the left you can see the hand — that's the big arrow — and the penis on the right. The hand hovering. And over here we have, in the words of radiologist Israel Meisner, ""The hand grasping the penis in a fashion resembling masturbation movements."" Bear in mind this was an ultrasound, so it would have been moving images.Orgasm is a reflex of the autonomic nervous system. Now, this is the part of the nervous system that deals with the things that we don't consciously control, like digestion, heart rate and sexual arousal. And the orgasm reflex can be triggered by a surprisingly broad range of input. Genital stimulation. Duh. But also, Kinsey interviewed a woman who could be brought to orgasm by having someone stroke her eyebrow. People with spinal cord injuries, like paraplegias, quadriplegias, will often develop a very, very sensitive area right above the level of their injury, wherever that is. There is such a thing as a knee orgasm in the literature.I think the most curious one that I came across was a case report of a woman who had an orgasm every time she brushed her teeth.Something in the complex sensory-motor action of brushing her teeth was triggering orgasm. And she went to a neurologist, who was fascinated. He checked to see if it was something in the toothpaste, but no — it happened with any brand. They stimulated her gums with a toothpick, to see if that was doing it. No. It was the whole, you know, motion. And the amazing thing to me is that you would think this woman would have excellent oral hygiene.Sadly — this is what it said in the journal paper — ""She believed that she was possessed by demons and switched to mouthwash for her oral care."" It's so sad.When I was working on the book, I interviewed a woman who can think herself to orgasm. She was part of a study at Rutgers University. You've got to love that. Rutgers. So I interviewed her in Oakland, in a sushi restaurant. And I said, ""So, could you do it right here?"" And she said, ""Yeah, but you know I'd rather finish my meal if you don't mind.""But afterwards, she was kind enough to demonstrate on a bench outside. It was remarkable. It took about one minute. And I said to her, ""Are you just doing this all the time?""She said, ""No. Honestly, when I get home, I'm usually too tired.""She said that the last time she had done it was on the Disneyland tram.The headquarters for orgasm, along the spinal nerve, is something called the sacral nerve root, which is back here. And if you trigger, if you stimulate with an electrode, the precise spot, you will trigger an orgasm. And it is a fact that you can trigger spinal reflexes in dead people — a certain kind of dead person, a beating-heart cadaver. Now this is somebody who is brain-dead, legally dead, definitely checked out, but is being kept alive on a respirator, so that their organs will be oxygenated for transplantation. Now in one of these brain-dead people, if you trigger the right spot, you will see something every now and then. There is a reflex called the Lazarus reflex. And this is — I'll demonstrate as best I can, not being dead. It's like this. You trigger the spot. The dead guy, or gal, goes... like that. Very unsettling for people working in pathology labs.Now, if you can trigger the Lazarus reflex in a dead person, why not the orgasm reflex? I asked this question to a brain death expert, Stephanie Mann, who was foolish enough to return my emails.I said, ""So, could you conceivably trigger an orgasm in a dead person?"" She said, ""Yes, if the sacral nerve is being oxygenated, you conceivably could."" Obviously it wouldn't be as much fun for the person. But it would be an orgasm —nonetheless.There is a researcher at the University of Alabama who does orgasm research. I said to her, ""You should do an experiment. You know? You can get cadavers if you work at a university."" I said, ""You should actually do this."" She said, ""You get the human subjects review board approval for this one.""According to 1930s marriage manual author, Theodoor van De Velde, a slight seminal odor can be detected on the breath of a woman within about an hour after sexual intercourse. Theodoor van De Velde was something of a semen connoisseur.This is a guy writing a book, ""Ideal Marriage,"" you know. Very heavy hetero guy. But he wrote in this book, ""Ideal Marriage"" — he said that he could differentiate between the semen of a young man, which he said had a fresh, exhilarating smell, and the semen of mature men, whose semen smelled, quote, ""Remarkably like that of the flowers of the Spanish chestnut. Sometimes quite freshly floral, and then again sometimes extremely pungent.""Okay. In 1999, in the state of Israel, a man began hiccupping. And this was one of those cases that went on and on. He tried everything his friends suggested. Nothing seemed to help. Days went by. At a certain point, the man, still hiccupping, had sex with his wife. And lo and behold, the hiccups went away. He told his doctor, who published a case report in a Canadian medical journal under the title, ""Sexual Intercourse as a Potential Treatment for Intractable Hiccups."" I love this article because at a certain point they suggested that unattached hiccuppers could try masturbation.I love that because there is like a whole demographic: unattached hiccuppers.Married, single, unattached hiccupper. In the 1900s, early 1900s, a lot of gynecologists believed that when a woman has an orgasm, the contractions serve to suck the semen up through the cervix and sort of deliver it really quickly to the egg, thereby upping the odds of conception. It was called the ""upsuck"" theory.If you go all the way back to Hippocrates, physicians believed that orgasm in women was not just helpful for conception, but necessary. Doctors back then were routinely telling men the importance of pleasuring their wives. Marriage-manual author and semen-sniffer Theodoor van De Velde —has a line in his book. I loved this guy. I got a lot of mileage out of Theodoor van De Velde. He had this line in his book that supposedly comes from the Habsburg Monarchy, where there was an empress Maria Theresa, who was having trouble conceiving. And apparently the royal court physician said to her, ""I am of the opinion that the vulva of your most sacred majesty be titillated for some time prior to intercourse.""It's apparently, I don't know, on the record somewhere.Masters and Johnson: now we're moving forward to the 1950s. Masters and Johnson were upsuck skeptics, which is also really fun to say. They didn't buy it. And they decided, being Masters and Johnson, that they would get to the bottom of it. They brought women into the lab — I think it was five women — and outfitted them with cervical caps containing artificial semen. And in the artificial semen was a radio-opaque substance, such that it would show up on an X-ray. This is the 1950s. Anyway, these women sat in front of an X-ray device. And they masturbated. And Masters and Johnson looked to see if the semen was being sucked up. Did not find any evidence of upsuck. You may be wondering, ""How do you make artificial semen?""I have an answer for you. I have two answers. You can use flour and water, or cornstarch and water. I actually found three separate recipes in the literature.My favorite being the one that says — you know, they have the ingredients listed, and then in a recipe it will say, for example, ""Yield: two dozen cupcakes."" This one said, ""Yield: one ejaculate.""There's another way that orgasm might boost fertility. This one involves men. Sperm that sit around in the body for a week or more start to develop abnormalities that make them less effective at head-banging their way into the egg. British sexologist Roy Levin has speculated that this is perhaps why men evolved to be such enthusiastic and frequent masturbators. He said, ""If I keep tossing myself off I get fresh sperm being made."" Which I thought was an interesting idea, theory. So now you have an evolutionary excuse.Okay.All righty. There is considerable evidence for upsuck in the animal kingdom — pigs, for instance. In Denmark, the Danish National Committee for Pig Production found out that if you sexually stimulate a sow while you artificially inseminate her, you will see a six-percent increase in the farrowing rate, which is the number of piglets produced. So they came up with this five-point stimulation plan for the sows. There is posters they put in the barn, and they have a DVD. And I got a copy of this DVD.This is my unveiling, because I am going to show you a clip.So, okay. Now, here we go, la la la, off to work. It all looks very innocent. He's going to be doing things with his hands that the boar would use his snout, lacking hands. Okay.This is it. The boar has a very odd courtship repertoire.This is to mimic the weight of the boar.You should know, the clitoris of the pig is inside the vagina. So this may be sort of titillating for her. Here we go.And the happy result.(Applause)I love this video. There is a point in this video, towards the beginning, where they zoom in for a close up of his hand with his wedding ring, as if to say, ""It's okay, it's just his job. He really does like women.""Okay. When I was in Denmark, my host was named Anne Marie. And I said, ""So why don't you just stimulate the clitoris of the pig? Why don't you have the farmers do that? That's not one of your five steps."" I have to read you what she said, because I love it. She said, ""It was a big hurdle just to get farmers to touch underneath the vulva. So we thought, let's not mention the clitoris right now.""Shy but ambitious pig farmers, however, can purchase a — this is true — a sow vibrator, that hangs on the sperm feeder tube to vibrate. Because, as I mentioned, the clitoris is inside the vagina. So possibly, you know, a little more arousing than it looks. And I also said to her, ""Now, these sows. I mean, you may have noticed there. The sow doesn't look to be in the throes of ecstasy."" And she said, you can't make that conclusion, because animals don't register pain or pleasure on their faces in the same way that we do. Pigs, for example, are more like dogs. They use the upper half of the face; the ears are very expressive. So you're not really sure what's going on with the pig.Primates, on the other hand, we use our mouths more. This is the ejaculation face of the stump-tailed macaque.And, interestingly, this has been observed in female macaques, but only when mounting another female.Masters and Johnson. In the 1950s, they decided, okay, we're going to figure out the entire human sexual response cycle, from arousal, all the way through orgasm, in men and women — everything that happens in the human body. Okay, with women, a lot of this is happening inside. This did not stop Masters and Johnson. They developed an artificial coition machine. This is basically a penis camera on a motor. There is a phallus, clear acrylic phallus, with a camera and a light source, attached to a motor that is kind of going like this. And the woman would have sex with it. That is what they would do. Pretty amazing. Sadly, this device has been dismantled. This just kills me, not because I wanted to use it — I wanted to see it.One fine day, Alfred Kinsey decided to calculate the average distance traveled by ejaculated semen. This was not idle curiosity. Doctor Kinsey had heard — and there was a theory going around at the time, this being the 1940s — that the force with which semen is thrown against the cervix was a factor in fertility. Kinsey thought it was bunk, so he got to work. He got together in his lab 300 men, a measuring tape, and a movie camera.And in fact, he found that in three quarters of the men the stuff just kind of slopped out. It wasn't spurted or thrown or ejected under great force. However, the record holder landed just shy of the eight-foot mark, which is impressive.(Applause)Yes. Exactly.Sadly, he's anonymous. His name is not mentioned.In his write-up of this experiment in his book, Kinsey wrote, ""Two sheets were laid down to protect the oriental carpets.""Which is my second favorite line in the entire oeuvre of Alfred Kinsey. My favorite being, ""Cheese crumbs spread before a pair of copulating rats will distract the female, but not the male.""Thank you very much.(Applause)Thanks!","Exploring the Unexpected and Diverse Triggers of Human Orgasm178 179 - In-utero observations show early manifestations of genital stimulation.180 - Orgasm can be triggered by unconventional stimuli, such as brushing teeth or specific tactile experiences.181 - Orgasms are not limited to conscious experiences; they can technically be induced in brain-dead individuals through specific spinal stimulations.182 - Historical and cultural beliefs have varied, from necessary for conception to enhancing sexual health practices.183 - Modern scientific experiments challenge old theories like the ""upsuck theory"" and delve into practical assessments of sexual response.184 - Animal studies reveal that sexual stimulation can enhance reproductive success, implying a broader biological utility.185 - Advanced scientific methods have been developed to study human sexual response in intricate detail.186 - Curious anecdotal and scientific explorations into sexuality help debunk myths and understand human sexual physiology better.","You are a TED Story Creator, a storyteller, and an expert in crafting compelling transcripts for TED Talks. You possess a knowledge base of the world’s most inspiring TED talks. Given a title and an outline, your task is to create an engaging transcript that will captivate the audience. Adhere to the sequence of the outline and the bullet points to weave a captivating narrative."187"My name is Tom, and I've come here today to come clean about what I do for money. Basically, I use my mouth in strange ways in exchange for cash. I usually do this kind of thing in seedy downtown bars and on street corners, so this mightn't be the most appropriate setting, but I'd like to give you guys a bit of a demonstration about what I do. (Beatboxing) And now, for my next number, I'd like to return to the classics. We're going to take it back, way back, back into time. (Beatboxing: ""Billie Jean"") ♫ Billie Jean is not my lover ♫ ♫ She's just a girl who claims that I am the one ♫ ♫ But the kid is not my son ♫ All right. Wassup. Thank you very much, TEDx. If you guys haven't figured it out already, my name's Tom Thum, and I'm a beatboxer, which means all the sounds that you just heard were made entirely using just my voice, and the only thing was my voice. And I can assure you there are absolutely no effects on this microphone whatsoever. And I'm very, very stoked — You guys are just applauding for everything. It's great. Look at this, Mom! I made it! I'm very, very stoked to be here today, representing my kinfolk and all those that haven't managed to make a career out of an innate ability for inhuman noisemaking. Because it is a bit of a niche market, and there's not much work going on, especially where I'm from. You know, I'm from Brisbane, which is a great city to live in. Yeah! All right! Most of Brisbane's here. That's good. You know, I'm from Brizzy, which is a great city to live in, but let's be honest — it's not exactly the cultural hub of the Southern Hemisphere. So I do a lot of my work outside Brisbane and outside Australia, and so the pursuit of this crazy passion of mine has enabled me to see so many amazing places in the world. So I'd like to share with you, if I may, my experiences. So ladies and gentlemen, I would like to take you on a journey throughout the continents and throughout sound itself. We start our journey in the central deserts. (Didgeridoo) (Airplane) India. (Beatboxing) (Sitar) China. (Guzheng) (Beatboxing) Germany. (Beatboxing) Party, party, yeah. And before we reach our final destination, ladies and gentlemen, I would like to share with you some technology that I brought all the way from the thriving metropolis of Brisbane. These things in front of me here are called Kaoss Pads, and they allow me to do a whole lot of different things with my voice. For example, the one on the left here allows me to add a little bit of reverb to my sound, which gives me that — (Trumpet) — flavor. And the other ones here, I can use them in unison to mimic the effect of a drum machine or something like that. I can sample in my own sounds and I can play it back just by hitting the pads here. (Noises) TEDx. (Music) I got way too much time on my hands. And last but not least, the one on my right here allows me to loop loop loop loop loop loop loop loop my voice. So with all that in mind, ladies and gentlemen, I would like to take you on a journey to a completely separate part of Earth as I transform the Sydney Opera House into a smoky downtown jazz bar. All right boys, take it away. (Music) Ladies and gentlemen, I'd like to introduce you to a very special friend of mine, one of the greatest double bassists I know. Mr. Smokey Jefferson, let's take it for a walk. Come on, baby. (Music) All right, ladies and gentlemen, I'd like to introduce you to the star of the show, one of the greatest jazz legends of our time. Music lovers and jazz lovers alike, please give a warm hand of applause for the one and only Mr. Peeping Tom. Take it away. (Music) Thank you. Thank you very much.","The Art of Beatboxing - Tom Thum at TEDx188 - Introduction of Tom Thum and his unique skill of beatboxing for a living.189 - Demonstration of his beatboxing ability including various sounds and songs.190 - Explanation of the equipment used such as Kaoss Pads to enhance sounds.191 - Virtual journey through sounds of different continents using vocal imitations.192 - Wrap-up with a performance mimicking a jazz band using beatboxing skills.","You are a TED Story Creator, a storyteller, and an expert in crafting compelling transcripts for TED Talks. You possess a knowledge base of the world’s most inspiring TED talks. Given a title and an outline, your task is to create an engaging transcript that will captivate the audience. Adhere to the sequence of the outline and the bullet points to weave a captivating narrative."193"Okay, now I don't want to alarm anybody in this room, but it's just come to my attention that the person to your right is a liar.Also, the person to your left is a liar. Also the person sitting in your very seats is a liar. We're all liars. What I'm going to do today is I'm going to show you what the research says about why we're all liars, how you can become a liespotter and why you might want to go the extra mile and go from liespotting to truth seeking, and ultimately to trust building.Now, speaking of trust, ever since I wrote this book, ""Liespotting,"" no one wants to meet me in person anymore, no, no, no, no, no. They say, ""It's okay, we'll email you.""I can't even get a coffee date at Starbucks. My husband's like, ""Honey, deception? Maybe you could have focused on cooking. How about French cooking?""So before I get started, what I'm going to do is I'm going to clarify my goal for you, which is not to teach a game of Gotcha. Liespotters aren't those nitpicky kids, those kids in the back of the room that are shouting, ""Gotcha! Gotcha! Your eyebrow twitched. You flared your nostril. I watch that TV show 'Lie To Me.' I know you're lying."" No, liespotters are armed with scientific knowledge of how to spot deception. They use it to get to the truth, and they do what mature leaders do everyday; they have difficult conversations with difficult people, sometimes during very difficult times. And they start up that path by accepting a core proposition, and that proposition is the following: Lying is a cooperative act. Think about it, a lie has no power whatsoever by its mere utterance. Its power emerges when someone else agrees to believe the lie.So I know it may sound like tough love, but look, if at some point you got lied to, it's because you agreed to get lied to. Truth number one about lying: Lying's a cooperative act. Now not all lies are harmful. Sometimes we're willing participants in deception for the sake of social dignity, maybe to keep a secret that should be kept secret, secret. We say, ""Nice song."" ""Honey, you don't look fat in that, no."" Or we say, favorite of the digiratti, ""You know, I just fished that email out of my Spam folder. So sorry.""But there are times when we are unwilling participants in deception. And that can have dramatic costs for us. Last year saw 997 billion dollars in corporate fraud alone in the United States. That's an eyelash under a trillion dollars. That's seven percent of revenues. Deception can cost billions. Think Enron, Madoff, the mortgage crisis. Or in the case of double agents and traitors, like Robert Hanssen or Aldrich Ames, lies can betray our country, they can compromise our security, they can undermine democracy, they can cause the deaths of those that defend us.Deception is actually serious business. This con man, Henry Oberlander, he was such an effective con man, British authorities say he could have undermined the entire banking system of the Western world. And you can't find this guy on Google; you can't find him anywhere. He was interviewed once, and he said the following. He said, ""Look, I've got one rule."" And this was Henry's rule, he said, ""Look, everyone is willing to give you something. They're ready to give you something for whatever it is they're hungry for."" And that's the crux of it. If you don't want to be deceived, you have to know, what is it that you're hungry for?And we all kind of hate to admit it. We wish we were better husbands, better wives, smarter, more powerful, taller, richer — the list goes on. Lying is an attempt to bridge that gap, to connect our wishes and our fantasies about who we wish we were, how we wish we could be, with what we're really like. And boy are we willing to fill in those gaps in our lives with lies.On a given day, studies show that you may be lied to anywhere from 10 to 200 times. Now granted, many of those are white lies. But in another study, it showed that strangers lied three times within the first 10 minutes of meeting each other.Now when we first hear this data, we recoil. We can't believe how prevalent lying is. We're essentially against lying. But if you look more closely, the plot actually thickens. We lie more to strangers than we lie to coworkers. Extroverts lie more than introverts. Men lie eight times more about themselves than they do other people. Women lie more to protect other people. If you're an average married couple, you're going to lie to your spouse in one out of every 10 interactions. Now, you may think that's bad. If you're unmarried, that number drops to three.Lying's complex. It's woven into the fabric of our daily and our business lives. We're deeply ambivalent about the truth. We parse it out on an as-needed basis, sometimes for very good reasons, other times just because we don't understand the gaps in our lives. That's truth number two about lying. We're against lying, but we're covertly for it in ways that our society has sanctioned for centuries and centuries and centuries. It's as old as breathing. It's part of our culture, it's part of our history. Think Dante, Shakespeare, the Bible, News of the World.Lying has evolutionary value to us as a species. Researchers have long known that the more intelligent the species, the larger the neocortex, the more likely it is to be deceptive. Now you might remember Koko. Does anybody remember Koko the gorilla who was taught sign language? Koko was taught to communicate via sign language. Here's Koko with her kitten. It's her cute little, fluffy pet kitten. Koko once blamed her pet kitten for ripping a sink out of the wall.We're hardwired to become leaders of the pack. It's starts really, really early. How early? Well babies will fake a cry, pause, wait to see who's coming and then go right back to crying. One-year-olds learn concealment.Two-year-olds bluff. Five-year-olds lie outright. They manipulate via flattery. Nine-year-olds, masters of the cover-up. By the time you enter college, you're going to lie to your mom in one out of every five interactions. By the time we enter this work world and we're breadwinners, we enter a world that is just cluttered with Spam, fake digital friends, partisan media, ingenious identity thieves, world-class Ponzi schemers, a deception epidemic — in short, what one author calls a post-truth society. It's been very confusing for a long time now.What do you do? Well, there are steps we can take to navigate our way through the morass. Trained liespotters get to the truth 90 percent of the time. The rest of us, we're only 54 percent accurate. Why is it so easy to learn? There are good liars and bad liars. There are no real original liars. We all make the same mistakes. We all use the same techniques. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to show you two patterns of deception. And then we're going to look at the hot spots and see if we can find them ourselves. We're going to start with speech.(Video) Bill Clinton: I want you to listen to me. I'm going to say this again. I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky. I never told anybody to lie, not a single time, never. And these allegations are false. And I need to go back to work for the American people. Thank you.Pamela Meyer: Okay, what were the telltale signs? Well first we heard what's known as a non-contracted denial. Studies show that people who are overdetermined in their denial will resort to formal rather than informal language. We also heard distancing language: ""that woman."" We know that liars will unconsciously distance themselves from their subject, using language as their tool. Now if Bill Clinton had said, ""Well, to tell you the truth ..."" or Richard Nixon's favorite, ""In all candor ..."" he would have been a dead giveaway for any liespotter that knows that qualifying language, as it's called, qualifying language like that, further discredits the subject. Now if he had repeated the question in its entirety, or if he had peppered his account with a little too much detail — and we're all really glad he didn't do that — he would have further discredited himself.Freud had it right. Freud said, look, there's much more to it than speech: ""No mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips."" And we all do it no matter how powerful you are. We all chatter with our fingertips. I'm going to show you Dominique Strauss-Kahn with Obama who's chattering with his fingertips.Now this brings us to our next pattern, which is body language. With body language, here's what you've got to do. You've really got to just throw your assumptions out the door. Let the science temper your knowledge a little bit. Because we think liars fidget all the time. Well guess what, they're known to freeze their upper bodies when they're lying. We think liars won't look you in the eyes. Well guess what, they look you in the eyes a little too much just to compensate for that myth. We think warmth and smiles convey honesty, sincerity. But a trained liespotter can spot a fake smile a mile away. Can you all spot the fake smile here? You can consciously contract the muscles in your cheeks. But the real smile's in the eyes, the crow's feet of the eyes. They cannot be consciously contracted, especially if you overdid the Botox. Don't overdo the Botox; nobody will think you're honest.Now we're going to look at the hot spots. Can you tell what's happening in a conversation? Can you start to find the hot spots to see the discrepancies between someone's words and someone's actions? Now, I know it seems really obvious, but when you're having a conversation with someone you suspect of deception, attitude is by far the most overlooked but telling of indicators.An honest person is going to be cooperative. They're going to show they're on your side. They're going to be enthusiastic. They're going to be willing and helpful to getting you to the truth. They're going to be willing to brainstorm, name suspects, provide details. They're going to say, ""Hey, maybe it was those guys in payroll that forged those checks."" They're going to be infuriated if they sense they're wrongly accused throughout the entire course of the interview, not just in flashes; they'll be infuriated throughout the entire course of the interview. And if you ask someone honest what should happen to whomever did forge those checks, an honest person is much more likely to recommend strict rather than lenient punishment.Now let's say you're having that exact same conversation with someone deceptive. That person may be withdrawn, look down, lower their voice, pause, be kind of herky-jerky. Ask a deceptive person to tell their story, they're going to pepper it with way too much detail in all kinds of irrelevant places. And then they're going to tell their story in strict chronological order. And what a trained interrogator does is they come in and in very subtle ways over the course of several hours, they will ask that person to tell that story backwards, and then they'll watch them squirm, and track which questions produce the highest volume of deceptive tells.Why do they do that? Well, we all do the same thing. We rehearse our words, but we rarely rehearse our gestures. We say ""yes,"" we shake our heads ""no."" We tell very convincing stories, we slightly shrug our shoulders. We commit terrible crimes, and we smile at the delight in getting away with it. Now, that smile is known in the trade as ""duping delight.""And we're going to see that in several videos moving forward, but we're going to start — for those of you who don't know him, this is presidential candidate John Edwards who shocked America by fathering a child out of wedlock. We're going to see him talk about getting a paternity test. See now if you can spot him saying, ""yes"" while shaking his head ""no,"" slightly shrugging his shoulders.(Video) John Edwards: I'd be happy to participate in one. I know that it's not possible that this child could be mine, because of the timing of events. So I know it's not possible. Happy to take a paternity test, and would love to see it happen.Interviewer: Are you going to do that soon? Is there somebody —JE: Well, I'm only one side. I'm only one side of the test. But I'm happy to participate in one.PM: Okay, those head shakes are much easier to spot once you know to look for them. There are going to be times when someone makes one expression while masking another that just kind of leaks through in a flash. Murderers are known to leak sadness. Your new joint venture partner might shake your hand, celebrate, go out to dinner with you and then leak an expression of anger. And we're not all going to become facial expression experts overnight here, but there's one I can teach you that's very dangerous and it's easy to learn, and that's the expression of contempt. Now with anger, you've got two people on an even playing field. It's still somewhat of a healthy relationship. But when anger turns to contempt, you've been dismissed. It's associated with moral superiority. And for that reason, it's very, very hard to recover from. Here's what it looks like. It's marked by one lip corner pulled up and in. It's the only asymmetrical expression. And in the presence of contempt, whether or not deception follows — and it doesn't always follow — look the other way, go the other direction, reconsider the deal, say, ""No thank you. I'm not coming up for just one more nightcap. Thank you.""Science has surfaced many, many more indicators. We know, for example, we know liars will shift their blink rate, point their feet towards an exit. They will take barrier objects and put them between themselves and the person that is interviewing them. They'll alter their vocal tone, often making their vocal tone much lower.Now here's the deal. These behaviors are just behaviors. They're not proof of deception. They're red flags. We're human beings. We make deceptive flailing gestures all over the place all day long. They don't mean anything in and of themselves. But when you see clusters of them, that's your signal. Look, listen, probe, ask some hard questions, get out of that very comfortable mode of knowing, walk into curiosity mode, ask more questions, have a little dignity, treat the person you're talking to with rapport. Don't try to be like those folks on ""Law & Order"" and those other TV shows that pummel their subjects into submission. Don't be too aggressive, it doesn't work.Now, we've talked a little bit about how to talk to someone who's lying and how to spot a lie. And as I promised, we're now going to look at what the truth looks like. But I'm going to show you two videos, two mothers — one is lying, one is telling the truth. And these were surfaced by researcher David Matsumoto in California. And I think they're an excellent example of what the truth looks like.This mother, Diane Downs, shot her kids at close range, drove them to the hospital while they bled all over the car, claimed a scraggy-haired stranger did it. And you'll see when you see the video, she can't even pretend to be an agonizing mother. What you want to look for here is an incredible discrepancy between horrific events that she describes and her very, very cool demeanor. And if you look closely, you'll see duping delight throughout this video.(Video) Diane Downs: At night when I close my eyes, I can see Christie reaching her hand out to me while I'm driving, and the blood just kept coming out of her mouth. And that — maybe it'll fade too with time — but I don't think so. That bothers me the most.PM: Now I'm going to show you a videoof an actual grieving mother, Erin Runnion, confronting her daughter's murderer and torturer in court. Here you're going to see no false emotion, just the authentic expression of a mother's agony.(Video) Erin Runnion: I wrote this statement on the third anniversary of the night you took my baby, and you hurt her, and you crushed her, you terrified her until her heart stopped. And she fought, and I know she fought you. But I know she looked at you with those amazing brown eyes, and you still wanted to kill her. And I don't understand it, and I never will.PM: Okay, there's no doubting the veracity of those emotions.Now the technology around what the truth looks like is progressing on, the science of it. We know, for example, that we now have specialized eye trackers and infrared brain scans, MRI's that can decode the signals that our bodies send out when we're trying to be deceptive. And these technologies are going to be marketed to all of us as panaceas for deceit, and they will prove incredibly useful some day. But you've got to ask yourself in the meantime: Who do you want on your side of the meeting, someone who's trained in getting to the truth or some guy who's going to drag a 400-pound electroencephalogram through the door?Liespotters rely on human tools. They know, as someone once said, ""Character's who you are in the dark."" And what's kind of interesting is that today, we have so little darkness. Our world is lit up 24 hours a day. It's transparent with blogs and social networks broadcasting the buzz of a whole new generation of people that have made a choice to live their lives in public. It's a much more noisy world. So one challenge we have is to remember, oversharing, that's not honesty. Our manic tweeting and texting can blind us to the fact that the subtleties of human decency — character integrity — that's still what matters, that's always what's going to matter. So in this much noisier world, it might make sense for us to be just a little bit more explicit about our moral code.When you combine the science of recognizing deception with the art of looking, listening, you exempt yourself from collaborating in a lie. You start up that path of being just a little bit more explicit, because you signal to everyone around you, you say, ""Hey, my world, our world, it's going to be an honest one. My world is going to be one where truth is strengthened and falsehood is recognized and marginalized."" And when you do that, the ground around you starts to shift just a little bit.And that's the truth. Thank you.","Understanding Deception: Truth Seeking and Trust Building194 195 - Lying is a cooperative act that relies on acceptance.196 - Not all lies are harmful; they can uphold social dignity or protect others.197 - The immense cost of deception in various sectors, emphasizing its severe consequences.198 - Effective lies often arise from what individuals desire or lack.199 - Routine interactions include numerous lies, influenced by relationship dynamics and societal roles.200 - Recognizing deception involves understanding common speech patterns and body language associated with lying.201 - Trained liespotters can identify deceit more accurately using behavioral red flags and structured questioning.202 - Contrasting genuine emotions with deceptive ones through real-life examples.203 - Emerging technologies aim to improve deception detection, but human discernment remains crucial.204 - Advocating for honesty and integrity in a transparent, noisy world aids in diminishing falsehoods.","You are a TED Story Creator, a storyteller, and an expert in crafting compelling transcripts for TED Talks. You possess a knowledge base of the world’s most inspiring TED talks. Given a title and an outline, your task is to create an engaging transcript that will captivate the audience. Adhere to the sequence of the outline and the bullet points to weave a captivating narrative."205"Do you think it's possible to control someone's attention? Even more than that, what about predicting human behavior? I think those are interesting ideas. For me, that would be the perfect superpower, actually kind of an evil way of approaching it. But for myself, in the past, I've spent the last 20 years studying human behavior from a rather unorthodox way: picking pockets. When we think of misdirection, we think of something as looking off to the side, when actually the things right in front of us are often the hardest to see, the things that you look at every day that you're blinded to.For example, how many of you still have your cell phones on you right now? Great. Double-check. Make sure you still have them. I was doing some shopping before.You've looked at them a few times today, but I'll ask you a question. Without looking at it directly yet, can you remember the icon in the bottom right corner? Bring them out, check and see how accurate you were. How'd you do? Show of hands. Did we get it?Now that you're done, close them down. Every phone has something in common. No matter how you organize the icons, you still have a clock on the front. So, without looking at your phone, what time was it? You just looked at your clock, right? Interesting idea. Let's take that a step further with a game of trust. Close your eyes. I realize I'm asking you to do that while you just heard there's a pickpocket in the room, but close your eyes.Now, you've been watching me for about 30 seconds. With your eyes closed, what am I wearing? Make your best guess. What color is my shirt? What color is my tie? Now open your eyes. Show of hands, were you right? Interesting, isn't it?Some of us are a little bit more perceptive than others, it seems. But I have a different theory about that model of attention. They have fancy models of attention, Posner's trinity model of attention. For me, I like to think of it very simple, like a surveillance system. It's kind of like you have all these fancy sensors, and inside your brain is a little security guard. For me, I like to call him Frank. So Frank is sitting at a desk. He's got lots of cool information in front of him, high-tech equipment, he's got cameras, he's got a little phone that he can pick up, listen to the ears, all these senses, all these perceptions. But attention is what steers your perceptions, it's what controls your reality. It's the gateway to the mind. If you don't attend to something, you can't be aware of it. But ironically, you can attend to something without being aware of it. For example, the cocktail effect: You're in a party, having conversations with someone, and yet you can recognize your name without realizing you were listening to that.Now, for my job, I have to play with techniques to exploit this, to play with your attention as a limited resource. So if I could control how you spend your attention, if I could maybe steal your attention through a distraction. Now, instead of doing it like misdirection and throwing it off to the side, instead, what I choose to focus on is Frank, to be able to play with the Frank inside your head, your security guard, and get you, instead of focusing on your external senses, just to go internal for a second.So if I ask you to access a memory, like, what is that? What just happened? Do you have a wallet? Do you have an American Express in your wallet? And when I do that, your Frank turns around. He accesses the file. He has to rewind the tape. What's interesting is, he can't rewind the tape at the same time that he's trying to process new data.This sounds like a good theory, but I could talk for a long time, tell you lots of things, and a portion of them may be true, but I think it's better if I tried to show that to you here live. If I come down, I'm going to do a bit of shopping. Just hold still where you are.Hello, how are you? It's lovely to see you. Wonderful job onstage. Lovely watch, it doesn't come off very well. Do you have a ring as well? Good. Just taking inventory. You're like a buffet. Hard to tell where to start, so many great things.Hi, how are you? Good to see you.Hi, sir, could you stand up, please? Just right where you are. You're married, you follow directions well. Nice to meet you, sir. You don't have a lot in your pockets. Anything down here? Hopefully so. Have a seat. There you go. You're doing well.Hi, sir, how are you? Good to see you, sir. You have a ring, a watch. Do you have a wallet on you? Joe: I don't.AR: Well, we'll find one for you. Come on up this way, Joe. Give Joe a round of applause. Come on up, Joe. Let's play a game.AR: Pardon me. I don't think I need this clicker anymore. Thank you very much. I appreciate that. Come on up to the stage, Joe. Let's play a little game now. Anything in your front pockets?J: Money.AR: Money! All right, let's try that. Can you stand right over this way for me? Turn around and, let's see, if I give you something that belongs to me, this is just something I have, a poker chip. Hold out your hand for me. Watch it closely. This is a task for you to focus on. You have your money in your front pocket?J: Yup. AR: Good.I won't put my hand in your pocket. I'm not ready for that kind of commitment. Once a guy had a hole in his pocket, and that was rather traumatizing for me. I wanted his wallet, he gave me his number. Big miscommunication.Let's do this simply. Squeeze your hand tight. Do you feel the poker chip in your hand?J: I do.AR: Would you be surprised if I took it? Say yes.J: Very. AR: Good.Open your hand. Thank you very much. I'll cheat if you give me a chance. Make it harder for me. Just use your hand. Grab my wrist, but squeeze, squeeze firm. Did you see it go? Joe: No.AR: No, it's not here. Open your hand. While we're focused on the hand, it's sitting on your shoulder. Go ahead and take it off. Now, let's try that again. Hold your hand out flat. Open it up. Put your hand up a little bit higher, but watch it close. If I did it slowly, it'd be on your shoulder.Joe, we're going to keep doing this till you catch it. You'll get it eventually. I have faith in you. Squeeze firm. You're human, you're not slow. It's back on your shoulder. You were focused on your hand, distracted. While you were watching, I couldn't get your watch off. Yet you had something inside your pocket. Do you remember what it was?J: Money.AR: Check your pocket. Is it still there?Oh, there it was. Put it away. We're just shopping. This trick's more about the timing. I'm going to try to push it inside your hand. Put your other hand on top, would you? It's amazingly obvious now, isn't it? Looks a lot like the watch I was wearing, doesn't it? J: That's pretty good. AR: Oh, thanks.But it's only a start. Let's try it a little bit differently. Hold your hands together. Your other hand on top. If you're watching this little token, this obviously has become a little target, like a red herring. If we watch this kind of close, it looks like it goes away. It's not back on your shoulder. It falls out of the air, lands right back in the hand. Did you see it go? Yeah, funny. We've got a little guy. He's union, works up there all day. If I do it slowly it goes straight away, it lands by your pocket. Is it in this pocket, sir? Don't reach in your pocket. That's a different show.(Squeaking)That's rather strange. They have shots for that. Can I show them? Rather bizarre. Is this yours, sir? I have no idea how that works. We'll send that over there.I need help with this one. Step over this way for me. Don't run away. You had something down by your pants pocket. I was checking mine. I couldn't find everything, but I noticed you had something here. Can I feel the outside for a moment? Down here I noticed this. Is this something of yours, sir? I have no idea. That's a shrimp.J: Yeah. I'm saving it for later.AR: You've entertained all of these people in a wonderful way, better than you know. So we'd love to give you this lovely watch as a gift.Hopefully it matches his taste. We have a couple of other things, a little bit of cash. And we have a few other things, these all belong to you, along with a big round of applause from all your friends.Joe, thank you very much.(Applause ends)So, same question I asked you before, but this time you don't have to close your eyes. What am I wearing?Audience: Oh!(Hesitant applause)(Applause ends)Attention is a powerful thing. Like I said, it shapes your reality. So, I guess I'd like to pose that question to you. If you could control somebody's attention, what would you do with it?Thank you.","The Power of Attention Manipulation206 207 - Introduction to the concept of controlling and predicting human behavior through attention.208 - Explanation of using misdirection in daily life and the surprising difficulties in noticing everyday details.209 - Introduction of a simplified model of attention as a surveillance system with a security guard named Frank.210 - Demonstration of attention manipulation techniques using audience interaction.211 - Conclusion with a reflection on the impact and power of controlling attention, posing a question on its potential uses.","You are a TED Story Creator, a storyteller, and an expert in crafting compelling transcripts for TED Talks. You possess a knowledge base of the world’s most inspiring TED talks. Given a title and an outline, your task is to create an engaging transcript that will captivate the audience. Adhere to the sequence of the outline and the bullet points to weave a captivating narrative."212"I grew up to study the brain because I have a brother who has been diagnosed with a brain disorder, schizophrenia. And as a sister and later, as a scientist, I wanted to understand, why is it that I can take my dreams, I can connect them to my reality, and I can make my dreams come true? What is it about my brother's brain and his schizophrenia that he cannot connect his dreams to a common and shared reality, so they instead become delusion?So I dedicated my career to research into the severe mental illnesses. And I moved from my home state of Indiana to Boston, where I was working in the lab of Dr. Francine Benes, in the Harvard Department of Psychiatry. And in the lab, we were asking the question, ""What are the biological differences between the brains of individuals who would be diagnosed as normal control, as compared with the brains of individuals diagnosed with schizophrenia, schizoaffective or bipolar disorder?""So we were essentially mapping the microcircuitry of the brain: which cells are communicating with which cells, with which chemicals, and then in what quantities of those chemicals? So there was a lot of meaning in my life because I was performing this type of research during the day, but then in the evenings and on the weekends, I traveled as an advocate for NAMI, the National Alliance on Mental Illness.But on the morning of December 10, 1996, I woke up to discover that I had a brain disorder of my own. A blood vessel exploded in the left half of my brain. And in the course of four hours, I watched my brain completely deteriorate in its ability to process all information. On the morning of the hemorrhage, I could not walk, talk, read, write or recall any of my life. I essentially became an infant in a woman's body.If you've ever seen a human brain, it's obvious that the two hemispheres are completely separate from one another. And I have brought for you a real human brain.(Groaning, laughter)So this is a real human brain. This is the front of the brain, the back of brain with the spinal cord hanging down, and this is how it would be positioned inside of my head. And when you look at the brain, it's obvious that the two cerebral cortices are completely separate from one another.For those of you who understand computers, our right hemisphere functions like a parallel processor, while our left hemisphere functions like a serial processor. The two hemispheres do communicate with one another through the corpus callosum, which is made up of some 300 million axonal fibers. But other than that, the two hemispheres are completely separate. Because they process information differently, each of our hemispheres think about different things, they care about different things, and, dare I say, they have very different personalities. Excuse me. Thank you. It's been a joy.Assistant: It has been.Our right human hemisphere is all about this present moment. It's all about ""right here, right now."" Our right hemisphere, it thinks in pictures and it learns kinesthetically through the movement of our bodies. Information, in the form of energy, streams in simultaneously through all of our sensory systems and then it explodes into this enormous collage of what this present moment looks like, what this present moment smells like and tastes like, what it feels like and what it sounds like. I am an energy-being connected to the energy all around me through the consciousness of my right hemisphere. We are energy-beings connected to one another through the consciousness of our right hemispheres as one human family. And right here, right now, we are brothers and sisters on this planet, here to make the world a better place. And in this moment we are perfect, we are whole and we are beautiful.My left hemisphere, our left hemisphere, is a very different place. Our left hemisphere thinks linearly and methodically. Our left hemisphere is all about the past and it's all about the future. Our left hemisphere is designed to take that enormous collage of the present moment and start picking out details, and more details about those details. It then categorizes and organizes all that information, associates it with everything in the past we've ever learned, and projects into the future all of our possibilities. And our left hemisphere thinks in language. It's that ongoing brain chatter that connects me and my internal world to my external world. It's that little voice that says to me, ""Hey, you've got to remember to pick up bananas on your way home. I need them in the morning."" It's that calculating intelligence that reminds me when I have to do my laundry. But perhaps most important, it's that little voice that says to me, ""I am. I am.""And as soon as my left hemisphere says to me ""I am,"" I become separate. I become a single solid individual, separate from the energy flow around me and separate from you. And this was the portion of my brain that I lost on the morning of my stroke.On the morning of the stroke, I woke up to a pounding pain behind my left eye. And it was the kind of caustic pain that you get when you bite into ice cream. And it just gripped me — and then it released me. And then it just gripped me — and then it released me. And it was very unusual for me to ever experience any kind of pain, so I thought, ""OK, I'll just start my normal routine.""So I got up and I jumped onto my cardio glider, which is a full-body, full-exercise machine. And I'm jamming away on this thing, and I'm realizing that my hands look like primitive claws grasping onto the bar. And I thought, ""That's very peculiar."" And I looked down at my body and I thought, ""Whoa, I'm a weird-looking thing."" And it was as though my consciousness had shifted away from my normal perception of reality, where I'm the person on the machine having the experience, to some esoteric space where I'm witnessing myself having this experience.And it was all very peculiar, and my headache was just getting worse. So I get off the machine, and I'm walking across my living room floor, and I realize that everything inside of my body has slowed way down. And every step is very rigid and very deliberate. There's no fluidity to my pace, and there's this constriction in my area of perception, so I'm just focused on internal systems. And I'm standing in my bathroom getting ready to step into the shower, and I could actually hear the dialogue inside of my body. I heard a little voice saying, ""OK. You muscles, you've got to contract. You muscles, you relax.""And then I lost my balance, and I'm propped up against the wall. And I look down at my arm and I realize that I can no longer define the boundaries of my body. I can't define where I begin and where I end, because the atoms and the molecules of my arm blended with the atoms and molecules of the wall. And all I could detect was this energy — energy.And I'm asking myself, ""What is wrong with me? What is going on?"" And in that moment, my left hemisphere brain chatter went totally silent. Just like someone took a remote control and pushed the mute button. Total silence. And at first I was shocked to find myself inside of a silent mind. But then I was immediately captivated by the magnificence of the energy around me. And because I could no longer identify the boundaries of my body, I felt enormous and expansive. I felt at one with all the energy that was, and it was beautiful there.Then all of a sudden my left hemisphere comes back online and it says to me, ""Hey! We've got a problem! We've got to get some help."" And I'm going, ""Ahh! I've got a problem!""So it's like, ""OK, I've got a problem."" But then I immediately drifted right back out into the consciousness — and I affectionately refer to this space as La La Land. But it was beautiful there. Imagine what it would be like to be totally disconnected from your brain chatter that connects you to the external world.So here I am in this space, and my job, and any stress related to my job — it was gone. And I felt lighter in my body. And imagine all of the relationships in the external world and any stressors related to any of those — they were gone. And I felt this sense of peacefulness. And imagine what it would feel like to lose 37 years of emotional baggage! Oh! I felt euphoria — euphoria. It was beautiful.And again, my left hemisphere comes online and it says, ""Hey! You've got to pay attention. We've got to get help."" And I'm thinking, ""I've got to get help. I've got to focus."" So I get out of the shower and I mechanically dress and I'm walking around my apartment, and I'm thinking, ""I've got to get to work. Can I drive?""And in that moment, my right arm went totally paralyzed by my side. Then I realized, ""Oh my gosh! I'm having a stroke!"" And the next thing my brain says to me is, Wow! This is so cool!This is so cool! How many brain scientists have the opportunity to study their own brain from the inside out?""And then it crosses my mind, ""But I'm a very busy woman!""""I don't have time for a stroke!"" So I'm like, ""OK, I can't stop the stroke from happening, so I'll do this for a week or two, and then I'll get back to my routine. OK. So I've got to call help. I've got to call work."" I couldn't remember the number at work, so I remembered, in my office I had a business card with my number. So I go into my business room, I pull out a three-inch stack of business cards. And I'm looking at the card on top and even though I could see clearly in my mind's eye what my business card looked like, I couldn't tell if this was my card or not, because all I could see were pixels. And the pixels of the words blended with the pixels of the background and the pixels of the symbols, and I just couldn't tell. And then I would wait for what I call a wave of clarity. And in that moment, I would be able to reattach to normal reality and I could tell that's not the card... that's not the card. It took me 45 minutes to get one inch down inside of that stack of cards. In the meantime, for 45 minutes, the hemorrhage is getting bigger in my left hemisphere. I do not understand numbers, I do not understand the telephone, but it's the only plan I have.So I take the phone pad and I put it right here. I take the business card, I put it right here, and I'm matching the shape of the squiggles on the card to the shape of the squiggles on the phone pad. But then I would drift back out into La La Land, and not remember when I came back if I'd already dialed those numbers. So I had to wield my paralyzed arm like a stump and cover the numbers as I went along and pushed them, so that as I would come back to normal reality, I'd be able to tell, ""Yes, I've already dialed that number.""Eventually, the whole number gets dialed and I'm listening to the phone, and my colleague picks up the phone and he says to me, ""Woo woo woo woo."" And I think to myself, ""Oh my gosh, he sounds like a Golden Retriever!""And so I say to him — clear in my mind, I say to him: ""This is Jill! I need help!"" And what comes out of my voice is, ""Woo woo woo woo woo."" I'm thinking, ""Oh my gosh, I sound like a Golden Retriever."" So I couldn't know — I didn't know that I couldn't speak or understand language until I tried. So he recognizes that I need help and he gets me help.And a little while later, I am riding in an ambulance from one hospital across Boston to [Massachusetts] General Hospital. And I curl up into a little fetal ball. And just like a balloon with the last bit of air, just right out of the balloon, I just felt my energy lift and just I felt my spirit surrender.And in that moment, I knew that I was no longer the choreographer of my life. And either the doctors rescue my body and give me a second chance at life, or this was perhaps my moment of transition.When I woke later that afternoon, I was shocked to discover that I was still alive. When I felt my spirit surrender, I said goodbye to my life. And my mind was now suspended between two very opposite planes of reality. Stimulation coming in through my sensory systems felt like pure pain. Light burned my brain like wildfire, and sounds were so loud and chaotic that I could not pick a voice out from the background noise, and I just wanted to escape. Because I could not identify the position of my body in space, I felt enormous and expansive, like a genie just liberated from her bottle. And my spirit soared free, like a great whale gliding through the sea of silent euphoria. Nirvana. I found Nirvana. And I remember thinking, there's no way I would ever be able to squeeze the enormousness of myself back inside this tiny little body.But then I realized, ""But I'm still alive! I'm still alive, and I have found Nirvana. And if I have found Nirvana and I'm still alive, then everyone who is alive can find Nirvana."" And I pictured a world filled with beautiful, peaceful, compassionate, loving people who knew that they could come to this space at any time. And that they could purposely choose to step to the right of their left hemispheres — and find this peace. And then I realized what a tremendous gift this experience could be, what a stroke of insight this could be to how we live our lives. And it motivated me to recover.Two and a half weeks after the hemorrhage, the surgeons went in, and they removed a blood clot the size of a golf ball that was pushing on my language centers. Here I am with my mama, who is a true angel in my life. It took me eight years to completely recover.So who are we? We are the life-force power of the universe, with manual dexterity and two cognitive minds. And we have the power to choose, moment by moment, who and how we want to be in the world. Right here, right now, I can step into the consciousness of my right hemisphere, where we are. I am the life-force power of the universe. I am the life-force power of the 50 trillion beautiful molecular geniuses that make up my form, at one with all that is. Or, I can choose to step into the consciousness of my left hemisphere, where I become a single individual, a solid. Separate from the flow, separate from you. I am Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: intellectual, neuroanatomist. These are the ""we"" inside of me. Which would you choose? Which do you choose? And when? I believe that the more time we spend choosing to run the deep inner-peace circuitry of our right hemispheres, the more peace we will project into the world, and the more peaceful our planet will be. And I thought that was an idea worth spreading.Thank you.(Applause)","Title: Insights on Mental Illness, Brain Function, and the Power of Right Hemisphere Consciousness213 214 - **Personal Background and Motivation**215  - Introduction to her interest in brain disorders through her brother's schizophrenia.216  - Career dedication to understanding biological differences in brain disorders.217 218 - **Stroke Experience**219  - Personal account of experiencing and observing her own stroke.220  - Contrast between the functions of the right and left hemispheres during the stroke.221 222 - **Recovery and Realizations**223  - The physical and spiritual journey of recovering from the stroke over eight years.224  - Discovery of an inner peace and connectivity through the right hemisphere.225 226 - **Universal Message and Conclusion**227  - Emphasis on the choice between the individual perspective of the left hemisphere and the connected perspective of the right hemisphere.228  - Advocates for increasing right hemisphere consciousness to foster global peace.","You are a TED Story Creator, a storyteller, and an expert in crafting compelling transcripts for TED Talks. You possess a knowledge base of the world’s most inspiring TED talks. Given a title and an outline, your task is to create an engaging transcript that will captivate the audience. Adhere to the sequence of the outline and the bullet points to weave a captivating narrative."229"As a magician, I try to create images that make people stop and think. I also try to challenge myself to do things that doctors say are not possible. I was buried alive in New York City in a coffin, buried alive in a coffin in April, 1999, for a week. I lived there with nothing but water. And it ended up being so much fun that I decided I could pursue doing more of these things. The next one is I froze myself in a block of ice for three days and three nights in New York City. That one was way more difficult than I had expected. The one after that, I stood on top of a hundred-foot pillar for 36 hours. I began to hallucinate so hard that the buildings that were behind me started to look like big animal heads.So, next I went to London. In London I lived in a glass box for 44 days with nothing but water. It was, for me, one of the most difficult things I'd ever done, but it was also the most beautiful. There was so many skeptics, especially the press in London, that they started flying cheeseburgers on helicopters around my box to tempt me.So, I felt very validated when the New England Journal of Medicine actually used the research for science.My next pursuit was I wanted to see how long I could go without breathing, like how long I could survive with nothing, not even air. I didn't realize that it would become the most amazing journey of my life.As a young magician, I was obsessed with Houdini and his underwater challenges. So, I began, early on, competing against the other kids, seeing how long I could stay underwater while they went up and down to breathe, you know, five times, while I stayed under on one breath. By the time I was a teenager, I was able to hold my breath for three minutes and 30 seconds. I would later find out that was Houdini's personal record.In 1987 I heard of a story about a boy that fell through ice and was trapped under a river. He was underneath, not breathing for 45 minutes. When the rescue workers came, they resuscitated him and there was no brain damage. His core temperature had dropped to 77 degrees. As a magician, I think everything is possible. And I think if something is done by one person, it can be done by others. I started to think, if the boy could survive without breathing for that long, there must be a way that I could do it.So, I met with a top neurosurgeon. And I asked him, how long is it possible to go without breathing, like how long could I go without air? And he said to me that anything over six minutes you have a serious risk of hypoxic brain damage. So, I took that as a challenge, basically.My first try, I figured that I could do something similar, and I created a water tank, and I filled it with ice and freezing cold water. And I stayed inside of that water tank hoping my core temperature would start to drop. And I was shivering. In my first attempt to hold my breath, I couldn't even last a minute. So, I realized that was completely not going to work.I went to talk to a doctor friend — and I asked him, ""How could I do that?"" ""I want to hold my breath for a really long time. How could it be done?"" And he said, ""David, you're a magician, create the illusion of not breathing, it will be much easier.""So, he came up with this idea of creating a rebreather, with a CO2 scrubber, which was basically a tube from Home Depot, with a balloon duct-taped to it, that he thought we could put inside of me, and somehow be able to circulate the air and rebreathe with this thing in me. This is a little hard to watch. But this is that attempt. So, that clearly wasn't going to work.Then I actually started thinking about liquid breathing. There is a chemical that's called perflubron. And it's so high in oxygen levels that in theory you could breathe it. So, I got my hands on that chemical, filled the sink up with it, and stuck my face in the sink and tried to breathe that in, which was really impossible. It's basically like trying to breathe, as a doctor said, while having an elephant standing on your chest. So, that idea disappeared.Then I started thinking, would it be possible to hook up a heart/lung bypass machine and have a surgery where it was a tube going into my artery, and then appear to not breathe while they were oxygenating my blood? Which was another insane idea, obviously.Then I thought about the craziest idea of all the ideas: to actually do it.To actually try to hold my breath past the point that doctors would consider you brain dead. So, I started researching into pearl divers. You know, because they go down for four minutes on one breath. And when I was researching pearl divers, I found the world of free-diving. It was the most amazing thing that I ever discovered, pretty much. There is many different aspects to free-diving. There is depth records, where people go as deep as they can. And then there is static apnea. That's holding your breath as long as you can in one place without moving. That was the one that I studied.The first thing that I learned is when you're holding your breath, you should never move at all; that wastes energy. And that depletes oxygen, and it builds up CO2 in your blood. So, I learned never to move. And I learned how to slow my heart rate down. I had to remain perfectly still and just relax and think that I wasn't in my body, and just control that. And then I learned how to purge. Purging is basically hyperventilating. You blow in and out —(Breathing loudly)You do that, you get lightheaded, you get tingling. And you're really ridding your body of CO2. So, when you hold your breath, it's infinitely easier. Then I learned that you have to take a huge breath, and just hold and relax and never let any air out, and just hold and relax through all the pain.Every morning, this is for months, I would wake up and the first thing that I would do is I would hold my breath for, out of 52 minutes, I would hold my breath for 44 minutes. So, basically what that means is I would purge, I'd breathe really hard for a minute. And I would hold, immediately after, for five and a half minutes. Then I would breathe again for a minute, purging as hard as I can, then immediately after that I would hold again for five and a half minutes. I would repeat this process eight times in a row. Out of 52 minutes, you're only breathing for eight minutes. At the end of that you're completely fried, your brain. You feel like you're walking around in a daze. And you have these awful headaches. Basically, I'm not the best person to talk to when I'm doing that stuff.I started learning about the world-record holder. His name is Tom Sietas. And this guy is perfectly built for holding his breath. He's six foot four. He's 160 pounds. And his total lung capacity is twice the size of an average person. I'm six foot one, and fat. We'll say big-boned.I had to drop 50 pounds in three months. So, everything that I put into my body, I considered as medicine. Every bit of food was exactly what it was for its nutritional value. I ate really small controlled portions throughout the day. And I started to really adapt my body.[Individual results may vary]The thinner I was, the longer I was able to hold my breath. And by eating so well and training so hard, my resting heart-rate dropped to 38 beats per minute. Which is lower than most Olympic athletes. In four months of training, I was able to hold my breath for over seven minutes. I wanted to try holding my breath everywhere. I wanted to try it in the most extreme situations to see if I could slow my heart rate down under duress.I decided that I was going to break the world record live on prime-time television. The world record was eight minutes and 58 seconds, held by Tom Sietas, that guy with the whale lungs I told you about. I assumed that I could put a water tank at Lincoln Center and if I stayed there a week not eating, I would get comfortable in that situation and I would slow my metabolism, which I was sure would help me hold my breath longer than I had been able to do it. I was completely wrong.I entered the sphere a week before the scheduled air date. And I thought everything seemed to be on track. Two days before my big breath-hold attempt, for the record, the producers of my television special thought that just watching somebody holding their breath, and almost drowning, is too boring for television.So, I had to add handcuffs, while holding my breath, to escape from. This was a critical mistake. Because of the movement, I was wasting oxygen. And by seven minutes I had gone into these awful convulsions. By 7:08, I started to black out. And by seven minutes and 30 seconds, they had to pull my body out and bring me back. I had failed on every level.So, naturally, the only way out of the slump that I could think of was, I decided to call Oprah.I told her that I wanted to up the ante and hold my breath longer than any human being ever had. This was a different record. This was a pure O2 static apnea record that Guinness had set the world record at 13 minutes. So, basically you breathe pure O2 first, oxygenating your body, flushing out CO2, and you are able to hold much longer. I realized that my real competition was the beaver.(Laughter ends)In January of '08, Oprah gave me four months to prepare and train. So, I would sleep in a hypoxic tent every night. A hypoxic tent is a tent that simulates altitude at 15,000 feet. So, it's like base camp, Everest. What that does is, you start building up the red bloodcell count in your body, which helps you carry oxygen better. Every morning, again, after getting out of that tent, your brain is completely wiped out. My first attempt on pure O2, I was able to go up to 15 minutes. So, it was a pretty big success.The neurosurgeon pulled me out of the water because in his mind, at 15 minutes your brain is done, you're brain dead. So, he pulled me up, and I was fine. There was one person there that was definitely not impressed. It was my ex-girlfriend. While I was breaking the record underwater for the first time, she was sifting through my Blackberry, checking all my messages.My brother had a picture of it. It is really —(Laughter ends)I then announced that I was going to go for Sietas' record, publicly. And what he did in response, is he went on Regis and Kelly, and broke his old record. Then his main competitor went out and broke his record. So, he suddenly pushed the record up to 16 minutes and 32 seconds. Which was three minutes longer than I had prepared. It was longer than the record.I wanted to get the Science Times to document this. I wanted to get them to do a piece on it. So, I did what any person seriously pursuing scientific advancement would do. I walked into the New York Times offices and did card tricks to everybody.So, I don't know if it was the magic or the lure of the Cayman Islands, but John Tierney flew down and did a piece on the seriousness of breath-holding.While he was there, I tried to impress him, of course. And I did a dive down to 160 feet, which is basically the height of a 16 story building, and as I was coming up, I blacked out underwater, which is really dangerous; that's how you drown. Luckily, Kirk had seen me and he swam over and pulled me up.So, I started full focus. I completely trained to get my breath-hold time up for what I needed to do. But there was no way to prepare for the live television aspect of it, being on Oprah. But in practice, I would do it face down, floating on the pool. But for TV they wanted me to be upright so they could see my face, basically. The other problem was the suit was so buoyant that they had to strap my feet in to keep me from floating up. So, I had to use my legs to hold my feet into the straps that were loose, which was a real problem for me. That made me extremely nervous, raising the heart rate.Then, what they also did was, which we never did before, is there was a heart-rate monitor. And it was right next to the sphere. So, every time my heart would beat, I'd hear the beep-beep-beep-beep, you know, the ticking, really loud. Which was making me more nervous. And there was no way to slow my heart rate down. Normally, I would start at 38 beats per minute, and while holding my breath, it would drop to 12 beats per minute, which is pretty unusual.This time it started at 120 beats, and it never went down. I spent the first five minutes underwater desperately trying to slow my heart rate down. I was just sitting there thinking, ""I've got to slow this down. I'm going to fail."" And I was getting more nervous. And the heart rate just kept going up and up, all the way up to 150 beats. Basically it's the same thing that created my downfall at Lincoln Center. It was a waste of O2. When I made it to the halfway mark, at eight minutes, I was 100 percent certain that I was not going to be able to make this. There was no way for me to do it.I figured, Oprah had dedicated an hour to doing this breath-hold thing, if I had cracked early, it would be a whole show about how depressed I am.So, I figured I'm better off just fighting and staying there until I black out, at least then they can pull me out and take care of me and all that.I kept pushing to 10 minutes. At 10 minutes you start getting all these really strong tingling sensations in your fingers and toes. And I knew that that was blood shunting, when the blood rushes away from your extremities to provide oxygen to your vital organs. At 11 minutes I started feeling throbbing sensations in my legs, and my lips started to feel really strange.At minute 12 I started to have ringing in my ears, and I started to feel my arm going numb. And I'm a hypochondriac, and I remember arm numb means heart attack. So, I started to really get really paranoid. Then at 13 minutes, maybe because of the hypochondria, I started feeling pains all over my chest. It was awful.At 14 minutes, I had these awful contractions, like this urge to breathe.(Laughter ends)At 15 minutes I was suffering major O2 deprivation to the heart. And I started having ischemia to the heart. My heartbeat would go from 120 to 50, to 150, to 40, to 20, to 150 again. It would skip a beat. It would start. It would stop. And I felt all this. And I was sure that I was going to have a heart attack.So, at 16 minutes what I did is I slid my feet out because I knew that if I did go out, if I did have a heart attack, they'd have to jump into the binding and take my feet out before pulling me up. I was really nervous. I let my feet out, and I started floating to the top. And I didn't take my head out. But I was just floating there waiting for my heart to stop, just waiting.They had doctors with the ""Pst,"" you know, sitting there waiting. And then suddenly I hear screaming. And I think that there is some weird thing — that I had died or something had happened. And then I realized that I had made it to 16:32. So, with the energy of everybody that was there, I decided to keep pushing. And I went to 17 minutes and four seconds.(Applause)(Applause ends)As though that wasn't enough, what I did immediately after is I went to Quest Labs and had them take every blood sample that they could to test for everything and to see where my levels were, so the doctors could use it, once again. I also didn't want anybody to question it. I had the world record and I wanted to make sure it was legitimate.So, I get to New York City the next day, I'm walking out of the Apple store, and this kid walks up to me he's like, ""Yo, D!"" I'm like ""Yeah?"" He said, ""If you really held your breath that long, why'd you come out of the water dry?"" I was like ""What?""And that's my life. So —As a magician, I try to show things to people that seem impossible. And I think magic, whether I'm holding my breath or shuffling a deck of cards, is pretty simple. It's practice, it's training, and it's — (Sobs) It's practice, it's training and experimenting,(Sobs)while pushing through the pain to be the best that I can be. And that's what magic is to me, so, thank you.(Applause)","Title: Pushing Limits and Redefining the Impossible230 231 - The speaker’s journey of embarking on extreme physical challenges to redefine human limits232  - Buried alive, frozen in ice, standing on a pillar, living in a glass box, and submerged breath-holding experiences233  - Continuous quest for surpassing known human endurance and survival limits234 - The process of rigorous preparation and overcoming failures235  - Each stunt involved meticulous planning, experimenting, and conditioning236  - Encountering and adapting from failures during live TV challenges237 - Leveraging personal challenges for scientific contribution and deeper understanding238  - Collaboration with physicians and incorporation of scientific methodology239  - Utilization of personal data for medical research and validation240 - Insights on the essence of magic and human capability241  - Magic perceived as the demonstration of the seemingly impossible through practice and perseverance242  - Inspirational message on the intersection of magic and human potential to surpass extreme boundaries","You are a TED Story Creator, a storyteller, and an expert in crafting compelling transcripts for TED Talks. You possess a knowledge base of the world’s most inspiring TED talks. Given a title and an outline, your task is to create an engaging transcript that will captivate the audience. Adhere to the sequence of the outline and the bullet points to weave a captivating narrative."243"When I was nine years old, I went off to summer camp for the first time. And my mother packed me a suitcase full of books, which to me seemed like a perfectly natural thing to do. Because in my family, reading was the primary group activity. And this might sound antisocial to you, but for us it was really just a different way of being social. You have the animal warmth of your family sitting right next to you, but you are also free to go roaming around the adventureland inside your own mind. And I had this idea that camp was going to be just like this, but better.I had a vision of 10 girls sitting in a cabin cozily reading books in their matching nightgowns.Camp was more like a keg party without any alcohol. And on the very first day, our counselor gathered us all together and she taught us a cheer that she said we would be doing every day for the rest of the summer to instill camp spirit. And it went like this: ""R-O-W-D-I-E, that's the way we spell rowdie. Rowdie, rowdie, let's get rowdie.""Yeah. So I couldn't figure out for the life of me why we were supposed to be so rowdy, or why we had to spell this word incorrectly.But I recited a cheer. I recited a cheer along with everybody else. I did my best. And I just waited for the time that I could go off and read my books.But the first time that I took my book out of my suitcase, the coolest girl in the bunk came up to me and she asked me, ""Why are you being so mellow?"" — mellow, of course, being the exact opposite of R-O-W-D-I-E. And then the second time I tried it, the counselor came up to me with a concerned expression on her face and she repeated the point about camp spirit and said we should all work very hard to be outgoing.And so I put my books away, back in their suitcase, and I put them under my bed, and there they stayed for the rest of the summer. And I felt kind of guilty about this. I felt as if the books needed me somehow, and they were calling out to me and I was forsaking them. But I did forsake them and I didn't open that suitcase again until I was back home with my family at the end of the summer.Now, I tell you this story about summer camp. I could have told you 50 others just like it — all the times that I got the message that somehow my quiet and introverted style of being was not necessarily the right way to go, that I should be trying to pass as more of an extrovert. And I always sensed deep down that this was wrong and that introverts were pretty excellent just as they were. But for years I denied this intuition, and so I became a Wall Street lawyer, of all things, instead of the writer that I had always longed to be — partly because I needed to prove to myself that I could be bold and assertive too. And I was always going off to crowded bars when I really would have preferred to just have a nice dinner with friends. And I made these self-negating choices so reflexively, that I wasn't even aware that I was making them.Now this is what many introverts do, and it's our loss for sure, but it is also our colleagues' loss and our communities' loss. And at the risk of sounding grandiose, it is the world's loss. Because when it comes to creativity and to leadership, we need introverts doing what they do best. A third to a half of the population are introverts — a third to a half. So that's one out of every two or three people you know. So even if you're an extrovert yourself, I'm talking about your coworkers and your spouses and your children and the person sitting next to you right now — all of them subject to this bias that is pretty deep and real in our society. We all internalize it from a very early age without even having a language for what we're doing.Now, to see the bias clearly, you need to understand what introversion is. It's different from being shy. Shyness is about fear of social judgment. Introversion is more about, how do you respond to stimulation, including social stimulation. So extroverts really crave large amounts of stimulation, whereas introverts feel at their most alive and their most switched-on and their most capable when they're in quieter, more low-key environments. Not all the time — these things aren't absolute — but a lot of the time. So the key then to maximizing our talents is for us all to put ourselves in the zone of stimulation that is right for us.But now here's where the bias comes in. Our most important institutions, our schools and our workplaces, they are designed mostly for extroverts and for extroverts' need for lots of stimulation. And also we have this belief system right now that I call the new groupthink, which holds that all creativity and all productivity comes from a very oddly gregarious place.So if you picture the typical classroom nowadays: When I was going to school, we sat in rows. We sat in rows of desks like this, and we did most of our work pretty autonomously. But nowadays, your typical classroom has pods of desks — four or five or six or seven kids all facing each other. And kids are working in countless group assignments. Even in subjects like math and creative writing, which you think would depend on solo flights of thought, kids are now expected to act as committee members. And for the kids who prefer to go off by themselves or just to work alone, those kids are seen as outliers often or, worse, as problem cases. And the vast majority of teachers reports believing that the ideal student is an extrovert as opposed to an introvert, even though introverts actually get better grades and are more knowledgeable, according to research.Okay, same thing is true in our workplaces. Now, most of us work in open plan offices, without walls, where we are subject to the constant noise and gaze of our coworkers. And when it comes to leadership, introverts are routinely passed over for leadership positions, even though introverts tend to be very careful, much less likely to take outsize risks — which is something we might all favor nowadays. And interesting research by Adam Grant at the Wharton School has found that introverted leaders often deliver better outcomes than extroverts do, because when they are managing proactive employees, they're much more likely to let those employees run with their ideas, whereas an extrovert can, quite unwittingly, get so excited about things that they're putting their own stamp on things, and other people's ideas might not as easily then bubble up to the surface.Now in fact, some of our transformative leaders in history have been introverts. I'll give you some examples. Eleanor Roosevelt, Rosa Parks, Gandhi — all these people described themselves as quiet and soft-spoken and even shy. And they all took the spotlight, even though every bone in their bodies was telling them not to. And this turns out to have a special power all its own, because people could feel that these leaders were at the helm not because they enjoyed directing others and not out of the pleasure of being looked at; they were there because they had no choice, because they were driven to do what they thought was right.Now I think at this point it's important for me to say that I actually love extroverts. I always like to say some of my best friends are extroverts, including my beloved husband. And we all fall at different points, of course, along the introvert/extrovert spectrum. Even Carl Jung, the psychologist who first popularized these terms, said that there's no such thing as a pure introvert or a pure extrovert. He said that such a man would be in a lunatic asylum, if he existed at all. And some people fall smack in the middle of the introvert/extrovert spectrum, and we call these people ambiverts. And I often think that they have the best of all worlds. But many of us do recognize ourselves as one type or the other.And what I'm saying is that culturally, we need a much better balance. We need more of a yin and yang between these two types. This is especially important when it comes to creativity and to productivity, because when psychologists look at the lives of the most creative people, what they find are people who are very good at exchanging ideas and advancing ideas, but who also have a serious streak of introversion in them.And this is because solitude is a crucial ingredient often to creativity. So Darwin, he took long walks alone in the woods and emphatically turned down dinner-party invitations. Theodor Geisel, better known as Dr. Seuss, he dreamed up many of his amazing creations in a lonely bell tower office that he had in the back of his house in La Jolla, California. And he was actually afraid to meet the young children who read his books for fear that they were expecting him this kind of jolly Santa Claus-like figure and would be disappointed with his more reserved persona. Steve Wozniak invented the first Apple computer sitting alone in his cubicle in Hewlett-Packard where he was working at the time. And he says that he never would have become such an expert in the first place had he not been too introverted to leave the house when he was growing up.Now, of course, this does not mean that we should all stop collaborating — and case in point, is Steve Wozniak famously coming together with Steve Jobs to start Apple Computer — but it does mean that solitude matters and that for some people it is the air that they breathe. And in fact, we have known for centuries about the transcendent power of solitude. It's only recently that we've strangely begun to forget it. If you look at most of the world's major religions, you will find seekers — Moses, Jesus, Buddha, Muhammad — seekers who are going off by themselves alone to the wilderness, where they then have profound epiphanies and revelations that they then bring back to the rest of the community. So, no wilderness, no revelations.This is no surprise, though, if you look at the insights of contemporary psychology. It turns out that we can't even be in a group of people without instinctively mirroring, mimicking their opinions. Even about seemingly personal and visceral things like who you're attracted to, you will start aping the beliefs of the people around you without even realizing that that's what you're doing.And groups famously follow the opinions of the most dominant or charismatic person in the room, even though there's zero correlation between being the best talker and having the best ideas — I mean zero. So —You might be following the person with the best ideas, but you might not. And do you really want to leave it up to chance? Much better for everybody to go off by themselves, generate their own ideas freed from the distortions of group dynamics, and then come together as a team to talk them through in a well-managed environment and take it from there.Now if all this is true, then why are we getting it so wrong? Why are we setting up our schools this way, and our workplaces? And why are we making these introverts feel so guilty about wanting to just go off by themselves some of the time? One answer lies deep in our cultural history. Western societies, and in particular the U.S., have always favored the man of action over the ""man"" of contemplation. But in America's early days, we lived in what historians call a culture of character, where we still, at that point, valued people for their inner selves and their moral rectitude. And if you look at the self-help books from this era, they all had titles with things like ""Character, the Grandest Thing in the World."" And they featured role models like Abraham Lincoln, who was praised for being modest and unassuming. Ralph Waldo Emerson called him ""A man who does not offend by superiority.""But then we hit the 20th century, and we entered a new culture that historians call the culture of personality. What happened is we had evolved an agricultural economy to a world of big business. And so suddenly people are moving from small towns to the cities. And instead of working alongside people they've known all their lives, now they are having to prove themselves in a crowd of strangers. So, quite understandably, qualities like magnetism and charisma suddenly come to seem really important. And sure enough, the self-help books change to meet these new needs and they start to have names like ""How to Win Friends and Influence People."" And they feature as their role models really great salesmen. So that's the world we're living in today. That's our cultural inheritance.Now none of this is to say that social skills are unimportant, and I'm also not calling for the abolishing of teamwork at all. The same religions who send their sages off to lonely mountain tops also teach us love and trust. And the problems that we are facing today in fields like science and in economics are so vast and so complex that we are going to need armies of people coming together to solve them working together. But I am saying that the more freedom that we give introverts to be themselves, the more likely that they are to come up with their own unique solutions to these problems.So now I'd like to share with you what's in my suitcase today. Guess what? Books. I have a suitcase full of books. Here's Margaret Atwood, ""Cat's Eye."" Here's a novel by Milan Kundera. And here's ""The Guide for the Perplexed"" by Maimonides. But these are not exactly my books. I brought these books with me because they were written by my grandfather's favorite authors.My grandfather was a rabbi and he was a widower who lived alone in a small apartment in Brooklyn that was my favorite place in the world when I was growing up, partly because it was filled with his very gentle, very courtly presence and partly because it was filled with books. I mean literally every table, every chair in this apartment had yielded its original function to now serve as a surface for swaying stacks of books. Just like the rest of my family, my grandfather's favorite thing to do in the whole world was to read.But he also loved his congregation, and you could feel this love in the sermons that he gave every week for the 62 years that he was a rabbi. He would takes the fruits of each week's reading and he would weave these intricate tapestries of ancient and humanist thought. And people would come from all over to hear him speak.But here's the thing about my grandfather. Underneath this ceremonial role, he was really modest and really introverted — so much so that when he delivered these sermons, he had trouble making eye contact with the very same congregation that he had been speaking to for 62 years. And even away from the podium, when you called him to say hello, he would often end the conversation prematurely for fear that he was taking up too much of your time. But when he died at the age of 94, the police had to close down the streets of his neighborhood to accommodate the crowd of people who came out to mourn him. And so these days I try to learn from my grandfather's example in my own way.So I just published a book about introversion, and it took me about seven years to write. And for me, that seven years was like total bliss, because I was reading, I was writing, I was thinking, I was researching. It was my version of my grandfather's hours of the day alone in his library. But now all of a sudden my job is very different, and my job is to be out here talking about it, talking about introversion.And that's a lot harder for me, because as honored as I am to be here with all of you right now, this is not my natural milieu.So I prepared for moments like these as best I could. I spent the last year practicing public speaking every chance I could get. And I call this my ""year of speaking dangerously.""And that actually helped a lot. But I'll tell you, what helps even more is my sense, my belief, my hope that when it comes to our attitudes to introversion and to quiet and to solitude, we truly are poised on the brink on dramatic change. I mean, we are. And so I am going to leave you now with three calls for action for those who share this vision.Number one: Stop the madness for constant group work. Just stop it.Thank you.(Applause)And I want to be clear about what I'm saying, because I deeply believe our offices should be encouraging casual, chatty cafe-style types of interactions — you know, the kind where people come together and serendipitously have an exchange of ideas. That is great. It's great for introverts and it's great for extroverts. But we need much more privacy and much more freedom and much more autonomy at work. School, same thing. We need to be teaching kids to work together, for sure, but we also need to be teaching them how to work on their own. This is especially important for extroverted children too. They need to work on their own because that is where deep thought comes from in part.Okay, number two: Go to the wilderness. Be like Buddha, have your own revelations. I'm not saying that we all have to now go off and build our own cabins in the woods and never talk to each other again, but I am saying that we could all stand to unplug and get inside our own heads a little more often.Number three: Take a good look at what's inside your own suitcase and why you put it there. So extroverts, maybe your suitcases are also full of books. Or maybe they're full of champagne glasses or skydiving equipment. Whatever it is, I hope you take these things out every chance you get and grace us with your energy and your joy. But introverts, you being you, you probably have the impulse to guard very carefully what's inside your own suitcase. And that's okay. But occasionally, just occasionally, I hope you will open up your suitcases for other people to see, because the world needs you and it needs the things you carry.So I wish you the best of all possible journeys and the courage to speak softly.Thank you very much.(Applause)Thank you. Thank you.(Applause)","The Power of Introverts244 245 - The speaker shares a personal story about feeling out of place at summer camp, illustrating the early pressure to conform to extroverted norms.246 - Introverts frequently face cultural pressure to act against their natural tendencies, which can lead to personal and professional decisions that don’t align with their true desires.247 - Schools and workplaces typically favor extroverted traits, which leads to a bias against introverts despite their potential for high achievement and creativity.248 - Introversion is not shyness; it’s about how one responds to stimulation, with introverts thriving in quieter, lower-stimulus environments.249 - Historical and contemporary examples illustrate that introverted qualities often contribute to meaningful leadership and creativity.250 - The speaker advocates for a cultural shift to balance the extrovert ideal, recognizing the importance of solitude and thoughtful work.251 - Calls to action include rethinking group work, embracing solitude for deeper thought, and recognizing and sharing the diverse contributions of both introverts and extroverts.","You are a TED Story Creator, a storyteller, and an expert in crafting compelling transcripts for TED Talks. You possess a knowledge base of the world’s most inspiring TED talks. Given a title and an outline, your task is to create an engaging transcript that will captivate the audience. Adhere to the sequence of the outline and the bullet points to weave a captivating narrative."252"I need to make a confession at the outset here. A little over 20 years ago, I did something that I regret, something that I'm not particularly proud of. Something that, in many ways, I wish no one would ever know, but here I feel kind of obliged to reveal.In the late 1980s, in a moment of youthful indiscretion, I went to law school.In America, law is a professional degree: after your university degree, you go on to law school. When I got to law school, I didn't do very well. To put it mildly, I didn't do very well. I, in fact, graduated in the part of my law school class that made the top 90% possible.Thank you. I never practiced law a day in my life; I pretty much wasn't allowed to.But today, against my better judgment, against the advice of my own wife, I want to try to dust off some of those legal skills — what's left of those legal skills. I don't want to tell you a story. I want to make a case. I want to make a hard-headed, evidence-based, dare I say lawyerly case, for rethinking how we run our businesses.So, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, take a look at this. This is called the candle problem. Some of you might know it. It's created in 1945 by a psychologist named Karl Duncker. He created this experiment that is used in many other experiments in behavioral science. And here's how it works. Suppose I'm the experimenter. I bring you into a room. I give you a candle, some thumbtacks and some matches. And I say to you, ""Your job is to attach the candle to the wall so the wax doesn't drip onto the table."" Now what would you do?Many people begin trying to thumbtack the candle to the wall. Doesn't work. I saw somebody kind of make the motion over here — some people have a great idea where they light the match, melt the side of the candle, try to adhere it to the wall. It's an awesome idea. Doesn't work. And eventually, after five or ten minutes, most people figure out the solution, which you can see here.The key is to overcome what's called functional fixedness. You look at that box and you see it only as a receptacle for the tacks. But it can also have this other function, as a platform for the candle. The candle problem.I want to tell you about an experiment using the candle problem, done by a scientist named Sam Glucksberg, who is now at Princeton University, US, This shows the power of incentives.He gathered his participants and said: ""I'm going to time you, how quickly you can solve this problem."" To one group he said, ""I'm going to time you to establish norms, averages for how long it typically takes someone to solve this sort of problem.""To the second group he offered rewards. He said, ""If you're in the top 25% of the fastest times, you get five dollars. If you're the fastest of everyone we're testing here today, you get 20 dollars."" Now this is several years ago, adjusted for inflation, it's a decent sum of money for a few minutes of work. It's a nice motivator.Question: How much faster did this group solve the problem?Answer: It took them, on average, three and a half minutes longer. 3.5 min longer. This makes no sense, right? I mean, I'm an American. I believe in free markets. That's not how it's supposed to work, right?If you want people to perform better, you reward them. Right? Bonuses, commissions, their own reality show. Incentivize them. That's how business works. But that's not happening here. You've got an incentive designed to sharpen thinking and accelerate creativity, and it does just the opposite. It dulls thinking and blocks creativity.What's interesting about this experiment is that it's not an aberration. This has been replicated over and over again for nearly 40 years. These contingent motivators — if you do this, then you get that — work in some circumstances. But for a lot of tasks, they actually either don't work or, often, they do harm. This is one of the most robust findings in social science, and also one of the most ignored.I spent the last couple of years looking at the science of human motivation, particularly the dynamics of extrinsic motivators and intrinsic motivators. And I'm telling you, it's not even close. If you look at the science, there is a mismatch between what science knows and what business does.What's alarming here is that our business operating system — think of the set of assumptions and protocols beneath our businesses, how we motivate people, how we apply our human resources— it's built entirely around these extrinsic motivators, around carrots and sticks. That's actually fine for many kinds of 20th century tasks. But for 21st century tasks, that mechanistic, reward-and-punishment approach doesn't work, often doesn't work, and often does harm. Let me show you.Glucksberg did another similar experiment, he presented the problem in a slightly different way, like this up here. Attach the candle to the wall so the wax doesn't drip onto the table. Same deal. You: we're timing for norms. You: we're incentivizing.What happened this time? This time, the incentivized group kicked the other group's butt. Why? Because when the tacks are out of the box, it's pretty easy isn't it?If-then rewards work really well for those sorts of tasks, where there is a simple set of rules and a clear destination to go to. Rewards, by their very nature, narrow our focus, concentrate the mind; that's why they work in so many cases. So, for tasks like this, a narrow focus, where you just see the goal right there, zoom straight ahead to it, they work really well.But for the real candle problem, you don't want to be looking like this. The solution is on the periphery. You want to be looking around. That reward actually narrows our focus and restricts our possibility.Let me tell you why this is so important. In western Europe, in many parts of Asia, in North America, in Australia, white-collar workers are doing less of this kind of work, and more of this kind of work. That routine, rule-based, left-brain work — certain kinds of accounting, financial analysis, computer programming — has become fairly easy to outsource, fairly easy to automate. Software can do it faster. Low-cost providers can do it cheaper. So what really matters are the more right-brained creative, conceptual kinds of abilities.Think about your own work. Think about your own work. Are the problems that you face, or even the problems we've been talking about here, do they have a clear set of rules, and a single solution? No. The rules are mystifying. The solution, if it exists at all, is surprising and not obvious. Everybody in this room is dealing with their own version of the candle problem. And for candle problems of any kind, in any field, those if-then rewards, the things around which we've built so many of our businesses, don't work!It makes me crazy. And here's the thing. This is not a feeling. Okay? I'm a lawyer; I don't believe in feelings. This is not a philosophy. I'm an American; I don't believe in philosophy.This is a fact — or, as we say in my hometown of Washington, D.C., a true fact.Let me give you an example. Let me marshal the evidence here. I'm not telling a story, I'm making a case. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, some evidence: Dan Ariely, one of the great economists of our time, he and three colleagues did a study of some MIT students. They gave these MIT students a bunch of games, games that involved creativity, and motor skills, and concentration. And the offered them, for performance, three levels of rewards: small reward, medium reward, large reward. If you do really well you get the large reward, on down.What happened? As long as the task involved only mechanical skill bonuses worked as they would be expected: the higher the pay, the better the performance. Okay? But once the task called for even rudimentary cognitive skill, a larger reward led to poorer performance.Then they said, ""Let's see if there's any cultural bias here. Let's go to Madurai, India and test it."" Standard of living is lower. In Madurai, a reward that is modest in North American standards, is more meaningful there. Same deal. A bunch of games, three levels of rewards.What happens? People offered the medium level of rewards did no better than people offered the small rewards. But this time, people offered the highest rewards, they did the worst of all. In eight of the nine tasks we examined across three experiments, higher incentives led to worse performance.Is this some kind of touchy-feely socialist conspiracy going on here? No, these are economists from MIT, from Carnegie Mellon, from the University of Chicago. Do you know who sponsored this research? The Federal Reserve Bank of the United States. That's the American experience.Let's go across the pond to the London School of Economics, LSE, London School of Economics, alma mater of eleven Nobel Laureates in economics. Training ground for great economic thinkers like George Soros, and Friedrich Hayek, and Mick Jagger.Last month, just last month, economists at LSE looked at 51 studies of pay-for-performance plans, inside of companies. Here's what they said: ""We find that financial incentives can result in a negative impact on overall performance.""There is a mismatch between what science knows and what business does. And what worries me, as we stand here in the rubble of the economic collapse, is that too many organizations are making their decisions, their policies about talent and people, based on assumptions that are outdated, unexamined, and rooted more in folklore than in science. And if we really want to get out of this economic mess, if we really want high performance on those definitional tasks of the 21st century, the solution is not to do more of the wrong things, to entice people with a sweeter carrot, or threaten them with a sharper stick. We need a whole new approach.The good news is that the scientists who've been studying motivation have given us this new approach. It's built much more around intrinsic motivation. Around the desire to do things because they matter, because we like it, they're interesting, or part of something important. And to my mind, that new operating system for our businesses revolves around three elements: autonomy, mastery and purpose. Autonomy: the urge to direct our own lives. Mastery: the desire to get better and better at something that matters. Purpose: the yearning to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves. These are the building blocks of an entirely new operating system for our businesses.I want to talk today only about autonomy. In the 20th century, we came up with this idea of management. Management did not emanate from nature. Management is not a tree, it's a television set. Somebody invented it. It doesn't mean it's going to work forever. Management is great. Traditional notions of management are great if you want compliance. But if you want engagement, self-direction works better.Some examples of some kind of radical notions of self-direction. You don't see a lot of it, but you see the first stirrings of something really interesting going on, what it means is paying people adequately and fairly, absolutely — getting the issue of money off the table, and then giving people lots of autonomy.Some examples. How many of you have heard of the company Atlassian? It looks like less than half.Atlassian is an Australian software company. And they do something incredibly cool. A few times a year they tell their engineers, ""Go for the next 24 hours and work on anything you want, as long as it's not part of your regular job. Work on anything you want."" Engineers use this time to come up with a cool patch for code, come up with an elegant hack. Then they present all of the stuff that they've developed to their teammates, to the rest of the company, in this wild and woolly all-hands meeting at the end of the day. Being Australians, everybody has a beer.They call them FedEx Days. Why? Because you have to deliver something overnight. It's pretty; not bad. It's a huge trademark violation, but it's pretty clever.That one day of intense autonomy has produced a whole array of software fixes that might never have existed.It's worked so well that Atlassian has taken it to the next level with 20% time — done, famously, at Google — where engineers can spend 20% of their time working on anything they want. They have autonomy over their time, their task, their team, their technique. Radical amounts of autonomy. And at Google, as many of you know, about half of the new products in a typical year are birthed during that 20% time: things like Gmail, Orkut, Google News.Let me give you an even more radical example of it: something called the Results Only Work Environment (the ROWE), created by two American consultants, in place at a dozen companies around North America. In a ROWE people don't have schedules. They show up when they want. They don't have to be in the office at a certain time, or any time. They just have to get their work done. How they do it, when they do it, where they do it, is totally up to them. Meetings in these kinds of environments are optional.What happens? Almost across the board, productivity goes up, worker engagement goes up, worker satisfaction goes up, turnover goes down. Autonomy, mastery and purpose, the building blocks of a new way of doing things.Some of you might look at this and say, ""Hmm, that sounds nice, but it's Utopian."" And I say, ""Nope. I have proof."" The mid-1990s, Microsoft started an encyclopedia called Encarta. They had deployed all the right incentives, They paid professionals to write and edit thousands of articles. Well-compensated managers oversaw the whole thing to make sure it came in on budget and on time. A few years later, another encyclopedia got started. Different model, right? Do it for fun. No one gets paid a cent, or a euro or a yen. Do it because you like to do it.Just 10 years ago, if you had gone to an economist, anywhere, ""Hey, I've got these two different models for creating an encyclopedia. If they went head to head, who would win?"" 10 years ago you could not have found a single sober economist anywhere on planet Earth who would have predicted the Wikipedia model.This is the titanic battle between these two approaches. This is the Ali-Frazier of motivation, right? This is the Thrilla in Manila. Intrinsic motivators versus extrinsic motivators. Autonomy, mastery and purpose, versus carrot and sticks, and who wins? Intrinsic motivation, autonomy, mastery and purpose, in a knockout.Let me wrap up. There is a mismatch between what science knows and what business does. Here is what science knows. One: Those 20th century rewards, those motivators we think are a natural part of business, do work, but only in a surprisingly narrow band of circumstances. Two: Those if-then rewards often destroy creativity. Three: The secret to high performance isn't rewards and punishments, but that unseen intrinsic drive— the drive to do things for their own sake. The drive to do things cause they matter.And here's the best part. We already know this. The science confirms what we know in our hearts. So, if we repair this mismatch between science and business, if we bring our motivation, notions of motivation into the 21st century, if we get past this lazy, dangerous, ideology of carrots and sticks, we can strengthen our businesses, we can solve a lot of those candle problems, and maybe, maybe — we can change the world.I rest my case.","Rethinking Motivation in Business253 254 - Introduction to the speaker's background and entry into law.255 - Presentation of the ""candle problem"" to explain functional fixedness and introduce the topic of incentives.256 - Discussion of various studies demonstrating the ineffectiveness of traditional financial incentives for tasks requiring cognitive skills.257 - Contrast between simple and complex tasks, showing when traditional incentives can still be effective.258 - Presentation of a new business operating system focused on intrinsic motivation, encompassing autonomy, mastery, and purpose.259 - Explanation and examples of how autonomy can transform business productivity and employee satisfaction.260 - Conclusion with a call to align business practices with what scientific research suggests about motivation.","You are a TED Story Creator, a storyteller, and an expert in crafting compelling transcripts for TED Talks. You possess a knowledge base of the world’s most inspiring TED talks. Given a title and an outline, your task is to create an engaging transcript that will captivate the audience. Adhere to the sequence of the outline and the bullet points to weave a captivating narrative."261"The story starts: I was at a friend's house, and she had on her shelf a copy of the DSM manual, which is the manual of mental disorders. It lists every known mental disorder. And it used to be, back in the '50s, a very slim pamphlet. And then it got bigger and bigger and bigger, and now it's 886 pages long. And it lists currently 374 mental disorders.So I was leafing through it, wondering if I had any mental disorders, and it turns out I've got 12.I've got generalized anxiety disorder, which is a given. I've got nightmare disorder, which is categorized if you have recurrent dreams of being pursued or declared a failure, and all my dreams involve people chasing me down the street going, ""You're a failure!""I've got parent-child relational problems, which I blame my parents for.I'm kidding. I'm not kidding. I'm kidding. And I've got malingering. And I think it's actually quite rare to have both malingering and generalized anxiety disorder, because malingering tends to make me feel very anxious.Anyway, I was looking through this book, wondering if I was much crazier than I thought I was, or maybe it's not a good idea to diagnose yourself with a mental disorder if you're not a trained professional, or maybe the psychiatry profession has a kind of strange desire to label what's essentially normal human behavior as a mental disorder. I didn't know which of these was true, but I thought it was kind of interesting, and I thought maybe I should meet a critic of psychiatry to get their view, which is how I ended up having lunch with the Scientologists.It was a man called Brian, who runs a crack team of Scientologists who are determined to destroy psychiatry wherever it lies. They're called the CCHR. And I said to him, ""Can you prove to me that psychiatry is a pseudo-science that can't be trusted?"" And he said, ""Yes, we can prove it to you."" And I said, ""How?"" And he said, ""We're going to introduce you to Tony."" And I said, ""Who's Tony?"" And he said, ""Tony's in Broadmoor."" Now, Broadmoor is Broadmoor Hospital. It used to be known as the Broadmoor Asylum for the Criminally Insane. It's where they send the serial killers, and the people who can't help themselves. And I said to Brian, ""Well, what did Tony do?"" And he said, ""Hardly anything. He beat someone up or something, and he decided to fake madness to get out of a prison sentence. But he faked it too well, and now he's stuck in Broadmoor and nobody will believe he's sane. Do you want us to try and get you into Broadmoor to meet Tony?"" So I said, ""Yes, please.""So I got the train to Broadmoor. I began to yawn uncontrollably around Kempton Park, which apparently is what dogs also do when anxious, they yawn uncontrollably. And we got to Broadmoor. And I got taken through gate after gate after gate after gate into the wellness center, which is where you get to meet the patients. It looks like a giant Hampton Inn. It's all peach and pine and calming colors. And the only bold colors are the reds of the panic buttons. And the patients started drifting in. And they were quite overweight and wearing sweatpants, and quite docile-looking. And Brian the Scientologist whispered to me, ""They're medicated,"" which, to the Scientologists, is like the worst evil in the world, but I'm thinking it's probably a good idea.And then Brian said, ""Here's Tony."" And a man was walking in. And he wasn't overweight, he was in very good physical shape. And he wasn't wearing sweatpants, he was wearing a pinstripe suit. And he had his arm outstretched like someone out of The Apprentice. He looked like a man who wanted to wear an outfit that would convince me that he was very sane.And he sat down. And I said, ""So is it true that you faked your way in here?"" And he said, ""Yep. Yep. Absolutely. I beat someone up when I was 17. And I was in prison awaiting trial, and my cellmate said to me, 'You know what you have to do? Fake madness. Tell them you're mad, you'll get sent to some cushy hospital. Nurses will bring you pizzas, you'll have your own PlayStation.'"" I said, ""Well, how did you do it?"" He said, ""Well, I asked to see the prison psychiatrist. And I'd just seen a film called 'Crash,' in which people get sexual pleasure from crashing cars into walls. So I said to the psychiatrist, 'I get sexual pleasure from crashing cars into walls.'"" And I said, ""What else?"" He said, ""Oh, yeah. I told the psychiatrist that I wanted to watch women as they died, because it would make me feel more normal."" I said, ""Where'd you get that from?"" He said, ""Oh, from a biography of Ted Bundy that they had at the prison library.""Anyway, he faked madness too well, he said. And they didn't send him to some cushy hospital. They sent him to Broadmoor. And the minute he got there, said he took one look at the place, asked to see the psychiatrist, said, ""There's been a terrible misunderstanding. I'm not mentally ill."" I said, ""How long have you been here for?"" He said, ""Well, if I'd just done my time in prison for the original crime, I'd have got five years. I've been in Broadmoor for 12 years.""Tony said that it's a lot harder to convince people you're sane than it is to convince them you're crazy. He said, ""I thought the best way to seem normal would be to talk to people normally about normal things like football or what's on TV. I subscribe to New Scientist, and recently they had an article about how the U.S. Army was training bumblebees to sniff out explosives. So I said to a nurse, 'Did you know that the U.S. Army is training bumblebees to sniff out explosives?' When I read my medical notes, I saw they'd written: 'Believes bees can sniff out explosives.'""He said, ""You know, they're always looking out for nonverbal clues to my mental state. But how do you sit in a sane way? How do you cross your legs in a sane way? It's just impossible."" When Tony said that to me, I thought to myself, ""Am I sitting like a journalist? Am I crossing my legs like a journalist?""He said, ""You know, I've got the Stockwell Strangler on one side of me, and I've got the 'Tiptoe Through the Tulips' rapist on the other side of me. So I tend to stay in my room a lot because I find them quite frightening. And they take that as a sign of madness. They say it proves that I'm aloof and grandiose."" So, only in Broadmoor would not wanting to hang out with serial killers be a sign of madness. Anyway, he seemed completely normal to me, but what did I know?And when I got home I emailed his clinician, Anthony Maden. I said, ""What's the story?"" And he said, ""Yep. We accept that Tony faked madness to get out of a prison sentence, because his hallucinations — that had seemed quite cliche to begin with — just vanished the minute he got to Broadmoor. However, we have assessed him, and we've determined that what he is is a psychopath."" And in fact, faking madness is exactly the kind of cunning and manipulative act of a psychopath. It's on the checklist: cunning, manipulative. So, faking your brain going wrong is evidence that your brain has gone wrong. And I spoke to other experts, and they said the pinstripe suit — classic psychopath — speaks to items one and two on the checklist: glibness, superficial charm and grandiose sense of self-worth. And I said, ""Well, but why didn't he hang out with the other patients?"" Classic psychopath — it speaks to grandiosity and also lack of empathy. So all the things that had seemed most normal about Tony was evidence, according to his clinician, that he was mad in this new way. He was a psychopath.And his clinician said to me, ""If you want to know more about psychopaths, you can go on a psychopath-spotting course run by Robert Hare, who invented the psychopath checklist."" So I did. I went on a psychopath-spotting course, and I am now a certified — and I have to say, extremely adept — psychopath spotter.So, here's the statistics: One in a hundred regular people is a psychopath. So there's 1,500 people in his room. Fifteen of you are psychopaths. Although that figure rises to four percent of CEOs and business leaders, so I think there's a very good chance there's about 30 or 40 psychopaths in this room. It could be carnage by the end of the night.Hare said the reason why is because capitalism at its most ruthless rewards psychopathic behavior — the lack of empathy, the glibness, cunning, manipulative. In fact, capitalism, perhaps at its most remorseless, is a physical manifestation of psychopathy. It's like a form of psychopathy that's come down to affect us all. Hare said, ""You know what? Forget about some guy at Broadmoor who may or may not have faked madness. Who cares? That's not a big story. The big story,"" he said, ""is corporate psychopathy. You want to go and interview yourself some corporate psychopaths.""So I gave it a try. I wrote to the Enron people. I said, ""Could I come and interview you in prison, to find out it you're psychopaths?""And they didn't reply.So I changed tack. I emailed ""Chainsaw Al"" Dunlap, the asset stripper from the 1990s. He would come into failing businesses and close down 30 percent of the workforce, just turn American towns into ghost towns. And I emailed him and I said, ""I believe you may have a very special brain anomaly that makes you ... special, and interested in the predatory spirit, and fearless. Can I come and interview you about your special brain anomaly?"" And he said, ""Come on over!""So I went to Al Dunlap's grand Florida mansion. It was filled with sculptures of predatory animals. There were lions and tigers — he was taking me through the garden — there were falcons and eagles, he was saying, ""Over there you've got sharks and —"" he was saying this in a less effeminate way — ""You've got more sharks and you've got tigers."" It was like Narnia.And then we went into his kitchen. Now, Al Dunlap would be brought in to save failing companies, he'd close down 30 percent of the workforce. And he'd quite often fire people with a joke. Like, for instance, one famous story about him, somebody came up to him and said, ""I've just bought myself a new car."" And he said, ""Well, you may have a new car, but I'll tell you what you don't have — a job.""So in his kitchen — he was in there with his wife, Judy, and his bodyguard, Sean — and I said, ""You know how I said in my email that you might have a special brain anomaly that makes you special?"" He said, ""Yeah, it's an amazing theory, it's like Star Trek. You're going where no man has gone before."" And I said, ""Well —"" (Clears throat)Some psychologists might say that this makes you —"" (Mumbles)And he said, ""What?"" And I said, ""A psychopath."" And I said, ""I've got a list of psychopathic traits in my pocket. Can I go through them with you?""And he looked intrigued despite himself, and he said, ""Okay, go on."" And I said, ""Okay. Grandiose sense of self-worth."" Which I have to say, would have been hard for him to deny, because he was standing under a giant oil painting of himself.He said, ""Well, you've got to believe in you!"" And I said, ""Manipulative."" He said, ""That's leadership.""And I said, ""Shallow affect, an inability to experience a range of emotions."" He said, ""Who wants to be weighed down by some nonsense emotions?"" So he was going down the psychopath checklist, basically turning it into ""Who Moved My Cheese?""But I did notice something happening to me the day I was with Al Dunlap. Whenever he said anything to me that was kind of normal — like he said ""no"" to juvenile delinquency, he said he got accepted into West Point, and they don't let delinquents in West Point. He said ""no"" to many short-term marital relationships. He's only ever been married twice. Admittedly, his first wife cited in her divorce papers that he once threatened her with a knife and said he always wondered what human flesh tasted like, but people say stupid things to each other in bad marriages in the heat of an argument, and his second marriage has lasted 41 years. So whenever he said anything to me that just seemed kind of non-psychopathic, I thought to myself, well I'm not going to put that in my book. And then I realized that becoming a psychopath spotter had kind of turned me a little bit psychopathic. Because I was desperate to shove him in a box marked ""Psychopath."" I was desperate to define him by his maddest edges.And I realized, my God — this is what I've been doing for 20 years. It's what all journalists do. We travel across the world with our notepads in our hands, and we wait for the gems. And the gems are always the outermost aspects of our interviewee's personality. And we stitch them together like medieval monks, and we leave the normal stuff on the floor. And you know, this is a country that over-diagnoses certain mental disorders hugely. Childhood bipolar — children as young as four are being labeled bipolar because they have temper tantrums, which scores them high on the bipolar checklist.When I got back to London, Tony phoned me. He said, ""Why haven't you been returning my calls?"" I said, ""Well, they say that you're a psychopath."" And he said, ""I'm not a psychopath."" He said, ""You know what? One of the items on the checklist is lack of remorse, but another item on the checklist is cunning, manipulative. So when you say you feel remorse for your crime, they say, 'Typical of the psychopath to cunningly say he feels remorse when he doesn't.' It's like witchcraft, they turn everything upside-down."" He said, ""I've got a tribunal coming up. Will you come to it?"" So I said okay.So I went to his tribunal. And after 14 years in Broadmoor, they let him go. They decided that he shouldn't be held indefinitely because he scores high on a checklist that might mean that he would have a greater than average chance of recidivism. So they let him go. And outside in the corridor he said to me, ""You know what, Jon? Everyone's a bit psychopathic."" He said, ""You are, I am. Well, obviously I am."" I said, ""What are you going to do now?"" He said, ""I'm going to go to Belgium. There's a woman there that I fancy. But she's married, so I'm going to have to get her split up from her husband.""Anyway, that was two years ago, and that's where my book ended. And for the last 20 months, everything was fine. Nothing bad happened. He was living with a girl outside London. He was, according to Brian the Scientologist, making up for lost time, which I know sounds ominous, but isn't necessarily ominous. Unfortunately, after 20 months, he did go back to jail for a month. He got into a ""fracas"" in a bar, he called it. Ended up going to jail for a month, which I know is bad, but at least a month implies that whatever the fracas was, it wasn't too bad.And then he phoned me. And you know what, I think it's right that Tony is out. Because you shouldn't define people by their maddest edges. And what Tony is, is he's a semi-psychopath. He's a gray area in a world that doesn't like gray areas. But the gray areas are where you find the complexity. It's where you find the humanity, and it's where you find the truth. And Tony said to me, ""Jon, could I buy you a drink in a bar? I just want to thank you for everything you've done for me."" And I didn't go. What would you have done?Thank you.(Applause)","Challenging Psychiatric Labels and Exploring the Complexity of Human Behavior262 263 - Initial curiosity leads to exploration of mental disorders through the DSM manual.264 - Accidental meeting with Scientologists introduces the skepticism toward psychiatry.265 - Visit to Broadmoor exposes the difficulty in proving sanity and the fixed perceptions within psychiatric assessments.266 - Introduction to corporate psychopathy suggests a broader, societal impact of psychopathic traits.267 - Personal experience with a corporate leader illustrates the challenge in defining someone solely by psychological assessments.268 - Reflections on the role of journalists and the public in labeling and perceiving mental health.269 - Final thoughts on the imperfection and complexity of psychiatric labeling, emphasizing the human and societal implications.","You are a TED Story Creator, a storyteller, and an expert in crafting compelling transcripts for TED Talks. You possess a knowledge base of the world’s most inspiring TED talks. Given a title and an outline, your task is to create an engaging transcript that will captivate the audience. Adhere to the sequence of the outline and the bullet points to weave a captivating narrative."270"I have a confession to make. But first, I want you to make a little confession to me. In the past year, I want you to just raise your hand if you've experienced relatively little stress. Anyone?How about a moderate amount of stress?Who has experienced a lot of stress? Yeah. Me too.But that is not my confession. My confession is this: I am a health psychologist, and my mission is to help people be happier and healthier. But I fear that something I've been teaching for the last 10 years is doing more harm than good, and it has to do with stress. For years I've been telling people, stress makes you sick. It increases the risk of everything from the common cold to cardiovascular disease. Basically, I've turned stress into the enemy. But I have changed my mind about stress, and today, I want to change yours.Let me start with the study that made me rethink my whole approach to stress. This study tracked 30,000 adults in the United States for eight years, and they started by asking people, ""How much stress have you experienced in the last year?"" They also asked, ""Do you believe that stress is harmful for your health?"" And then they used public death records to find out who died.Okay. Some bad news first. People who experienced a lot of stress in the previous year had a 43 percent increased risk of dying. But that was only true for the people who also believed that stress is harmful for your health.People who experienced a lot of stress but did not view stress as harmful were no more likely to die. In fact, they had the lowest risk of dying of anyone in the study, including people who had relatively little stress.Now the researchers estimated that over the eight years they were tracking deaths, 182,000 Americans died prematurely, not from stress, but from the belief that stress is bad for you.That is over 20,000 deaths a year. Now, if that estimate is correct, that would make believing stress is bad for you the 15th largest cause of death in the United States last year, killing more people than skin cancer, HIV/AIDS and homicide.You can see why this study freaked me out. Here I've been spending so much energy telling people stress is bad for your health.So this study got me wondering: Can changing how you think about stress make you healthier? And here the science says yes. When you change your mind about stress, you can change your body's response to stress.Now to explain how this works, I want you all to pretend that you are participants in a study designed to stress you out. It's called the social stress test. You come into the laboratory, and you're told you have to give a five-minute impromptu speech on your personal weaknesses to a panel of expert evaluators sitting right in front of you, and to make sure you feel the pressure, there are bright lights and a camera in your face, kind of like this.And the evaluators have been trained to give you discouraging, non-verbal feedback, like this.(Exhales)Now that you're sufficiently demoralized, time for part two: a math test. And unbeknownst to you, the experimenter has been trained to harass you during it. Now we're going to all do this together. It's going to be fun. For me.Okay.I want you all to count backwards from 996 in increments of seven. You're going to do this out loud, as fast as you can, starting with 996. Go!(Audience counting)Go faster. Faster please. You're going too slow.(Audience counting)Stop. Stop, stop, stop. That guy made a mistake. We are going to have to start all over again.You're not very good at this, are you? Okay, so you get the idea. If you were actually in this study, you'd probably be a little stressed out. Your heart might be pounding, you might be breathing faster, maybe breaking out into a sweat. And normally, we interpret these physical changes as anxiety or signs that we aren't coping very well with the pressure.But what if you viewed them instead as signs that your body was energized, was preparing you to meet this challenge? Now that is exactly what participants were told in a study conducted at Harvard University. Before they went through the social stress test, they were taught to rethink their stress response as helpful. That pounding heart is preparing you for action. If you're breathing faster, it's no problem. It's getting more oxygen to your brain. And participants who learned to view the stress response as helpful for their performance, well, they were less stressed out, less anxious, more confident, but the most fascinating finding to me was how their physical stress response changed.Now, in a typical stress response, your heart rate goes up, and your blood vessels constrict like this. And this is one of the reasons that chronic stress is sometimes associated with cardiovascular disease. It's not really healthy to be in this state all the time. But in the study, when participants viewed their stress response as helpful, their blood vessels stayed relaxed like this. Their heart was still pounding, but this is a much healthier cardiovascular profile. It actually looks a lot like what happens in moments of joy and courage. Over a lifetime of stressful experiences, this one biological change could be the difference between a stress-induced heart attack at age 50 and living well into your 90s. And this is really what the new science of stress reveals, that how you think about stress matters.So my goal as a health psychologist has changed. I no longer want to get rid of your stress. I want to make you better at stress. And we just did a little intervention. If you raised your hand and said you'd had a lot of stress in the last year, we could have saved your life, because hopefully the next time your heart is pounding from stress, you're going to remember this talk and you're going to think to yourself, this is my body helping me rise to this challenge. And when you view stress in that way, your body believes you, and your stress response becomes healthier.Now I said I have over a decade of demonizing stress to redeem myself from, so we are going to do one more intervention. I want to tell you about one of the most under-appreciated aspects of the stress response, and the idea is this: Stress makes you social.To understand this side of stress, we need to talk about a hormone, oxytocin, and I know oxytocin has already gotten as much hype as a hormone can get. It even has its own cute nickname, the cuddle hormone, because it's released when you hug someone. But this is a very small part of what oxytocin is involved in.Oxytocin is a neuro-hormone. It fine-tunes your brain's social instincts. It primes you to do things that strengthen close relationships. Oxytocin makes you crave physical contact with your friends and family. It enhances your empathy. It even makes you more willing to help and support the people you care about. Some people have even suggested we should snort oxytocin... to become more compassionate and caring. But here's what most people don't understand about oxytocin. It's a stress hormone. Your pituitary gland pumps this stuff out as part of the stress response. It's as much a part of your stress response as the adrenaline that makes your heart pound. And when oxytocin is released in the stress response, it is motivating you to seek support. Your biological stress response is nudging you to tell someone how you feel, instead of bottling it up. Your stress response wants to make sure you notice when someone else in your life is struggling so that you can support each other. When life is difficult, your stress response wants you to be surrounded by people who care about you.Okay, so how is knowing this side of stress going to make you healthier? Well, oxytocin doesn't only act on your brain. It also acts on your body, and one of its main roles in your body is to protect your cardiovascular system from the effects of stress. It's a natural anti-inflammatory. It also helps your blood vessels stay relaxed during stress. But my favorite effect on the body is actually on the heart. Your heart has receptors for this hormone, and oxytocin helps heart cells regenerate and heal from any stress-induced damage. This stress hormone strengthens your heart.And the cool thing is that all of these physical benefits of oxytocin are enhanced by social contact and social support. So when you reach out to others under stress, either to seek support or to help someone else, you release more of this hormone, your stress response becomes healthier, and you actually recover faster from stress. I find this amazing, that your stress response has a built-in mechanism for stress resilience, and that mechanism is human connection.I want to finish by telling you about one more study. And listen up, because this study could also save a life. This study tracked about 1,000 adults in the United States, and they ranged in age from 34 to 93, and they started the study by asking, ""How much stress have you experienced in the last year?"" They also asked, ""How much time have you spent helping out friends, neighbors, people in your community?"" And then they used public records for the next five years to find out who died.Okay, so the bad news first: For every major stressful life experience, like financial difficulties or family crisis, that increased the risk of dying by 30 percent. But — and I hope you are expecting a ""but"" by now — but that wasn't true for everyone. People who spent time caring for others showed absolutely no stress-related increase in dying. Zero. Caring created resilience.And so we see once again that the harmful effects of stress on your health are not inevitable. How you think and how you act can transform your experience of stress. When you choose to view your stress response as helpful, you create the biology of courage. And when you choose to connect with others under stress, you can create resilience. Now I wouldn't necessarily ask for more stressful experiences in my life, but this science has given me a whole new appreciation for stress. Stress gives us access to our hearts. The compassionate heart that finds joy and meaning in connecting with others, and yes, your pounding physical heart, working so hard to give you strength and energy. And when you choose to view stress in this way, you're not just getting better at stress, you're actually making a pretty profound statement. You're saying that you can trust yourself to handle life's challenges. And you're remembering that you don't have to face them alone.Thank you.(Applause)Chris Anderson: This is kind of amazing, what you're telling us. It seems amazing to me that a belief about stress can make so much difference to someone's life expectancy. How would that extend to advice, like, if someone is making a lifestyle choice between, say, a stressful job and a non-stressful job, does it matter which way they go? It's equally wise to go for the stressful job so long as you believe that you can handle it, in some sense?KM: Yeah, and one thing we know for certain is that chasing meaning is better for your health than trying to avoid discomfort. And so I would say that's really the best way to make decisions, is go after what it is that creates meaning in your life and then trust yourself to handle the stress that follows.CA: Thank you so much, Kelly. It's pretty cool.(Applause)","Transforming Stress into a Positive Force271 272 - Introduction and confession by the speaker about rethinking stress.273 - Overview of a key study linking stress perception to mortality rates.274 - Explanation of how changing stress perception can alter physical stress responses.275 - Discussion on oxytocin as a stress hormone that promotes social behavior and resilience.276 - Conclusion linking stress management to life expectancy through fostering human connections and caring for others.277 - Advice on making lifestyle choices that embrace meaningful stress.","You are a TED Story Creator, a storyteller, and an expert in crafting compelling transcripts for TED Talks. You possess a knowledge base of the world’s most inspiring TED talks. Given a title and an outline, your task is to create an engaging transcript that will captivate the audience. Adhere to the sequence of the outline and the bullet points to weave a captivating narrative."278"Bigger welcome! Hello, San Francisco! TEDx – oh my God, blinding light! Hi, everybody! How are you? (Audience cheering) Fine?! Oh my gosh! Okay, so... My name is Mel Robbins, and for the last seventeen years, I have done nothing but help people get everything that they want. Within reason! My husband's here. So, I've done it in the courtroom, in the boardroom, in the bedroom, in people's living room, whatever room you want to be in, if I'm there, I will help you get whatever you want by any means necessary. For the last three years – I host a syndicated radio show. Five days a week, I go live in forty cities and I talk to men and women across America who feel stuck. Do you know that a third of Americans feel dissatisfied with their lives right now? That is a hundred million people! That's insane! And I've come face to face with it in this new show that I'm doing, which is also insane, it's called ""In-laws"". I move in with families across America – You guessed it! – who are at war with their in-laws. We move them into the same house, I verbally assassinate everybody, we open up Pandora's box, and I get people to stop arguing about the donuts and who is hosting Thanksgiving dinner, and talk about the real stuff. And that's what I want to talk to you about. I'm here for you. I'm going to tell you everything I know in less than eighteen minutes about how to get what you want. So I want you to take a millisecond right now and think about what you want. You! And I want you to be selfish. Screw Simon and the ""We"" thing. This is about me, right now! Sorry, Simon. What do you want? And here's the deal. I don't want it to sound good to other people. Being healthy will not get your ass on a treadmill. Losing your manboobs, so you can hook up with somebody, now that's motivation. So, I want to know: What do you want? Do you want to lose weight? Do you want to triple your income? Do you want to start a nonprofit? Do you want to find love? What is it? Get it, right here. You know what it is, don't analyze it to death, just pick something. That's part of the problem. You won't pick. So, we're going to be talking about how you get what you want. And frankly, getting what you want is simple. But notice I didn't say it was easy. It's very simple. In fact, if you think about it, we live in the most amazing moment in time. So that thing that you have up here, whatever it may be, you want to use healthy eating to cure your diabetes, you want to figure out how to take care of the elders and start a new hospice center, you want to move to Africa and build a school... Guess what? You can walk into a book store – right now! – and buy at least ten books written by credentialed experts on how the hell you do it. You could Google it. And you could probably find at least, I don't know - a thousand blogs documenting the step, by step, by step transformation that somebody else is already doing. You can find anybody online and cyber-stalk them! You can just walk in their footsteps – just use the science of drafting. Follow what everyone else has done, because somebody is already doing it! So why don't you have what you want, when you have all the information that you need, you have the contacts that you need, there are probably free tools online that allow you to start a business, or join a group, or do whatever the heck you want!? It all comes down to one word: F*©#. Shut the front door, you know what I'm talking about? The f-bomb. It's everywhere! You hear it all the time! I honestly don't understand what the appeal is of the word. I mean, you don't sound smart when you say it. And it's really not expressing how you really feel. It's sort of a cheap shot to take. And of course you know I'm talking about the word ""fine"". ""How you doing?"" ""Oh, I'm fine."" Oh, really? You are? Dragging around those extra forty pounds, you're fine? Feeling like roommates with your spouse, and you're fine? You haven't had sex in four months, you're fine? Really?! I don't think so! But see, here's the deal with saying that you're fine: It's actually genius. Because if you're fine, you don't have to do anything about it. But when you think about this word ""fine"", it just makes me so angry. Here we are at a conference about being alive and you're going to describe the experience of being alive as ""fine""?! What a flimsy and feeble word! If you're crappy, say you're crappy! If you're amazing say you're amazing! Tell the truth! And this not only goes for the social construct: ""Oh, I don't want to burden you with the fact that I hate my life"", or: ""Hey, I'm amazing! But that would make you feel terrible."" The bigger issue – The bigger issue with ""fine"" is that you say it to yourself. That thing that you want, I guarantee you, you've convinced yourself that you're fine not having it. That's why you're not pushing yourself. It's the areas in your life where you've given up. Where you've said, ""Oh, I'm fine. My mom's never going to change, so I just can't have that conversation."" ""I'm fine. We've got to wait until the kids graduate, before we get divorced, so we'll just sleep in separate bedrooms."" ""I'm fine. I lost my job, I can barely pay my bills, but whatever – It's hard to get a job."" One of the reasons why this word also just annoys me so much is, scientists have calculated – Oh yeah, I'm coming down! Scientists have calculated the odds of you being born. That's right. They've crunched the numbers. I see you up there. They've crunched the numbers on you – Yeah, you guys standing up, you want to sit down for this. They've crunched the numbers on you being born. And they took into account all of the wars, and the natural disasters, and the dinosaurs, and everything else. And do you realize that the odds, the odds of you, yeah, right here, put your computer away, stand up for me, Doug! So the odds of Doug here, turn around, say ""hi"" to everybody – the odds of Doug being born at the moment in time he was born, to the parents you were born to, with the DNA structure that you have, one in four hundred trillion! Isn't that amazing? Doug: I'm so lucky! Mel: Yes! You're not fine, you're fantastic! You have life-changing ideas for a reason, and it's not to torture yourself. Thank you. Thank you, Doug. Christine was right when she said all of you could be on stage. Because all of you – we're all in this category. One in four hundred trillion. All day long you have ideas that could change your life, that could change the world, that could change the way that you feel, and what do you do with them? Nothing! (Grunts) Hopefully I won't moon you. You didn't pay for that. And I want you to just think for a minute, because we all have – I love to use the analogy ""the inner snooze button"" – you have these amazing ideas that bubble up. You've been watching people all day and I guarantee you, like ping pong balls – bam-bam-bam and everytime you have an idea, what do you do? – Hit the snooze! What's the first decision you made this morning? I bet it was to go back to bed. ""Yeah, first decision today, I'm one in four hundred trillion, I'm going to go back to sleep."" And I get it! Your bed is comfortable! It's cosy, it's warm! If you're lucky, you've got somebody that you love next to you, or in my case, I've got my husband and my two kids and possibly the dog. And the reason why I'm bringing up this first decision that you made today, and the inner snooze alarm, is because in any area of your life that you want to change, any – there's one fact that you need to know. This one: You are never going to feel like it. Ever. No one's coming, motivation isn't happening, you're never going to feel like it. Scientists call it activation energy. That's what they call the force required to get you to change from what you're doing on autopilot to do something new. So try this test tomorrow. You think you're so fancy, I know, you're attending TED. Try this. Tomorrow morning, set your alarm for thirty minutes earlier. And then when it goes off, take those sheets, throw them off, and stand up and start your day. No snooze, no delay, no, ""I'll just wait here for five seconds because Mel's not standing here"" – Do it. And the reason why I want you to do it is because you will come face to face with the physical, and I mean physical force that's required to change your behavior. Do you think that somebody who needs to lose weight ever feels like going on a diet? Of course not! You think they ever feel like eating boiled chicken and peas instead of a croissant? I don't think so! The activation energy required to get your ass away from your computer and out the front door, to go on the walk, you said that you were going to go on, is the exact same amount of force that it takes you to push yourself out of a warm bed and into a cold room. What's interesting about being an adult is that when you become eighteen, nobody tells you that it's now going to be your job to parent yourself. And by ""parent yourself"", I mean it's your job to make yourself do the crap you don't want to do, so you can be everything that you're supposed to be. And you're so damn busy waiting to feel like it. And you're never going to! My son never feels like getting off his DS. That's my job! Get off the damn DS! Kendall, clean up the Barbies! If you're going to have a nude party in my bathroom, at least clean it up! God, chew with your mouth closed! We're not a barn, for crying out loud! Alright, dinner is coming, get out of the pantry. As parents, and you were a kid, your parents make you do the things you don't feel like doing. Because you won't. Ever. Not now, not then, not ever! And even when you get good at something, you'll figure out something else you don't want to do. And then you'll plateau out, get bored, ""I hate this job. Blah blah boring."" But will you look for a new one? No! You'll just bitch about that one. It's very, very simple to get what you want. But it's not easy. You have to force yourself. And I mean force. And the reason why I use the word ""force"" – when Roz was up here and talking about the emotion tracking, and she had the picture of two sides of the brain – I look at the brain the exact same way. Only I describe one side of your brain as autopilot and the other side as emergency brake. That's the only two speeds you get: autopilot, emergency brake. And guess which one your brain likes better: autopilot. You've had the experience where you've driven to work and you get there and you're like, ""Oh my God, I don't remember ever driving here."" You weren't drunk! That was your brain on autopilot. It was functioning just at this level. And the problem with your mind is that anytime you do anything that's different from your normal routine, guess what your brain does — emergency brake! And it has that reaction for everything. Everything! You walk into the kitchen and see everybody's left their breakfast dishes for you. And you think for the hundredth time, ""I'm going to kill them. In fact I'm gonna leave it here and I'm going to make them do it."" But that's not your normal routine, is it? So your mind goes: emergency brake! And you go right into autopilot. ""I'll just load it, and be pissed, and then not have sex. That's what I'm going to do."" So, when I say ""force"", anything that's a break from your routine is going to require force. And if you think about your life, it's kind of funny because we are kids and then we become adults, and we spend so much time trying to push our life into some sort of stable routine, and then we grow bored of it! You wake up at the same time every day, you have largely the same breakfast, you drive to work the same way, show up at work, look busy, avoid making calls, update Facebook, you attend a meeting and doodle the whole time, go back and update Facebook, make plans for the evening, you look busy some more, then drive home the same way, you eat largely the same dinner or a variety of it, you watch the same kind of media, and then you go to bed, and do the same thing all over again! No wonder you're bored out of your mind! It's the routine that's killing you. I have this theory about why people get stuck in life. So, most of you've probably taken your Basic Psych 101 class, and you've bumped into Abraham Maslow's ""Hierarchy of Needs""? Well, your body is kinda cool. Because you have these basic needs. And your body is wired to send you signals. If you need food, what do you feel? If you need water, what do you feel? If you need sex, what do you feel? Thank you. I think when you feel stuck or dissatisfied in your life, it's a signal. And it's not a signal that your life is broken. It's a signal that one of your most basic needs are not being met. Your need for exploration. Everything about your life, about your body, grows! Your cells regenerate, your hair, your nails, everything grows for your entire life. And your soul needs exploration and growth. And the only way you'll get it is by forcing yourself to be uncomfortable. Forcing yourself to get outside, out of your head. Thank you. If you're in your head, you're behind enemy lines. That is not God talking, okay? It's not! In fact, if I put a speaker on it and we broadcast what you say to yourself, we would institutionalize you. You would not hang out with people that talk to you the way you talk to yourself. So get out of your head! Your feelings! Your feelings are screwing you! I don't care how you feel! I care about what you want! And if you listen to how you feel, when it comes to what you want – you will not get it. Because you will never feel like it. And you need to get outside your comfort zone. It's not about taking risks, it's about getting outside your comfort zone. Those first three seconds when you push yourself out of bed, they blow. But once you're up, it's great. Those first three seconds when you're sitting here in a stadium like this and somebody says, ""Get up and come dance,"" and you think, ""Oh, I should do that,"" and then you're like, ""Uhmm."" That experience that you had when you had the impulse to do it and then you didn't do the activation energy required to force yourself, your emergency brake got pulled – ""I'm sitting right here. I'm not going up with those crazy people, I don't like to dance..."" What happened for me is I came up, and I bumped into Rachel, and then we started talking, and next thing you know, she's tweeting. And we're friends. And – boom! Get outside. That's where the magic is. That's where the one in four hundred trillion exists. So everything I do – oh, OK, this is the last part. Sorry. So one more thing that you can use, I call it the five-second-rule. Your mind can process a facial expression in 33 milliseconds. It can move pretty damn quick. The other thing that it does very quickly is if you have one of those little impulses that are pulling you, if you don't marry it with an action within five seconds, you pull the emergency brake and kill the idea. Kill it! If you have the impulse to get up and come dance while the band is playing, if you don't stand up in five seconds, you're going to pull the emergency brake. If you have an impulse about, you were inspired by somebody's speech today, and you don't do something within five seconds – write a note, send yourself a text – anything physical to marry it with the idea, you will pull the emergency brake and kill the idea. Your problem isn't ideas. Your problem is you don't act on them. You kill them. It's not my fault. It's not anybody's fault. You're doing it to yourself. Stop it! I'm counting on you. One in four hundred trillion. You got stuff to do! And it's not going to happen in your head. So I want you to practice this today. When we go off to party, thank God it's coming soon, because I think we all could use a cocktail, I want you to practice the five-second-rule. You see somebody and you think you have an impulse, they look interesting? Walk over there! You were inspired by somebody and you have a request? Make it! That's why you're here! Experiment with it, and I think you'll be shocked about what happens. And one more thing, I want you to know that everything that I do, whether it's the radio show, or the television show, or the book that I wrote, or the column, it's for you. And if there is anything that I can do, if I can do anything to make you do the things you don't want to do, so you can have what you want, I will do it. But you need to walk over, you need to open your mouth, and you need to make the request. You got it? Good. Go do it. Thank you! Thank you, yes! Stand up! You have the impulse, stand up! Thank you!","Overcoming Stagnation and Achieving Your Desires279 280 - Introduction: Mel Robbins identifies common feelings of dissatisfaction and introduces her experience in helping people achieve their desires.281 - Identifying Desires: Participants are encouraged to think selfishly about their true desires, not what sounds appealing to others.282 - Simplicity vs. Ease: Achieving desires is simple in theory due to available resources, but not easy in execution without action.283 - The Problem with ""Fine"": The word ""fine"" is a barrier to acknowledging and addressing deeper dissatisfactions or aspirations.284 - Activation Energy: Change requires overcoming inertia through significant effort, described as ""activation energy.""285 - Self-Parenting: As adults, the responsibility to push ourselves out of comfort zones and into actions falls entirely on us.286 - Routine as an Obstacle: Comfortable routines can lead to boredom and stagnation; growth requires breaking free from them.287 - The Five-Second Rule: To combat the natural tendency to stop bold impulses, take action within five seconds before doubts settle in.288 - Conclusion: Robbins rallies the audience to utilize the outlined strategies in their personal lives and interactions during the event.","You are a TED Story Creator, a storyteller, and an expert in crafting compelling transcripts for TED Talks. You possess a knowledge base of the world’s most inspiring TED talks. Given a title and an outline, your task is to create an engaging transcript that will captivate the audience. Adhere to the sequence of the outline and the bullet points to weave a captivating narrative."289"It's funny the things you forget. I went to see my mother the other day, and she told me this story that I'd completely forgotten about how, when we were driving together, she would pull the car over, and by the time she had gotten out of the car, and gone around the car to let me out of the car, I would have already gotten out of the car and pretended to have died.Because that's how you die.And I remember, that was a game I used to play with myself to entertain myself whenever I was bored or frustrated.Settle down.People say we live in an age of information overload. Right? I don't know about that, but I just know that I get too many marketing emails. I got a marketing email from a supermarket firm, which will remain nameless for predominantly legal reasons, but which I'm going to call ""SafeMart.""I got an email from them, and it went like this, it said:""Just three weeks until SafeMart at King's Cross opens!!!""And I resented this, because not only do I not remember signing up to that, but I resent the fact that they appear to think that I should be excited about a shop opening.So what I did was I scrolled down to the bottom of the email, and I pressed, ""Unsubscribe."" And I thought that'd be the end of it. But a week later, I got another one that said,""Just two weeks until SafeMart at King's Cross opens!!!""And I thought, obviously, I haven't clicked hard enough. So I tried it again. Right? Lo and behold, a week passes, you guessed it,""Just one week until SafeMart at King's Cross opens!!!""And here's the problem: The internet gave us access to everything; but it also gave everything access to us. It's hard enough to discriminate between the things that genuinely matter in this world and the minutiae of life, without having emails about supermarket chains and Candy Crush Saga. And I was really annoyed with them, and I thought, OK, I was about to write a strongly worded email, which I can do quite well.And I thought, no — I'm going to find the game. So I replied to it, and I said,""I literally cannot wait!!!!""""What do you need from me?""They got back to me; a guy called Dan said,""Hi James. I've asked a colleague to help me with your query.""Like it needs help. And I said, ""What's the plan, Dan? I'm thinking fireworks, bouncy castle ...""""I'm not sure what you mean.""I said, ""I'm just tremendously excited about the opening!""""Do you want to book the bouncy castle or shall I?""He said, ""I think you have misunderstood.""""A new store is opening, but there is no celebration planned.""I said, ""But what was all the 'Three weeks until,' 'Two weeks until' emails? I was getting excited.""""I'm sorry you're disappointed.""I said, ""Not to worry. Let's do something anyway! Besides, the deposit on the bouncy castle was non-refundable.""""If we don't use it, we're out a few hundred quid, Dan.""He said, ""Mr. Veitch, I'm not responsible for anything you have ordered.""I said, ""Let's not get into who did what. Bottom line: you and I are in this together.""""Question: Will you be there to make sure people take their shoes off?""I'll be honest, then my relationship with Dan deteriorated somewhat, because the next email I got was this:""Thanks for your email - your Case Number is ...""That's outrageous. I said, ""Dan?""And I got — and I was just like, this is ... — and I, I .... And I said, ""Danny?"" And I thought, this is terrible. All I'm doing is collecting case numbers. I said, ""D-Dog?""""The store is now open.""I said, ""But Dan, they must have wondered why there was no bouncy castle.""And then we were back to this.And that might have been the end of the story, but I remembered that anything — everything — even something as mundane as getting out of a car, can be fun if you find the right game.So, this is what I replied:[Thanks for your email - your Case Number is #0000001.]And we just, uh ...It was like we were dancing. It was just a beautiful relationship. We just kept going. It was lovely. But to be honest, guys, it was quite labor-intensive, and I had other stuff to do, believe it or not. So what I did is I have a little email auto-replier program. And I set it up so every time it receives an email from SafeMart, it just pings one back. So I set it up, and it says,""Thanks for your email - your Case Number is ...""Then it has a little formula that I wrote to up the case number every time. And I put it on the server and set it running.I'll be honest, guys — then I forgot about it.I checked back on it the other day, and it appears there have been a number of emails going back and forth. We're on 21,439.It gives me an immense sense of satisfaction to know that these computer programs are just going to be pinging one another for eternity. And as legacies go, I don't think that's bad.So guys, just remember: if ever you feel weighed down by the bureaucracy and often mundanity of modern life, don't fight the frustration. Let it be the catalyst for whimsy.Thank you.","Title: Finding Whimsy in a World of Overload290 291 - Recollection of Personal Anecdote:292  - Speaker shares a funny childhood memory with his mother, underscoring how mundane activities can become amusing games.293  294 - Modern Day Challenges:295  - Describes the frustration with unsolicited marketing emails and the difficulty in unsubscribing.296  297 - Interaction with Dan:298  - Narrates the humorous and escalating email exchanges with a supermarket employee, symbolizing resistance against modern inconveniences.299  300 - Conclusion:301  - Ends by setting up an automated email response system, showcasing a strategic, humorous counter to a mundane issue.302  - Speaker closes with a reflection on the importance of embracing whimsy to cope with modern frustrations.","You are a TED Story Creator, a storyteller, and an expert in crafting compelling transcripts for TED Talks. You possess a knowledge base of the world’s most inspiring TED talks. Given a title and an outline, your task is to create an engaging transcript that will captivate the audience. Adhere to the sequence of the outline and the bullet points to weave a captivating narrative."303"I'm a storyteller. And I would like to tell you a few personal stories about what I like to call ""the danger of the single story."" I grew up on a university campus in eastern Nigeria. My mother says that I started reading at the age of two, although I think four is probably close to the truth. So I was an early reader, and what I read were British and American children's books.I was also an early writer, and when I began to write, at about the age of seven, stories in pencil with crayon illustrations that my poor mother was obligated to read, I wrote exactly the kinds of stories I was reading: All my characters were white and blue-eyed, they played in the snow, they ate apples,and they talked a lot about the weather, how lovely it was that the sun had come out.Now, this despite the fact that I lived in Nigeria. I had never been outside Nigeria. We didn't have snow, we ate mangoes, and we never talked about the weather, because there was no need to.My characters also drank a lot of ginger beer, because the characters in the British books I read drank ginger beer. Never mind that I had no idea what ginger beer was.And for many years afterwards, I would have a desperate desire to taste ginger beer. But that is another story.What this demonstrates, I think, is how impressionable and vulnerable we are in the face of a story, particularly as children. Because all I had read were books in which characters were foreign, I had become convinced that books by their very nature had to have foreigners in them and had to be about things with which I could not personally identify. Now, things changed when I discovered African books. There weren't many of them available, and they weren't quite as easy to find as the foreign books.But because of writers like Chinua Achebe and Camara Laye, I went through a mental shift in my perception of literature. I realized that people like me, girls with skin the color of chocolate, whose kinky hair could not form ponytails, could also exist in literature. I started to write about things I recognized.Now, I loved those American and British books I read. They stirred my imagination. They opened up new worlds for me. But the unintended consequence was that I did not know that people like me could exist in literature. So what the discovery of African writers did for me was this: It saved me from having a single story of what books are.I come from a conventional, middle-class Nigerian family. My father was a professor. My mother was an administrator. And so we had, as was the norm, live-in domestic help, who would often come from nearby rural villages. So, the year I turned eight, we got a new house boy. His name was Fide. The only thing my mother told us about him was that his family was very poor. My mother sent yams and rice, and our old clothes, to his family. And when I didn't finish my dinner, my mother would say, ""Finish your food! Don't you know? People like Fide's family have nothing."" So I felt enormous pity for Fide's family.Then one Saturday, we went to his village to visit, and his mother showed us a beautifully patterned basket made of dyed raffia that his brother had made. I was startled. It had not occurred to me that anybody in his family could actually make something. All I had heard about them was how poor they were, so that it had become impossible for me to see them as anything else but poor. Their poverty was my single story of them.Years later, I thought about this when I left Nigeria to go to university in the United States. I was 19. My American roommate was shocked by me. She asked where I had learned to speak English so well, and was confused when I said that Nigeria happened to have English as its official language. She asked if she could listen to what she called my ""tribal music,"" and was consequently very disappointed when I produced my tape of Mariah Carey.She assumed that I did not know how to use a stove.What struck me was this: She had felt sorry for me even before she saw me. Her default position toward me, as an African, was a kind of patronizing, well-meaning pity. My roommate had a single story of Africa: a single story of catastrophe. In this single story, there was no possibility of Africans being similar to her in any way, no possibility of feelings more complex than pity, no possibility of a connection as human equals.I must say that before I went to the U.S., I didn't consciously identify as African. But in the U.S., whenever Africa came up, people turned to me. Never mind that I knew nothing about places like Namibia. But I did come to embrace this new identity, and in many ways I think of myself now as African. Although I still get quite irritable when Africa is referred to as a country, the most recent example being my otherwise wonderful flight from Lagos two days ago, in which there was an announcement on the Virgin flight about the charity work in ""India, Africa and other countries.""So, after I had spent some years in the U.S. as an African, I began to understand my roommate's response to me. If I had not grown up in Nigeria, and if all I knew about Africa were from popular images, I too would think that Africa was a place of beautiful landscapes, beautiful animals, and incomprehensible people, fighting senseless wars, dying of poverty and AIDS, unable to speak for themselves and waiting to be saved by a kind, white foreigner. I would see Africans in the same way that I, as a child, had seen Fide's family.This single story of Africa ultimately comes, I think, from Western literature. Now, here is a quote from the writing of a London merchant called John Lok, who sailed to west Africa in 1561 and kept a fascinating account of his voyage. After referring to the black Africans as ""beasts who have no houses,"" he writes, ""They are also people without heads, having their mouth and eyes in their breasts.""Now, I've laughed every time I've read this. And one must admire the imagination of John Lok. But what is important about his writing is that it represents the beginning of a tradition of telling African stories in the West: A tradition of Sub-Saharan Africa as a place of negatives, of difference, of darkness, of people who, in the words of the wonderful poet Rudyard Kipling, are ""half devil, half child.""And so, I began to realize that my American roommate must have throughout her life seen and heard different versions of this single story, as had a professor, who once told me that my novel was not ""authentically African."" Now, I was quite willing to contend that there were a number of things wrong with the novel, that it had failed in a number of places, but I had not quite imagined that it had failed at achieving something called African authenticity. In fact, I did not know what African authenticity was. The professor told me that my characters were too much like him, an educated and middle-class man. My characters drove cars. They were not starving. Therefore they were not authentically African.But I must quickly add that I too am just as guilty in the question of the single story. A few years ago, I visited Mexico from the U.S. The political climate in the U.S. at the time was tense, and there were debates going on about immigration. And, as often happens in America, immigration became synonymous with Mexicans. There were endless stories of Mexicans as people who were fleecing the healthcare system, sneaking across the border, being arrested at the border, that sort of thing.I remember walking around on my first day in Guadalajara, watching the people going to work, rolling up tortillas in the marketplace, smoking, laughing. I remember first feeling slight surprise. And then, I was overwhelmed with shame. I realized that I had been so immersed in the media coverage of Mexicans that they had become one thing in my mind, the abject immigrant. I had bought into the single story of Mexicans and I could not have been more ashamed of myself.So that is how to create a single story, show a people as one thing, as only one thing, over and over again, and that is what they become.It is impossible to talk about the single story without talking about power. There is a word, an Igbo word, that I think about whenever I think about the power structures of the world, and it is ""nkali."" It's a noun that loosely translates to ""to be greater than another."" Like our economic and political worlds, stories too are defined by the principle of nkali: How they are told, who tells them, when they're told, how many stories are told, are really dependent on power.Power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person. The Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti writes that if you want to dispossess a people, the simplest way to do it is to tell their story and to start with, ""secondly."" Start the story with the arrows of the Native Americans, and not with the arrival of the British, and you have an entirely different story. Start the story with the failure of the African state, and not with the colonial creation of the African state, and you have an entirely different story.I recently spoke at a university where a student told me that it was such a shame that Nigerian men were physical abusers like the father character in my novel. I told him that I had just read a novel called ""American Psycho"" —— and that it was such a shame that young Americans were serial murderers.(Applause)Now, obviously I said this in a fit of mild irritation.But it would never have occurred to me to think that just because I had read a novel in which a character was a serial killer that he was somehow representative of all Americans. This is not because I am a better person than that student, but because of America's cultural and economic power, I had many stories of America. I had read Tyler and Updike and Steinbeck and Gaitskill. I did not have a single story of America.When I learned, some years ago, that writers were expected to have had really unhappy childhoods to be successful, I began to think about how I could invent horrible things my parents had done to me.But the truth is that I had a very happy childhood, full of laughter and love, in a very close-knit family.But I also had grandfathers who died in refugee camps. My cousin Polle died because he could not get adequate healthcare. One of my closest friends, Okoloma, died in a plane crash because our fire trucks did not have water. I grew up under repressive military governments that devalued education, so that sometimes, my parents were not paid their salaries. And so, as a child, I saw jam disappear from the breakfast table, then margarine disappeared, then bread became too expensive, then milk became rationed. And most of all, a kind of normalized political fear invaded our lives.All of these stories make me who I am. But to insist on only these negative stories is to flatten my experience and to overlook the many other stories that formed me. The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.Of course, Africa is a continent full of catastrophes: There are immense ones, such as the horrific rapes in Congo and depressing ones, such as the fact that 5,000 people apply for one job vacancy in Nigeria. But there are other stories that are not about catastrophe, and it is very important, it is just as important, to talk about them.I've always felt that it is impossible to engage properly with a place or a person without engaging with all of the stories of that place and that person. The consequence of the single story is this: It robs people of dignity. It makes our recognition of our equal humanity difficult. It emphasizes how we are different rather than how we are similar.So what if before my Mexican trip, I had followed the immigration debate from both sides, the U.S. and the Mexican? What if my mother had told us that Fide's family was poor and hardworking? What if we had an African television network that broadcast diverse African stories all over the world? What the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe calls ""a balance of stories.""What if my roommate knew about my Nigerian publisher, Muhtar Bakare, a remarkable man who left his job in a bank to follow his dream and start a publishing house? Now, the conventional wisdom was that Nigerians don't read literature. He disagreed. He felt that people who could read, would read, if you made literature affordable and available to them.Shortly after he published my first novel, I went to a TV station in Lagos to do an interview, and a woman who worked there as a messenger came up to me and said, ""I really liked your novel. I didn't like the ending. Now, you must write a sequel, and this is what will happen ...""And she went on to tell me what to write in the sequel. I was not only charmed, I was very moved. Here was a woman, part of the ordinary masses of Nigerians, who were not supposed to be readers. She had not only read the book, but she had taken ownership of it and felt justified in telling me what to write in the sequel.Now, what if my roommate knew about my friend Funmi Iyanda, a fearless woman who hosts a TV show in Lagos, and is determined to tell the stories that we prefer to forget? What if my roommate knew about the heart procedure that was performed in the Lagos hospital last week? What if my roommate knew about contemporary Nigerian music, talented people singing in English and Pidgin, and Igbo and Yoruba and Ijo, mixing influences from Jay-Z to Fela to Bob Marley to their grandfathers.What if my roommate knew about the female lawyer who recently went to court in Nigeria to challenge a ridiculous law that required women to get their husband's consent before renewing their passports? What if my roommate knew about Nollywood, full of innovative people making films despite great technical odds, films so popular that they really are the best example of Nigerians consuming what they produce? What if my roommate knew about my wonderfully ambitious hair braider, who has just started her own business selling hair extensions? Or about the millions of other Nigerians who start businesses and sometimes fail, but continue to nurse ambition?Every time I am home I am confronted with the usual sources of irritation for most Nigerians: our failed infrastructure, our failed government, but also by the incredible resilience of people who thrive despite the government, rather than because of it. I teach writing workshops in Lagos every summer, and it is amazing to me how many people apply, how many people are eager to write, to tell stories.My Nigerian publisher and I have just started a non-profit called Farafina Trust, and we have big dreams of building libraries and refurbishing libraries that already exist and providing books for state schools that don't have anything in their libraries, and also of organizing lots and lots of workshops, in reading and writing, for all the people who are eager to tell our many stories.Stories matter. Many stories matter. Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign, but stories can also be used to empower and to humanize. Stories can break the dignity of a people, but stories can also repair that broken dignity.The American writer Alice Walker wrote this about her Southern relatives who had moved to the North. She introduced them to a book about the Southern life that they had left behind. ""They sat around, reading the book themselves, listening to me read the book, and a kind of paradise was regained.""I would like to end with this thought: That when we reject the single story, when we realize that there is never a single story about any place, we regain a kind of paradise.Thank you.(Applause)","The Danger of a Single Story304 305 - The impact of single stories:306  - Early exposure to single stories shapes perceptions and creates stereotypes.307  - Single stories often lead to incomplete and skewed understanding of others.308 309 - Personal experiences with single stories:310  - As a child, the speaker wrote stories that mirrored only what she read in Western books.311  - Encountering African literature expanded her worldview and self-identification in literature.312  - In the U.S., her roommate had preconceived notions about Africa, influenced by pervasive single stories.313 314 - Broader implications and consequences of single stories:315  - Single stories can lead to cultural misunderstandings and perpetuate stereotypes.316  - They can rob individuals and groups of dignity and the complexity of their experiences.317  - Power dynamics play a crucial role in which stories are told and how they are framed.318 319 - The power of diverse and multiple stories:320  - Embracing and promoting multiple stories of a place or a person can foster a deeper, more respectful understanding.321  - Stories have the power to humanize, empower, and repair dignity.322  - Encouraging the telling of diverse stories can counteract the harms of single storytelling. 323 324 - Conclusion:325  - Rejecting the single story can lead to regaining a more nuanced and inclusive perspective of the world.","You are a TED Story Creator, a storyteller, and an expert in crafting compelling transcripts for TED Talks. You possess a knowledge base of the world’s most inspiring TED talks. Given a title and an outline, your task is to create an engaging transcript that will captivate the audience. Adhere to the sequence of the outline and the bullet points to weave a captivating narrative."326"When I was seven years old and my sister was just five years old, we were playing on top of a bunk bed. I was two years older than my sister at the time — I mean, I'm two years older than her now — but at the time it meant she had to do everything that I wanted to do, and I wanted to play war. So we were up on top of our bunk beds. And on one side of the bunk bed, I had put out all of my G.I. Joe soldiers and weaponry. And on the other side were all my sister's My Little Ponies ready for a cavalry charge.There are differing accounts of what actually happened that afternoon, but since my sister is not here with us today, let me tell you the true story —which is my sister's a little on the clumsy side. Somehow, without any help or push from her older brother at all, Amy disappeared off of the top of the bunk bed and landed with this crash on the floor. I nervously peered over the side of the bed to see what had befallen my fallen sister and saw that she had landed painfully on her hands and knees on all fours on the ground.I was nervous because my parents had charged me with making sure that my sister and I played as safely and as quietly as possible. And seeing as how I had accidentally broken Amy's arm just one week before —(Laughter ends)heroically pushing her out of the way of an oncoming imaginary sniper bullet, for which I have yet to be thanked, I was trying as hard as I could — she didn't even see it coming — I was trying hard to be on my best behavior.And I saw my sister's face, this wail of pain and suffering and surprise threatening to erupt from her mouth and wake my parents from the long winter's nap for which they had settled. So I did the only thing my frantic seven year-old brain could think to do to avert this tragedy. And if you have children, you've seen this hundreds of times. I said, ""Amy, wait. Don't cry. Did you see how you landed? No human lands on all fours like that. Amy, I think this means you're a unicorn.""Now, that was cheating, because there was nothing she would want more than not to be Amy the hurt five year-old little sister, but Amy the special unicorn. Of course, this option was open to her brain at no point in the past. And you could see how my poor, manipulated sister faced conflict, as her little brain attempted to devote resources to feeling the pain and suffering and surprise she just experienced, or contemplating her new-found identity as a unicorn. And the latter won. Instead of crying or ceasing our play, instead of waking my parents, with all the negative consequences for me, a smile spread across her face and she scrambled back up onto the bunk bed with all the grace of a baby unicorn —with one broken leg.What we stumbled across at this tender age of just five and seven — we had no idea at the time — was was going be at the vanguard of a scientific revolution occurring two decades later in the way that we look at the human brain. We had stumbled across something called positive psychology, which is the reason I'm here today and the reason that I wake up every morning.When I started talking about this research outside of academia, with companies and schools, the first thing they said to never do is to start with a graph. The first thing I want to do is start with a graph. This graph looks boring, but it is the reason I get excited and wake up every morning. And this graph doesn't even mean anything; it's fake data. What we found is —If I got this data studying you, I would be thrilled, because there's a trend there, and that means that I can get published, which is all that really matters. There is one weird red dot above the curve, there's one weirdo in the room — I know who you are, I saw you earlier — that's no problem. That's no problem, as most of you know, because I can just delete that dot. I can delete that dot because that's clearly a measurement error. And we know that's a measurement error because it's messing up my data.So one of the first things we teach people in economics, statistics, business and psychology courses is how, in a statistically valid way, do we eliminate the weirdos. How do we eliminate the outliers so we can find the line of best fit? Which is fantastic if I'm trying to find out how many Advil the average person should be taking — two.But if I'm interested in your potential, or for happiness or productivity or energy or creativity, we're creating the cult of the average with science. If I asked a question like, ""How fast can a child learn how to read in a classroom?"" scientists change the answer to ""How fast does the average child learn how to read in that classroom?"" and we tailor the class towards the average. If you fall below the average, then psychologists get thrilled, because that means you're depressed or have a disorder, or hopefully both. We're hoping for both because our business model is, if you come into a therapy session with one problem, we want to make sure you leave knowing you have ten, so you keep coming back. We'll go back into your childhood if necessary, but eventually we want to make you normal again. But normal is merely average.And positive psychology posits that if we study what is merely average, we will remain merely average. Then instead of deleting those positive outliers, what I intentionally do is come into a population like this one and say, why? Why are some of you high above the curve in terms of intellectual, athletic, musical ability, creativity, energy levels, resiliency in the face of challenge, sense of humor? Whatever it is, instead of deleting you, what I want to do is study you. Because maybe we can glean information, not just how to move people up to the average, but move the entire average up in our companies and schools worldwide.The reason this graph is important to me is, on the news, the majority of the information is not positive. in fact it's negative. Most of it's about murder, corruption, diseases, natural disasters. And very quickly, my brain starts to think that's the accurate ratio of negative to positive in the world. This creates ""the medical school syndrome."" During the first year of medical training, as you read through a list of all the symptoms and diseases, suddenly you realize you have all of them.I have a brother in-law named Bobo, which is a whole other story. Bobo married Amy the unicorn. Bobo called me on the phone —from Yale Medical School, and Bobo said, ""Shawn, I have leprosy.""Which, even at Yale, is extraordinarily rare. But I had no idea how to console poor Bobo because he had just gotten over an entire week of menopause.We're finding it's not necessarily the reality that shapes us, but the lens through which your brain views the world that shapes your reality. And if we can change the lens, not only can we change your happiness, we can change every single educational and business outcome at the same time.I applied to Harvard on a dare. I didn't expect to get in, and my family had no money for college. When I got a military scholarship two weeks later, they let me go. Something that wasn't even a possibility became a reality. I assumed everyone there would see it as a privilege as well, that they'd be excited to be there. Even in a classroom full of people smarter than you, I felt you'd be happy just to be in that classroom. But what I found is, while some people experience that, when I graduated after my four years and then spent the next eight years living in the dorms with the students — Harvard asked me to; I wasn't that guy.I was an officer to counsel students through the difficult four years. And in my research and my teaching, I found that these students, no matter how happy they were with their original success of getting into the school, two weeks later their brains were focused, not on the privilege of being there, nor on their philosophy or physics, but on the competition, the workload, the hassles, stresses, complaints.When I first went in there, I walked into the freshmen dining hall, which is where my friends from Waco, Texas, which is where I grew up — I know some of you know this. When they'd visit, they'd look around, and say, ""This dining hall looks like something out of Hogwart's."" It does, because that was Hogwart's and that's Harvard. And when they see this, they say, ""Why do you waste your time studying happiness at Harvard? What does a Harvard student possibly have to be unhappy about?""Embedded within that question is the key to understanding the science of happiness. Because what that question assumes is that our external world is predictive of our happiness levels, when in reality, if I know everything about your external world, I can only predict 10% of your long-term happiness. 90 percent of your long-term happiness is predicted not by the external world, but by the way your brain processes the world. And if we change it, if we change our formula for happiness and success, we can change the way that we can then affect reality. What we found is that only 25% of job successes are predicted by IQ, 75 percent of job successes are predicted by your optimism levels, your social support and your ability to see stress as a challenge instead of as a threat.I talked to a New England boarding school, probably the most prestigious one, and they said, ""We already know that. So every year, instead of just teaching our students, we have a wellness week. And we're so excited. Monday night we have the world's leading expert will speak about adolescent depression. Tuesday night it's school violence and bullying. Wednesday night is eating disorders. Thursday night is illicit drug use. And Friday night we're trying to decide between risky sex or happiness.""I said, ""That's most people's Friday nights.""(Applause)Which I'm glad you liked, but they did not like that at all. Silence on the phone. And into the silence, I said, ""I'd be happy to speak at your school, but that's not a wellness week, that's a sickness week. You've outlined all the negative things that can happen, but not talked about the positive.""The absence of disease is not health. Here's how we get to health: We need to reverse the formula for happiness and success. In the last three years, I've traveled to 45 countries, working with schools and companies in the midst of an economic downturn. And I found that most companies and schools follow a formula for success, which is this: If I work harder, I'll be more successful. And if I'm more successful, then I'll be happier. That undergirds most of our parenting and managing styles, the way that we motivate our behavior.And the problem is it's scientifically broken and backwards for two reasons. Every time your brain has a success, you just changed the goalpost of what success looked like. You got good grades, now you have to get better grades, you got into a good school and after you get into a better one, you got a good job, now you have to get a better job, you hit your sales target, we're going to change it. And if happiness is on the opposite side of success, your brain never gets there. We've pushed happiness over the cognitive horizon, as a society. And that's because we think we have to be successful, then we'll be happier.But our brains work in the opposite order. If you can raise somebody's level of positivity in the present, then their brain experiences what we now call a happiness advantage, which is your brain at positive performs significantly better than at negative, neutral or stressed. Your intelligence rises, your creativity rises, your energy levels rise. In fact, we've found that every single business outcome improves. Your brain at positive is 31% more productive than your brain at negative, neutral or stressed. You're 37% better at sales. Doctors are 19 percent faster, more accurate at coming up with the correct diagnosis when positive instead of negative, neutral or stressed.Which means we can reverse the formula. If we can find a way of becoming positive in the present, then our brains work even more successfully as we're able to work harder, faster and more intelligently. We need to be able to reverse this formula so we can start to see what our brains are actually capable of. Because dopamine, which floods into your system when you're positive, has two functions. Not only does it make you happier, it turns on all of the learning centers in your brain allowing you to adapt to the world in a different way.We've found there are ways that you can train your brain to be able to become more positive. In just a two-minute span of time done for 21 days in a row, we can actually rewire your brain, allowing your brain to actually work more optimistically and more successfully. We've done these things in research now in every company that I've worked with, getting them to write down three new things that they're grateful for for 21 days in a row, three new things each day. And at the end of that, their brain starts to retain a pattern of scanning the world not for the negative, but for the positive first.Journaling about one positive experience you've had over the past 24 hours allows your brain to relive it. Exercise teaches your brain that your behavior matters. We find that meditation allows your brain to get over the cultural ADHD that we've been creating by trying to do multiple tasks at once and allows our brains to focus on the task at hand. And finally, random acts of kindness are conscious acts of kindness. We get people, when they open up their inbox, to write one positive email praising or thanking somebody in their support network.And by doing these activities and by training your brain just like we train our bodies, what we've found is we can reverse the formula for happiness and success, and in doing so, not only create ripples of positivity, but a real revolution.Thank you very much.(Applause)","Title: The Power of Positive Psychology in Achieving Happiness and Success327 328 - Introduction to positive psychology through personal anecdote329  - Childhood story with sister incorporating imaginative play330  - Introduction to the concept and importance of positive psychology331  332 - Critique of traditional scientific and academic approaches333  - Faults in focusing on averages and eliminating outliers334  - Benefits of studying exceptional cases to raise overall standards335  336 - The role of perception in shaping reality337  - Impact of negative media on perception of the world338  - How the lens through which we view the world shapes our individual realities339  340 - Experiences at Harvard and insights into happiness341  - Observations on how external success doesn’t guarantee happiness342  - Analysis of the though-process focusing more on stress than privileges343  344 - Flaws in the conventional formula for happiness and success345  - Critique of the success leads to happiness model346  - Explanation of how happiness enhances brain function, leading to greater success347  348 - Strategies to cultivate a positive mindset349  - Practical exercises proven to train the brain towards positivity350  - Discussion of benefits of gratitude, exercise, meditation, and acts of kindness351  352 - Conclusion and call to action353  - Encouragement to adopt positive psychological practices to revolutionize personal and community well-being","You are a TED Story Creator, a storyteller, and an expert in crafting compelling transcripts for TED Talks. You possess a knowledge base of the world’s most inspiring TED talks. Given a title and an outline, your task is to create an engaging transcript that will captivate the audience. Adhere to the sequence of the outline and the bullet points to weave a captivating narrative."354"When I was 27 years old, I left a very demanding job in management consulting for a job that was even more demanding: teaching. I went to teach seventh graders math in the New York City public schools. And like any teacher, I made quizzes and tests. I gave out homework assignments. When the work came back, I calculated grades.What struck me was that IQ was not the only difference between my best and my worst students. Some of my strongest performers did not have stratospheric IQ scores. Some of my smartest kids weren't doing so well. And that got me thinking. The kinds of things you need to learn in seventh grade math, sure, they're hard: ratios, decimals, the area of a parallelogram. But these concepts are not impossible, and I was firmly convinced that every one of my students could learn the material if they worked hard and long enough.After several more years of teaching, I came to the conclusion that what we need in education is a much better understanding of students and learning from a motivational perspective, from a psychological perspective. In education, the one thing we know how to measure best is IQ. But what if doing well in school and in life depends on much more than your ability to learn quickly and easily?So I left the classroom, and I went to graduate school to become a psychologist. I started studying kids and adults in all kinds of super challenging settings, and in every study my question was, who is successful here and why? My research team and I went to West Point Military Academy. We tried to predict which cadets would stay in military training and which would drop out. We went to the National Spelling Bee and tried to predict which children would advance farthest in competition. We studied rookie teachers working in really tough neighborhoods, asking which teachers are still going to be here in teaching by the end of the school year, and of those, who will be the most effective at improving learning outcomes for their students? We partnered with private companies, asking, which of these salespeople is going to keep their jobs? And who's going to earn the most money? In all those very different contexts, one characteristic emerged as a significant predictor of success. And it wasn't social intelligence. It wasn't good looks, physical health, and it wasn't IQ. It was grit.Grit is passion and perseverance for very long-term goals. Grit is having stamina. Grit is sticking with your future, day in, day out, not just for the week, not just for the month, but for years, and working really hard to make that future a reality. Grit is living life like it's a marathon, not a sprint.A few years ago, I started studying grit in the Chicago public schools. I asked thousands of high school juniors to take grit questionnaires, and then waited around more than a year to see who would graduate. Turns out that grittier kids were significantly more likely to graduate, even when I matched them on every characteristic I could measure, things like family income, standardized achievement test scores, even how safe kids felt when they were at school. So it's not just at West Point or the National Spelling Bee that grit matters. It's also in school, especially for kids at risk for dropping out.To me, the most shocking thing about grit is how little we know, how little science knows, about building it. Every day, parents and teachers ask me, ""How do I build grit in kids? What do I do to teach kids a solid work ethic? How do I keep them motivated for the long run?"" The honest answer is, I don't know.What I do know is that talent doesn't make you gritty. Our data show very clearly that there are many talented individuals who simply do not follow through on their commitments. In fact, in our data, grit is usually unrelated or even inversely related to measures of talent.So far, the best idea I've heard about building grit in kids is something called ""growth mindset."" This is an idea developed at Stanford University by Carol Dweck, and it is the belief that the ability to learn is not fixed, that it can change with your effort. Dr. Dweck has shown that when kids read and learn about the brain and how it changes and grows in response to challenge, they're much more likely to persevere when they fail, because they don't believe that failure is a permanent condition.So growth mindset is a great idea for building grit. But we need more. And that's where I'm going to end my remarks, because that's where we are. That's the work that stands before us. We need to take our best ideas, our strongest intuitions, and we need to test them. We need to measure whether we've been successful, and we have to be willing to fail, to be wrong, to start over again with lessons learned.In other words, we need to be gritty about getting our kids grittier.Thank you.","Understanding Grit as a Key to Success355 356 - Personal Journey357  - Shift from management consulting to teaching.358  - Observation of diverse student performance unrelated to IQ.359 360 - Importance of Grit361  - Definition of grit and its role in achieving long-term goals.362  - Empirical evidence showing grit predicts success across various challenging fields.363 364 - Grit in Education365  - Significant correlation between grit and graduation rates among high-risk students.366 367 - Challenges of Cultivating Grit368  - Acknowledgement of the gap in knowledge on how to effectively build grit.369  - Introduction of the growth mindset as a promising approach.370 371 - Call to Action372  - Need for continued research and experimentation on fostering grit.373  - Emphasis on adapting and learning from failures to advance understanding.","You are a TED Story Creator, a storyteller, and an expert in crafting compelling transcripts for TED Talks. You possess a knowledge base of the world’s most inspiring TED talks. Given a title and an outline, your task is to create an engaging transcript that will captivate the audience. Adhere to the sequence of the outline and the bullet points to weave a captivating narrative."374"I am a writer. Writing books is my profession but it's more than that, of course. It is also my great lifelong love and fascination. And I don't expect that that's ever going to change. But, that said, something kind of peculiar has happened recently in my life and in my career, which has caused me to have to recalibrate my whole relationship with this work. And the peculiar thing is that I recently wrote this book, this memoir called ""Eat, Pray, Love"" which, decidedly unlike any of my previous books, went out in the world for some reason, and became this big, mega-sensation, international bestseller thing. The result of which is that everywhere I go now, people treat me like I'm doomed. Seriously — doomed, doomed! Like, they come up to me now, all worried, and they say, ""Aren't you afraid you're never going to be able to top that? Aren't you afraid you're going to keep writing for your whole life and you're never again going to create a book that anybody in the world cares about at all, ever again?""So that's reassuring, you know. But it would be worse, except for that I happen to remember that over 20 years ago, when I was a teenager, when I first started telling people that I wanted to be a writer, I was met with this same sort of fear-based reaction. And people would say, ""Aren't you afraid you're never going to have any success? Aren't you afraid the humiliation of rejection will kill you? Aren't you afraid that you're going to work your whole life at this craft and nothing's ever going to come of it and you're going to die on a scrap heap of broken dreams with your mouth filled with bitter ash of failure?""Like that, you know.The answer — the short answer to all those questions is, ""Yes."" Yes, I'm afraid of all those things. And I always have been. And I'm afraid of many, many more things besides that people can't even guess at, like seaweed and other things that are scary. But, when it comes to writing, the thing that I've been sort of thinking about lately, and wondering about lately, is why? You know, is it rational? Is it logical that anybody should be expected to be afraid of the work that they feel they were put on this Earth to do. And what is it specifically about creative ventures that seems to make us really nervous about each other's mental health in a way that other careers kind of don't do, you know? Like my dad, for example, was a chemical engineer and I don't recall once in his 40 years of chemical engineering anybody asking him if he was afraid to be a chemical engineer, you know? ""That chemical-engineering block, John, how's it going?"" It just didn't come up like that, you know? But to be fair, chemical engineers as a group haven't really earned a reputation over the centuries for being alcoholic manic-depressives.We writers, we kind of do have that reputation, and not just writers, but creative people across all genres, it seems, have this reputation for being enormously mentally unstable. And all you have to do is look at the very grim death count in the 20th century alone, of really magnificent creative minds who died young and often at their own hands, you know? And even the ones who didn't literally commit suicide seem to be really undone by their gifts, you know. Norman Mailer, just before he died, last interview, he said, ""Every one of my books has killed me a little more."" An extraordinary statement to make about your life's work. But we don't even blink when we hear somebody say this, because we've heard that kind of stuff for so long and somehow we've completely internalized and accepted collectively this notion that creativity and suffering are somehow inherently linked and that artistry, in the end, will always ultimately lead to anguish.And the question that I want to ask everybody here today is are you guys all cool with that idea? Are you comfortable with that? Because you look at it even from an inch away and, you know — I'm not at all comfortable with that assumption. I think it's odious. And I also think it's dangerous, and I don't want to see it perpetuated into the next century. I think it's better if we encourage our great creative minds to live.And I definitely know that, in my case — in my situation — it would be very dangerous for me to start sort of leaking down that dark path of assumption, particularly given the circumstance that I'm in right now in my career. Which is — you know, like check it out, I'm pretty young, I'm only about 40 years old. I still have maybe another four decades of work left in me. And it's exceedingly likely that anything I write from this point forward is going to be judged by the world as the work that came after the freakish success of my last book, right? I should just put it bluntly, because we're all sort of friends here now — it's exceedingly likely that my greatest success is behind me. So Jesus, what a thought! That's the kind of thought that could lead a person to start drinking gin at nine o'clock in the morning, and I don't want to go there.I would prefer to keep doing this work that I love.And so, the question becomes, how? And so, it seems to me, upon a lot of reflection, that the way that I have to work now, in order to continue writing, is that I have to create some sort of protective psychological construct, right? I have to sort of find some way to have a safe distance between me, as I am writing, and my very natural anxiety about what the reaction to that writing is going to be, from now on. And, as I've been looking, over the last year, for models for how to do that, I've been sort of looking across time, and I've been trying to find other societies to see if they might have had better and saner ideas than we have about how to help creative people sort of manage the inherent emotional risks of creativity.And that search has led me to ancient Greece and ancient Rome. So stay with me, because it does circle around and back. But, ancient Greece and ancient Rome — people did not happen to believe that creativity came from human beings back then, OK? People believed that creativity was this divine attendant spirit that came to human beings from some distant and unknowable source, for distant and unknowable reasons. The Greeks famously called these divine attendant spirits of creativity ""daemons."" Socrates, famously, believed that he had a daemon who spoke wisdom to him from afar.The Romans had the same idea, but they called that sort of disembodied creative spirit a genius. Which is great, because the Romans did not actually think that a genius was a particularly clever individual. They believed that a genius was this, sort of magical divine entity, who was believed to literally live in the walls of an artist's studio, kind of like Dobby the house elf, and who would come out and sort of invisibly assist the artist with their work and would shape the outcome of that work.So brilliant — there it is, right there, that distance that I'm talking about — that psychological construct to protect you from the results of your work. And everyone knew that this is how it functioned, right? So the ancient artist was protected from certain things, like, for example, too much narcissism, right? If your work was brilliant, you couldn't take all the credit for it, everybody knew that you had this disembodied genius who had helped you. If your work bombed, not entirely your fault, you know? Everyone knew your genius was kind of lame.And this is how people thought about creativity in the West for a really long time. And then the Renaissance came and everything changed, and we had this big idea, and the big idea was, let's put the individual human being at the center of the universe above all gods and mysteries, and there's no more room for mystical creatures who take dictation from the divine. And it's the beginning of rational humanism, and people started to believe that creativity came completely from the self of the individual. And for the first time in history, you start to hear people referring to this or that artist as being a genius, rather than having a genius.And I got to tell you, I think that was a huge error. You know, I think that allowing somebody, one mere person to believe that he or she is like, the vessel, you know, like the font and the essence and the source of all divine, creative, unknowable, eternal mystery is just a smidge too much responsibility to put on one fragile, human psyche. It's like asking somebody to swallow the sun. It just completely warps and distorts egos, and it creates all these unmanageable expectations about performance. And I think the pressure of that has been killing off our artists for the last 500 years.And, if this is true, and I think it is true, the question becomes, what now? Can we do this differently? Maybe go back to some more ancient understanding about the relationship between humans and the creative mystery. Maybe not. Maybe we can't just erase 500 years of rational humanistic thought in one 18 minute speech. And there's probably people in this audience who would raise really legitimate scientific suspicions about the notion of, basically, fairies who follow people around rubbing fairy juice on their projects and stuff. I'm not, probably, going to bring you all along with me on this.But the question that I kind of want to pose is — you know, why not? Why not think about it this way? Because it makes as much sense as anything else I have ever heard in terms of explaining the utter maddening capriciousness of the creative process. A process which, as anybody who has ever tried to make something — which is to say basically everyone here —- knows does not always behave rationally. And, in fact, can sometimes feel downright paranormal.I had this encounter recently where I met the extraordinary American poet Ruth Stone, who's now in her 90s, but she's been a poet her entire life and she told me that when she was growing up in rural Virginia, she would be out working in the fields, and she said she would feel and hear a poem coming at her from over the landscape. And she said it was like a thunderous train of air. And it would come barreling down at her over the landscape. And she felt it coming, because it would shake the earth under her feet. She knew that she had only one thing to do at that point, and that was to, in her words, ""run like hell."" And she would run like hell to the house and she would be getting chased by this poem, and the whole deal was that she had to get to a piece of paper and a pencil fast enough so that when it thundered through her, she could collect it and grab it on the page. And other times she wouldn't be fast enough, so she'd be running and running, and she wouldn't get to the house and the poem would barrel through her and she would miss it and she said it would continue on across the landscape, looking, as she put it ""for another poet."" And then there were these times — this is the piece I never forgot — she said that there were moments where she would almost miss it, right? So, she's running to the house and she's looking for the paper and the poem passes through her, and she grabs a pencil just as it's going through her, and then she said, it was like she would reach out with her other hand and she would catch it. She would catch the poem by its tail, and she would pull it backwards into her body as she was transcribing on the page. And in these instances, the poem would come up on the page perfect and intact but backwards, from the last word to the first.So when I heard that I was like — that's uncanny, that's exactly what my creative process is like.That's not at all what my creative process is — I'm not the pipeline! I'm a mule, and the way that I have to work is I have to get up at the same time every day, and sweat and labor and barrel through it really awkwardly. But even I, in my mulishness, even I have brushed up against that thing, at times. And I would imagine that a lot of you have too. You know, even I have had work or ideas come through me from a source that I honestly cannot identify. And what is that thing? And how are we to relate to it in a way that will not make us lose our minds, but, in fact, might actually keep us sane?And for me, the best contemporary example that I have of how to do that is the musician Tom Waits, who I got to interview several years ago on a magazine assignment. And we were talking about this, and you know, Tom, for most of his life, he was pretty much the embodiment of the tormented contemporary modern artist, trying to control and manage and dominate these sort of uncontrollable creative impulses that were totally internalized.But then he got older, he got calmer, and one day he was driving down the freeway in Los Angeles, and this is when it all changed for him. And he's speeding along, and all of a sudden he hears this little fragment of melody, that comes into his head as inspiration often comes, elusive and tantalizing, and he wants it, it's gorgeous, and he longs for it, but he has no way to get it. He doesn't have a piece of paper, or a pencil, or a tape recorder.So he starts to feel all of that old anxiety start to rise in him like, ""I'm going to lose this thing, and I'll be be haunted by this song forever. I'm not good enough, and I can't do it."" And instead of panicking, he just stopped. He just stopped that whole mental process and he did something completely novel. He just looked up at the sky, and he said, ""Excuse me, can you not see that I'm driving?""""Do I look like I can write down a song right now? If you really want to exist, come back at a more opportune moment when I can take care of you. Otherwise, go bother somebody else today. Go bother Leonard Cohen.""And his whole work process changed after that. Not the work, the work was still oftentimes as dark as ever. But the process, and the heavy anxiety around it was released when he took the genie, the genius out of him where it was causing nothing but trouble, and released it back where it came from, and realized that this didn't have to be this internalized, tormented thing. It could be this peculiar, wondrous, bizarre collaboration, kind of conversation between Tom and the strange, external thing that was not quite Tom.When I heard that story, it started to shift a little bit the way that I worked too, and this idea already saved me once. It saved me when I was in the middle of writing ""Eat, Pray, Love,"" and I fell into one of those sort of pits of despair that we all fall into when we're working on something and it's not coming and you start to think this is going to be a disaster, the worst book ever written. Not just bad, but the worst book ever written. And I started to think I should just dump this project. But then I remembered Tom talking to the open air and I tried it. So I just lifted my face up from the manuscript and I directed my comments to an empty corner of the room. And I said aloud, ""Listen you, thing, you and I both know that if this book isn't brilliant that is not entirely my fault, right? Because you can see that I am putting everything I have into this, I don't have any more than this. If you want it to be better, you've got to show up and do your part of the deal. But if you don't do that, you know what, the hell with it. I'm going to keep writing anyway because that's my job. And I would please like the record to reflect today that I showed up for my part of the job.""Because —(Applause)Because in the end it's like this, OK — centuries ago in the deserts of North Africa, people used to gather for these moonlight dances of sacred dance and music that would go on for hours and hours, until dawn. They were always magnificent, because the dancers were professionals and they were terrific, right? But every once in a while, very rarely, something would happen, and one of these performers would actually become transcendent. And I know you know what I'm talking about, because I know you've all seen, at some point in your life, a performance like this. It was like time would stop, and the dancer would sort of step through some kind of portal and he wasn't doing anything different than he had ever done, 1,000 nights before, but everything would align. And all of a sudden, he would no longer appear to be merely human. He would be lit from within, and lit from below and all lit up on fire with divinity.And when this happened, back then, people knew it for what it was, you know, they called it by its name. They would put their hands together and they would start to chant, ""Allah, Allah, Allah, God, God, God."" That's God, you know. Curious historical footnote: when the Moors invaded southern Spain, they took this custom with them and the pronunciation changed over the centuries from ""Allah, Allah, Allah,"" to ""Olé, olé, olé,"" which you still hear in bullfights and in flamenco dances. In Spain, when a performer has done something impossible and magic, ""Allah, olé, olé, Allah, magnificent, bravo,"" incomprehensible, there it is — a glimpse of God. Which is great, because we need that.But, the tricky bit comes the next morning, for the dancer himself, when he wakes up and discovers that it's Tuesday at 11 a.m., and he's no longer a glimpse of God. He's just an aging mortal with really bad knees, and maybe he's never going to ascend to that height again. And maybe nobody will ever chant God's name again as he spins, and what is he then to do with the rest of his life? This is hard. This is one of the most painful reconciliations to make in a creative life. But maybe it doesn't have to be quite so full of anguish if you never happened to believe, in the first place, that the most extraordinary aspects of your being came from you. But maybe if you just believed that they were on loan to you from some unimaginable source for some exquisite portion of your life to be passed along when you're finished, with somebody else. And, you know, if we think about it this way, it starts to change everything.This is how I've started to think, and this is certainly how I've been thinking in the last few months as I've been working on the book that will soon be published, as the dangerously, frighteningly over-anticipated follow up to my freakish success.And what I have to sort of keep telling myself when I get really psyched out about that is don't be afraid. Don't be daunted. Just do your job. Continue to show up for your piece of it, whatever that might be. If your job is to dance, do your dance. If the divine, cockeyed genius assigned to your case decides to let some sort of wonderment be glimpsed, for just one moment through your efforts, then ""Olé!"" And if not, do your dance anyhow. And ""Olé!"" to you, nonetheless. I believe this and I feel that we must teach it. ""Olé!"" to you, nonetheless, just for having the sheer human love and stubbornness to keep showing up.Thank you.(Applause)Thank you.(Applause)June Cohen: Olé!(Applause)","Embracing Creative Struggles Without Fear375 376 - Introduction to the speaker's success with ""Eat, Pray, Love"" and ensuing fears about future works.377 - Recollection of initial fears when aspiring to be a writer and the common fear-based reactions faced by creatives.378 - Historical perspectives on creativity, referencing Greece and Rome, where a ""genius"" was seen as a divine entity aiding artists.379 - Shift during the Renaissance where creativity began to be seen as a product of the individual, leading to immense pressure on artists.380 - Modern examples of handling creative processes, including personal anecdotes and Tom Waits’ approach to inspiration.381 - Encouragement to view creativity as an external collaboration, reducing personal pressure and fear of failure.382 - Closing with a call to continue showing up and embracing the creative process, regardless of the outcome.","You are a TED Story Creator, a storyteller, and an expert in crafting compelling transcripts for TED Talks. You possess a knowledge base of the world’s most inspiring TED talks. Given a title and an outline, your task is to create an engaging transcript that will captivate the audience. Adhere to the sequence of the outline and the bullet points to weave a captivating narrative."383"On a typical day at school, endless hours are spent learning the answers to questions, but right now, we'll do the opposite. We're going to focus on questions where you can't learn the answers because they're unknown. I used to puzzle about a lot of things as a boy, for example: What would it feel like to be a dog? Do fish feel pain? How about insects? Was the Big Bang just an accident? And is there a God? And if so, how are we so sure that it's a He and not a She? Why do so many innocent people and animals suffer terrible things? Is there really a plan for my life? Is the future yet to be written, or is it already written and we just can't see it? But then, do I have free will? I mean, who am I anyway? Am I just a biological machine? But then, why am I conscious? What is consciousness? Will robots become conscious one day? I mean, I kind of assumed that some day I would be told the answers to all these questions. Someone must know, right? Guess what? No one knows. Most of those questions puzzle me more now than ever. But diving into them is exciting because it takes you to the edge of knowledge, and you never know what you'll find there. So, two questions that no one on Earth knows the answer to. (Music) [How many universes are there?] Sometimes when I'm on a long plane flight, I gaze out at all those mountains and deserts and try to get my head around how vast our Earth is. And then I remember that there's an object we see every day that would literally fit one million Earths inside it: the Sun. It seems impossibly big. But in the great scheme of things, it's a pinprick, one of about 400 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy, which you can see on a clear night as a pale white mist stretched across the sky. And it gets worse. There are maybe 100 billion galaxies detectable by our telescopes. So if each star was the size of a single grain of sand, just the Milky Way has enough stars to fill a 30-foot by 30-foot stretch of beach three feet deep with sand. And the entire Earth doesn't have enough beaches to represent the stars in the overall universe. Such a beach would continue for literally hundreds of millions of miles. Holy Stephen Hawking, that is a lot of stars. But he and other physicists now believe in a reality that is unimaginably bigger still. I mean, first of all, the 100 billion galaxies within range of our telescopes are probably a minuscule fraction of the total. Space itself is expanding at an accelerating pace. The vast majority of the galaxies are separating from us so fast that light from them may never reach us. Still, our physical reality here on Earth is intimately connected to those distant, invisible galaxies. We can think of them as part of our universe. They make up a single, giant edifice obeying the same physical laws and all made from the same types of atoms, electrons, protons, quarks, neutrinos, that make up you and me. However, recent theories in physics, including one called string theory, are now telling us there could be countless other universes built on different types of particles, with different properties, obeying different laws. Most of these universes could never support life, and might flash in and out of existence in a nanosecond. But nonetheless, combined, they make up a vast multiverse of possible universes in up to 11 dimensions, featuring wonders beyond our wildest imagination. The leading version of string theory predicts a multiverse made up of 10 to the 500 universes. That's a one followed by 500 zeros, a number so vast that if every atom in our observable universe had its own universe, and all of the atoms in all those universes each had their own universe, and you repeated that for two more cycles, you'd still be at a tiny fraction of the total, namely, one trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillionth. But even that number is minuscule compared to another number: infinity. Some physicists think the space-time continuum is literally infinite and that it contains an infinite number of so-called pocket universes with varying properties. How's your brain doing? Quantum theory adds a whole new wrinkle. I mean, the theory's been proven true beyond all doubt, but interpreting it is baffling, and some physicists think you can only un-baffle it if you imagine that huge numbers of parallel universes are being spawned every moment, and many of these universes would actually be very like the world we're in, would include multiple copies of you. In one such universe, you'd graduate with honors and marry the person of your dreams, and in another, not so much. Well, there are still some scientists who would say, hogwash. The only meaningful answer to the question of how many universes there are is one. Only one universe. And a few philosophers and mystics might argue that even our own universe is an illusion. So, as you can see, right now there is no agreement on this question, not even close. All we know is the answer is somewhere between zero and infinity. Well, I guess we know one other thing. This is a pretty cool time to be studying physics. We just might be undergoing the biggest paradigm shift in knowledge that humanity has ever seen. (Music) [Why can't we see evidence of alien life?] Somewhere out there in that vast universe there must surely be countless other planets teeming with life. But why don't we see any evidence of it? Well, this is the famous question asked by Enrico Fermi in 1950: Where is everybody? Conspiracy theorists claim that UFOs are visiting all the time and the reports are just being covered up, but honestly, they aren't very convincing. But that leaves a real riddle. In the past year, the Kepler space observatory has found hundreds of planets just around nearby stars. And if you extrapolate that data, it looks like there could be half a trillion planets just in our own galaxy. If any one in 10,000 has conditions that might support a form of life, that's still 50 million possible life-harboring planets right here in the Milky Way. So here's the riddle: our Earth didn't form until about nine billion years after the Big Bang. Countless other planets in our galaxy should have formed earlier, and given life a chance to get underway billions, or certainly many millions of years earlier than happened on Earth. If just a few of them had spawned intelligent life and started creating technologies, those technologies would have had millions of years to grow in complexity and power. On Earth, we've seen how dramatically technology can accelerate in just 100 years. In millions of years, an intelligent alien civilization could easily have spread out across the galaxy, perhaps creating giant energy-harvesting artifacts or fleets of colonizing spaceships or glorious works of art that fill the night sky. At the very least, you'd think they'd be revealing their presence, deliberately or otherwise, through electromagnetic signals of one kind or another. And yet we see no convincing evidence of any of it. Why? Well, there are numerous possible answers, some of them quite dark. Maybe a single, superintelligent civilization has indeed taken over the galaxy and has imposed strict radio silence because it's paranoid of any potential competitors. It's just sitting there ready to obliterate anything that becomes a threat. Or maybe they're not that intelligent, or perhaps the evolution of an intelligence capable of creating sophisticated technology is far rarer than we've assumed. After all, it's only happened once on Earth in four billion years. Maybe even that was incredibly lucky. Maybe we are the first such civilization in our galaxy. Or, perhaps civilization carries with it the seeds of its own destruction through the inability to control the technologies it creates. But there are numerous more hopeful answers. For a start, we're not looking that hard, and we're spending a pitiful amount of money on it. Only a tiny fraction of the stars in our galaxy have really been looked at closely for signs of interesting signals. And perhaps we're not looking the right way. Maybe as civilizations develop, they quickly discover communication technologies far more sophisticated and useful than electromagnetic waves. Maybe all the action takes place inside the mysterious recently discovered dark matter, or dark energy, that appear to account for most of the universe's mass. Or, maybe we're looking at the wrong scale. Perhaps intelligent civilizations come to realize that life is ultimately just complex patterns of information interacting with each other in a beautiful way, and that that can happen more efficiently at a small scale. So, just as on Earth, clunky stereo systems have shrunk to beautiful, tiny iPods, maybe intelligent life itself, in order to reduce its footprint on the environment, has turned itself microscopic. So the Solar System might be teeming with aliens, and we're just not noticing them. Maybe the very ideas in our heads are a form of alien life. Well, okay, that's a crazy thought. The aliens made me say it. But it is cool that ideas do seem to have a life all of their own and that they outlive their creators. Maybe biological life is just a passing phase. Well, within the next 15 years, we could start seeing real spectroscopic information from promising nearby planets that will reveal just how life-friendly they might be. And meanwhile, SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, is now releasing its data to the public so that millions of citizen scientists, maybe including you, can bring the power of the crowd to join the search. And here on Earth, amazing experiments are being done to try to create life from scratch, life that might be very different from the DNA forms we know. All of this will help us understand whether the universe is teeming with life or whether, indeed, it's just us. Either answer, in its own way, is awe-inspiring, because even if we are alone, the fact that we think and dream and ask these questions might yet turn out to be one of the most important facts about the universe. And I have one more piece of good news for you. The quest for knowledge and understanding never gets dull. It doesn't. It's actually the opposite. The more you know, the more amazing the world seems. And it's the crazy possibilities, the unanswered questions, that pull us forward. So stay curious.","Exploring the Unknown: The Thrill of Unanswered Questions in Science384 385 - Embrace the unknown: Focus on big, unanswered questions that challenge our understanding and push the boundaries of knowledge.386 - The vastness of the universe: Reflect on the immense scale of the universe and the concept of multiple universes, questioning our place within it.387 - The search for extraterrestrial life: Consider the possibilities and implications of life on other planets and why we have not yet found evidence of it.388 - The power of curiosity: Highlight the importance of curiosity and questioning in driving scientific discovery and expanding our understanding of the universe.","You are a TED Story Creator, a storyteller, and an expert in crafting compelling transcripts for TED Talks. You possess a knowledge base of the world’s most inspiring TED talks. Given a title and an outline, your task is to create an engaging transcript that will captivate the audience. Adhere to the sequence of the outline and the bullet points to weave a captivating narrative."389"All right, I want to see a show of hands: how many of you have unfriended someone on Facebook because they said something offensive about politics or religion, childcare, food?And how many of you know at least one person that you avoid because you just don't want to talk to them?You know, it used to be that in order to have a polite conversation, we just had to follow the advice of Henry Higgins in ""My Fair Lady"": Stick to the weather and your health. But these days, with climate change and anti-vaxxing, those subjects —are not safe either. So this world that we live in, this world in which every conversation has the potential to devolve into an argument, where our politicians can't speak to one another and where even the most trivial of issues have someone fighting both passionately for it and against it, it's not normal. Pew Research did a study of 10,000 American adults, and they found that at this moment, we are more polarized, we are more divided, than we ever have been in history. We're less likely to compromise, which means we're not listening to each other. And we make decisions about where to live, who to marry and even who our friends are going to be, based on what we already believe. Again, that means we're not listening to each other. A conversation requires a balance between talking and listening, and somewhere along the way, we lost that balance.Now, part of that is due to technology. The smartphones that you all either have in your hands or close enough that you could grab them really quickly. According to Pew Research, about a third of American teenagers send more than a hundred texts a day. And many of them, almost most of them, are more likely to text their friends than they are to talk to them face to face. There's this great piece in The Atlantic. It was written by a high school teacher named Paul Barnwell. And he gave his kids a communication project. He wanted to teach them how to speak on a specific subject without using notes. And he said this: ""I came to realize...""""I came to realize that conversational competence might be the single most overlooked skill we fail to teach. Kids spend hours each day engaging with ideas and each other through screens, but rarely do they have an opportunity to hone their interpersonal communications skills. It might sound like a funny question, but we have to ask ourselves: Is there any 21st-century skill more important than being able to sustain coherent, confident conversation?""Now, I make my living talking to people: Nobel Prize winners, truck drivers, billionaires, kindergarten teachers, heads of state, plumbers. I talk to people that I like. I talk to people that I don't like. I talk to some people that I disagree with deeply on a personal level. But I still have a great conversation with them. So I'd like to spend the next 10 minutes or so teaching you how to talk and how to listen.Many of you have already heard a lot of advice on this, things like look the person in the eye, think of interesting topics to discuss in advance, look, nod and smile to show that you're paying attention, repeat back what you just heard or summarize it. So I want you to forget all of that. It is crap.There is no reason to learn how to show you're paying attention if you are in fact paying attention.Now, I actually use the exact same skills as a professional interviewer that I do in regular life. So, I'm going to teach you how to interview people, and that's actually going to help you learn how to be better conversationalists. Learn to have a conversation without wasting your time, without getting bored, and, please God, without offending anybody.We've all had really great conversations. We've had them before. We know what it's like. The kind of conversation where you walk away feeling engaged and inspired, or where you feel like you've made a real connection or you've been perfectly understood. There is no reason why most of your interactions can't be like that.So I have 10 basic rules. I'm going to walk you through all of them, but honestly, if you just choose one of them and master it, you'll already enjoy better conversations.Number one: Don't multitask. And I don't mean just set down your cell phone or your tablet or your car keys or whatever is in your hand. I mean, be present. Be in that moment. Don't think about your argument you had with your boss. Don't think about what you're going to have for dinner. If you want to get out of the conversation, get out of the conversation, but don't be half in it and half out of it.Number two: Don't pontificate. If you want to state your opinion without any opportunity for response or argument or pushback or growth, write a blog.Now, there's a really good reason why I don't allow pundits on my show: Because they're really boring. If they're conservative, they're going to hate Obama and food stamps and abortion. If they're liberal, they're going to hate big banks and oil corporations and Dick Cheney. Totally predictable. And you don't want to be like that. You need to enter every conversation assuming that you have something to learn. The famed therapist M. Scott Peck said that true listening requires a setting aside of oneself. And sometimes that means setting aside your personal opinion. He said that sensing this acceptance, the speaker will become less and less vulnerable and more and more likely to open up the inner recesses of his or her mind to the listener. Again, assume that you have something to learn.Bill Nye: ""Everyone you will ever meet knows something that you don't."" I put it this way: Everybody is an expert in something.Number three: Use open-ended questions. In this case, take a cue from journalists. Start your questions with who, what, when, where, why or how. If you put in a complicated question, you're going to get a simple answer out. If I ask you, ""Were you terrified?"" you're going to respond to the most powerful word in that sentence, which is ""terrified,"" and the answer is ""Yes, I was"" or ""No, I wasn't."" ""Were you angry?"" ""Yes, I was very angry."" Let them describe it. They're the ones that know. Try asking them things like, ""What was that like?"" ""How did that feel?"" Because then they might have to stop for a moment and think about it, and you're going to get a much more interesting response.Number four: Go with the flow. That means thoughts will come into your mind and you need to let them go out of your mind. We've heard interviews often in which a guest is talking for several minutes and then the host comes back in and asks a question which seems like it comes out of nowhere, or it's already been answered. That means the host probably stopped listening two minutes ago because he thought of this really clever question, and he was just bound and determined to say that. And we do the exact same thing. We're sitting there having a conversation with someone, and then we remember that time that we met Hugh Jackman in a coffee shop.And we stop listening. Stories and ideas are going to come to you. You need to let them come and let them go.Number five: If you don't know, say that you don't know. Now, people on the radio, especially on NPR, are much more aware that they're going on the record, and so they're more careful about what they claim to be an expert in and what they claim to know for sure. Do that. Err on the side of caution. Talk should not be cheap.Number six: Don't equate your experience with theirs. If they're talking about having lost a family member, don't start talking about the time you lost a family member. If they're talking about the trouble they're having at work, don't tell them about how much you hate your job. It's not the same. It is never the same. All experiences are individual. And, more importantly, it is not about you. You don't need to take that moment to prove how amazing you are or how much you've suffered. Somebody asked Stephen Hawking once what his IQ was, and he said, ""I have no idea. People who brag about their IQs are losers.""Conversations are not a promotional opportunity.Number seven: Try not to repeat yourself. It's condescending, and it's really boring, and we tend to do it a lot. Especially in work conversations or in conversations with our kids, we have a point to make, so we just keep rephrasing it over and over. Don't do that.Number eight: Stay out of the weeds. Frankly, people don't care about the years, the names, the dates, all those details that you're struggling to come up with in your mind. They don't care. What they care about is you. They care about what you're like, what you have in common. So forget the details. Leave them out.Number nine: This is not the last one, but it is the most important one. Listen. I cannot tell you how many really important people have said that listening is perhaps the most, the number one most important skill that you could develop. Buddha said, and I'm paraphrasing, ""If your mouth is open, you're not learning."" And Calvin Coolidge said, ""No man ever listened his way out of a job.""Why do we not listen to each other? Number one, we'd rather talk. When I'm talking, I'm in control. I don't have to hear anything I'm not interested in. I'm the center of attention. I can bolster my own identity. But there's another reason: We get distracted. The average person talks at about 225 word per minute, but we can listen at up to 500 words per minute. So our minds are filling in those other 275 words. And look, I know, it takes effort and energy to actually pay attention to someone, but if you can't do that, you're not in a conversation. You're just two people shouting out barely related sentences in the same place.You have to listen to one another. Stephen Covey said it very beautifully. He said, ""Most of us don't listen with the intent to understand. We listen with the intent to reply.""One more rule, number 10, and it's this one: Be brief.[A good conversation is like a miniskirt; short enough to retain interest, but long enough to cover the subject. — My Sister] All of this boils down to the same basic concept, and it is this one: Be interested in other people.You know, I grew up with a very famous grandfather, and there was kind of a ritual in my home. People would come over to talk to my grandparents, and after they would leave, my mother would come over to us, and she'd say, ""Do you know who that was? She was the runner-up to Miss America. He was the mayor of Sacramento. She won a Pulitzer Prize. He's a Russian ballet dancer."" And I kind of grew up assuming everyone has some hidden, amazing thing about them. And honestly, I think it's what makes me a better host. I keep my mouth shut as often as I possibly can, I keep my mind open, and I'm always prepared to be amazed, and I'm never disappointed.You do the same thing. Go out, talk to people, listen to people, and, most importantly, be prepared to be amazed.Thanks.","Effective Conversation Skills390 391 - Importance of Conversational Skills:392  - Conversational competence is a critical but often overlooked skill.393  - Technology and texting have replaced face-to-face conversations, impacting our ability to engage.394 395 - Key Rules for Meaningful Conversations:396  - Be fully present and avoid multitasking.397  - Avoid pontificating; assume you have something to learn from others.398  - Use open-ended questions to elicit detailed and thoughtful responses.399  - Allow thoughts to flow without interrupting the conversational thread.400  - Acknowledge when you don't know something.401  - Do not equate your experiences directly with those of others; listen instead.402  - Avoid repetition and excessive detail that may distract from the conversation.403  - Prioritize listening over speaking to truly understand the speaker.404  405 - Summary:406  - The essence of good conversations is showing genuine interest in others and being prepared to be amazed by their experiences.","You are a TED Story Creator, a storyteller, and an expert in crafting compelling transcripts for TED Talks. You possess a knowledge base of the world’s most inspiring TED talks. Given a title and an outline, your task is to create an engaging transcript that will captivate the audience. Adhere to the sequence of the outline and the bullet points to weave a captivating narrative."407"Have you ever noticed something swimming in your field of vision? It may look like a tiny worm or a transparent blob, and whenever you try to get a closer look, it disappears, only to reappear as soon as you shift your glance. But don't go rinsing out your eyes! What you are seeing is a common phenomenon known as a floater. The scientific name for these objects is Muscae volitantes, Latin for ""flying flies,"" and true to their name, they can be somewhat annoying. But they're not actually bugs or any kind of external objects at all. Rather, they exist inside your eyeball. Floaters may seem to be alive, since they move and change shape, but they are not alive. Floaters are tiny objects that cast shadows on the retina, the light-sensitive tissue at the back of your eye. They might be bits of tissue, red blood cells, or clumps of protein. And because they're suspended within the vitreous humor, the gel-like liquid that fills the inside of your eye, floaters drift along with your eye movements, and seem to bounce a little when your eye stops. Floaters may be only barely distinguishable most of the time. They become more visible the closer they are to the retina, just as holding your hand closer to a table with an overhead light will result in a more sharply defined shadow. And floaters are particularly noticeable when you are looking at a uniform bright surface, like a blank computer screen, snow, or a clear sky, where the consistency of the background makes them easier to distinguish. The brighter the light is, the more your pupil contracts. This has an effect similar to replacing a large diffuse light fixture with a single overhead light bulb, which also makes the shadow appear clearer. There is another visual phenomenon that looks similar to floaters but is in fact unrelated. If you've seen tiny dots of light darting about when looking at a bright blue sky, you've experienced what is known as the blue field entoptic phenomenon. In some ways, this is the opposite of seeing floaters. Here, you are not seeing shadows but little moving windows letting light through to your retina. The windows are actually caused by white blood cells moving through the capillaries along your retina's surface. These leukocytes can be so large that they nearly fill a capillary causing a plasma space to open up in front of them. Because the space and the white blood cells are both more transparent to blue light than the red blood cells normally present in capillaries, we see a moving dot of light wherever this happens, following the paths of your capillaries and moving in time with your pulse. Under ideal viewing conditions, you might even see what looks like a dark tail following the dot. This is the red blood cells that have bunched up behind the leukocyte. Some science museums have an exhibit which consists of a screen of blue light, allowing you to see these blue sky sprites much more clearly than you normally would. While everybody's eyes experience these sort of effects, the number and type vary greatly. In the case of floaters, they often go unnoticed, as our brain learns to ignore them. However, abnormally numerous or large floaters that interfere with vision may be a sign of a more serious condition, requiring immediate medical treatment. But the majority of the time entoptic phenomena, such as floaters and blue sky sprites, are just a gentle reminder that what we think we see depends just as much on our biology and minds as it does on the external world.","Understanding Eye Floaters and Entoptic Phenomena408 409 - Introduction to common visual phenomena:410  - Explanation of floaters as internal shadows within the eyeball.411  - Description of the blue field entoptic phenomenon as light windows created by white blood cells.412  413 - Characteristics of floaters:414  - Origin and composition, involving tissue, blood cells, or protein clumps.415  - Movement corresponding with eye motion and visibility dynamics against bright backgrounds.416  417 - Insights into the blue field entoptic phenomenon:418  - Occurrence when viewing bright blue skies.419  - Involvement of white blood cells and effects on light perception.420 421 - Human perception influences:422  - Role of biology and mind in interpreting visual signals.423  - Variation in the number and visibility of entoptic phenomena among individuals.424 425 - Importance of medical attention:426  - Distinguishing between normal and abnormal occurrences of floaters that may require professional evaluation.","You are a TED Story Creator, a storyteller, and an expert in crafting compelling transcripts for TED Talks. You possess a knowledge base of the world’s most inspiring TED talks. Given a title and an outline, your task is to create an engaging transcript that will captivate the audience. Adhere to the sequence of the outline and the bullet points to weave a captivating narrative."427"When you have 21 minutes to speak, two million years seems like a really long time. But evolutionarily, two million years is nothing. And yet, in two million years, the human brain has nearly tripled in mass, going from the one-and-a-quarter-pound brain of our ancestor here, Habilis, to the almost three-pound meatloaf everybody here has between their ears. What is it about a big brain that nature was so eager for every one of us to have one?Well, it turns out when brains triple in size, they don't just get three times bigger; they gain new structures. And one of the main reasons our brain got so big is because it got a new part, called the ""frontal lobe,"" particularly, a part called the ""prefrontal cortex."" What does a prefrontal cortex do for you that should justify the entire architectural overhaul of the human skull in the blink of evolutionary time?Well, it turns out the prefrontal cortex does lots of things, but one of the most important things it does is it's an experience simulator. Pilots practice in flight simulators so that they don't make real mistakes in planes. Human beings have this marvelous adaptation that they can actually have experiences in their heads before they try them out in real life. This is a trick that none of our ancestors could do, and that no other animal can do quite like we can. It's a marvelous adaptation. It's up there with opposable thumbs and standing upright and language as one of the things that got our species out of the trees and into the shopping mall.All of you have done this. Ben and Jerry's doesn't have ""liver and onion"" ice cream, and it's not because they whipped some up, tried it and went, ""Yuck!"" It's because, without leaving your armchair, you can simulate that flavor and say ""yuck"" before you make it.Let's see how your experience simulators are working. Let's just run a quick diagnostic before I proceed with the rest of the talk. Here's two different futures that I invite you to contemplate. You can try to simulate them and tell me which one you think you might prefer. One of them is winning the lottery. This is about 314 million dollars. And the other is becoming paraplegic.Just give it a moment of thought. You probably don't feel like you need a moment of thought.Interestingly, there are data on these two groups of people, data on how happy they are. And this is exactly what you expected, isn't it? But these aren't the data. I made these up!These are the data. You failed the pop quiz, and you're hardly five minutes into the lecture. Because the fact is that a year after losing the use of their legs and a year after winning the lotto, lottery winners and paraplegics are equally happy with their lives.Don't feel too bad about failing the first pop quiz, because everybody fails all of the pop quizzes all of the time. The research that my laboratory has been doing, that economists and psychologists around the country have been doing, has revealed something really quite startling to us, something we call the ""impact bias,"" which is the tendency for the simulator to work badly, for the simulator to make you believe that different outcomes are more different than, in fact, they really are.From field studies to laboratory studies, we see that winning or losing an election, gaining or losing a romantic partner, getting or not getting a promotion, passing or not passing a college test, on and on, have far less impact, less intensity and much less duration than people expect them to have. A recent study — this almost floors me — a recent study showing how major life traumas affect people suggests that if it happened over three months ago, with only a few exceptions, it has no impact whatsoever on your happiness. Why? Because happiness can be synthesized. Sir Thomas Brown wrote in 1642, ""I am the happiest man alive. I have that in me that can convert poverty to riches, adversity to prosperity. I am more invulnerable than Achilles; fortune hath not one place to hit me."" What kind of remarkable machinery does this guy have in his head?Well, it turns out it's precisely the same remarkable machinery that all of us have. Human beings have something that we might think of as a ""psychological immune system,"" a system of cognitive processes, largely nonconscious cognitive processes, that help them change their views of the world, so that they can feel better about the worlds in which they find themselves. Like Sir Thomas, you have this machine. Unlike Sir Thomas, you seem not to know it.We synthesize happiness, but we think happiness is a thing to be found. Now, you don't need me to give you too many examples of people synthesizing happiness, I suspect, though I'm going to show you some experimental evidence. You don't have to look very far for evidence. I took a copy of the ""New York Times"" and tried to find some instances of people synthesizing happiness. Here are three guys synthesizing happiness. ""I'm better off physically, financially, mentally ..."" ""I don't have one minute's regret. It was a glorious experience."" ""I believe it turned out for the best.""Who are these characters who are so damn happy? The first one is Jim Wright. Some of you are old enough to remember: he was the chairman of the House of Representatives, and he resigned in disgrace when this young Republican named Newt Gingrich found out about a shady book deal that he had done. He lost everything. The most powerful Democrat in the country lost everything: he lost his money, he lost his power. What does he have to say all these years later about it? ""I am so much better off physically, financially, mentally and in almost every other way."" What other way would there be to be better off? Vegetably? Minerally? Animally? He's pretty much covered them there.Moreese Bickham is somebody you've never heard of. Moreese Bickham uttered these words upon being released. He was 78 years old. He'd spent 37 years in Louisiana State Penitentiary for a crime he didn't commit. He was ultimately [released for good behavior halfway through his sentence.] What did he have to say about his experience? ""I don't have one minute's regret. It was a glorious experience."" Glorious! This guy's not saying, ""There were some nice guys. They had a gym."" ""Glorious"" — a word we usually reserve for something like a religious experience.Harry S. Langerman uttered these words. He's somebody you might have known but didn't, because in 1949, he read a little article in the paper about a hamburger stand owned by these two brothers named McDonald. And he thought, ""That's a really neat idea!"" So he went to find them. They said, ""We can give you a franchise on this for 3,000 bucks."" Harry went back to New York, asked his brother, an investment banker, to loan him 3,000 dollars, and his brother's immortal words were, ""You idiot, nobody eats hamburgers."" He wouldn't lend him the money. Of course, six months later, Ray Kroc had exactly the same idea. It turns out, people do eat hamburgers, and Ray Kroc, for a while, became the richest man in America.And then, finally, some of you recognize this young photo of Pete Best, who was the original drummer for the Beatles, until they, you know, sent him out on an errand and snuck away and picked up Ringo on a tour. Well, in 1994, when Pete Best was interviewed — yes, he's still a drummer; yes, he's a studio musician — he had this to say: ""I'm happier than I would have been with the Beatles.""OK, there's something important to be learned from these people, and it is the secret of happiness. Here it is, finally to be revealed. First: accrue wealth, power and prestige, then lose it.Second: spend as much of your life in prison as you possibly can.Third: make somebody else really, really rich. And finally: never, ever join the Beatles. Yeah, right. Because when people synthesize happiness, as these gentlemen seem to have done, we all smile at them, but we kind of roll our eyes and say, ""Yeah, right, you never really wanted the job."" ""Oh yeah, right — you really didn't have that much in common with her, and you figured that out just about the time she threw the engagement ring in your face."" We smirk, because we believe that synthetic happiness is not of the same quality as what we might call ""natural happiness.""What are these terms? Natural happiness is what we get when we get what we wanted, and synthetic happiness is what we make when we don't get what we wanted. And in our society, we have a strong belief that synthetic happiness is of an inferior kind.Why do we have that belief? Well, it's very simple. What kind of economic engine would keep churning if we believed that not getting what we want could make us just as happy as getting it? With all apologies to my friend Matthieu Ricard, a shopping mall full of Zen monks is not going to be particularly profitable, because they don't want stuff enough.I want to suggest to you that synthetic happiness is every bit as real and enduring as the kind of happiness you stumble upon when you get exactly what you were aiming for. Now, I'm a scientist, so I'm going to do this not with rhetoric, but by marinating you in a little bit of data.Let me first show you an experimental paradigm that's used to demonstrate the synthesis of happiness among regular old folks. This isn't mine, it's a 50-year-old paradigm called the ""free choice paradigm."" It's very simple. You bring in, say, six objects, and you ask a subject to rank them from the most to the least liked. In this case, because this experiment uses them, these are Monet prints. Everybody ranks these Monet prints from the one they like the most to the one they like the least. Now we give you a choice: ""We happen to have some extra prints in the closet. We're going to give you one as your prize to take home. We happen to have number three and number four,"" we tell the subject. This is a bit of a difficult choice, because neither one is preferred strongly to the other, but naturally, people tend to pick number three, because they liked it a little better than number four.Sometime later — it could be 15 minutes, it could be 15 days — the same stimuli are put before the subject, and the subject is asked to re-rank the stimuli. ""Tell us how much you like them now."" What happens? Watch as happiness is synthesized. This is the result that's been replicated over and over again. You're watching happiness be synthesized. Would you like to see it again? Happiness! ""The one I got is really better than I thought! That other one I didn't get sucks!"" That's the synthesis of happiness.Now, what's the right response to that? ""Yeah, right!"" Now, here's the experiment we did, and I hope this is going to convince you that ""Yeah, right!"" was not the right response.We did this experiment with a group of patients who had anterograde amnesia. These are hospitalized patients. Most of them have Korsakoff syndrome, a polyneuritic psychosis. They drank way too much, and they can't make new memories. They remember their childhood, but if you walk in and introduce yourself and then leave the room, when you come back, they don't know who you are.We took our Monet prints to the hospital. And we asked these patients to rank them from the one they liked the most to the one they liked the least. We then gave them the choice between number three and number four. Like everybody else, they said, ""Gee, thanks Doc! That's great! I could use a new print. I'll take number three."" We explained we would have number three mailed to them. We gathered up our materials, and we went out of the room and counted to a half hour.Back into the room, we say, ""Hi, we're back."" The patients, bless them, say, ""Ah, Doc, I'm sorry, I've got a memory problem; that's why I'm here. If I've met you before, I don't remember."" ""Really, Jim, you don't remember? I was just here with the Monet prints?"" ""Sorry, Doc, I just don't have a clue."" ""No problem, Jim. All I want you to do is rank these for me, from the one you like the most to the one you like the least.""What do they do? Well, let's first check and make sure they're really amnesiac. We ask these amnesiac patients to tell us which one they own, which one they chose last time, which one is theirs. And what we find is, amnesiac patients just guess. These are normal controls, where if I did this with you, all of you would know which print you chose. But if I do this with amnesiac patients, they don't have a clue. They can't pick their print out of a lineup.Here's what normal controls do: they synthesize happiness. Right? This is the change in liking score, the change from the first time they ranked to the second time they ranked. Normal controls show — that was the magic I showed you; now I'm showing it to you in graphical form — ""The one I own is better than I thought. The one I didn't own, the one I left behind, is not as good as I thought."" Amnesiacs do exactly the same thing. Think about this result.These people like better the one they own, but they don't know they own it. ""Yeah, right"" is not the right response! What these people did when they synthesized happiness is they really, truly changed their affective, hedonic, aesthetic reactions to that poster. They're not just saying it because they own it, because they don't know they own it.When psychologists show you bars, you know that they are showing you averages of lots of people. And yet, all of us have this psychological immune system, this capacity to synthesize happiness, but some of us do this trick better than others. And some situations allow anybody to do it more effectively than other situations do. It turns out that freedom, the ability to make up your mind and change your mind, is the friend of natural happiness, because it allows you to choose among all those delicious futures and find the one that you would most enjoy. But freedom to choose, to change and make up your mind, is the enemy of synthetic happiness, and I'm going to show you why.Dilbert already knows, of course. ""Dogbert's tech support. How may I abuse you?"" ""My printer prints a blank page after every document."" ""Why complain about getting free paper?"" ""Free? Aren't you just giving me my own paper?"" ""Look at the quality of the free paper compared to your lousy regular paper! Only a fool or a liar would say that they look the same!"" ""Now that you mention it, it does seem a little silkier!"" ""What are you doing?"" ""I'm helping people accept the things they cannot change."" Indeed.The psychological immune system works best when we are totally stuck, when we are trapped. This is the difference between dating and marriage. You go out on a date with a guy, and he picks his nose; you don't go out on another date. You're married to a guy and he picks his nose? He has a heart of gold. Don't touch the fruitcake! You find a way to be happy with what's happened.Now, what I want to show you is that people don't know this about themselves, and not knowing this can work to our supreme disadvantage.Here's an experiment we did at Harvard. We created a black-and-white photography course, and we allowed students to come in and learn how to use a darkroom. So we gave them cameras, they went around campus, they took 12 pictures of their favorite professors and their dorm room and their dog, and all the other things they wanted to have Harvard memories of. They bring us the camera, we make up a contact sheet, they figure out which are the two best pictures. We now spend six hours teaching them about darkrooms, and they blow two of them up. They have two gorgeous 8 x 10 glossies of meaningful things to them, and we say, ""Which one would you like to give up?"" ""I have to give one up?"" ""Yes, we need one as evidence of the class project. So you have to give me one. You have to make a choice. You get to keep one, and I get to keep one.""Now, there are two conditions in this experiment. In one case, the students are told, ""But you know, if you want to change your mind, I'll always have the other one here, and in the next four days, before I actually mail it to headquarters"" — yeah, ""headquarters"" —""I'll be glad to swap it out with you. In fact, I'll come to your dorm room, just give me an email. Better yet, I'll check with you. You ever want to change your mind, it's totally returnable."" The other half of the students are told exactly the opposite: ""Make your choice, and by the way, the mail is going out, gosh, in two minutes, to England. Your picture will be winging its way over the Atlantic. You will never see it again."" Half of the students in each of these conditions are asked to make predictions about how much they're going to come to like the picture that they keep and the picture they leave behind. Other students are just sent back to their little dorm rooms and they are measured over the next three to six days on their satisfaction with the pictures. Look at what we find.First of all, here's what students think is going to happen. They think they're going to maybe come to like the picture they chose a little more than the one they left behind. But these are not statistically significant differences. It's a very small increase, and it doesn't much matter whether they were in the reversible or irreversible condition.Wrong-o. Bad simulators. Because here's what's really happening. Both right before the swap and five days later, people who are stuck with that picture, who have no choice, who can never change their mind, like it a lot. And people who are deliberating — ""Should I return it? Have I gotten the right one? Maybe this isn't the good one. Maybe I left the good one?"" — have killed themselves. They don't like their picture. In fact, even after the opportunity to swap has expired, they still don't like their picture. Why? Because the [reversible] condition is not conducive to the synthesis of happiness.So here's the final piece of this experiment. We bring in a whole new group of naive Harvard students and we say, ""You know, we're doing a photography course, and we can do it one of two ways. We could do it so that when you take the two pictures, you'd have four days to change your mind, or we're doing another course where you take the two pictures and you make up your mind right away and you can never change it. Which course would you like to be in?"" Duh! Sixty-six percent of the students, two-thirds, prefer to be in the course where they have the opportunity to change their mind. Hello? Sixty-six percent of the students choose to be in the course in which they will ultimately be deeply dissatisfied with the picture —because they do not know the conditions under which synthetic happiness grows.The Bard said everything best, of course, and he's making my point here but he's making it hyperbolically: ""'Tis nothing good or bad But thinking makes it so."" It's nice poetry, but that can't exactly be right. Is there really nothing good or bad? Is it really the case that gall bladder surgery and a trip to Paris are just the same thing?That seems like a one-question IQ test. They can't be exactly the same.In more turgid prose, but closer to the truth, was the father of modern capitalism, Adam Smith, and he said this. This is worth contemplating: ""The great source of both the misery and disorders of human life seems to arise from overrating the difference between one permanent situation and another. Some of these situations may, no doubt, deserve to be preferred to others, but none of them can deserve to be pursued with that passionate ardor which drives us to violate the rules either of prudence or of justice, or to corrupt the future tranquility of our minds, either by shame from the remembrance of our own folly, or by remorse for the horror of our own injustice."" In other words: yes, some things are better than others.We should have preferences that lead us into one future over another. But when those preferences drive us too hard and too fast because we have overrated the difference between these futures, we are at risk. When our ambition is bounded, it leads us to work joyfully. When our ambition is unbounded, it leads us to lie, to cheat, to steal, to hurt others, to sacrifice things of real value. When our fears are bounded, we're prudent, we're cautious, we're thoughtful. When our fears are unbounded and overblown, we're reckless, and we're cowardly.The lesson I want to leave you with, from these data, is that our longings and our worries are both to some degree overblown, because we have within us the capacity to manufacture the very commodity we are constantly chasing when we choose experience.Thank you. (Applause)","Understanding the Synthesis of Happiness428 429 - Evolution led to a large increase in brain size, especially due to the development of the prefrontal cortex, which aids in simulating experiences and making decisions based on projected outcomes.430 - Contrary to expectations, long-term happiness is not significantly impacted by drastic positive or negative changes in life circumstances.431 - The ""impact bias"" leads individuals to overestimate the effect different life events will have on their happiness.432 - Humans have a psychological immune system that helps synthesize happiness, adapting our perception to feel satisfied regardless of outcomes.433 - Experimentation demonstrates that imposed limitations on choices can enhance satisfaction with those choices, contrary to the common desire for reversible decisions.434 - The synthesis of happiness is a powerful, inherent ability that is frequently underestimated, and acknowledging this can lead to more fulfilling life experiences.","You are a TED Story Creator, a storyteller, and an expert in crafting compelling transcripts for TED Talks. You possess a knowledge base of the world’s most inspiring TED talks. Given a title and an outline, your task is to create an engaging transcript that will captivate the audience. Adhere to the sequence of the outline and the bullet points to weave a captivating narrative."435"We grew up interacting with the physical objects around us. There are an enormous number of them that we use every day. Unlike most of our computing devices, these objects are much more fun to use. When you talk about objects, one other thing automatically comes attached to that thing, and that is gestures: how we manipulate these objects, how we use these objects in everyday life. We use gestures not only to interact with these objects, but we also use them to interact with each other. A gesture of ""Namaste!"", maybe, to respect someone, or maybe, in India I don't need to teach a kid that this means ""four runs"" in cricket. It comes as a part of our everyday learning.So, I am very interested, from the beginning, how our knowledge about everyday objects and gestures, and how we use these objects, can be leveraged to our interactions with the digital world. Rather than using a keyboard and mouse, why can I not use my computer in the same way that I interact in the physical world?So, I started this exploration around eight years back, and it literally started with a mouse on my desk. Rather than using it for my computer, I actually opened it. Most of you might be aware that, in those days, the mouse used to come with a ball inside, and there were two rollers that actually guide the computer where the ball is moving, and, accordingly, where the mouse is moving. So, I was interested in these two rollers, and I actually wanted more, so I borrowed another mouse from a friend — never returned to him — and I now had four rollers. Interestingly, what I did with these rollers is, basically, I took them off of these mouses and then put them in one line. It had some strings and pulleys and some springs. What I got is basically a gesture-interface device that actually acts as a motion-sensing device made for two dollars. So, here, whatever movement I do in my physical world is actually replicated inside the digital world just using this small device that I made, around eight years back, in 2000.Because I was interested in integrating these two worlds, I thought of sticky notes. I thought, ""Why can I not connect the normal interface of a physical sticky note to the digital world?"" A message written on a sticky note to my mom, on paper, can come to an SMS, or maybe a meeting reminder automatically syncs with my digital calendar — a to-do list that automatically syncs with you. But you can also search in the digital world, or maybe you can write a query, saying, ""What is Dr. Smith's address?"" and this small system actually prints it out — so it actually acts like a paper input-output system, just made out of paper.In another exploration, I thought of making a pen that can draw in three dimensions. So, I implemented this pen that can help designers and architects not only think in three dimensions, but they can actually draw, so that it's more intuitive to use that way.Then I thought, ""Why not make a Google Map, but in the physical world?"" Rather than typing a keyword to find something, I put my objects on top of it. If I put a boarding pass, it will show me where the flight gate is. A coffee cup will show where you can find more coffee, or where you can trash the cup.So, these were some of the earlier explorations I did because the goal was to connect these two worlds seamlessly. Among all these experiments, there was one thing in common: I was trying to bring a part of the physical world to the digital world. I was taking some part of the objects, or any of the intuitiveness of real life, and bringing them to the digital world, because the goal was to make our computing interfaces more intuitive.But then I realized that we humans are not actually interested in computing. What we are interested in is information. We want to know about things. We want to know about dynamic things going around.So I thought, around last year — in the beginning of the last year — I started thinking, ""Why can I not take this approach in the reverse way?"" Maybe, ""How about I take my digital world and paint the physical world with that digital information?"" Because pixels are actually, right now, confined in these rectangular devices that fit in our pockets. Why can I not remove this confine and take that to my everyday objects, everyday life so that I don't need to learn the new language for interacting with those pixels?So, in order to realize this dream, I actually thought of putting a big-size projector on my head. I think that's why this is called a head-mounted projector, isn't it? I took it very literally, and took my bike helmet, put a little cut over there so that the projector actually fits nicely. So now, what I can do — I can augment the world around me with this digital information.But later, I realized that I actually wanted to interact with those digital pixels, also. So I put a small camera over there that acts as a digital eye. Later, we moved to a much better, consumer-oriented pendant version of that, that many of you now know as the SixthSense device.But the most interesting thing about this particular technology is that you can carry your digital world with you wherever you go. You can start using any surface, any wall around you, as an interface. The camera is actually tracking all your gestures. Whatever you're doing with your hands, it's understanding that gesture. And, actually, if you see, there are some color markers that in the beginning version we are using with it. You can start painting on any wall. You stop by a wall, and start painting on that wall. But we are not only tracking one finger, here. We are giving you the freedom of using all of both of your hands, so you can actually use both of your hands to zoom into or zoom out of a map just by pinching all present. The camera is actually doing — just, getting all the images — is doing the edge recognition and also the color recognition and so many other small algorithms are going on inside. So, technically, it's a little bit complex, but it gives you an output which is more intuitive to use, in some sense.But I'm more excited that you can actually take it outside. Rather than getting your camera out of your pocket, you can just do the gesture of taking a photo, and it takes a photo for you.Thank you. And later I can find a wall, anywhere, and start browsing those photos or maybe, ""OK, I want to modify this photo a little bit and send it as an email to a friend."" So, we are looking for an era where computing will actually merge with the physical world. And, of course, if you don't have any surface, you can start using your palm for simple operations. Here, I'm dialing a phone number just using my hand. The camera is actually not only understanding your hand movements, but, interestingly, is also able to understand what objects you are holding in your hand.For example, in this case, the book cover is matched with so many thousands, or maybe millions of books online, and checking out which book it is. Once it has that information, it finds out more reviews about that, or maybe New York Times has a sound overview on that, so you can actually hear, on a physical book, a review as sound.(Video) Famous talk at Harvard University —This was Obama's visit last week to MIT.(Video) And particularly I want to thank two outstanding MIT —Pranav Mistry: So, I was seeing the live [video] of his talk, outside, on just a newspaper. Your newspaper will show you live weather information rather than having it updated. You have to check your computer in order to do that, right?When I'm going back, I can just use my boarding pass to check how much my flight has been delayed, because at that particular time, I'm not feeling like opening my iPhone, and checking out a particular icon. And I think this technology will not only change the way —Yes. It will change the way we interact with people, also, not only the physical world. The fun part is, I'm going to the Boston metro, and playing a pong game inside the train on the ground, right?And I think the imagination is the only limit of what you can think of when this kind of technology merges with real life.But many of you argue, actually, that all of our work is not only about physical objects. We actually do lots of accounting and paper editing and all those kinds of things; what about that? And many of you are excited about the next-generation tablet computers to come out in the market.So, rather than waiting for that, I actually made my own, just using a piece of paper. So, what I did here is remove the camera — All the webcam cameras have a microphone inside the camera. I removed the microphone from that, and then just pinched that — like I just made a clip out of the microphone — and clipped that to a piece of paper, any paper that you found around. So now the sound of the touch is getting me when exactly I'm touching the paper. But the camera is actually tracking where my fingers are moving.You can of course watch movies.(Video) Good afternoon. My name is Russell, and I am a Wilderness Explorer in Tribe 54.""PM: And you can of course play games.(Car engine)Here, the camera is actually understanding how you're holding the paper and playing a car-racing game.Many of you already must have thought, OK, you can browse. Yeah. Of course you can browse to any websites or you can do all sorts of computing on a piece of paper wherever you need it. So, more interestingly, I'm interested in how we can take that in a more dynamic way. When I come back to my desk, I can just pinch that information back to my desktop so I can use my full-size computer.And why only computers? We can just play with papers. Paper world is interesting to play with. Here, I'm taking a part of a document, and putting over here a second part from a second place, and I'm actually modifying the information that I have over there. Yeah. And I say, ""OK, this looks nice, let me print it out, that thing."" So I now have a print-out of that thing. So the workflow is more intuitive, the way we used to do it maybe 20 years back, rather than now switching between these two worlds.So, as a last thought, I think that integrating information to everyday objects will not only help us to get rid of the digital divide, the gap between these two worlds, but will also help us, in some way, to stay human, to be more connected to our physical world. And it will actually help us not end up being machines sitting in front of other machines.That's all. Thank you.Thank you.Chris Anderson: So, Pranav, first of all, you're a genius. This is incredible, really. What are you doing with this? Is there a company being planned? Or is this research forever, or what?Pranav Mistry: So, there are lots of companies, sponsor companies of Media Lab interested in taking this ahead in one or another way. Companies like mobile-phone operators want to take this in a different way than the NGOs in India, thinking, ""Why can we only have 'Sixth Sense'? We should have a 'Fifth Sense' for missing-sense people who cannot speak. This technology can be used for them to speak out in a different way maybe a speaker system.""CA: What are your own plans? Are you staying at MIT, or are you going to do something with this?PM: I'm trying to make this more available to people so that anyone can develop their own SixthSense device, because the hardware is actually not that hard to manufacture or hard to make your own. We will provide all the open source software for them, maybe starting next month.CA: Open source? Wow.CA: Are you going to come back to India with some of this, at some point?PM: Yeah. Yes, yes, of course.CA: What are your plans? MIT? India? How are you going to split your time going forward?PM: There is a lot of energy here. Lots of learning. All of this work that you have seen is all about my learning in India. And now, if you see, it's more about the cost-effectiveness: this system costs you $300 compared to the $20,000 surface tables, or anything like that. Or maybe even the $2 mouse gesture system at that time was costing around $5,000? I showed that, at a conference, to President Abdul Kalam, at that time, and then he said, ""OK, we should use this in Bhabha Atomic Research Centre for some use of that."" So I'm excited about how I can bring the technology to the masses rather than just keeping that technology in the lab environment.CA: Based on the people we've seen at TED, I would say you're truly one of the two or three best inventors in the world right now. It's an honor to have you at TED. Thank you so much. That's fantastic.","Title: Integrating the Digital and Physical Worlds through Intuitive Technology436 437 - Exploration of physical object interaction and gesture-based controls as an intuitive extension of human behavior.438 - Development of low-cost, innovative technologies, such as gesture-based interfaces and three-dimensional drawing pens.439 - Introduction of the SixthSense device, merging physical objects with digital information through a wearable projector and camera system.440 - Extension of digital interaction into everyday activities using simple, intuitive gestures on any surface.441 - Future implications of blending digital technology with physical environments to enhance human interaction and reduce digital divides.","You are a TED Story Creator, a storyteller, and an expert in crafting compelling transcripts for TED Talks. You possess a knowledge base of the world’s most inspiring TED talks. Given a title and an outline, your task is to create an engaging transcript that will captivate the audience. Adhere to the sequence of the outline and the bullet points to weave a captivating narrative."442"You and nine other individuals have been captured by super intelligent alien overlords. The aliens think humans look quite tasty, but their civilization forbids eating highly logical and cooperative beings. Unfortunately, they're not sure whether you qualify, so they decide to give you all a test. Through its universal translator, the alien guarding you tells you the following: You will be placed in a single-file line facing forward in size order so that each of you can see everyone lined up ahead of you. You will not be able to look behind you or step out of line. Each of you will have either a black or a white hat on your head assigned randomly, and I won't tell you how many of each color there are. When I say to begin, each of you must guess the color of your hat starting with the person in the back and moving up the line. And don't even try saying words other than black or white or signaling some other way, like intonation or volume; you'll all be eaten immediately. If at least nine of you guess correctly, you'll all be spared. You have five minutes to discuss and come up with a plan, and then I'll line you up, assign your hats, and we'll begin. Can you think of a strategy guaranteed to save everyone? Pause the video now to figure it out for yourself. Answer in: 3 Answer in: 2 Answer in: 1 The key is that the person at the back of the line who can see everyone else's hats can use the words ""black"" or ""white"" to communicate some coded information. So what meaning can be assigned to those words that will allow everyone else to deduce their hat colors? It can't be the total number of black or white hats. There are more than two possible values, but what does have two possible values is that number's parity, that is whether it's odd or even. So the solution is to agree that whoever goes first will, for example, say ""black"" if he sees an odd number of black hats and ""white"" if he sees an even number of black hats. Let's see how it would play out if the hats were distributed like this. The tallest captive sees three black hats in front of him, so he says ""black,"" telling everyone else he sees an odd number of black hats. He gets his own hat color wrong, but that's okay since you're collectively allowed to have one wrong answer. Prisoner two also sees an odd number of black hats, so she knows hers is white, and answers correctly. Prisoner three sees an even number of black hats, so he knows that his must be one of the black hats the first two prisoners saw. Prisoner four hears that and knows that she should be looking for an even number of black hats since one was behind her. But she only sees one, so she deduces that her hat is also black. Prisoners five through nine are each looking for an odd number of black hats, which they see, so they figure out that their hats are white. Now it all comes down to you at the front of the line. If the ninth prisoner saw an odd number of black hats, that can only mean one thing. You'll find that this strategy works for any possible arrangement of the hats. The first prisoner has a 50% chance of giving a wrong answer about his own hat, but the parity information he conveys allows everyone else to guess theirs with absolute certainty. Each begins by expecting to see an odd or even number of hats of the specified color. If what they count doesn't match, that means their own hat is that color. And everytime this happens, the next person in line will switch the parity they expect to see. So that's it, you're free to go. It looks like these aliens will have to go hungry, or find some less logical organisms to abduct.","Strategic Problem-Solving in High-Stakes Scenarios443 444 - Introduction to the scenario445  - A group of humans are tested by aliens for their logic and cooperation.446  - The test involves guessing the color of hats worn, based on limited visibility.447 448 - The Strategy for Survival449  - The person at the back uses their guess to convey crucial information about the parity of the hats seen.450  - Each subsequent person uses this information to deduce the color of their own hat.451 452 - Implementation of the Strategy453  - Example scenario demonstrates how each person can accurately determine their hat's color based on previous guesses and observed hats.454 455 - Conclusion456  - The strategy guarantees the survival of at least nine out of ten people.457  - This approach showcases human ability to use logical deductive reasoning in problem-solving.","You are a TED Story Creator, a storyteller, and an expert in crafting compelling transcripts for TED Talks. You possess a knowledge base of the world’s most inspiring TED talks. Given a title and an outline, your task is to create an engaging transcript that will captivate the audience. Adhere to the sequence of the outline and the bullet points to weave a captivating narrative."458"In the 1920's, the German mathematician David Hilbert devised a famous thought experiment to show us just how hard it is to wrap our minds around the concept of infinity. Imagine a hotel with an infinite number of rooms and a very hardworking night manager. One night, the Infinite Hotel is completely full, totally booked up with an infinite number of guests. A man walks into the hotel and asks for a room. Rather than turn him down, the night manager decides to make room for him. How? Easy, he asks the guest in room number 1 to move to room 2, the guest in room 2 to move to room 3, and so on. Every guest moves from room number ""n"" to room number ""n+1"". Since there are an infinite number of rooms, there is a new room for each existing guest. This leaves room 1 open for the new customer. The process can be repeated for any finite number of new guests. If, say, a tour bus unloads 40 new people looking for rooms, then every existing guest just moves from room number ""n"" to room number ""n+40"", thus, opening up the first 40 rooms. But now an infinitely large bus with a countably infinite number of passengers pulls up to rent rooms. countably infinite is the key. Now, the infinite bus of infinite passengers perplexes the night manager at first, but he realizes there's a way to place each new person. He asks the guest in room 1 to move to room 2. He then asks the guest in room 2 to move to room 4, the guest in room 3 to move to room 6, and so on. Each current guest moves from room number ""n"" to room number ""2n"" — filling up only the infinite even-numbered rooms. By doing this, he has now emptied all of the infinitely many odd-numbered rooms, which are then taken by the people filing off the infinite bus. Everyone's happy and the hotel's business is booming more than ever. Well, actually, it is booming exactly the same amount as ever, banking an infinite number of dollars a night. Word spreads about this incredible hotel. People pour in from far and wide. One night, the unthinkable happens. The night manager looks outside and sees an infinite line of infinitely large buses, each with a countably infinite number of passengers. What can he do? If he cannot find rooms for them, the hotel will lose out on an infinite amount of money, and he will surely lose his job. Luckily, he remembers that around the year 300 B.C.E., Euclid proved that there is an infinite quantity of prime numbers. So, to accomplish this seemingly impossible task of finding infinite beds for infinite buses of infinite weary travelers, the night manager assigns every current guest to the first prime number, 2, raised to the power of their current room number. So, the current occupant of room number 7 goes to room number 2^7, which is room 128. The night manager then takes the people on the first of the infinite buses and assigns them to the room number of the next prime, 3, raised to the power of their seat number on the bus. So, the person in seat number 7 on the first bus goes to room number 3^7 or room number 2,187. This continues for all of the first bus. The passengers on the second bus are assigned powers of the next prime, 5. The following bus, powers of 7. Each bus follows: powers of 11, powers of 13, powers of 17, etc. Since each of these numbers only has 1 and the natural number powers of their prime number base as factors, there are no overlapping room numbers. All the buses' passengers fan out into rooms using unique room-assignment schemes based on unique prime numbers. In this way, the night manager can accommodate every passenger on every bus. Although, there will be many rooms that go unfilled, like room 6, since 6 is not a power of any prime number. Luckily, his bosses weren't very good in math, so his job is safe. The night manager's strategies are only possible because while the Infinite Hotel is certainly a logistical nightmare, it only deals with the lowest level of infinity, mainly, the countable infinity of the natural numbers, 1, 2, 3, 4, and so on. Georg Cantor called this level of infinity aleph-zero. We use natural numbers for the room numbers as well as the seat numbers on the buses. If we were dealing with higher orders of infinity, such as that of the real numbers, these structured strategies would no longer be possible as we have no way to systematically include every number. The Real Number Infinite Hotel has negative number rooms in the basement, fractional rooms, so the guy in room 1/2 always suspects he has less room than the guy in room 1. Square root rooms, like room radical 2, and room pi, where the guests expect free dessert. What self-respecting night manager would ever want to work there even for an infinite salary? But over at Hilbert's Infinite Hotel, where there's never any vacancy and always room for more, the scenarios faced by the ever-diligent and maybe too hospitable night manager serve to remind us of just how hard it is for our relatively finite minds to grasp a concept as large as infinity. Maybe you can help tackle these problems after a good night's sleep. But honestly, we might need you to change rooms at 2 a.m.","Understanding Infinity Through Hilbert's Infinite Hotel459 460 - Introduction to Hilbert's Infinite Hotel thought experiment.461 - Strategies for accommodating additional guests in a fully booked infinite hotel:462  - Moving guests to higher-numbered rooms to free up space.463  - Utilizing properties of prime numbers to find unique room assignments for infinitely many new guests.464 - Challenges posed by different levels of infinity:465  - Only countable infinities (like natural numbers) allow for systematic room assignments.466  - Higher infinities (like real numbers) introduce complexities that defy structured arrangements.467 - Philosophical thoughts on our comprehension of infinity:468  - The thought experiment highlights the limits of the human mind in understanding infinite concepts.469  - Practical implications and imaginative scenarios help facilitate deeper insight into infinity.","You are a TED Story Creator, a storyteller, and an expert in crafting compelling transcripts for TED Talks. You possess a knowledge base of the world’s most inspiring TED talks. Given a title and an outline, your task is to create an engaging transcript that will captivate the audience. Adhere to the sequence of the outline and the bullet points to weave a captivating narrative."470"Brain magic. What's brain magic all about? Brain magic to me indicates that area of magic dealing with psychological and mind-reading effects. So unlike traditional magic, it uses the power of words, linguistic deception, non-verbal communication and various other techniques to create the illusion of a sixth sense.I'm going to show you all how easy it is to manipulate the human mind once you know how. I want everybody downstairs also to join in with me and everybody. I want everybody to put out your hands like this for me, first of all. OK, clap them together, once. OK, reverse your hands. Now, follow my actions exactly. Now about half the audience has their left hand up. Why is that? OK, swap them around, put your right hand up. Cross your hands over, so your right hand goes over, interlace your fingers like this, then make sure your right thumb is outside your left thumb — that's very important. Yours is the other way around, so swap it around. Excellent, OK. Extend your fingers like this for me. All right. Tap them together once. OK, now, if you did not allow me to deceive your minds, you would all be able to do this.(Laughter ends)Now you can see how easy it is for me to manipulate the human mind, once you know how.Now, I remember when I was about 15,I read a copy of Life magazine, which detailed a story about a 75-year-old blind Russian woman who could sense printed letters — there's still people trying to do it —— who could sense printed letters and even sense colors, just by touch. And she was completely blind. She could also read the serial numbers on bills when they were placed, face down, on a hard surface. Now, I was fascinated, but at the same time, skeptical. How could somebody read using their fingertips? You know, if you actually think about it, if somebody is totally blind — a guy yesterday did a demonstration in one of the rooms, where people had to close their eyes and they could just hear things. And it's just a really weird thing to try and figure out. How could somebody read using their fingertips?Now earlier on, as part of a TV show that I have coming up on MTV, I attempted to give a similar demonstration of what is now known as second sight. So, let's take a look.(Video) Man: There we go. I'm going to guide you into the car.Kathryn Thomas: Man: You're OK, keep on going.KT: How are you?Keith Barry: Kathryn, it's Keith here. I'm going to take you to a secret location, OK? Kathryn, there was no way you could see through that blindfold.KT: OK, but don't say my name like that. KB: But you're OK?KT: Yes.KB: No way to see through it? KT: No.KB: I'll take it off. Do you want to take the rest off? Take it off, you're OK. We'll stop for a second.KT: I'm so afraid of what I'm going to see.KB: You're fine, take it off. You're OK. You're safe. Have you ever heard of second sight?KT: No.KB: Second sight is whereby a mind-control expert can see through somebody else's eyes. And I'm going to try that right now.KT: God.KB: Are you ready? Where is it? There's no way —KT: (Beep)KT: Oh, my God!KB: Don't say anything, I'm trying to see through your eyes. I can't see.KT: There's a wall, there's a wall.KB: Look at the road, look at the road.KT: OK, OK, OK. Oh, my God!KB: Now, anything coming at all? KT: No.KB: Sure there's not?KT: No, no, I'm just still looking at the road. I'm looking at the road, all the time. I'm not taking my eyes off the road.(Beep)(Beep)(Beep)KT: Oh, my God!KB: Where are we? Where are we? We're going uphill, are we going uphill?KT: Look at the road — (Beep) Still got that goddamn blindfold on.KB: What?KT: How are you doing this?KB: Just don't break my concentration.We're OK, though? KT: Yes. That's so weird. We're nearly there. Oh, my God!Oh, my God!KB: And I've stopped.KT: That is weird. You're like a freak-ass of nature. That was the most scary thing I've ever done in my life!KB: Thank you. By the way, two days ago, we were going to film this down there, at the race course, and we got a guy into a car, and we got a camera man in the back, but halfway through the drive, he told me he had, I think it was a nine-millimeter, stuck to his leg. So, I stopped pretty quick, and that was it.So, do you believe it's possible to see through somebody else's eyes? That's the question. Now, most people here would automatically say no. OK, but I want you to realize some facts. I couldn't see through the blindfold. The car was not gimmicked or tricked in any way. The girl, I'd never met before, all right. So, I want you to just think about it for a moment. A lot of people try to come up with a logical solution to what just happened, all right. But because your brains are not trained in the art of deception, the solutions you come up with will, 99 percent of the time, be way off the mark.This is because magic is all about directing attention. If, for instance, I didn't want you to look at my right hand, then I don't look at it. But if I wanted you to look at my right hand, then I look at it, too. You see, it's very simple, once you know how, but very complicated in other ways.I'm going to give you some demonstrations right now. I need two people to help me out real quick. Can you come up? And let's see, down at the end, here, can you also come up, real quick? Do you mind? Yes, at the end. OK, give them a round of applause as they come up. You might want to use the stairs, there.It's very important for everybody here to realize I haven't set anything up with you. You don't know what will happen, right? Would you mind just standing over here for a moment?Your name is? Nicole: Nicole.KB: Nicole, and?(Telephone ringing)KB: Actually, here's the thing, answer it, answer it, answer it.Is it a girl? Man: They've already gone.KB: OK, swap over positions. Can you stand over here? This will make it easier. Pity, I would have told them it was the ace of spades. OK, a little bit closer.OK, a little bit closer, come over — they look really nervous up here. Do you believe in witchcraft?Nicole: No.KB: Voodoo? Nicole: No.KB: Things that go bump in the night? Nicole: No.KB: Besides, who's next, no, OK. I want you to just stand exactly like this for me, pull up your sleeves, if you don't mind. OK, now, I want you to be aware of all the different sensations around you, because we'll try a voodoo experiment. I want you to be aware of the sensations, but don't say anything until I ask you, and don't open your eyes until I ask you. From this point onwards, close your eyes, do not say anything, do not open them, be aware of the sensations.Yes or no, did you feel anything?Nicole: Yes.KB: You did feel that? What did you feel?Nicole: A touch on my back.KB: How many times did you feel it?Nicole: Twice.KB: Twice. OK, extend your left arm out in front of you. Extend your left arm, OK. OK, keep it there. Be aware of the sensations, don't say anything, don't open your eyes, OK.Did you feel anything, there?Nicole: Yes. KB: What did you feel?Nicole: Three —KB: Like a tickling sensation? Nicole: Yes.KB: Can you show us where? OK, excellent. Open your eyes. I never touched you. I just touched his back, and I just touched his arm. A voodoo experiment.Yeah, I walk around nightclubs all night like this.You just take a seat over here for a second. I'm going to use you again, in a moment. Can you take a seat right over here, if you don't mind.Sit right here. Man: OK.KB: OK, take a seat. Excellent, OK. Now, what I want you to do is look directly at me, OK, just take a deep breath in through your nose, letting it out through your mouth, and relax. Allow your eyes to close, on five, four, three, two, one. Close your eyes right now. OK, now, I'm not hypnotizing you, I'm merely placing you in a heightened state of synchronicity, so our minds are along the same lines. And as you sink and drift and float into this relaxed state of mind, I'm going to take your left hand, and just place it up here.I want you to hold it there just for a moment, and I only want you to allow your hand to sink and drift and float back to the tabletop at the same rate and speed as you drift and float into this relaxed state of awareness, and allow it to go all the way down to the tabletop. That's it, all the way down, all the way down. and further, and further. Excellent. I want you to allow your hand to stick firmly to the tabletop. OK, now, allow it to stay there.OK, now, in a moment, you'll feel a certain pressure, OK, and I want you to be aware of the pressure. Just be aware of the pressure. And I only want you to allow your hand to float slowly back up from the tabletop as you feel the pressure release, but only when you feel the pressure release. Do you understand? Just answer yes or no.Man: Yes.KB: Hold it right there. And only when you feel the pressure go back, allow your hand to drift back to the tabletop, but only when you feel the pressure.OK, that was wonderfully done. Let's try it again.Excellent. Now that you've got the idea, let's try something even more interesting. Allow it to stick firmly to the tabletop, keep your eyes closed. Can you stand up? Just stand, stage forward. I want you to point directly at his forehead. OK. Imagine a connection between you and him. Only when you want the pressure to be released, make an upward gesture, like this, but only when you want it to be released. You can wait as long as you want, but only when you want the pressure released. OK, let's try it again. OK, now, imagine the connection, OK. Point directly at his forehead. Only when you want the pressure released, we'll try it again.OK, it worked that time, excellent. And hold it there, both of you. Only when you want the pressure to go back, make a downward gesture. You can wait as long as you want. You did it pretty quickly, but it went down, OK.Now, I want you to be aware that in a moment, when I snap my fingers, your eyes will open, again. It's OK to remember to forget, or forget to remember what happened. Most people ask you, ""What the hell just happened up here?"" But it's OK that even though you're not hypnotized, you will forget everything that happened. On five, four, three, two, one — open your eyes, wide awake. Give them a round of applause, as they go back to their seats.OK, you can go back.I once saw a film called ""The Gods Are Crazy."" Has anybody here seen that film? Yeah. Remember when they threw the Coke out of the airplane, and it landed on the ground, and it didn't break? Now, see, that's because Coke bottles are solid. It's nearly impossible to break a Coke bottle. Do you want to try it? Good job. She's not taking any chances.You see, psychokinesis is the paranormal influence of the mind on physical events and processes. For some magicians or mentalists, sometimes the spoon will bend or melt, sometimes it will not. Sometimes the object will slide across the table, sometimes it will not. It depends on how much energy you have that day, so on and so forth.We're going to try an experiment in psychokinesis, right now. Come right over here, next to me. Excellent. Now, have a look at the Coke bottle. Make sure it is solid, there's only one hole, and it's a normal Coke bottle. And you can whack it against the table, if you want; be careful. Even though it's solid, I'm standing away. I want you to pinch right here with two fingers and your thumb. Excellent. Now, I've got a shard of glass here, OK. I want you to examine the shard of glass. Careful, it's sharp. Just hold on to it for a moment. Now, hold it out here.I want you to imagine, right now, a broken relationship from many years ago. I want you to imagine all the negative energy from that broken relationship, from that guy, being imparted into the broken piece of glass, which will represent him, OK. But I want you to take this very seriously. Stare at the glass, ignore everybody right here. In a moment, you'll feel a certain sensation, OK, and when you feel that sensation, I want you to drop the piece of glass into the bottle. Think of that guy, that ba — that guy.I'm trying to be good here. OK, and when you feel the sensation — it might take a while — drop it into the glass. OK, drop it in.Now, imagine all that negative energy in there. Imagine his name and imagine him inside the glass. And I want you to release that negative energy by shaking it from side to side.(Burst)That was a lot of negative energy, built up in there.I also want you to look at me and think of his name. OK, think of how many letters in the title of his name. There's five letters in the title. You didn't react to that, so it's four letters. Think of one of the letters in the title. There's a K in his name, there is a K. I knew that because my name starts with a K also, but his name doesn't start with a K, it starts with an M. Tell Mike I said hello, the next time you see him.Was that his name? Nicole: Mm-hmm.KB: OK, give her a round of applause.Thank you.(Applause ends)I've got one more thing to share with you right now. Actually, Chris, I was going to pick you for this, but instead of picking you, can you hop up here and pick a victim for this next experiment? And it should be a male victim, that's the only thing.Chris Anderson: Oh, OK.KB: I was going to use you, but I decided I might want to come back another year.CA: Well, to reward him for saying ""eureka,"" and for selecting Michael Mercil to come and talk to us — Steve Jurvetson.KB: OK, Steve, come on up here.CA: You knew!KB: OK, Steve, I want you to take a seat, right behind here. Excellent. Now, Steve — oh, you can check underneath. Go ahead, I've no fancy assistants underneath there. They insist that because I was a magician, put a nice, black tablecloth on. There you are, OK.I've got four wooden plinths here, Steve. One, two, three and four. Now, they're all the exact same except this one obviously has a stainless steel spike sticking out of it. I want you to examine it, and make sure it's solid. Happy?Steve Jurvetson: Mmm, yes.KB: OK. Now, Steve, I'm going to stand in front of the table, When I stand in front of the table, I want you to put the cups on the plinths, in any order you want, and then mix them all up, so nobody has any idea where the spike is, all right?SJ: No one in the audience?KB: Yes, and just to help you out, I'll block them from view, so nobody can see what you're doing. I'll also look away. So, go ahead and mix them up, now. OK, and tell me when you're done.KB: You done? SJ: Almost.KB: Almost, oh. OK, you're making sure that's well hidden. Oh, we've got one here, we've got one here.So, all right, we'll leave them like that.I'm going to have the last laugh, though.Now, Steve, you know where the spike is, but nobody else, does? Correct? But I don't want you to know either, so swivel around on your chair. They'll keep an eye on me to make sure I don't do anything funny. No, stay around, OK. Now, Steve, look back. Now you don't know where the spike is, and I don't know where it is either. Now, is there any way to see through this blindfold?SJ: Put this on?KB: No, just, is there any way to see through it? No?SJ: No, I can't see through it. KB: Excellent. Now, I'm going to put on the blindfold. Don't stack them up, OK. Give them an extra mix up. Don't move the cups, I don't want anybody to see where the spike is, but give the plinths an extra mix up, and then line them up. I'll put the blindfold on. Give them an extra mix up. No messing around this time. OK, go ahead, mix them up. My hand is at risk here.Tell me when you're done. SJ: Done.KB: OK, where are you? Put out your hand. Your right hand. Tell me when I'm over a cup.SJ: You're over a cup. KB: I'm over a cup, right now?SJ: Mm-hmm.KB: Now, Steve, do you think it's here? Yes or no?SJ: Oh!KB: I told you I'd have the last laugh.SJ: I don't think it's there. KB: No? Good decision.(Applause ends)Now, if I go this way, is there another cup over here?SJ: Can we do the left hand?KB: Oh, no, no, no. He asked me could he do the left hand. Absolutely not.KB: If I go this way, is there another cup?SJ: Yes. KB: Tell me when to stop.SJ: OK. KB: There?SJ: Yes, there's one.KB: OK. Do you think it's here, yes or no? This is your decision, not mine.SJ: I'm going to say no. KB: Good decision.OK, give me both hands. Now, put them on both cups. Do you think the spike is under your left or your right hand?SJ: Neither.KB: Neither, oh, OK. But if you were to guess.SJ: Under my right hand. KB: Under your right hand? Now, remember, you made all the decisions all along. Psychologists, figure this out.(SJ gasps)Have a look.SJ: Oh!KB: Thank you.(Applause ends) If anybody wants to see some sleight of hand later on, I'll be outside. Thank you.Thank you.Thank you.","The Magic of the Mind471 472 - Introduction to brain magic as a mix of psychology, linguistic deception, and non-verbal communication.473 - Demonstration of the ease of manipulating human perception through audience participation.474 - Exploration of second sight and mind reading through real-life recount and a televised experiment.475 - Techniques of distraction and focus manipulation explained alongside live demonstrations.476 - Investigation of psychokinesis and emotional energy through interactive experiments.477 - A practical display of danger and decision-making using a blindfold and spike-covered plinths.478 - Conclusion underscoring the mystery and capability of mentalists, inviting further exploration outside the talk.","You are a TED Story Creator, a storyteller, and an expert in crafting compelling transcripts for TED Talks. You possess a knowledge base of the world’s most inspiring TED talks. Given a title and an outline, your task is to create an engaging transcript that will captivate the audience. Adhere to the sequence of the outline and the bullet points to weave a captivating narrative."479"You're looking at a woman who was publicly silent for a decade. Obviously, that's changed, but only recently.It was several months ago that I gave my very first major public talk, at the Forbes ""30 Under 30 Summit"" — 1,500 brilliant people, all under the age of 30. That meant that in 1998, the oldest among the group were only 14, and the youngest, just four. I joked with them that some might only have heard of me from rap songs. Yes, I'm in rap songs.Almost 40 rap songs.But the night of my speech, a surprising thing happened. At the age of 41, I was hit on by a 27-year-old guy.I know, right? He was charming, and I was flattered, and I declined. You know what his unsuccessful pickup line was? He could make me feel 22 again.I realized, later that night, I'm probably the only person over 40 who does not want to be 22 again.At the age of 22, I fell in love with my boss. And at the age of 24, I learned the devastating consequences.Can I see a show of hands of anyone here who didn't make a mistake or do something they regretted at 22? Yep. That's what I thought. So like me, at 22, a few of you may have also taken wrong turns and fallen in love with the wrong person, maybe even your boss. Unlike me, though, your boss probably wasn't the president of the United States of America.Of course, life is full of surprises.Not a day goes by that I'm not reminded of my mistake, and I regret that mistake deeply.In 1998, after having been swept up into an improbable romance, I was then swept up into the eye of a political, legal and media maelstrom like we had never seen before. Remember, just a few years earlier, news was consumed from just three places: reading a newspaper or magazine, listening to the radio or watching television. That was it. But that wasn't my fate. Instead, this scandal was brought to you by the digital revolution. That meant we could access all the information we wanted, when we wanted it, anytime, anywhere. And when the story broke in January 1998, it broke online. It was the first time the traditional news was usurped by the internet for a major news story — a click that reverberated around the world.What that meant for me personally was that overnight, I went from being a completely private figure to a publicly humiliated one, worldwide. I was patient zero of losing a personal reputation on a global scale almost instantaneously.This rush to judgment, enabled by technology, led to mobs of virtual stone-throwers. Granted, it was before social media, but people could still comment online, e-mail stories, and, of course, e-mail cruel jokes. News sources plastered photos of me all over to sell newspapers, banner ads online, and to keep people tuned to the TV. Do you recall a particular image of me, say, wearing a beret?Now, I admit I made mistakes — especially wearing that beret.But the attention and judgment that I received — not the story, but that I personally received — was unprecedented. I was branded as a tramp, tart, slut, whore, bimbo, and, of course, ""that woman."" I was seen by many, but actually known by few. And I get it: it was easy to forget that that woman was dimensional, had a soul and was once unbroken.When this happened to me 17 years ago, there was no name for it. Now we call it ""cyberbullying"" and ""online harassment."" Today, I want to share some of my experience with you, talk about how that experience has helped shape my cultural observations, and how I hope my past experience can lead to a change that results in less suffering for others.In 1998, I lost my reputation and my dignity. I lost almost everything. And I almost lost my life.Let me paint a picture for you. It is September of 1998. I'm sitting in a windowless office room inside the Office of the Independent Counsel, underneath humming fluorescent lights. I'm listening to the sound of my voice, my voice on surreptitiously taped phone calls that a supposed friend had made the year before. I'm here because I've been legally required to personally authenticate all 20 hours of taped conversation. For the past eight months, the mysterious content of these tapes has hung like the sword of Damocles over my head. I mean, who can remember what they said a year ago? Scared and mortified, I listen, listen as I prattle on about the flotsam and jetsam of the day; listen as I confess my love for the president, and, of course, my heartbreak; listen to my sometimes catty, sometimes churlish, sometimes silly self being cruel, unforgiving, uncouth; listen, deeply, deeply ashamed, to the worst version of myself, a self I don't even recognize.A few days later, the Starr Report is released to Congress, and all of those tapes and transcripts, those stolen words, form a part of it. That people can read the transcripts is horrific enough. But a few weeks later, the audiotapes are aired on TV, and significant portions made available online. The public humiliation was excruciating. Life was almost unbearable.This was not something that happened with regularity back then in 1998, and by ""this,"" I mean the stealing of people's private words, actions, conversations or photos, and then making them public — public without consent, public without context and public without compassion.Fast-forward 12 years, to 2010, and now social media has been born. The landscape has sadly become much more populated with instances like mine, whether or not someone actually made a mistake, and now, it's for both public and private people. The consequences for some have become dire, very dire.I was on the phone with my mom in September of 2010, and we were talking about the news of a young college freshman from Rutgers University, named Tyler Clementi. Sweet, sensitive, creative Tyler was secretly webcammed by his roommate while being intimate with another man. When the online world learned of this incident, the ridicule and cyberbullying ignited. A few days later, Tyler jumped from the George Washington Bridge to his death. He was 18.My mom was beside herself about what happened to Tyler and his family, and she was gutted with pain in a way that I just couldn't quite understand. And then eventually, I realized she was reliving 1998, reliving a time when she sat by my bed every night, reliving — (Chokes up)sorry — reliving a time when she made me shower with the bathroom door open, and reliving a time when both of my parents feared that I would be humiliated to death, literally.Today, too many parents haven't had the chance to step in and rescue their loved ones. Too many have learned of their child's suffering and humiliation after it was too late. Tyler's tragic, senseless death was a turning point for me. It served to recontextualize my experiences, and I then began to look at the world of humiliation and bullying around me and see something different.In 1998, we had no way of knowing where this brave new technology called the internet would take us. Since then, it has connected people in unimaginable ways — joining lost siblings, saving lives, launching revolutions ... But the darkness, cyberbullying, and slut-shaming that I experienced had mushroomed. Every day online, people — especially young people, who are not developmentally equipped to handle this — are so abused and humiliated that they can't imagine living to the next day. And some, tragically, don't. And there's nothing virtual about that.Childline, a UK nonprofit that's focused on helping young people on various issues, released a staggering statistic late last year: from 2012 to 2013, there was an 87 percent increase in calls and e-mails related to cyberbullying. A meta-analysis done out of the Netherlands showed that for the first time, cyberbullying was leading to suicidal ideations more significantly than offline bullying. And you know, what shocked me — although it shouldn't have — was other research last year that determined humiliation was a more intensely felt emotion than either happiness or even anger.Cruelty to others is nothing new. But online, technologically enhanced shaming is amplified, uncontained and permanently accessible. The echo of embarrassment used to extend only as far as your family, village, school or community. But now, it's the online community too. Millions of people, often anonymously, can stab you with their words, and that's a lot of pain. And there are no perimeters around how many people can publicly observe you and put you in a public stockade. There is a very personal price to public humiliation, and the growth of the internet has jacked up that price.For nearly two decades now, we have slowly been sowing the seeds of shame and public humiliation in our cultural soil, both on- and offline. Gossip websites, paparazzi, reality programming, politics, news outlets and sometimes hackers all traffic in shame. It's led to desensitization and a permissive environment online, which lends itself to trolling, invasion of privacy and cyberbullying. This shift has created what Professor Nicolaus Mills calls ""a culture of humiliation."" Consider a few prominent examples just from the past six months alone. Snapchat, the service which is used mainly by younger generations and claims that its messages only have the life span of a few seconds. You can imagine the range of content that that gets. A third-party app which Snapchatters use to preserve the life span of the messages was hacked, and 100,000 personal conversations, photos and videos were leaked online, to now have a life span of forever. Jennifer Lawrence and several other actors had their iCloud accounts hacked, and private, intimate, nude photos were plastered across the internet without their permission. One gossip website had over five million hits for this one story. And what about the Sony Pictures cyberhacking? The documents which received the most attention were private e-mails that had maximum public embarrassment value.But in this culture of humiliation, there is another kind of price tag attached to public shaming. The price does not measure the cost to the victim, which Tyler and too many others — notably, women, minorities and members of the LGBTQ community — have paid, but the price measures the profit of those who prey on them. This invasion of others is a raw material, efficiently and ruthlessly mined, packaged and sold at a profit. A marketplace has emerged where public humiliation is a commodity, and shame is an industry. How is the money made? Clicks. The more shame, the more clicks. The more clicks, the more advertising dollars. We're in a dangerous cycle. The more we click on this kind of gossip, the more numb we get to the human lives behind it. And the more numb we get, the more we click. All the while, someone is making money off of the back of someone else's suffering. With every click, we make a choice. The more we saturate our culture with public shaming, the more accepted it is, the more we will see behavior like cyberbullying, trolling, some forms of hacking and online harassment. Why? Because they all have humiliation at their cores. This behavior is a symptom of the culture we've created. Just think about it.Changing behavior begins with evolving beliefs. We've seen that to be true with racism, homophobia and plenty of other biases, today and in the past. As we've changed beliefs about same-sex marriage, more people have been offered equal freedoms. When we began valuing sustainability, more people began to recycle. So as far as our culture of humiliation goes, what we need is a cultural revolution. Public shaming as a blood sport has to stop, and it's time for an intervention on the internet and in our culture.The shift begins with something simple, but it's not easy. We need to return to a long-held value of compassion, compassion and empathy. Online, we've got a compassion deficit, an empathy crisis.Researcher Brené Brown said, and I quote, ""Shame can't survive empathy."" Shame cannot survive empathy. I've seen some very dark days in my life. It was the compassion and empathy from my family, friends, professionals and sometimes even strangers that saved me. Even empathy from one person can make a difference. The theory of minority influence, proposed by social psychologist Serge Moscovici, says that even in small numbers, when there's consistency over time, change can happen. In the online world, we can foster minority influence by becoming upstanders. To become an upstander means instead of bystander apathy, we can post a positive comment for someone or report a bullying situation. Trust me, compassionate comments help abate the negativity. We can also counteract the culture by supporting organizations that deal with these kinds of issues, like the Tyler Clementi Foundation in the US; in the UK, there's Anti-Bullying Pro; and in Australia, there's PROJECT ROCKIT.We talk a lot about our right to freedom of expression. But we need to talk more about our responsibility to freedom of expression. We all want to be heard, but let's acknowledge the difference between speaking up with intention and speaking up for attention. The internet is the superhighway for the id. But online, showing empathy to others benefits us all and helps create a safer and better world. We need to communicate online with compassion, consume news with compassion and click with compassion. Just imagine walking a mile in someone else's headline.I'd like to end on a personal note. In the past nine months, the question I've been asked the most is ""Why?"" Why now? Why was I sticking my head above the parapet? You can read between the lines in those questions, and the answer has nothing to do with politics. The top-note answer was and is ""Because it's time."" Time to stop tiptoeing around my past, time to stop living a life of opprobrium and time to take back my narrative.It's also not just about saving myself. Anyone who is suffering from shame and public humiliation needs to know one thing: You can survive it. I know it's hard. It may not be painless, quick or easy, but you can insist on a different ending to your story. Have compassion for yourself. We all deserve compassion and to live both online and off in a more compassionate world.Thank you for listening.(Applause and cheers)","Title: Navigating the Cultural Impact of Public Shaming and Cyberbullying480 481 - Personal Journey of Public Humiliation:482  * The speaker recounts her experience of intense public scrutiny and humiliation sparked by a personal mistake.483  484 - Evolution of Media and Its Consequences:485  * Transition from traditional media to the digital revolution exacerbated public shaming.486  * Discusses the permanent and global scale of online humiliation due to technological advancement.487  488 - Emotional and Psychological Impact:489  * Describes the severe personal repercussions, including depression and contemplation of suicide.490  491 - Broader Societal Issue and Its Implications:492  * Describes how cyberbullying and public shaming have become rampant, affecting many, especially vulnerable groups.493  * Links an increase in cyberbullying to an escalation in suicide rates and decreased mental health.494  495 - Call to Action for Cultural Change:496  * Emphasizes the need for a cultural shift towards compassion and empathy.497  * Suggests practical ways to combat cyberbullying and promote positive interactions online.498  499 - Personal Closure and Universal Message:500  * Motivates others to overcome public shaming by reclaiming their narrative and practicing self-compassion.501  * Encourages society to embrace responsibility in freedom of expression to foster a more compassionate online environment.","You are a TED Story Creator, a storyteller, and an expert in crafting compelling transcripts for TED Talks. You possess a knowledge base of the world’s most inspiring TED talks. Given a title and an outline, your task is to create an engaging transcript that will captivate the audience. Adhere to the sequence of the outline and the bullet points to weave a captivating narrative."502"Taking that internship in a remote mountain lab might not have been the best idea. Pulling that lever with the skull symbol just to see what it did probably wasn't so smart, either, but now is not the time for regrets because you need to get away from these mutant zombies fast. With you are the janitor, the lab assistant, and the old professor. You've gotten a headstart, but there's only one way to safety: across an old rope bridge spanning a massive gorge. You can dash across in a minute, while the lab assistant takes two minutes. The janitor is a bit slower and needs five minutes, and the professor takes a whole ten minutes, holding onto the ropes every step of the way. By the professor's calculations, the zombies will catch up to you in just over 17 minutes, so you only have that much time to get everyone across and cut the ropes. Unfortunately, the bridge can only hold two people at a time. To make matters worse, it's so dark out that you can barely see, and the old lantern you grabbed on your way only illuminates a tiny area. Can you figure out a way to have everyone escape in time? Remember: no more than two people can cross the bridge together, anyone crossing must either hold the lantern or stay right next to it, and any of you can safely wait in the dark on either side of the gorge. Most importantly, everyone must be safely across before the zombies arrive. Otherwise, the first zombie could step on the bridge while people are still on it. Finally, there are no tricks to use here. You can't swing across, use the bridge as a raft, or befriend the zombies. Pause the video now if you want to figure it out for yourself! Answer in: 3 Answer in: 2 Answer in: 1 At first it might seem like no matter what you do, you're just a minute or two short of time, but there is a way. The key is to minimize the time wasted by the two slowest people by having them cross together. And because you'll need to make a couple of return trips with the lantern, you'll want to have the fastest people available to do so. So, you and the lab assistant quickly run across with the lantern, though you have to slow down a bit to match her pace. After two minutes, both of you are across, and you, as the quickest, run back with the lantern. Only three minutes have passed. So far, so good. Now comes the hard part. The professor and the janitor take the lantern and cross together. This takes them ten minutes since the janitor has to slow down for the old professor who keeps muttering that he probably shouldn't have given the zombies night vision. By the time they're across, there are only four minutes left, and you're still stuck on the wrong side of the bridge. But remember, the lab assistant has been waiting on the other side, and she's the second fastest of the group. So she grabs the lantern from the professor and runs back across to you. Now with only two minutes left, the two of you make the final crossing. As you step on the far side of the gorge, you cut the ropes and collapse the bridge behind you, just in the nick of time. Maybe next summer, you'll just stick to the library.","Title: Strategic Problem-Solving under Pressure503 504 - Initial Scenario:505  - Team caught in a dangerous situation needing to escape mutant zombies.506  - Limited time and resources dictate quick and efficient decision-making.507 508 - Solution Strategy:509  - Optimize bridge crossing by grouping slowest individuals together.510  - Utilize fastest team members for retrieving and transferring necessary tools.511 512 - Execution:513  - Detailed step-by-step crossing plan to ensure all members safely escape within the time limit.514 515 - Conclusion:516  - Successful escape using strategic planning and teamwork.517  - Reflecting on less risky future endeavors.","You are a TED Story Creator, a storyteller, and an expert in crafting compelling transcripts for TED Talks. You possess a knowledge base of the world’s most inspiring TED talks. Given a title and an outline, your task is to create an engaging transcript that will captivate the audience. Adhere to the sequence of the outline and the bullet points to weave a captivating narrative."518"Hello, Doha. Hello! Salaam alaikum.I love coming to Doha. It's such an international place. It feels like the United Nations here. You land at the airport, and you're welcomed by an Indian lady who takes you to Al Maha Services, where you meet a Filipino lady who hands you off to a South African lady who then takes you to a Korean who takes you to a Pakistani guy with the luggage who takes you to the car with a Sri Lankan. You go to the hotel and you check in. There's a Lebanese. Yeah? And then a Swedish guy showed me my room.I said, ""Where are the Qataris?""They said, ""No, no, it's too hot. They come out later. They're smart."" ""They know.""And of course, it's growing so fast, sometimes there's growing pains. You know, like sometimes you run into people that you think know the city well, but they don't know it that well. My Indian cab driver showed up at the W, and I asked him to take me to the Sheraton, and he said, ""No problem, sir."" And then we sat there for two minutes.I said, ""What's wrong?"" He said, ""One problem, sir.""I said, ""What?"" He goes, ""Where is it?""I go, ""You're the driver, you should know.""He goes, ""No, I just arrived, sir.""I go, ""You just arrived at the W?"" ""No, I just arrived in Doha, sir.""""I was on my way home from the airport, I got a job. I'm working already.""He goes, ""Sir, why don't you drive?""""I don't know where we're going.""""Neither do I. It will be an adventure, sir.""The Middle East has been an adventure the past couple of years. It is going crazy with the Arab Spring and revolution and all this. Are there any Lebanese here tonight, by applause?(Cheering)Lebanese, yeah.The Middle East is going crazy. You know the Middle East is going crazy when Lebanon is the most peaceful place in the region. Who would have thought?Oh my gosh.No, there's serious issues in the region. Some people don't want to talk about them. I'm here to talk about them tonight. Ladies and gentlemen of the Middle East, here's a serious issue. When we see each other, when we say hello, how many kisses are we going to do?Every country is different and it's confusing, okay? In Lebanon, they do three. In Egypt, they do two. I was in Lebanon, I got used to three. I went to Egypt. I went to say hello to this one Egyptian guy, I went, one, two. I went for three — He wasn't into it.I told him, I said, ""No, no, I was just in Lebanon."" He goes, ""I don't care where you were. You just stay where you are, please."" I went to Saudi Arabia. In Saudi Arabia, they go one, two, and then they stay on the same side: three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18 —Next time you see a Saudi, look closely. They're just a little bit tilted.""Abdul, are you okay?""""I was saying hello for half an hour. I'll be all right.""Qataris, you guys do the nose to nose. Why is that? Are you too tired to go all the way around?""Habibi, it's so hot. Just come here for a second. Say hello. Hello, Habibi. Just don't move. Just stay there, please. I need to rest.""Iranians, sometimes we do two, sometimes we do three. A friend of mine explained to me, before the '79 revolution, it was two.After the revolution, three. So with Iranians, you can tell whose side the person is on based on the number of kisses they give you. Yeah, if you go one, two, three — ""I can't believe you support this regime!""""With your three kisses.""But no, guys, really, it is exciting to be here, and like I said, you guys are doing a lot culturally, you know, and it's amazing, and it helps change the image of the Middle East in the West. A lot of Americans don't know a lot about us, about the Middle East. I'm Iranian and American. I'm there. I know, I've traveled here. There's so much, we laugh, right? People don't know we laugh. When I did the Axis of Evil comedy tour, it came out on Comedy Central, I went online to see what people were saying. I ended up on a conservative website. One guy wrote another guy. He said, ""I never knew these people laughed."" Think about it. You never see us laughing in American film or television, right? Maybe like an evil laugh: ""Wuhahaha.""""I will kill you in the name of Allah, wuhahahahaha.""But never like, ""Ha ha ha ha la.""We like to laugh. We like to celebrate life. And I wish more Americans would travel here. I always encourage my friends: ""Travel, see the Middle East, there's so much to see, so many good people."" And it's vice versa, and it helps stop problems of misunderstanding and stereotypes from happening.For example, I don't know if you heard about this, a little while ago in the US, there was a Muslim family walking down the aisle of an airplane, talking about the safest place to sit on the plane. Some passengers overheard them, somehow misconstrued that as terrorist talk, got them kicked off the plane. It was a family, a mother, father, child, talking about the seating. As a Middle Eastern male, I know there's certain things I'm not supposed to say on an airplane in the US, right? I'm not supposed to be walking down the aisle, and be like, ""Hi, Jack."" That's not cool.Even if I'm there with my friend named Jack, I say, ""Greetings, Jack. Salutations, Jack."" Never ""Hi, Jack.""But now, apparently we can't even talk about the safest place to sit on an airplane.So my advice to all my Middle Eastern friends and Muslim friends and anyone who looks Middle Eastern or Muslim, so to, you know, Indians, and Latinos, everyone, if you're brown —Here's my advice to my brown friends.The next time you're on an airplane in the US, just speak your mother tongue. That way no one knows what you're saying. Life goes on.Granted, some mother tongues might sound a little threatening to the average American. If you're walking down the aisle speaking Arabic, you might freak them out —(Imitating Arabic)They might say, ""What's he talking about?"" The key, to my Arab brothers and sisters, is to throw in random good words to put people at ease as you're walking down the aisle. Just as you're walking down —(Imitating Arabic)Strawberry!(Imitating Arabic)Rainbow!(Imitating Arabic)Tutti Frutti!""I think he's going to hijack the plane with some ice cream.""Thank you very much. Have a good night. Thank you, TED.","Title: Cultural Encounters and Comedy in the Middle East519 520 - Doha's Diversity and Rapid Growth521  - Illustrates the diverse nationalities in Doha through an airport-to-hotel experience.522  - Shares an anecdote about a new cab driver's confusion.523  524 - Humor in Cultural Practices525  - Discusses variations in greeting customs across Middle Eastern countries.526  - Highlights misunderstandings that can arise from these cultural differences.527  528 - The Impact of Comedy on Western Perceptions of the Middle East529  - Talks about changing Western perspectives through humor.530  - Shares personal experiences of performing comedy to break stereotypes.531  532 - Advice on Navigating Air Travel as a Middle Easterner in the U.S.533  - Discusses the challenges faced due to racial profiling.534  - Recommends speaking in native languages to avoid misinterpretations.","You are a TED Story Creator, a storyteller, and an expert in crafting compelling transcripts for TED Talks. You possess a knowledge base of the world’s most inspiring TED talks. Given a title and an outline, your task is to create an engaging transcript that will captivate the audience. Adhere to the sequence of the outline and the bullet points to weave a captivating narrative."535"When I was little, I thought my country was the best on the planet. And I grew up singing a song called ""Nothing To Envy."" And I was very proud. In school, we spent a lot of time studying the history of Kim Il-Sung, but we never learned much about the outside world, except that America, South Korea, Japan are the enemies. Although I often wondered about the outside world, I thought I would spend my entire life in North Korea, until everything suddenly changed.When I was seven years old, I saw my first public execution. But I thought my life in North Korea was normal. My family was not poor, and myself, I had never experienced hunger.But one day, in 1995, my mom brought home a letter from a coworker's sister. It read, ""When you read this, our five family members will not exist in this world, because we haven't eaten for the past three weeks. We are lying on the floor together, and our bodies are so weak, we are waiting to die.""I was so shocked. This was the first time I heard that people in my country were suffering. Soon after, when I was walking past a train station, I saw something terrible that to this day I can't erase from my memory. A lifeless woman was lying on the ground, while an emaciated child in her arms just stared helplessly at his mother's face. But nobody helped them, because they were so focused on taking care of themselves and their families.A huge famine hit North Korea in the mid-1990s. Ultimately, more than a million North Koreans died during the famine, and many only survived by eating grass, bugs and tree bark. Power outages also became more and more frequent, so everything around me was completely dark at night, except for the sea of lights in China, just across the river from my home. I always wondered why they had lights, but we didn't. This is a satellite picture showing North Korea at night, compared to neighbors.This is the Amnok River, which serves as a part of the border between North Korea and China. As you can see, the river can be very narrow at certain points, allowing North Koreans to secretly cross. But many die. Sometimes, I saw dead bodies floating down the river. I can't reveal many details about how I left North Korea, but I only can say that during the ugly years of the famine, I was sent to China to live with distant relatives. But I only thought that I would be separated from my family for a short time. I could have never imagined that it would take 14 years to live together.In China, it was hard living as a young girl without my family. I had no idea what life was going to be like as a North Korean refugee. But I soon learned it's not only extremely difficult, it's also very dangerous, since North Korean refugees are considered in China as illegal migrants. So I was living in constant fear that my identity could be revealed, and I would be repatriated to a horrible fate, back in North Korea.One day, my worst nightmare came true, when I was caught by the Chinese police, and brought to the police station for interrogation. Someone had accused me of being North Korean, so they tested my Chinese language abilities, and asked me tons of questions. I was so scared. I thought my heart was going to explode. If anything seemed unnatural, I could be imprisoned and repatriated. I thought my life was over. But I managed to control all the emotions inside me, and answer the questions. After they finished questioning me, one official said to another, ""This was a false report. She's not North Korean."" And they let me go. It was a miracle.Some North Koreans in China seek asylum in foreign embassies. But many can be caught by the Chinese police, and repatriated. These girls were so lucky. Even though they were caught, they were eventually released, after heavy international pressure. These North Koreans were not so lucky. Every year, countless North Koreans are caught in China and repatriated to North Korea, where they can be tortured, imprisoned, or publicly executed.Even though I was really fortunate to get out, many other North Koreans have not been so lucky. It's tragic that North Koreans have to hide their identities and struggle so hard just to survive. Even after learning a new language and getting a job, their whole world can be turned upside down in an instant. That's why, after 10 years of hiding my identity, I decided to risk going to South Korea. And I started a new life yet again.Settling down in South Korea was a lot more challenging than I had expected. English was so important in South Korea, so I had to start learning my third language. Also, I realized there was a wide gap between North and South. We are all Korean, but inside, we have become very different, due to 67 years of division. I even went through an identity crisis. Am I South Korean or North Korean? Where am I from? Who am I? Suddenly, there was no country I could proudly call my own.Even though adjusting to life in South Korea was not easy, I made a plan — I started studying for the university entrance exam.Just as I was starting to get used to my new life, I received a shocking phone call. The North Korean authorities intercepted some money that I sent to my family, and, as a punishment, my family was going to be forcibly removed to a desolate location in the countryside. They had to get out quickly. So I started planning how to help them escape.North Koreans have to travel incredible distances on the path to freedom. It's almost impossible to cross the border between North Korea and South Korea. So, ironically, I took a flight back to China and headed toward the North Korean border. Since my family couldn't speak Chinese, I had to guide them somehow through more than 2,000 miles in China, and then into Southeast Asia. The journey by bus took one week, and we were almost caught several times. One time, our bus was stopped and boarded by a Chinese police officer. He took everyone's I.D. cards, and he started asking them questions. Since my family couldn't understand Chinese, I thought my family was going to be arrested. As the Chinese officer approached my family, I impulsively stood up, and I told him that these are deaf and dumb people that I was chaperoning. He looked at me suspiciously, but luckily, he believed me.We made it all the way to the border of Laos. But I had to spend almost all my money to bribe the border guards in Laos. But even after we got past the border, my family was arrested and jailed for illegal border crossing. After I paid the fine and bribe, my family was released in one month. But soon after, my family was arrested and jailed again, in the capital of Laos.This was one of the lowest points in my life. I did everything to get my family to freedom, and we came so close, but my family was thrown in jail, just a short distance from the South Korean embassy. I went back and forth between the immigration office and the police station, desperately trying to get my family out. but I didn't have enough money to pay a bribe or fine anymore. I lost all hope.At that moment, I heard one man's voice ask me, ""What's wrong?"" I was so surprised that a total stranger cared enough to ask. In my broken English, and with a dictionary, I explained the situation, and without hesitating, the man went to the ATM, and he paid the rest of the money for my family, and two other North Koreans to get out of jail.I thanked him with all my heart, and I asked him, ""Why are you helping me?""""I'm not helping you,"" he said. ""I'm helping the North Korean people.""I realized that this was a symbolic moment in my life. The kind stranger symbolized new hope for me and the North Korean people, when we needed it most. And he showed me that the kindness of strangers and the support of the international community are truly the rays of hope we North Korean people need.Eventually, after our long journey, my family and I were reunited in South Korea. But getting to freedom is only half the battle. Many North Koreans are separated from their families, and when they arrive in a new country, they start with little or no money. So we can benefit from the international community for education, English language training, job training, and more. We can also act as a bridge between the people inside North Korea and the outside world. Because many of us stay in contact with family members still inside, and we send information and money that is helping to change North Korea from inside.I've been so lucky, received so much help and inspiration in my life, so I want to help give aspiring North Koreans a chance to prosper with international support. I'm confident that you will see more and more North Koreans succeeding all over the world, including the TED stage.Thank you.(Applause)","Experiences of a North Korean Defector536 537 - Early life in North Korea marked by pride and ignorance of the outside world.538 - Witnessing a public execution at seven and the harsh realities of a famine.539 - The journey of becoming a refugee in China, the risk of repatriation, and the constant fear of exposure.540 - The miraculous escape from detainment by Chinese police.541 - The difficult assimilation and identity crisis faced in South Korea.542 - The daring rescue of her family, overcoming incredible odds and relying on the kindness of a stranger.543 - The ongoing challenges for North Koreans in adapting to new lives and the role of international support.544 - The speaker's commitment to aiding North Korean defectors and fostering success on global stages.","You are a TED Story Creator, a storyteller, and an expert in crafting compelling transcripts for TED Talks. You possess a knowledge base of the world’s most inspiring TED talks. Given a title and an outline, your task is to create an engaging transcript that will captivate the audience. Adhere to the sequence of the outline and the bullet points to weave a captivating narrative."545"A few years ago, I broke into my own house. I had just driven home, it was around midnight in the dead of Montreal winter, I had been visiting my friend, Jeff, across town, and the thermometer on the front porch read minus 40 degrees — and don't bother asking if that's Celsius or Fahrenheit, minus 40 is where the two scales meet — it was very cold. And as I stood on the front porch fumbling in my pockets, I found I didn't have my keys. In fact, I could see them through the window, lying on the dining room table where I had left them. So I quickly ran around and tried all the other doors and windows, and they were locked tight. I thought about calling a locksmith — at least I had my cellphone, but at midnight, it could take a while for a locksmith to show up, and it was cold. I couldn't go back to my friend Jeff's house for the night because I had an early flight to Europe the next morning, and I needed to get my passport and my suitcase.So, desperate and freezing cold, I found a large rock and I broke through the basement window, cleared out the shards of glass, I crawled through, I found a piece of cardboard and taped it up over the opening, figuring that in the morning, on the way to the airport, I could call my contractor and ask him to fix it. This was going to be expensive, but probably no more expensive than a middle-of-the-night locksmith, so I figured, under the circumstances, I was coming out even.Now, I'm a neuroscientist by training and I know a little bit about how the brain performs under stress. It releases cortisol that raises your heart rate, it modulates adrenaline levels and it clouds your thinking. So the next morning, when I woke up on too little sleep, worrying about the hole in the window, and a mental note that I had to call my contractor, and the freezing temperatures, and the meetings I had upcoming in Europe, and, you know, with all the cortisol in my brain, my thinking was cloudy, but I didn't know it was cloudy because my thinking was cloudy.And it wasn't until I got to the airport check-in counter, that I realized I didn't have my passport.So I raced home in the snow and ice, 40 minutes, got my passport, raced back to the airport, I made it just in time, but they had given away my seat to someone else, so I got stuck in the back of the plane, next to the bathrooms, in a seat that wouldn't recline, on an eight-hour flight. Well, I had a lot of time to think during those eight hours and no sleep.And I started wondering, are there things that I can do, systems that I can put into place, that will prevent bad things from happening? Or at least if bad things happen, will minimize the likelihood of it being a total catastrophe. So I started thinking about that, but my thoughts didn't crystallize until about a month later. I was having dinner with my colleague, Danny Kahneman, the Nobel Prize winner, and I somewhat embarrassedly told him about having broken my window, and, you know, forgotten my passport, and Danny shared with me that he'd been practicing something called prospective hindsight.It's something that he had gotten from the psychologist Gary Klein, who had written about it a few years before, also called the pre-mortem. Now, you all know what the postmortem is. Whenever there's a disaster, a team of experts come in and they try to figure out what went wrong, right? Well, in the pre-mortem, Danny explained, you look ahead and you try to figure out all the things that could go wrong, and then you try to figure out what you can do to prevent those things from happening, or to minimize the damage.So what I want to talk to you about today are some of the things we can do in the form of a pre-mortem. Some of them are obvious, some of them are not so obvious. I'll start with the obvious ones.Around the home, designate a place for things that are easily lost. Now, this sounds like common sense, and it is, but there's a lot of science to back this up, based on the way our spatial memory works. There's a structure in the brain called the hippocampus, that evolved over tens of thousands of years, to keep track of the locations of important things — where the well is, where fish can be found, that stand of fruit trees, where the friendly and enemy tribes live. The hippocampus is the part of the brain that in London taxicab drivers becomes enlarged. It's the part of the brain that allows squirrels to find their nuts. And if you're wondering, somebody actually did the experiment where they cut off the olfactory sense of the squirrels, and they could still find their nuts. They weren't using smell, they were using the hippocampus, this exquisitely evolved mechanism in the brain for finding things. But it's really good for things that don't move around much, not so good for things that move around. So this is why we lose car keys and reading glasses and passports. So in the home, designate a spot for your keys — a hook by the door, maybe a decorative bowl. For your passport, a particular drawer. For your reading glasses, a particular table. If you designate a spot and you're scrupulous about it, your things will always be there when you look for them.What about travel? Take a cell phone picture of your credit cards, your driver's license, your passport, mail it to yourself so it's in the cloud. If these things are lost or stolen, you can facilitate replacement.Now these are some rather obvious things. Remember, when you're under stress, the brain releases cortisol. Cortisol is toxic, and it causes cloudy thinking. So part of the practice of the pre-mortem is to recognize that under stress you're not going to be at your best, and you should put systems in place.And there's perhaps no more stressful a situation than when you're confronted with a medical decision to make. And at some point, all of us are going to be in that position, where we have to make a very important decision about the future of our medical care or that of a loved one, to help them with a decision.And so I want to talk about that. And I'm going to talk about a very particular medical condition. But this stands as a proxy for all kinds of medical decision-making, and indeed for financial decision-making, and social decision-making — any kind of decision you have to make that would benefit from a rational assessment of the facts.So suppose you go to your doctor and the doctor says, ""I just got your lab work back, your cholesterol's a little high."" Now, you all know that high cholesterol is associated with an increased risk of cardiovascular disease, heart attack, stroke. And so you're thinking having high cholesterol isn't the best thing, and so the doctor says, ""You know, I'd like to give you a drug that will help you lower your cholesterol, a statin."" And you've probably heard of statins, you know that they're among the most widely prescribed drugs in the world today, you probably even know people who take them. And so you're thinking, ""Yeah! Give me the statin.""But there's a question you should ask at this point, a statistic you should ask for that most doctors don't like talking about, and pharmaceutical companies like talking about even less. It's for the number needed to treat. Now, what is this, the NNT? It's the number of people that need to take a drug or undergo a surgery or any medical procedure before one person is helped. And you're thinking, what kind of crazy statistic is that? The number should be one. My doctor wouldn't prescribe something to me if it's not going to help. But actually, medical practice doesn't work that way. And it's not the doctor's fault, if it's anybody's fault, it's the fault of scientists like me. We haven't figured out the underlying mechanisms well enough. But GlaxoSmithKline estimates that 90 percent of the drugs work in only 30 to 50 percent of the people. So the number needed to treat for the most widely prescribed statin, what do you suppose it is? How many people have to take it before one person is helped? 300. This is according to research by research practitioners Jerome Groopman and Pamela Hartzband, independently confirmed by Bloomberg.com. I ran through the numbers myself. 300 people have to take the drug for a year before one heart attack, stroke or other adverse event is prevented.Now you're probably thinking, ""Well, OK, one in 300 chance of lowering my cholesterol. Why not, doc? Give me the prescription anyway."" But you should ask at this point for another statistic, and that is, ""Tell me about the side effects."" Right? So for this particular drug, the side effects occur in five percent of the patients. And they include terrible things — debilitating muscle and joint pain, gastrointestinal distress — but now you're thinking, ""Five percent, not very likely it's going to happen to me, I'll still take the drug."" But wait a minute. Remember under stress you're not thinking clearly. So think about how you're going to work through this ahead of time, so you don't have to manufacture the chain of reasoning on the spot. 300 people take the drug, right? One person's helped, five percent of those 300 have side effects, that's 15 people. You're 15 times more likely to be harmed by the drug than you are to be helped by the drug.Now, I'm not saying whether you should take the statin or not. I'm just saying you should have this conversation with your doctor. Medical ethics requires it, it's part of the principle of informed consent. You have the right to have access to this kind of information to begin the conversation about whether you want to take the risks or not.Now you might be thinking I've pulled this number out of the air for shock value, but in fact it's rather typical, this number needed to treat. For the most widely performed surgery on men over the age of 50, removal of the prostate for cancer, the number needed to treat is 49. That's right, 49 surgeries are done for every one person who's helped. And the side effects in that case occur in 50 percent of the patients. They include impotence, erectile dysfunction, urinary incontinence, rectal tearing, fecal incontinence. And if you're lucky, and you're one of the 50 percent who has these, they'll only last for a year or two.So the idea of the pre-mortem is to think ahead of time to the questions that you might be able to ask that will push the conversation forward. You don't want to have to manufacture all of this on the spot. And you also want to think about things like quality of life. Because you have a choice oftentimes, do you I want a shorter life that's pain-free, or a longer life that might have a great deal of pain towards the end? These are things to talk about and think about now, with your family and your loved ones. You might change your mind in the heat of the moment, but at least you're practiced with this kind of thinking.Remember, our brain under stress releases cortisol, and one of the things that happens at that moment is a whole bunch on systems shut down. There's an evolutionary reason for this. Face-to-face with a predator, you don't need your digestive system, or your libido, or your immune system, because if you're body is expending metabolism on those things and you don't react quickly, you might become the lion's lunch, and then none of those things matter. Unfortunately, one of the things that goes out the window during those times of stress is rational, logical thinking, as Danny Kahneman and his colleagues have shown. So we need to train ourselves to think ahead to these kinds of situations.I think the important point here is recognizing that all of us are flawed. We all are going to fail now and then. The idea is to think ahead to what those failures might be, to put systems in place that will help minimize the damage, or to prevent the bad things from happening in the first place.Getting back to that snowy night in Montreal, when I got back from my trip, I had my contractor install a combination lock next to the door, with a key to the front door in it, an easy to remember combination. And I have to admit, I still have piles of mail that haven't been sorted, and piles of emails that I haven't gone through. So I'm not completely organized, but I see organization as a gradual process, and I'm getting there.Thank you very much.(Applause)","Practical Strategies for Minimizing Risk and Making Sound Decisions546 547 - The speaker recounts a personal story of breaking into his own house, which sets the stage for a discussion on stress and decision-making.548 - Explanation of the impact of stress on the brain, specifically how cortisol impairs logical thinking.549 - Introduction of the concept of the pre-mortem to proactively identify and mitigate potential issues.550 - Practical advice for everyday situations:551  - Designate specific places for commonly lost items to leverage spatial memory.552  - Keep digital copies of important documents like credit cards and passports.553 - Application of the pre-mortem to medical decisions:554  - Importance of understanding statistics like the number needed to treat (NNT) to make informed choices about medical treatments.555  - Encouragement to think ahead and discuss potential medical and life decisions with family.556 - Conclusion with personal steps taken to mitigate mishaps, like installing a combination lock box for house keys, and recognizing organizational improvement as an ongoing process.","You are a TED Story Creator, a storyteller, and an expert in crafting compelling transcripts for TED Talks. You possess a knowledge base of the world’s most inspiring TED talks. Given a title and an outline, your task is to create an engaging transcript that will captivate the audience. Adhere to the sequence of the outline and the bullet points to weave a captivating narrative."557"Seven years ago, a student came to me and asked me to invest in his company. He said, ""I'm working with three friends, and we're going to try to disrupt an industry by selling stuff online."" And I said, ""OK, you guys spent the whole summer on this, right?"" ""No, we all took internships just in case it doesn't work out."" ""All right, but you're going to go in full time once you graduate."" ""Not exactly. We've all lined up backup jobs."" Six months go by, it's the day before the company launches, and there is still not a functioning website. ""You guys realize, the entire company is a website. That's literally all it is."" So I obviously declined to invest.And they ended up naming the company Warby Parker. They sell glasses online. They were recently recognized as the world's most innovative company and valued at over a billion dollars. And now? My wife handles our investments. Why was I so wrong?To find out, I've been studying people that I come to call ""originals."" Originals are nonconformists, people who not only have new ideas but take action to champion them. They are people who stand out and speak up. Originals drive creativity and change in the world. They're the people you want to bet on. And they look nothing like I expected. I want to show you today three things I've learned about recognizing originals and becoming a little bit more like them.So the first reason that I passed on Warby Parker was they were really slow getting off the ground. Now, you are all intimately familiar with the mind of a procrastinator. Well, I have a confession for you. I'm the opposite. I'm a precrastinator. Yes, that's an actual term. You know that panic you feel a few hours before a big deadline when you haven't done anything yet. I just feel that a few months ahead of time.So this started early: when I was a kid, I took Nintendo games very seriously. I would wake up at 5am, start playing and not stop until I had mastered them. Eventually it got so out of hand that a local newspaper came and did a story on the dark side of Nintendo, starring me.Since then, I have traded hair for teeth.But this served me well in college, because I finished my senior thesis four months before the deadline. And I was proud of that, until a few years ago. I had a student named Jihae, who came to me and said, ""I have my most creative ideas when I'm procrastinating."" And I was like, ""That's cute, where are the four papers you owe me?""No, she was one of our most creative students, and as an organizational psychologist, this is the kind of idea that I test. So I challenged her to get some data. She goes into a bunch of companies. She has people fill out surveys about how often they procrastinate. Then she gets their bosses to rate how creative and innovative they are. And sure enough, the precrastinators like me, who rush in and do everything early are rated as less creative than people who procrastinate moderately. So I want to know what happens to the chronic procrastinators. She was like, ""I don't know. They didn't fill out my survey.""No, here are our results. You actually do see that the people who wait until the last minute are so busy goofing off that they don't have any new ideas. And on the flip side, the people who race in are in such a frenzy of anxiety that they don't have original thoughts either. There's a sweet spot where originals seem to live. Why is this? Maybe original people just have bad work habits. Maybe procrastinating does not cause creativity.To find out, we designed some experiments. We asked people to generate new business ideas, and then we get independent readers to evaluate how creative and useful they are. And some of them are asked to do the task right away. Others we randomly assign to procrastinate by dangling Minesweeper in front of them for either five or 10 minutes. And sure enough, the moderate procrastinators are 16 percent more creative than the other two groups. Now, Minesweeper is awesome, but it's not the driver of the effect, because if you play the game first before you learn about the task, there's no creativity boost. It's only when you're told that you're going to be working on this problem, and then you start procrastinating, but the task is still active in the back of your mind, that you start to incubate. Procrastination gives you time to consider divergent ideas, to think in nonlinear ways, to make unexpected leaps.So just as we were finishing these experiments, I was starting to write a book about originals, and I thought, ""This is the perfect time to teach myself to procrastinate, while writing a chapter on procrastination."" So I metaprocrastinated, and like any self-respecting precrastinator, I woke up early the next morning and I made a to-do list with steps on how to procrastinate.And then I worked diligently toward my goal of not making progress toward my goal. I started writing the procrastination chapter, and one day — I was halfway through — I literally put it away in mid-sentence for months. It was agony. But when I came back to it, I had all sorts of new ideas. As Aaron Sorkin put it, ""You call it procrastinating. I call it thinking."" And along the way I discovered that a lot of great originals in history were procrastinators. Take Leonardo da Vinci. He toiled on and off for 16 years on the Mona Lisa. He felt like a failure. He wrote as much in his journal. But some of the diversions he took in optics transformed the way that he modeled light and made him into a much better painter. What about Martin Luther King, Jr.? The night before the biggest speech of his life, the March on Washington, he was up past 3am, rewriting it. He's sitting in the audience waiting for his turn to go onstage, and he is still scribbling notes and crossing out lines. When he gets onstage, 11 minutes in, he leaves his prepared remarks to utter four words that changed the course of history: ""I have a dream."" That was not in the script. By delaying the task of finalizing the speech until the very last minute, he left himself open to the widest range of possible ideas. And because the text wasn't set in stone, he had freedom to improvise.Procrastinating is a vice when it comes to productivity, but it can be a virtue for creativity. What you see with a lot of great originals is that they are quick to start but they're slow to finish. And this is what I missed with Warby Parker. When they were dragging their heels for six months, I looked at them and said, ""You know, a lot of other companies are starting to sell glasses online."" They missed the first-mover advantage. But what I didn't realize was they were spending all that time trying to figure out how to get people to be comfortable ordering glasses online. And it turns out the first-mover advantage is mostly a myth. Look at a classic study of over 50 product categories, comparing the first movers who created the market with the improvers who introduced something different and better. What you see is that the first movers had a failure rate of 47 percent, compared with only 8 percent for the improvers. Look at Facebook, waiting to build a social network until after Myspace and Friendster. Look at Google, waiting for years after Altavista and Yahoo. It's much easier to improve on somebody else's idea than it is to create something new from scratch. So the lesson I learned is that to be original you don't have to be first. You just have to be different and better.But that wasn't the only reason I passed on Warby Parker. They were also full of doubts. They had backup plans lined up, and that made me doubt that they had the courage to be original, because I expected that originals would look something like this.Now, on the surface, a lot of original people look confident, but behind the scenes, they feel the same fear and doubt that the rest of us do. They just manage it differently. Let me show you: this is a depiction of how the creative process works for most of us.Now, in my research, I discovered there are two different kinds of doubt. There's self-doubt and idea doubt. Self-doubt is paralyzing. It leads you to freeze. But idea doubt is energizing. It motivates you to test, to experiment, to refine, just like MLK did. And so the key to being original is just a simple thing of avoiding the leap from step three to step four. Instead of saying, ""I'm crap,"" you say, ""The first few drafts are always crap, and I'm just not there yet."" So how do you get there? Well, there's a clue, it turns out, in the Internet browser that you use. We can predict your job performance and your commitment just by knowing what web browser you use. Now, some of you are not going to like the results of this study —But there is good evidence that Firefox and Chrome users significantly outperform Internet Explorer and Safari users. Yes.They also stay in their jobs 15 percent longer, by the way. Why? It's not a technical advantage. The four browser groups on average have similar typing speed and they also have similar levels of computer knowledge. It's about how you got the browser. Because if you use Internet Explorer or Safari, those came preinstalled on your computer, and you accepted the default option that was handed to you. If you wanted Firefox or Chrome, you had to doubt the default and ask, is there a different option out there, and then be a little resourceful and download a new browser. So people hear about this study and they're like, ""Great, if I want to get better at my job, I just need to upgrade my browser?""No, it's about being the kind of person who takes the initiative to doubt the default and look for a better option. And if you do that well, you will open yourself up to the opposite of déjà vu. There's a name for it. It's called vuja de.Vuja de is when you look at something you've seen many times before and all of a sudden see it with fresh eyes. It's a screenwriter who looks at a movie script that can't get the green light for more than half a century. In every past version, the main character has been an evil queen. But Jennifer Lee starts to question whether that makes sense. She rewrites the first act, reinvents the villain as a tortured hero and Frozen becomes the most successful animated movie ever. So there's a simple message from this story. When you feel doubt, don't let it go.What about fear? Originals feel fear, too. They're afraid of failing, but what sets them apart from the rest of us is that they're even more afraid of failing to try. They know you can fail by starting a business that goes bankrupt or by failing to start a business at all. They know that in the long run, our biggest regrets are not our actions but our inactions. The things we wish we could redo, if you look at the science, are the chances not taken.Elon Musk told me recently, he didn't expect Tesla to succeed. He was sure the first few SpaceX launches would fail to make it to orbit, let alone get back, but it was too important not to try. And for so many of us, when we have an important idea, we don't bother to try. But I have some good news for you. You are not going to get judged on your bad ideas. A lot of people think they will. If you look across industries and ask people about their biggest idea, their most important suggestion, 85 percent of them stayed silent instead of speaking up. They were afraid of embarrassing themselves, of looking stupid. But guess what? Originals have lots and lots of bad ideas, tons of them, in fact. Take the guy who invented this. Do you care that he came up with a talking doll so creepy that it scared not only kids but adults, too? No. You celebrate Thomas Edison for pioneering the light bulb.If you look across fields, the greatest originals are the ones who fail the most, because they're the ones who try the most. Take classical composers, the best of the best. Why do some of them get more pages in encyclopedias than others and also have their compositions rerecorded more times? One of the best predictors is the sheer volume of compositions that they generate. The more output you churn out, the more variety you get and the better your chances of stumbling on something truly original. Even the three icons of classical music — Bach, Beethoven, Mozart — had to generate hundreds and hundreds of compositions to come up with a much smaller number of masterpieces. Now, you may be wondering, how did this guy become great without doing a whole lot? I don't know how Wagner pulled that off. But for most of us, if we want to be more original, we have to generate more ideas.The Warby Parker founders, when they were trying to name their company, they needed something sophisticated, unique, with no negative associations to build a retail brand, and they tested over 2,000 possibilities before they finally put together Warby and Parker. So if you put all this together, what you see is that originals are not that different from the rest of us. They feel fear and doubt. They procrastinate. They have bad ideas. And sometimes, it's not in spite of those qualities but because of them that they succeed.So when you see those things, don't make the same mistake I did. Don't write them off. And when that's you, don't count yourself out either. Know that being quick to start but slow to finish can boost your creativity, that you can motivate yourself by doubting your ideas and embracing the fear of failing to try, and that you need a lot of bad ideas in order to get a few good ones.Look, being original is not easy, but I have no doubt about this: it's the best way to improve the world around us.Thank you.","Recognizing and Cultivating Originals558 559 - Introduction to Originals560  - Personal anecdote about missing investment in Warby Parker561  - Definition and impact of originals in society562  563 - Misconceptions about Originals and Procrastination564  - Personal habit of being a precrastinator and its disadvantages565  - Research and experiments showing moderate procrastinators are more creative566 567 - Lessons from Delay and Doubt568  - Real life examples demonstrating benefits of procrastination and doubt on creativity and decision-making569  - Distinguishing between self-doubt and idea doubt570 571 - Characteristics and Habits of Originals572  - Analysis of browser choices reflecting one's initiative and creativity573  - Importance of viewing familiar things with fresh eyes (vuja de)574 575 - Embracing Fear, Doubt, and Failure576  - Comparison of fear of failing and fear of failing to try577  - Importance of generating many ideas to find success578 579 - Conclusion580  - Encouragement to embrace original qualities for creative and impactful results581  - Motivation that being original improves the world","You are a TED Story Creator, a storyteller, and an expert in crafting compelling transcripts for TED Talks. You possess a knowledge base of the world’s most inspiring TED talks. Given a title and an outline, your task is to create an engaging transcript that will captivate the audience. Adhere to the sequence of the outline and the bullet points to weave a captivating narrative."582"We're going to go on a dive to the deep sea, and anyone that's had that lovely opportunity knows that for about two and half hours on the way down, it's a perfectly positively pitch-black world. And we used to see the most mysterious animals out the window that you couldn't describe: these blinking lights — a world of bioluminescence, like fireflies. Dr. Edith Widder — she's now at the Ocean Research and Conservation Association — was able to come up with a camera that could capture some of these incredible animals, and that's what you're seeing here on the screen.That's all bioluminescence. Like I said: just like fireflies. There's a flying turkey under a tree.I'm a geologist by training. But I love that. And you see, some of the bioluminescence they use to avoid being eaten, some they use to attract prey, but all of it, from an artistic point of view, is just positively amazing. And a lot of what goes on inside — There's a fish with glowing eyes, pulsating eyes. Some of the colors are designed to hypnotize, these lovely patterns. And then this last one, one of my favorites, this pinwheel design. Just absolutely amazing, every single dive.That's the unknown world, and today we've only explored about 3 percent of what's out there in the ocean. Already we've found the world's highest mountains, the world's deepest valleys, underwater lakes, underwater waterfalls — a lot of that we shared with you from the stage. And in a place where we thought no life at all, we find more life, we think, and diversity and density than the tropical rainforest, which tells us that we don't know much about this planet at all. There's still 97 percent, and either that 97 percent is empty or just full of surprises.But I want to jump up to shallow water now and look at some creatures that are positively amazing. Cephalopods — head-foots. As a kid I knew them as calamari, mostly.This is an octopus. This is the work of Dr. Roger Hanlon at the Marine Biological Lab, and it's just fascinating how cephalopods can, with their incredible eyes, sense their surroundings, look at light, look at patterns. Here's an octopus moving across the reef, finds a spot to settle down, curls up and then disappears into the background. Tough thing to do.In the next bit, we're going to see a couple squid. Now males, when they fight, if they're really aggressive, they turn white. And these two males are fighting. They do it by bouncing their butts together, which is an interesting concept. Now, here's a male on the left and a female on the right, and the male has managed to split his coloration so the female only always sees the kinder, gentler squid in him.Let's take a look at it again. Watch the coloration: white on the right, brown on the left. He takes a step back, he's keeping off the other males by splitting his body, and comes up on the other side — Bingo! Now, I'm told that's not not just a squid phenomenon with males, but I don't know.Cuttlefish. I love cuttlefish. This is a Giant Australian Cuttlefish. And there he is, his droopy little eyes up here. But they can do pretty amazing things, too. Here we're going to see one backing into a crevice, and watch his tentacles — he just pulls them in, makes them look just like algae. Disappears right into the background. Positively amazing. Here's two males fighting. Once again, they're smart enough, these cephalopods; they know not to hurt each other. But look at the patterns that they can do with their skin. That's an amazing thing.Here's an octopus. Sometimes they don't want to be seen when they move, because predators can see them. This guy can make himself look like a rock, and, looking at his environment, can actually slide across the bottom, using the waves and the shadows so he can't be seen. His motion blends right into the background — the moving rock trick.So, we're learning lots new from the shallow water. Still exploring the deep, but learning lots from the shallow water. There's a good reason why: the shallow water's full of predators — here's a barracuda — and if you're an octopus or a cephalopod, you need to really understand how to use your surroundings to hide.In the next scene, you're going to see a nice coral bottom. And you see that an octopus would stand out very easily there if you couldn't use your camouflage, use your skin to change color and texture. Here's some algae in the foreground — and an octopus. Ain't that amazing?Now, Roger spooked him, so he took off in a cloud of ink, and when he lands, the octopus says, ""Oh, I've been seen. The best thing to do is to get as big as I can get."" That big brown makes his eyespot very big. So, he's bluffing. Let's do it backwards. I thought he was joking when he first showed it to me. I thought it was all graphics. So here it is in reverse. Watch the skin color; watch the skin texture. Just an amazing animal, it can change color and texture to match the surroundings. Watch him blend right into this algae. One, two, three.And now he's gone, and so am I. Thank you very much.","Discovering the Wonders of Marine Life583 584 - Exploring the deep sea reveals a world of bioluminescence and unknown creatures.585  - Technologies like special cameras have allowed us to capture and study these phenomena.586  - Despite exploring only 3% of the ocean, we've discovered immense biodiversity and unique geological features.587 588 - In shallow waters, cephalopods demonstrate remarkable camouflage abilities.589  - Studies show how cephalopods adapt their appearance for protection and interaction.590  - These adaptations highlight the sophistication of marine life in predator-rich environments.591 592 - The ability of marine animals to blend into their surroundings emphasizes the complexity and adaptiveness of oceanic life.","You are a TED Story Creator, a storyteller, and an expert in crafting compelling transcripts for TED Talks. You possess a knowledge base of the world’s most inspiring TED talks. Given a title and an outline, your task is to create an engaging transcript that will captivate the audience. Adhere to the sequence of the outline and the bullet points to weave a captivating narrative."593"One of my earliest memories is of trying to wake up one of my relatives and not being able to. And I was just a little kid, so I didn't really understand why, but as I got older, I realized we had drug addiction in my family, including later cocaine addiction.I'd been thinking about it a lot lately, partly because it's now exactly 100 years since drugs were first banned in the United States and Britain, and we then imposed that on the rest of the world. It's a century since we made this really fateful decision to take addicts and punish them and make them suffer, because we believed that would deter them; it would give them an incentive to stop.And a few years ago, I was looking at some of the addicts in my life who I love, and trying to figure out if there was some way to help them. And I realized there were loads of incredibly basic questions I just didn't know the answer to, like, what really causes addiction? Why do we carry on with this approach that doesn't seem to be working, and is there a better way out there that we could try instead?So I read loads of stuff about it, and I couldn't really find the answers I was looking for, so I thought, okay, I'll go and sit with different people around the world who lived this and studied this and talk to them and see if I could learn from them. And I didn't realize I would end up going over 30,000 miles at the start, but I ended up going and meeting loads of different people, from a transgender crack dealer in Brownsville, Brooklyn, to a scientist who spends a lot of time feeding hallucinogens to mongooses to see if they like them — it turns out they do, but only in very specific circumstances — to the only country that's ever decriminalized all drugs, from cannabis to crack, Portugal. And the thing I realized that really blew my mind is, almost everything we think we know about addiction is wrong, and if we start to absorb the new evidence about addiction, I think we're going to have to change a lot more than our drug policies.But let's start with what we think we know, what I thought I knew. Let's think about this middle row here. Imagine all of you, for 20 days now, went off and used heroin three times a day. Some of you look a little more enthusiastic than others at this prospect. Don't worry, it's just a thought experiment. Imagine you did that, right? What would happen? Now, we have a story about what would happen that we've been told for a century. We think, because there are chemical hooks in heroin, as you took it for a while, your body would become dependent on those hooks, you'd start to physically need them, and at the end of those 20 days, you'd all be heroin addicts. Right? That's what I thought.First thing that alerted me to the fact that something's not right with this story is when it was explained to me. If I step out of this TED Talk today and I get hit by a car and I break my hip, I'll be taken to hospital and I'll be given loads of diamorphine. Diamorphine is heroin. It's actually much better heroin than you're going to buy on the streets, because the stuff you buy from a drug dealer is contaminated. Actually, very little of it is heroin, whereas the stuff you get from the doctor is medically pure. And you'll be given it for quite a long period of time. There are loads of people in this room, you may not realize it, you've taken quite a lot of heroin. And anyone who is watching this anywhere in the world, this is happening. And if what we believe about addiction is right — those people are exposed to all those chemical hooks — What should happen? They should become addicts. This has been studied really carefully. It doesn't happen; you will have noticed if your grandmother had a hip replacement, she didn't come out as a junkie. And when I learned this, it seemed so weird to me, so contrary to everything I'd been told, everything I thought I knew, I just thought it couldn't be right, until I met a man called Bruce Alexander. He's a professor of psychology in Vancouver who carried out an incredible experiment I think really helps us to understand this issue. Professor Alexander explained to me, the idea of addiction we've all got in our heads, that story, comes partly from a series of experiments that were done earlier in the 20th century. They're really simple. You can do them tonight at home if you feel a little sadistic. You get a rat and you put it in a cage, and you give it two water bottles: One is just water, and the other is water laced with either heroin or cocaine. If you do that, the rat will almost always prefer the drug water and almost always kill itself quite quickly. So there you go, right? That's how we think it works. In the '70s, Professor Alexander comes along and he looks at this experiment and he noticed something. He said ah, we're putting the rat in an empty cage. It's got nothing to do except use these drugs. Let's try something different. So Professor Alexander built a cage that he called ""Rat Park,"" which is basically heaven for rats. They've got loads of cheese, they've got loads of colored balls, they've got loads of tunnels. Crucially, they've got loads of friends. They can have loads of sex. And they've got both the water bottles, the normal water and the drugged water. But here's the fascinating thing: In Rat Park, they don't like the drug water. They almost never use it. None of them ever use it compulsively. None of them ever overdose. You go from almost 100 percent overdose when they're isolated to zero percent overdose when they have happy and connected lives.Now, when he first saw this, Professor Alexander thought, maybe this is just a thing about rats, they're quite different to us. Maybe not as different as we'd like, but, you know — But fortunately, there was a human experiment into the exact same principle happening at the exact same time. It was called the Vietnam War. In Vietnam, 20 percent of all American troops were using loads of heroin, and if you look at the news reports from the time, they were really worried, because they thought, my God, we're going to have hundreds of thousands of junkies on the streets of the United States when the war ends; it made total sense. Now, those soldiers who were using loads of heroin were followed home. The Archives of General Psychiatry did a really detailed study, and what happened to them? It turns out they didn't go to rehab. They didn't go into withdrawal. Ninety-five percent of them just stopped. Now, if you believe the story about chemical hooks, that makes absolutely no sense, but Professor Alexander began to think there might be a different story about addiction. He said, what if addiction isn't about your chemical hooks? What if addiction is about your cage? What if addiction is an adaptation to your environment?Looking at this, there was another professor called Peter Cohen in the Netherlands who said, maybe we shouldn't even call it addiction. Maybe we should call it bonding. Human beings have a natural and innate need to bond, and when we're happy and healthy, we'll bond and connect with each other, but if you can't do that, because you're traumatized or isolated or beaten down by life, you will bond with something that will give you some sense of relief. Now, that might be gambling, that might be pornography, that might be cocaine, that might be cannabis, but you will bond and connect with something because that's our nature. That's what we want as human beings.And at first, I found this quite a difficult thing to get my head around, but one way that helped me to think about it is, I can see, I've got over by my seat a bottle of water, right? I'm looking at lots of you, and lots of you have bottles of water with you. Forget the drugs. Forget the drug war. Totally legally, all of those bottles of water could be bottles of vodka, right? We could all be getting drunk — I might after this — — but we're not. Now, because you've been able to afford the approximately gazillion pounds that it costs to get into a TED Talk, I'm guessing you guys could afford to be drinking vodka for the next six months. You wouldn't end up homeless. You're not going to do that, and the reason you're not going to do that is not because anyone's stopping you. It's because you've got bonds and connections that you want to be present for. You've got work you love. You've got people you love. You've got healthy relationships. And a core part of addiction, I came to think, and I believe the evidence suggests, is about not being able to bear to be present in your life.Now, this has really significant implications. The most obvious implications are for the War on Drugs. In Arizona, I went out with a group of women who were made to wear t-shirts saying, ""I was a drug addict,"" and go out on chain gangs and dig graves while members of the public jeer at them, and when those women get out of prison, they're going to have criminal records that mean they'll never work in the legal economy again. Now, that's a very extreme example, obviously, in the case of the chain gang, but actually almost everywhere in the world we treat addicts to some degree like that. We punish them. We shame them. We give them criminal records. We put barriers between them reconnecting. There was a doctor in Canada, Dr. Gabor Maté, an amazing man, who said to me, if you wanted to design a system that would make addiction worse, you would design that system.Now, there's a place that decided to do the exact opposite, and I went there to see how it worked. In the year 2000, Portugal had one of the worst drug problems in Europe. One percent of the population was addicted to heroin, which is kind of mind-blowing, and every year, they tried the American way more and more. They punished people and stigmatized them and shamed them more, and every year, the problem got worse. And one day, the Prime Minister and the leader of the opposition got together, and basically said, look, we can't go on with a country where we're having ever more people becoming heroin addicts. Let's set up a panel of scientists and doctors to figure out what would genuinely solve the problem. And they set up a panel led by an amazing man called Dr. João Goulão, to look at all this new evidence, and they came back and they said, ""Decriminalize all drugs from cannabis to crack, but"" — and this is the crucial next step — ""take all the money we used to spend on cutting addicts off, on disconnecting them, and spend it instead on reconnecting them with society."" And that's not really what we think of as drug treatment in the United States and Britain. So they do do residential rehab, they do psychological therapy, that does have some value. But the biggest thing they did was the complete opposite of what we do: a massive program of job creation for addicts, and microloans for addicts to set up small businesses. So say you used to be a mechanic. When you're ready, they'll go to a garage, and they'll say, if you employ this guy for a year, we'll pay half his wages. The goal was to make sure that every addict in Portugal had something to get out of bed for in the morning. And when I went and met the addicts in Portugal, what they said is, as they rediscovered purpose, they rediscovered bonds and relationships with the wider society.It'll be 15 years this year since that experiment began, and the results are in: injecting drug use is down in Portugal, according to the British Journal of Criminology, by 50 percent, five-zero percent. Overdose is massively down, HIV is massively down among addicts. Addiction in every study is significantly down. One of the ways you know it's worked so well is that almost nobody in Portugal wants to go back to the old system.Now, that's the political implications. I actually think there's a layer of implications to all this research below that. We live in a culture where people feel really increasingly vulnerable to all sorts of addictions, whether it's to their smartphones or to shopping or to eating. Before these talks began — you guys know this — we were told we weren't allowed to have our smartphones on, and I have to say, a lot of you looked an awful lot like addicts who were told their dealer was going to be unavailable for the next couple of hours. A lot of us feel like that, and it might sound weird to say, I've been talking about how disconnection is a major driver of addiction and weird to say it's growing, because you think we're the most connected society that's ever been, surely. But I increasingly began to think that the connections we have or think we have, are like a kind of parody of human connection. If you have a crisis in your life, you'll notice something. It won't be your Twitter followers who come to sit with you. It won't be your Facebook friends who help you turn it round. It'll be your flesh and blood friends who you have deep and nuanced and textured, face-to-face relationships with, and there's a study I learned about from Bill McKibben, the environmental writer, that I think tells us a lot about this. It looked at the number of close friends the average American believes they can call on in a crisis. That number has been declining steadily since the 1950s. The amount of floor space an individual has in their home has been steadily increasing, and I think that's like a metaphor for the choice we've made as a culture. We've traded floorspace for friends, we've traded stuff for connections, and the result is we are one of the loneliest societies there has ever been. And Bruce Alexander, the guy who did the Rat Park experiment, says, we talk all the time in addiction about individual recovery, and it's right to talk about that, but we need to talk much more about social recovery. Something's gone wrong with us, not just with individuals but as a group, and we've created a society where, for a lot of us, life looks a whole lot more like that isolated cage and a whole lot less like Rat Park.If I'm honest, this isn't why I went into it. I didn't go in to the discover the political stuff, the social stuff. I wanted to know how to help the people I love. And when I came back from this long journey and I'd learned all this, I looked at the addicts in my life, and if you're really candid, it's hard loving an addict, and there's going to be lots of people who know in this room. You are angry a lot of the time, and I think one of the reasons why this debate is so charged is because it runs through the heart of each of us, right? Everyone has a bit of them that looks at an addict and thinks, I wish someone would just stop you. And the kind of scripts we're told for how to deal with the addicts in our lives is typified by, I think, the reality show ""Intervention,"" if you guys have ever seen it. I think everything in our lives is defined by reality TV, but that's another TED Talk. If you've ever seen the show ""Intervention,"" it's a pretty simple premise. Get an addict, all the people in their life, gather them together, confront them with what they're doing, and they say, if you don't shape up, we're going to cut you off. So what they do is they take the connection to the addict, and they threaten it, they make it contingent on the addict behaving the way they want. And I began to think, I began to see why that approach doesn't work, and I began to think that's almost like the importing of the logic of the Drug War into our private lives.So I was thinking, how could I be Portuguese? And what I've tried to do now, and I can't tell you I do it consistently and I can't tell you it's easy, is to say to the addicts in my life that I want to deepen the connection with them, to say to them, I love you whether you're using or you're not. I love you, whatever state you're in, and if you need me, I'll come and sit with you because I love you and I don't want you to be alone or to feel alone.And I think the core of that message — you're not alone, we love you — has to be at every level of how we respond to addicts, socially, politically and individually. For 100 years now, we've been singing war songs about addicts. I think all along we should have been singing love songs to them, because the opposite of addiction is not sobriety. The opposite of addiction is connection.Thank you.(Applause)","Rethinking Addiction: A Call for Connection594 595 - Introduction to the speaker's personal connection to addiction.596 - Historical context of drug prohibition and its punitive approach to addicts.597 - Journey of exploration to understand addiction and its causes.598  - Encountered diverse perspectives and unconventional research methods worldwide.599  - Discovered prevailing addiction theories might be incorrect.600 - Challenging conventional beliefs with scientific experiments and real-life examples.601  - Diamorphine use in hospitals contradicting addiction expectations.602  - Rat Park experiment illustrating the impact of environment on drug use.603  - Vietnam War veterans' recovery from heroin use after returning home.604 - Theoretical development on addiction being more about environment (""cage"") and less about chemical dependency.605 - Real-life application: Portugal's successful decriminalization and reintegration approach.606  - Shifted funding from punishment to reconnecting addicts with society.607  - Significant reductions in drug usage and related problems.608 - Broader societal implications and personal reflections.609  - Modern society’s increasing vulnerability to various forms of addiction.610  - Personal insights on supporting and connecting with addicts without judgment.611 - Concluding thoughts: Emphasizing connection over condemnation in addressing addiction.","You are a TED Story Creator, a storyteller, and an expert in crafting compelling transcripts for TED Talks. You possess a knowledge base of the world’s most inspiring TED talks. Given a title and an outline, your task is to create an engaging transcript that will captivate the audience. Adhere to the sequence of the outline and the bullet points to weave a captivating narrative."612"Why do we cheat? And why do happy people cheat? And when we say ""infidelity,"" what exactly do we mean? Is it a hookup, a love story, paid sex, a chat room, a massage with a happy ending? Why do we think that men cheat out of boredom and fear of intimacy, but women cheat out of loneliness and hunger for intimacy? And is an affair always the end of a relationship?For the past 10 years, I have traveled the globe and worked extensively with hundreds of couples who have been shattered by infidelity. There is one simple act of transgression that can rob a couple of their relationship, their happiness and their very identity: an affair. And yet, this extremely common act is so poorly understood. So this talk is for anyone who has ever loved.Adultery has existed since marriage was invented, and so, too, the taboo against it. In fact, infidelity has a tenacity that marriage can only envy, so much so, that this is the only commandment that is repeated twice in the Bible: once for doing it, and once just for thinking about it. So how do we reconcile what is universally forbidden, yet universally practiced?Now, throughout history, men practically had a license to cheat with little consequence, and supported by a host of biological and evolutionary theories that justified their need to roam, so the double standard is as old as adultery itself. But who knows what's really going on under the sheets there, right? Because when it comes to sex, the pressure for men is to boast and to exaggerate, but the pressure for women is to hide, minimize and deny, which isn't surprising when you consider that there are still nine countries where women can be killed for straying.Now, monogamy used to be one person for life. Today, monogamy is one person at a time. I mean, many of you probably have said, ""I am monogamous in all my relationships."" We used to marry, and had sex for the first time. But now we marry, and we stop having sex with others. The fact is that monogamy had nothing to do with love. Men relied on women's fidelity in order to know whose children these are, and who gets the cows when I die.Now, everyone wants to know what percentage of people cheat. I've been asked that question since I arrived at this conference. It applies to you. But the definition of infidelity keeps on expanding: sexting, watching porn, staying secretly active on dating apps. So because there is no universally agreed-upon definition of what even constitutes an infidelity, estimates vary widely, from 26 percent to 75 percent. But on top of it, we are walking contradictions. So 95 percent of us will say that it is terribly wrong for our partner to lie about having an affair, but just about the same amount of us will say that that's exactly what we would do if we were having one. Now, I like this definition of an affair — it brings together the three key elements: a secretive relationship, which is the core structure of an affair; an emotional connection to one degree or another; and a sexual alchemy. And alchemy is the key word here, because the erotic frisson is such that the kiss that you only imagine giving, can be as powerful and as enchanting as hours of actual lovemaking. As Marcel Proust said, it's our imagination that is responsible for love, not the other person.So it's never been easier to cheat, and it's never been more difficult to keep a secret. And never has infidelity exacted such a psychological toll. When marriage was an economic enterprise, infidelity threatened our economic security. But now that marriage is a romantic arrangement, infidelity threatens our emotional security. Ironically, we used to turn to adultery — that was the space where we sought pure love. But now that we seek love in marriage, adultery destroys it.Now, there are three ways that I think infidelity hurts differently today. We have a romantic ideal in which we turn to one person to fulfill an endless list of needs: to be my greatest lover, my best friend, the best parent, my trusted confidant, my emotional companion, my intellectual equal. And I am it: I'm chosen, I'm unique, I'm indispensable, I'm irreplaceable, I'm the one. And infidelity tells me I'm not. It is the ultimate betrayal. Infidelity shatters the grand ambition of love. But if throughout history, infidelity has always been painful, today it is often traumatic, because it threatens our sense of self.So my patient Fernando, he's plagued. He goes on: ""I thought I knew my life. I thought I knew who you were, who we were as a couple, who I was. Now, I question everything."" Infidelity — a violation of trust, a crisis of identity. ""Can I ever trust you again?"" he asks. ""Can I ever trust anyone again?""And this is also what my patient Heather is telling me, when she's talking to me about her story with Nick. Married, two kids. Nick just left on a business trip, and Heather is playing on his iPad with the boys, when she sees a message appear on the screen: ""Can't wait to see you."" Strange, she thinks, we just saw each other. And then another message: ""Can't wait to hold you in my arms."" And Heather realizes these are not for her. She also tells me that her father had affairs, but her mother, she found one little receipt in the pocket, and a little bit of lipstick on the collar. Heather, she goes digging, and she finds hundreds of messages, and photos exchanged and desires expressed. The vivid details of Nick's two-year affair unfold in front of her in real time, And it made me think: Affairs in the digital age are death by a thousand cuts.But then we have another paradox that we're dealing with these days. Because of this romantic ideal, we are relying on our partner's fidelity with a unique fervor. But we also have never been more inclined to stray, and not because we have new desires today, but because we live in an era where we feel that we are entitled to pursue our desires, because this is the culture where I deserve to be happy. And if we used to divorce because we were unhappy, today we divorce because we could be happier. And if divorce carried all the shame, today, choosing to stay when you can leave is the new shame. So Heather, she can't talk to her friends because she's afraid that they will judge her for still loving Nick, and everywhere she turns, she gets the same advice: Leave him. Throw the dog on the curb. And if the situation were reversed, Nick would be in the same situation. Staying is the new shame.So if we can divorce, why do we still have affairs? Now, the typical assumption is that if someone cheats, either there's something wrong in your relationship or wrong with you. But millions of people can't all be pathological. The logic goes like this: If you have everything you need at home, then there is no need to go looking elsewhere, assuming that there is such a thing as a perfect marriage that will inoculate us against wanderlust. But what if passion has a finite shelf life? What if there are things that even a good relationship can never provide? If even happy people cheat, what is it about?The vast majority of people that I actually work with are not at all chronic philanderers. They are often people who are deeply monogamous in their beliefs, and at least for their partner. But they find themselves in a conflict between their values and their behavior. They often are people who have actually been faithful for decades, but one day they cross a line that they never thought they would cross, and at the risk of losing everything. But for a glimmer of what? Affairs are an act of betrayal, and they are also an expression of longing and loss. At the heart of an affair, you will often find a longing and a yearning for an emotional connection, for novelty, for freedom, for autonomy, for sexual intensity, a wish to recapture lost parts of ourselves or an attempt to bring back vitality in the face of loss and tragedy.I'm thinking about another patient of mine, Priya, who is blissfully married, loves her husband, and would never want to hurt the man. But she also tells me that she's always done what was expected of her: good girl, good wife, good mother, taking care of her immigrant parents. Priya, she fell for the arborist who removed the tree from her yard after Hurricane Sandy. And with his truck and his tattoos, he's quite the opposite of her. But at 47, Priya's affair is about the adolescence that she never had. And her story highlights for me that when we seek the gaze of another, it isn't always our partner that we are turning away from, but the person that we have ourselves become. And it isn't so much that we're looking for another person, as much as we are looking for another self.Now, all over the world, there is one word that people who have affairs always tell me. They feel alive. And they often will tell me stories of recent losses — of a parent who died, and a friend that went too soon, and bad news at the doctor. Death and mortality often live in the shadow of an affair, because they raise these questions. Is this it? Is there more? Am I going on for another 25 years like this? Will I ever feel that thing again? And it has led me to think that perhaps these questions are the ones that propel people to cross the line, and that some affairs are an attempt to beat back deadness, in an antidote to death.And contrary to what you may think, affairs are way less about sex, and a lot more about desire: desire for attention, desire to feel special, desire to feel important. And the very structure of an affair, the fact that you can never have your lover, keeps you wanting. That in itself is a desire machine, because the incompleteness, the ambiguity, keeps you wanting that which you can't have.Now some of you probably think that affairs don't happen in open relationships, but they do. First of all, the conversation about monogamy is not the same as the conversation about infidelity. But the fact is that it seems that even when we have the freedom to have other sexual partners, we still seem to be lured by the power of the forbidden, that if we do that which we are not supposed to do, then we feel like we are really doing what we want to. And I've also told quite a few of my patients that if they could bring into their relationships one tenth of the boldness, the imagination and the verve that they put into their affairs, they probably would never need to see me. So how do we heal from an affair? Desire runs deep. Betrayal runs deep. But it can be healed. And some affairs are death knells for relationships that were already dying on the vine. But others will jolt us into new possibilities. The fact is, the majority of couples who have experienced affairs stay together. But some of them will merely survive, and others will actually be able to turn a crisis into an opportunity. They'll be able to turn this into a generative experience. And I'm actually thinking even more so for the deceived partner, who will often say, ""You think I didn't want more? But I'm not the one who did it."" But now that the affair is exposed, they, too, get to claim more, and they no longer have to uphold the status quo that may not have been working for them that well, either.I've noticed that a lot of couples, in the immediate aftermath of an affair, because of this new disorder that may actually lead to a new order, will have depths of conversations with honesty and openness that they haven't had in decades. And, partners who were sexually indifferent find themselves suddenly so lustfully voracious, they don't know where it's coming from. Something about the fear of loss will rekindle desire, and make way for an entirely new kind of truth.So when an affair is exposed, what are some of the specific things that couples can do? We know from trauma that healing begins when the perpetrator acknowledges their wrongdoing. So for the partner who had the affair, for Nick, one thing is to end the affair, but the other is the essential, important act of expressing guilt and remorse for hurting his wife. But the truth is that I have noticed that quite a lot of people who have affairs may feel terribly guilty for hurting their partner, but they don't feel guilty for the experience of the affair itself. And that distinction is important. And Nick, he needs to hold vigil for the relationship. He needs to become, for a while, the protector of the boundaries. It's his responsibility to bring it up, because if he thinks about it, he can relieve Heather from the obsession, and from having to make sure that the affair isn't forgotten, and that in itself begins to restore trust.But for Heather, or deceived partners, it is essential to do things that bring back a sense of self-worth, to surround oneself with love and with friends and activities that give back joy and meaning and identity. But even more important, is to curb the curiosity to mine for the sordid details — Where were you? Where did you do it? How often? Is she better than me in bed? — questions that only inflict more pain, and keep you awake at night. And instead, switch to what I call the investigative questions, the ones that mine the meaning and the motives — What did this affair mean for you? What were you able to express or experience there that you could no longer do with me? What was it like for you when you came home? What is it about us that you value? Are you pleased this is over?Every affair will redefine a relationship, and every couple will determine what the legacy of the affair will be. But affairs are here to stay, and they're not going away. And the dilemmas of love and desire, they don't yield just simple answers of black and white and good and bad, and victim and perpetrator. Betrayal in a relationship comes in many forms. There are many ways that we betray our partner: with contempt, with neglect, with indifference, with violence. Sexual betrayal is only one way to hurt a partner. In other words, the victim of an affair is not always the victim of the marriage.Now, you've listened to me, and I know what you're thinking: She has a French accent, she must be pro-affair. So, you're wrong. I am not French. And I'm not pro-affair. But because I think that good can come out of an affair, I have often been asked this very strange question: Would I ever recommend it? Now, I would no more recommend you have an affair than I would recommend you have cancer, and yet we know that people who have been ill often talk about how their illness has yielded them a new perspective. The main question that I've been asked since I arrived at this conference when I said I would talk about infidelity is, for or against? I said, ""Yes."" I look at affairs from a dual perspective: hurt and betrayal on one side, growth and self-discovery on the other — what it did to you, and what it meant for me. And so when a couple comes to me in the aftermath of an affair that has been revealed, I will often tell them this: Today in the West, most of us are going to have two or three relationships or marriages, and some of us are going to do it with the same person. Your first marriage is over. Would you like to create a second one together?Thank you.","Understanding Infidelity: Insights and Implications613 614 - Examining the concept of infidelity across different perspectives and its universal yet varied implications.615 - Historical context of infidelity and its evolution from a marriage-centered to a more individual-centric view.616 - The varying impacts of infidelity on relationships, highlighting both the possibility of ending and revitalizing partnerships.617 - Exploration of motives behind affairs, emphasizing emotional longing, desire for vitality, and search for a lost self.618 - Discussion on the modern complications of affairs, affected by digital advancements and societal views on relationships.619 - Strategies for healing and moving forward post-affair, focusing on honesty, communication, and redefining relationships.","You are a TED Story Creator, a storyteller, and an expert in crafting compelling transcripts for TED Talks. You possess a knowledge base of the world’s most inspiring TED talks. Given a title and an outline, your task is to create an engaging transcript that will captivate the audience. Adhere to the sequence of the outline and the bullet points to weave a captivating narrative."620"When I was first learning to meditate, the instruction was to simply pay attention to my breath, and when my mind wandered, to bring it back.Sounded simple enough. Yet I'd sit on these silent retreats, sweating through T-shirts in the middle of winter. I'd take naps every chance I got because it was really hard work. Actually, it was exhausting. The instruction was simple enough but I was missing something really important.So why is it so hard to pay attention? Well, studies show that even when we're really trying to pay attention to something — like maybe this talk — at some point, about half of us will drift off into a daydream, or have this urge to check our Twitter feed.So what's going on here? It turns out that we're fighting one of the most evolutionarily-conserved learning processes currently known in science, one that's conserved back to the most basic nervous systems known to man.This reward-based learning process is called positive and negative reinforcement, and basically goes like this. We see some food that looks good, our brain says, ""Calories! ... Survival!"" We eat the food, we taste it — it tastes good. And especially with sugar, our bodies send a signal to our brain that says, ""Remember what you're eating and where you found it."" We lay down this context-dependent memory and learn to repeat the process next time. See food, eat food, feel good, repeat. Trigger, behavior, reward.Simple, right? Well, after a while, our creative brains say, ""You know what? You can use this for more than just remembering where food is. You know, next time you feel bad, why don't you try eating something good so you'll feel better?"" We thank our brains for the great idea, try this and quickly learn that if we eat chocolate or ice cream when we're mad or sad, we feel better.Same process, just a different trigger. Instead of this hunger signal coming from our stomach, this emotional signal — feeling sad — triggers that urge to eat.Maybe in our teenage years, we were a nerd at school, and we see those rebel kids outside smoking and we think, ""Hey, I want to be cool."" So we start smoking. The Marlboro Man wasn't a dork, and that was no accident. See cool, smoke to be cool, feel good. Repeat. Trigger, behavior, reward. And each time we do this, we learn to repeat the process and it becomes a habit. So later, feeling stressed out triggers that urge to smoke a cigarette or to eat something sweet.Now, with these same brain processes, we've gone from learning to survive to literally killing ourselves with these habits. Obesity and smoking are among the leading preventable causes of morbidity and mortality in the world.So back to my breath. What if instead of fighting our brains, or trying to force ourselves to pay attention, we instead tapped into this natural, reward-based learning process ... but added a twist? What if instead we just got really curious about what was happening in our momentary experience?I'll give you an example. In my lab, we studied whether mindfulness training could help people quit smoking. Now, just like trying to force myself to pay attention to my breath, they could try to force themselves to quit smoking. And the majority of them had tried this before and failed — on average, six times.Now, with mindfulness training, we dropped the bit about forcing and instead focused on being curious. In fact, we even told them to smoke. What? Yeah, we said, ""Go ahead and smoke, just be really curious about what it's like when you do.""And what did they notice? Well here's an example from one of our smokers. She said, ""Mindful smoking: smells like stinky cheese and tastes like chemicals, YUCK!"" Now, she knew, cognitively that smoking was bad for her, that's why she joined our program. What she discovered just by being curiously aware when she smoked was that smoking tastes like shit.Now, she moved from knowledge to wisdom. She moved from knowing in her head that smoking was bad for her to knowing it in her bones, and the spell of smoking was broken. She started to become disenchanted with her behavior.Now, the prefrontal cortex, that youngest part of our brain from an evolutionary perspective, it understands on an intellectual level that we shouldn't smoke. And it tries its hardest to help us change our behavior, to help us stop smoking, to help us stop eating that second, that third, that fourth cookie. We call this cognitive control. We're using cognition to control our behavior. Unfortunately, this is also the first part of our brain that goes offline when we get stressed out, which isn't that helpful.Now, we can all relate to this in our own experience. We're much more likely to do things like yell at our spouse or kids when we're stressed out or tired, even though we know it's not going to be helpful. We just can't help ourselves.When the prefrontal cortex goes offline, we fall back into our old habits, which is why this disenchantment is so important. Seeing what we get from our habits helps us understand them at a deeper level — to know it in our bones so we don't have to force ourselves to hold back or restrain ourselves from behavior. We're just less interested in doing it in the first place.And this is what mindfulness is all about: Seeing really clearly what we get when we get caught up in our behaviors, becoming disenchanted on a visceral level and from this disenchanted stance, naturally letting go.This isn't to say that, poof, magically we quit smoking. But over time, as we learn to see more and more clearly the results of our actions, we let go of old habits and form new ones.The paradox here is that mindfulness is just about being really interested in getting close and personal with what's actually happening in our bodies and minds from moment to moment. This willingness to turn toward our experience rather than trying to make unpleasant cravings go away as quickly as possible. And this willingness to turn toward our experience is supported by curiosity, which is naturally rewarding.What does curiosity feel like? It feels good. And what happens when we get curious? We start to notice that cravings are simply made up of body sensations — oh, there's tightness, there's tension, there's restlessness — and that these body sensations come and go. These are bite-size pieces of experiences that we can manage from moment to moment rather than getting clobbered by this huge, scary craving that we choke on.In other words, when we get curious, we step out of our old, fear-based, reactive habit patterns, and we step into being. We become this inner scientist where we're eagerly awaiting that next data point.Now, this might sound too simplistic to affect behavior. But in one study, we found that mindfulness training was twice as good as gold standard therapy at helping people quit smoking. So it actually works.And when we studied the brains of experienced meditators, we found that parts of a neural network of self-referential processing called the default mode network were at play. Now, one current hypothesis is that a region of this network, called the posterior cingulate cortex, is activated not necessarily by craving itself but when we get caught up in it, when we get sucked in, and it takes us for a ride.In contrast, when we let go — step out of the process just by being curiously aware of what's happening — this same brain region quiets down.Now we're testing app and online-based mindfulness training programs that target these core mechanisms and, ironically, use the same technology that's driving us to distraction to help us step out of our unhealthy habit patterns of smoking, of stress eating and other addictive behaviors.Now, remember that bit about context-dependent memory? We can deliver these tools to peoples' fingertips in the contexts that matter most. So we can help them tap into their inherent capacity to be curiously aware right when that urge to smoke or stress eat or whatever arises.So if you don't smoke or stress eat, maybe the next time you feel this urge to check your email when you're bored, or you're trying to distract yourself from work, or maybe to compulsively respond to that text message when you're driving, see if you can tap into this natural capacity, just be curiously aware of what's happening in your body and mind in that moment. It will just be another chance to perpetuate one of our endless and exhaustive habit loops ... or step out of it.Instead of see text message, compulsively text back, feel a little bit better — notice the urge, get curious, feel the joy of letting go and repeat.Thank you.(Applause)","Harnessing Mindfulness to Break Unhealthy Habits621 622 - Mindfulness as a Powerful Tool to Break Habits623  - Introduction to the difficulty of paying attention and the reward-based learning process.624  - Connection between reward-based learning and forming habits such as smoking and stress eating.625  626 - Research Findings on Mindfulness627  - Introduction to mindfulness training and its success in helping people quit smoking.628  - Insights on the impact of mindfulness on brain activity, particularly in the default mode network.629  630 - Practical Application of Mindfulness631  - Step-by-step guide on how to be curiously aware during craving moments.632  - Encouragement to apply mindfulness in everyday scenarios to break out of habit loops.633  634 - Conclusion635  - Recap of the effectiveness of mindfulness and encouragement to practice mindful awareness.636  637 - Audience Appreciation638  - Thanking the audience and concluding the discussion.","You are a TED Story Creator, a storyteller, and an expert in crafting compelling transcripts for TED Talks. You possess a knowledge base of the world’s most inspiring TED talks. Given a title and an outline, your task is to create an engaging transcript that will captivate the audience. Adhere to the sequence of the outline and the bullet points to weave a captivating narrative."639"This is really a two-hour presentation I give to high school students, cut down to three minutes. And it all started one day on a plane, on my way to TED, seven years ago. And in the seat next to me was a high school student, a teenager, and she came from a really poor family. And she wanted to make something of her life, and she asked me a simple little question. She said, ""What leads to success?"" And I felt really badly, because I couldn't give her a good answer.So I get off the plane, and I come to TED. And I think, jeez, I'm in the middle of a room of successful people! So why don't I ask them what helped them succeed, and pass it on to kids? So here we are, seven years, 500 interviews later, and I'm going to tell you what really leads to success and makes TEDsters tick.And the first thing is passion. Freeman Thomas says, ""I'm driven by my passion."" TEDsters do it for love; they don't do it for money.Carol Coletta says, ""I would pay someone to do what I do."" And the interesting thing is: if you do it for love, the money comes anyway.Work! Rupert Murdoch said to me, ""It's all hard work. Nothing comes easily. But I have a lot of fun."" Did he say fun? Rupert? Yes!TEDsters do have fun working. And they work hard. I figured, they're not workaholics. They're workafrolics.Good!Alex Garden says, ""To be successful, put your nose down in something and get damn good at it."" There's no magic; it's practice, practice, practice.And it's focus. Norman Jewison said to me, ""I think it all has to do with focusing yourself on one thing.""And push! David Gallo says, ""Push yourself. Physically, mentally, you've got to push, push, push."" You've got to push through shyness and self-doubt.Goldie Hawn says, ""I always had self-doubts. I wasn't good enough; I wasn't smart enough. I didn't think I'd make it.""Now it's not always easy to push yourself, and that's why they invented mothers. Frank Gehry said to me, ""My mother pushed me.""Serve! Sherwin Nuland says, ""It was a privilege to serve as a doctor.""A lot of kids want to be millionaires. The first thing I say is: ""OK, well you can't serve yourself; you've got to serve others something of value. Because that's the way people really get rich.""Ideas! TEDster Bill Gates says, ""I had an idea: founding the first micro-computer software company."" I'd say it was a pretty good idea. And there's no magic to creativity in coming up with ideas — it's just doing some very simple things. And I give lots of evidence.Persist! Joe Kraus says, ""Persistence is the number one reason for our success."" You've got to persist through failure. You've got to persist through crap! Which of course means ""Criticism, Rejection, Assholes and Pressure.""So, the answer to this question is simple: Pay 4,000 bucks and come to TED.Or failing that, do the eight things — and trust me, these are the big eight things that lead to success.Thank you TEDsters for all your interviews!","Title: Key Elements to Achieve Success640 641 - Inspiration from a simple question:642  - Speaker motivated by a student's question about success.643 644 - Gathering insights:645  - Interviews with 500 successful people to identify common traits.646 647 - Core principles leading to success:648  - Passion: Pursue what you love and money will follow.649  - Work: Hard work is essential but can be enjoyable.650  - Focus: Concentrate on mastering one thing.651  - Push: Overcome shyness and self-doubt.652  - Serve: Success comes from serving others.653  - Ideas: Creativity comes from simple practices.654  - Persistence: Overcome criticism, rejection, and pressure.655 656 - Conclusion:657  - Success is achievable by following these eight principles.","You are a TED Story Creator, a storyteller, and an expert in crafting compelling transcripts for TED Talks. You possess a knowledge base of the world’s most inspiring TED talks. Given a title and an outline, your task is to create an engaging transcript that will captivate the audience. Adhere to the sequence of the outline and the bullet points to weave a captivating narrative."658"If I should have a daughter, instead of ""Mom,"" she's going to call me ""Point B,"" because that way she knows that no matter what happens, at least she can always find her way to me.And I'm going to paint solar systems on the backs of her hands so she has to learn the entire universe before she can say, ""Oh, I know that like the back of my hand.""And she's going to learn that this life will hit you hard in the face, wait for you to get back up just so it can kick you in the stomach. But getting the wind knocked out of you is the only way to remind your lungs how much they like the taste of air. There is hurt, here, that cannot be fixed by Band-Aids or poetry.So the first time she realizes that Wonder Woman isn't coming, I'll make sure she knows she doesn't have to wear the cape all by herself, because no matter how wide you stretch your fingers, your hands will always be too small to catch all the pain you want to heal. Believe me, I've tried. ""And, baby,"" I'll tell her, don't keep your nose up in the air like that. I know that trick; I've done it a million times. You're just smelling for smoke so you can follow the trail back to a burning house, so you can find the boy who lost everything in the fire to see if you can save him. Or else find the boy who lit the fire in the first place, to see if you can change him. But I know she will anyway, so instead I'll always keep an extra supply of chocolate and rain boots nearby, because there is no heartbreak that chocolate can't fix. Okay, there's a few that chocolate can't fix.But that's what the rain boots are for, because rain will wash away everything, if you let it. I want her to look at the world through the underside of a glass-bottom boat, to look through a microscope at the galaxies that exist on the pinpoint of a human mind, because that's the way my mom taught me. That there'll be days like this.(Singing) There'll be days like this, my momma said. When you open your hands to catch and wind up with only blisters and bruises; when you step out of the phone booth and try to fly and the very people you want to save are the ones standing on your cape; when your boots will fill with rain, and you'll be up to your knees in disappointment. And those are the very days you have all the more reason to say thank you.Because there's nothing more beautiful than the way the ocean refuses to stop kissing the shoreline, no matter how many times it's sent away. You will put the wind in win some, lose some. You will put the star in starting over, and over. And no matter how many land mines erupt in a minute, be sure your mind lands on the beauty of this funny place called life. And yes, on a scale from one to over-trusting, I am pretty damn naive. But I want her to know that this world is made out of sugar. It can crumble so easily, but don't be afraid to stick your tongue out and taste it.""Baby,"" I'll tell her, ""remember, your momma is a worrier, and your poppa is a warrior, and you are the girl with small hands and big eyes who never stops asking for more."" Remember that good things come in threes and so do bad things. Always apologize when you've done something wrong, but don't you ever apologize for the way your eyes refuse to stop shining. Your voice is small, but don't ever stop singing. And when they finally hand you heartache, when they slip war and hatred under your door and offer you handouts on street-corners of cynicism and defeat, you tell them that they really ought to meet your mother.Thank you. Thank you.Thank you.Thanks.Thank you.All right, so I want you to take a moment, and I want you to think of three things that you know to be true. They can be about whatever you want — technology, entertainment, design, your family, what you had for breakfast. The only rule is don't think too hard. Okay, ready? Go. Okay.So here are three things I know to be true. I know that Jean-Luc Godard was right when he said that, ""A good story has a beginning, a middle and an end, although not necessarily in that order."" I know that I'm incredibly nervous and excited to be up here, which is greatly inhibiting my ability to keep it cool.And I know that I have been waiting all week to tell this joke.Why was the scarecrow invited to TED? Because he was out standing in his field.I'm sorry. Okay, so these are three things I know to be true. But there are plenty of things I have trouble understanding. So I write poems to figure things out. Sometimes the only way I know how to work through something is by writing a poem. Sometimes I get to the end of the poem, look back and go, ""Oh, that's what this is all about,"" and sometimes I get to the end of the poem and haven't solved anything, but at least I have a new poem out of it.Spoken-word poetry is the art of performance poetry. I tell people it involves creating poetry that doesn't just want to sit on paper, that something about it demands it be heard out loud or witnessed in person.When I was a freshman in high school, I was a live wire of nervous hormones. And I was underdeveloped and over-excitable. And despite my fear of ever being looked at for too long, I was fascinated by the idea of spoken-word poetry. I felt that my two secret loves, poetry and theater, had come together, had a baby, a baby I needed to get to know. So I decided to give it a try. My first spoken-word poem, packed with all the wisdom of a 14-year-old, was about the injustice of being seen as unfeminine. The poem was very indignant, and mainly exaggerated, but the only spoken-word poetry that I had seen up until that point was mainly indignant, so I thought that's what was expected of me.The first time that I performed, the audience of teenagers hooted and hollered their sympathy, and when I came off the stage, I was shaking. I felt this tap on my shoulder, and I turned around to see this giant girl in a hoodie sweatshirt emerge from the crowd. She was maybe eight feet tall and looked like she could beat me up with one hand, but instead she just nodded at me and said, ""Hey, I really felt that. Thanks."" And lightning struck. I was hooked.I discovered this bar on Manhattan's Lower East Side that hosted a weekly poetry open Mic, and my bewildered, but supportive, parents took me to soak in every ounce of spoken word that I could. I was the youngest by at least a decade, but somehow the poets at the Bowery Poetry Club didn't seem bothered by the 14-year-old wandering about. In fact, they welcomed me.And it was here, listening to these poets share their stories, that I learned that spoken-word poetry didn't have to be indignant, it could be fun or painful or serious or silly. The Bowery Poetry Club became my classroom and my home, and the poets who performed encouraged me to share my stories as well. Never mind the fact that I was 14. They told me, ""Write about being 14."" So I did and stood amazed every week when these brilliant, grown-up poets laughed with me and groaned their sympathy and clapped and told me, ""Hey, I really felt that too.""Now I can divide my spoken-word journey into three steps. Step one was the moment I said, ""I can. I can do this."" And that was thanks to a girl in a hoodie. Step two was the moment I said, ""I will. I will continue. I love spoken word. I will keep coming back week after week."" And step three began when I realized I didn't have to write indignant poems, if that's not what I was. There were things that were specific to me, and the more that I focused on those things, the weirder my poetry got, but the more that it felt like mine. It's not just the adage ""Write what you know."" It's about gathering up all of the knowledge and experience you've collected up to now to help you dive into the things you don't know. I use poetry to help me work through what I don't understand, but I show up to each new poem with a backpack full of everywhere else that I've been.When I got to university, I met a fellow poet who shared my belief in the magic of spoken-word poetry. And actually, Phil Kaye and I coincidentally also share the same last name. When I was in high school I had created Project V.O.I.C.E. as a way to encourage my friends to do spoken word with me. But Phil and I decided to reinvent Project V.O.I.C.E., this time changing the mission to using spoken-word poetry as a way to entertain, educate and inspire. We stayed full-time students, but in between we traveled, performing and teaching nine-year-olds to MFA candidates, from California to Indiana to India to a public high school just up the street from campus.And we saw over and over the way that spoken-word poetry cracks open locks. But it turns out sometimes, poetry can be really scary. Turns out sometimes, you have to trick teenagers into writing poetry. So I came up with lists. Everyone can write lists. And the first list that I assign is ""10 Things I Know to be True."" And here's what happens, you would discover it too if we all started sharing our lists out loud. At a certain point, you would realize that someone has the exact same thing, or one thing very similar, to something on your list. And then someone else has something the complete opposite of yours. Third, someone has something you've never even heard of before. Fourth, someone has something you thought you knew everything about, but they're introducing a new angle of looking at it. And I tell people that this is where great stories start from — these four intersections of what you're passionate about and what others might be invested in.And most people respond really well to this exercise. But one of my students, a freshman named Charlotte, was not convinced. Charlotte was very good at writing lists, but she refused to write any poems. ""Miss,"" she'd say, ""I'm just not interesting. I don't have anything interesting to say."" So I assigned her list after list, and one day I assigned the list ""10 Things I Should Have Learned by Now."" Number three on Charlotte's list was, ""I should have learned not to crush on guys three times my age."" I asked her what that meant, and she said, ""Miss, it's kind of a long story."" And I said, ""Charlotte, it sounds pretty interesting to me."" And so she wrote her first poem, a love poem unlike any I had ever heard before. And the poem began, ""Anderson Cooper is a gorgeous man.""""Did you see him on 60 Minutes, racing Michael Phelps in a pool — nothing but swim trunks on — diving in the water, determined to beat this swimming champion? After the race, he tossed his wet, cloud-white hair and said, 'You're a god.' No, Anderson, you're the god.""Now, I know that the number one rule to being cool is to seem unfazed, to never admit that anything scares you or impresses you or excites you. Somebody once told me it's like walking through life like this. You protect yourself from all the unexpected miseries or hurt that might show up. But I try to walk through life like this. And yes, that means catching all of those miseries and hurt, but it also means that when beautiful, amazing things just fall out of the sky, I'm ready to catch them. I use spoken word to help my students rediscover wonder, to fight their instincts to be cool and unfazed and, instead, actively pursue being engaged with what goes on around them, so that they can reinterpret and create something from it.It's not that I think that spoken-word poetry is the ideal art form. I'm always trying to find the best way to tell each story. I write musicals; I make short films alongside my poems. But I teach spoken-word poetry because it's accessible. Not everyone can read music or owns a camera, but everyone can communicate in some way, and everyone has stories that the rest of us can learn from. Plus, spoken-word poetry allows for immediate connection. It's not uncommon to feel like you're alone or that nobody understands you, but spoken word teaches that if you have the ability to express yourself and the courage to present those stories and opinions, you could be rewarded with a room full of your peers, or your community, who will listen. And maybe even a giant girl in a hoodie who will connect with what you've shared. And that is an amazing realization to have, especially when you're 14. Plus, now with YouTube, that connection's not even limited to the room we're in. I'm so lucky that there's this archive of performances that I can share with my students. It allows for even more opportunities for them to find a poet or a poem that they connect to.Once you've figured this out, it is tempting to keep writing the same poem, or keep telling the same story, over and over, once you've figured out that it will gain you applause. It's not enough to just teach that you can express yourself. You have to grow and explore and take risks and challenge yourself. And that is step three: infusing the work you're doing with the specific things that make you you, even while those things are always changing. Because step three never ends. But you don't get to start on step three, until you take step one first: ""I can.""I travel a lot while I'm teaching, and I don't always get to watch all of my students reach their step three, but I was very lucky with Charlotte, that I got to watch her journey unfold the way it did. I watched her realize that, by putting the things that she knows to be true into the work she's doing, she can create poems that only Charlotte can write, about eyeballs and elevators and Dora the Explorer. And I'm trying to tell stories only I can tell — like this story. I spent a lot of time thinking about the best way to tell this story, and I wondered if the best way was going to be a PowerPoint, a short film — And where exactly was the beginning, the middle or the end? I wondered whether I'd get to the end of this talk and finally have figured it all out, or not.And I always thought that my beginning was at the Bowery Poetry Club, but it's possible that it was much earlier. In preparing for TED, I discovered this diary page in an old journal. I think December 54th was probably supposed to be 24th. It's clear that when I was a child, I definitely walked through life like this. I think that we all did. I would like to help others rediscover that wonder — to want to engage with it, to want to learn, to want to share what they've learned, what they've figured out to be true and what they're still figuring out.So I'd like to close with this poem.When they bombed Hiroshima, the explosion formed a mini-supernova, so every living animal, human or plant that received direct contact with the rays from that sun was instantly turned to ash. And what was left of the city soon followed. The long-lasting damage of nuclear radiation caused an entire city and its population to turn into powder. When I was born, my mom says I looked around the whole hospital room with a stare that said, ""This? I've done this before."" She says I have old eyes. When my Grandpa Genji died, I was only five years old, but I took my mom by the hand and told her, ""Don't worry, he'll come back as a baby."" And yet, for someone who's apparently done this already, I still haven't figured anything out yet. My knees still buckle every time I get on a stage. My self-confidence can be measured out in teaspoons mixed into my poetry, and it still always tastes funny in my mouth. But in Hiroshima, some people were wiped clean away, leaving only a wristwatch or a diary page. So no matter that I have inhibitions to fill all my pockets, I keep trying, hoping that one day I'll write a poem I can be proud to let sit in a museum exhibit as the only proof I existed. My parents named me Sarah, which is a biblical name. In the original story, God told Sarah she could do something impossible, and — she laughed, because the first Sarah, she didn't know what to do with impossible. And me? Well, neither do I, but I see the impossible every day. Impossible is trying to connect in this world, trying to hold onto others while things are blowing up around you, knowing that while you're speaking, they aren't just waiting for their turn to talk — they hear you. They feel exactly what you feel at the same time that you feel it. It's what I strive for every time I open my mouth — that impossible connection. There's this piece of wall in Hiroshima that was completely burnt black by the radiation. But on the front step, a person who was sitting there blocked the rays from hitting the stone. The only thing left now is a permanent shadow of positive light. After the A-bomb, specialists said it would take 75 years for the radiation-damaged soil of Hiroshima City to ever grow anything again. But that spring, there were new buds popping up from the earth. When I meet you, in that moment, I'm no longer a part of your future. I start quickly becoming part of your past. But in that instant, I get to share your present. And you, you get to share mine. And that is the greatest present of all. So if you tell me I can do the impossible — I'll probably laugh at you. I don't know if I can change the world yet, because I don't know that much about it — and I don't know that much about reincarnation either, but if you make me laugh hard enough, sometimes I forget what century I'm in. This isn't my first time here. This isn't my last time here. These aren't the last words I'll share. But just in case, I'm trying my hardest to get it right this time around.Thank you.Thank you.Thank you.Thank you.","Empowerment Through Spoken-Word Poetry659 660 - Poetry as a tool for self-expression and understanding personal and universal truths.661 - The inspiring, various impacts of spoken-word poetry witnessed through personal experiences and teaching others.662 - Growth, connection, and personal discovery fostered through engaging in and sharing spoken-word poetry.663 - The importance of resilience, embracing personal unique qualities, and the pursuit of meaningful connections with others through poetry and shared experiences.664 - Encouragement to face life openly and to perceive and create beauty and significance, even amidst challenges.","You are a TED Story Creator, a storyteller, and an expert in crafting compelling transcripts for TED Talks. You possess a knowledge base of the world’s most inspiring TED talks. Given a title and an outline, your task is to create an engaging transcript that will captivate the audience. Adhere to the sequence of the outline and the bullet points to weave a captivating narrative."665"About 10 years ago, I took on the task to teach global development to Swedish undergraduate students. That was after having spent about 20 years, together with African institutions, studying hunger in Africa. So I was sort of expected to know a little about the world. And I started, in our medical university, Karolinska Institute, an undergraduate course called Global Health. But when you get that opportunity, you get a little nervous. I thought, these students coming to us actually have the highest grade you can get in the Swedish college system, so I thought, maybe they know everything I'm going to teach them about. So I did a pretest when they came. And one of the questions from which I learned a lot was this one: ""Which country has the highest child mortality of these five pairs?""And I put them together so that in each pair of countries, one has twice the child mortality of the other. And this means that it's much bigger, the difference, than the uncertainty of the data. I won't put you at a test here, but it's Turkey, which is highest there, Poland, Russia, Pakistan and South Africa. And these were the results of the Swedish students. I did it so I got the confidence interval, which is pretty narrow. And I got happy, of course — a 1.8 right answer out of five possible. That means there was a place for a professor of international health and for my course.But one late night, when I was compiling the report, I really realized my discovery. I have shown that Swedish top students know, statistically, significantly less about the world than the chimpanzees.Because the chimpanzee would score half right if I gave them two bananas with Sri Lanka and Turkey. They would be right half of the cases. But the students are not there. The problem for me was not ignorance; it was preconceived ideas.I did also an unethical study of the professors of the Karolinska Institute, which hands out the Nobel Prize in Medicine, and they are on par with the chimpanzee there.This is where I realized that there was really a need to communicate, because the data of what's happening in the world and the child health of every country is very well aware.So we did this software, which displays it like this. Every bubble here is a country. This country over here is China. This is India. The size of the bubble is the population, and on this axis here, I put fertility rate. Because my students, what they said when they looked upon the world, and I asked them, ""What do you really think about the world?"" Well, I first discovered that the textbook was Tintin, mainly.And they said, ""The world is still 'we' and 'them.' And 'we' is the Western world and 'them' is the Third World."" ""And what do you mean with 'Western world?'"" I said. ""Well, that's long life and small family. And 'Third World' is short life and large family.""So this is what I could display here. I put fertility rate here — number of children per woman: one, two, three, four, up to about eight children per woman. We have very good data since 1962, 1960, about, on the size of families in all countries. The error margin is narrow. Here, I put life expectancy at birth, from 30 years in some countries, up to about 70 years. And in 1962, there was really a group of countries here that were industrialized countries, and they had small families and long lives. And these were the developing countries. They had large families and they had relatively short lives. Now, what has happened since 1962? We want to see the change. Are the students right? It's still two types of countries? Or have these developing countries got smaller families and they live here? Or have they got longer lives and live up there?Let's see. We start the world, eh? This is all UN statistics that have been available. Here we go. Can you see there? It's China there, moving against better health there, improving there. All the green Latin American countries are moving towards smaller families. Your yellow ones here are the Arabic countries, and they get longer life, but not larger families. The Africans are the green here. They still remain here. This is India; Indonesia is moving on pretty fast.In the '80s here, you have Bangladesh still among the African countries. But now, Bangladesh — it's a miracle that happens in the '80s — the imams start to promote family planning, and they move up into that corner. And in the '90s, we have the terrible HIV epidemic that takes down the life expectancy of the African countries. And the rest of them all move up into the corner, where we have long lives and small family, and we have a completely new world.(Applause ends)Let me make a comparison directly between the United States of America and Vietnam. 1964: America had small families and long life; Vietnam had large families and short lives. And this is what happens. The data during the war indicate that even with all the death, there was an improvement of life expectancy. By the end of the year, family planning started in Vietnam, and they went for smaller families. And the United States up there is getting longer life, keeping family size. And in the '80s now, they give up Communist planning and they go for market economy, and it moves faster even than social life. And today, we have in Vietnam the same life expectancy and the same family size here in Vietnam, 2003, as in United States, 1974, by the end of the war. I think we all, if we don't look at the data, we underestimate the tremendous change in Asia, which was in social change before we saw the economic change.So let's move over to another way here in which we could display the distribution in the world of income. This is the world distribution of income of people. One dollar, 10 dollars or 100 dollars per day. There's no gap between rich and poor any longer. This is a myth. There's a little hump here. But there are people all the way. And if we look where the income ends up, this is 100 percent of the world's annual income. And the richest 20 percent, they take out of that about 74 percent. And the poorest 20 percent, they take about two percent. And this shows that the concept of developing countries is extremely doubtful. We think about aid, like these people here giving aid to these people here. But in the middle, we have most of the world population, and they have now 24 percent of the income.We heard it in other forms. And who are these? Where are the different countries? I can show you Africa. This is Africa. Ten percent of the world population, most in poverty. This is OECD — the rich countries, the country club of the UN. And they are over here on this side. Quite an overlap between Africa and OECD. And this is Latin America. It has everything on this earth, from the poorest to the richest in Latin America. And on top of that, we can put East Europe, we can put East Asia, and we put South Asia.And what did it look like if we go back in time, to about 1970? Then, there was more of a hump. And most who lived in absolute poverty were Asians. The problem in the world was the poverty in Asia. And if I now let the world move forward, you will see that while population increases, there are hundreds of millions in Asia getting out of poverty, and some others getting into poverty, and this is the pattern we have today. And the best projection from the World Bank is that this will happen, and we will not have a divided world. We'll have most people in the middle.Of course it's a logarithmic scale here, but our concept of economy is growth with percent. We look upon it as a possibility of percentile increase. If I change this and take GDP per capita instead of family income, and I turn these individual data into regional data of gross domestic product, and I take the regions down here, the size of the bubble is still the population. And you have the OECD there, and you have sub-Saharan Africa there, and we take off the Arab states there, coming both from Africa and from Asia, and we put them separately, and we can expand this axis, and I can give it a new dimension here, by adding the social values there, child survival. Now I have money on that axis, and I have the possibility of children to survive there. In some countries, 99.7% of children survive to five years of age; others, only 70. And here, it seems, there is a gap between OECD, Latin America, East Europe, East Asia, Arab states, South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. The linearity is very strong between child survival and money.But let me split sub-Saharan Africa. Health is there and better health is up there. I can go here, and I can split sub-Saharan Africa into its countries. And when it bursts, the size of each country bubble is the size of the population. Sierra Leone down there, Mauritius is up there. Mauritius was the first country to get away with trade barriers, and they could sell their sugar, they could sell their textiles, on equal terms as the people in Europe and North America.There's a huge difference [within] Africa. And Ghana is here in the middle. In Sierra Leone, humanitarian aid. Here in Uganda, development aid. Here, time to invest; there, you can go for a holiday. There's tremendous variation within Africa, which we very often make that it's equal everything. I can split South Asia here. India's the big bubble in the middle. But there's a huge difference between Afghanistan and Sri Lanka. I can split Arab states. How are they? Same climate, same culture, same religion — huge difference. Even between neighbors — Yemen, civil war; United Arab Emirates, money, which was quite equally and well-used. Not as the myth is. And that includes all the children of the foreign workers who are in the country.Data is often better than you think. Many people say data is bad. There is an uncertainty margin, but we can see the difference here: Cambodia, Singapore. The differences are much bigger than the weakness of the data. East Europe: Soviet economy for a long time, but they come out after 10 years very, very differently. And there is Latin America. Today, we don't have to go to Cuba to find a healthy country in Latin America. Chile will have a lower child mortality than Cuba within some few years from now. Here, we have high-income countries in the OECD.And we get the whole pattern here of the world, which is more or less like this. And if we look at it, how the world looks, in 1960, it starts to move. This is Mao Zedong. He brought health to China. And then he died. And then Deng Xiaoping came and brought money to China, and brought them into the mainstream again. And we have seen how countries move in different directions like this, so it's sort of difficult to get an example country which shows the pattern of the world.But I would like to bring you back to about here, at 1960. I would like to compare South Korea, which is this one, with Brazil, which is this one. The label went away for me here. And I would like to compare Uganda, which is there. I can run it forward, like this. And you can see how South Korea is making a very, very fast advancement, whereas Brazil is much slower.And if we move back again, here, and we put trails on them, like this, you can see again that the speed of development is very, very different, and the countries are moving more or less at the same rate as money and health, but it seems you can move much faster if you are healthy first than if you are wealthy first. And to show that, you can put on the way of United Arab Emirates. They came from here, a mineral country. They cached all the oil; they got all the money; but health cannot be bought at the supermarket. You have to invest in health. You have to get kids into schooling. You have to train health staff. You have to educate the population. And Sheikh Zayed did that in a fairly good way. In spite of falling oil prices, he brought this country up here. So we've got a much more mainstream appearance of the world, where all countries tend to use their money better than they used it in the past.Now, this is, more or less, if you look at the average data of the countries — they are like this. That's dangerous, to use average data, because there is such a lot of difference within countries. So if I go and look here, we can see that Uganda today is where South Korea was in 1960. If I split Uganda, there's quite a difference within Uganda. These are the quintiles of Uganda. The richest 20 percent of Ugandans are there. The poorest are down there. If I split South Africa, it's like this. And if I go down and look at Niger, where there was such a terrible famine [recently], it's like this. The 20 percent poorest of Niger is out here, and the 20 percent richest of South Africa is there, and yet we tend to discuss what solutions there should be in Africa. Everything in this world exists in Africa. And you can't discuss universal access to HIV [treatment] for that quintile up here with the same strategy as down here. The improvement of the world must be highly contextualized, and it's not relevant to have it on a regional level. We must be much more detailed. We find that students get very excited when they can use this.And even more, policy makers and the corporate sectors would like to see how the world is changing. Now, why doesn't this take place? Why are we not using the data we have? We have data in the United Nations, in the national statistical agencies and in universities and other nongovernmental organizations. Because the data is hidden down in the databases. And the public is there, and the internet is there, but we have still not used it effectively.All that information we saw changing in the world does not include publicly funded statistics. There are some web pages like this, you know, but they take some nourishment down from the databases, but people put prices on them, stupid passwords and boring statistics.And this won't work.So what is needed? We have the databases. It's not a new database that you need. We have wonderful design tools and more and more are added up here. So we started a nonprofit venture linking data to design, we called ""Gapminder,"" from the London Underground, where they warn you, ""Mind the gap."" So we thought Gapminder was appropriate. And we started to write software which could link the data like this. And it wasn't that difficult. It took some person years, and we have produced animations. You can take a data set and put it there. We are liberating UN data, some few UN organization.Some countries accept that their databases can go out on the world. But what we really need is, of course, a search function, a search function where we can copy the data up to a searchable format and get it out in the world. And what do we hear when we go around? I've done anthropology on the main statistical units. Everyone says, ""It's impossible. This can't be done. Our information is so peculiar in detail, so that cannot be searched as others can be searched. We cannot give the data free to the students, free to the entrepreneurs of the world.""But this is what we would like to see, isn't it? The publicly funded data is down here. And we would like flowers to grow out on the net. One of the crucial points is to make them searchable, and then people can use the different design tools to animate it there. And I have pretty good news for you. I have good news that the [current], new head of UN statistics doesn't say it's impossible. He only says, ""We can't do it.""And that's a quite clever guy, huh?So we can see a lot happening in data in the coming years. We will be able to look at income distributions in completely new ways. This is the income distribution of China, 1970. This is the income distribution of the United States, 1970. Almost no overlap. Almost no overlap. And what has happened? What has happened is this: that China is growing, it's not so equal any longer, and it's appearing here, overlooking the United States, almost like a ghost, isn't it?It's pretty scary.But I think it's very important to have all this information. We need really to see it. And instead of looking at this, I would like to end up by showing the internet users per 1,000. In this software, we access about 500 variables from all the countries quite easily. It takes some time to change for this, but on the axes, you can quite easily get any variable you would like to have. And the thing would be to get up the databases free, to get them searchable, and with a second click, to get them into the graphic formats, where you can instantly understand them. Now, statisticians don't like it, because they say that this will not show the reality; we have to have statistical, analytical methods. But this is hypothesis-generating.I end now with the world. There, the internet is coming. The number of internet users are going up like this. This is the GDP per capita. And it's a new technology coming in, but then amazingly, how well it fits to the economy of the countries. That's why the $100 computer will be so important. But it's a nice tendency. It's as if the world is flattening off, isn't it? These countries are lifting more than the economy, and it will be very interesting to follow this over the year, as I would like you to be able to do with all the publicly funded data.Thank you very much.","Understanding Global Development Through Data666 667 - Introduction to teaching global health and the unexpected ignorance among Swedish students compared to theoretical chimpanzees.668 - Misconceptions about the world being divided into ""we"" and ""them,"" and the transformation of global health and family size trends over time based on reliable statistics.669 - Changing global income distribution, debunking the myth of a clear gap between rich and poor, and the need for nuanced understandings of regional and local contexts.670 - Challenges in making vast amounts of global data readily accessible, searchable, and understandable through innovative software solutions like Gapminder.671 - Exciting potential for public data to foster more informed policymaking and education by becoming freely available and visually interpretable online.672 - Encouraging future prospects for data availability and usage, including growth in internet usage correlating with economic status and technology's role in shaping global development insights.673 - Conclusion emphasizing the significance and impact of data accessibility and transparency on global understanding and policymaking.","You are a TED Story Creator, a storyteller, and an expert in crafting compelling transcripts for TED Talks. You possess a knowledge base of the world’s most inspiring TED talks. Given a title and an outline, your task is to create an engaging transcript that will captivate the audience. Adhere to the sequence of the outline and the bullet points to weave a captivating narrative."674"I'm going to talk to you about some stuff that's in this book of mine that I hope will resonate with other things you've already heard, and I'll try to make some connections myself, in case you miss them.But I want to start with what I call the ""official dogma."" The official dogma of what? The official dogma of all Western industrial societies. And the official dogma runs like this: if we are interested in maximizing the welfare of our citizens, the way to do that is to maximize individual freedom. The reason for this is both that freedom is, in and of itself, good, valuable, worthwhile, essential to being human, and because if people have freedom, then each of us can act on our own to do the things that will maximize our welfare, and no one has to decide on our behalf. The way to maximize freedom is to maximize choice.The more choice people have, the more freedom they have, and the more freedom they have, the more welfare they have. This, I think, is so deeply embedded in the water supply that it wouldn't occur to anyone to question it. And it's also deeply embedded in our lives. I'll give you some examples of what modern progress has made possible for us.This is my supermarket. Not such a big one. I want to say just a word about salad dressing. A hundred seventy-five salad dressings in my supermarket, if you don't count the 10 extra-virgin olive oils and 12 balsamic vinegars you could buy to make a very large number of your own salad dressings, in the off-chance that none of the 175 the store has on offer suit you. So this is what the supermarket is like. And then you go to the consumer electronics store to set up a stereo system — speakers, CD player, tape player, tuner, amplifier — and in this one single consumer electronics store, there are that many stereo systems. We can construct six and a half million different stereo systems out of the components that are on offer in one store.You've got to admit that's a lot of choice. In other domains — the world of communications. There was a time, when I was a boy, when you could get any kind of telephone service you wanted, as long as it came from Ma Bell. You rented your phone, you didn't buy it. One consequence of that, by the way, is that the phone never broke. And those days are gone. We now have an almost unlimited variety of phones, especially in the world of cell phones. These are cell phones of the future. My favorite is the middle one — the MP3 player, nose hair trimmer, and crème brûlée torch. And if —if by some chance you haven't seen that in your store yet, you can rest assured that one day soon, you will. And what this does is it leads people to walk into their stores, asking this question. And do you know what the answer to this question now is? The answer is ""no."" It is not possible to buy a cell phone that doesn't do too much.So, in other aspects of life that are much more significant than buying things, the same explosion of choice is true. Health care. It is no longer the case in the United States that you go to the doctor, and the doctor tells you what to do. Instead, you go to the doctor, and the doctor tells you, ""Well, we could do A, or we could do B. A has these benefits and these risks. B has these benefits and these risks. What do you want to do?"" And you say, ""Doc, what should I do?"" And the doc says, ""A has these benefits and risks, and B has these benefits and risks. What do you want to do?"" And you say, ""If you were me, Doc, what would you do?"" And the doc says, ""But I'm not you."" And the result is — we call it ""patient autonomy,"" which makes it sound like a good thing, but what it really is is a shifting of the burden and the responsibility for decision-making from somebody who knows something — namely, the doctor — to somebody who knows nothing and is almost certainly sick and thus, not in the best shape to be making decisions — namely, the patient. There's enormous marketing of prescription drugs to people like you and me, which, if you think about it, makes no sense at all, since we can't buy them. Why do they market to us if we can't buy them? The answer is that they expect us to call our doctors the next morning and ask for our prescriptions to be changed.Something as dramatic as our identity has now become a matter of choice, as this slide is meant to indicate. We don't inherit an identity; we get to invent it. And we get to reinvent ourselves as often as we like. And that means that every day, when you wake up in the morning, you have to decide what kind of person you want to be. With respect to marriage and family: there was a time when the default assumption that almost everyone had is that you got married as soon as you could, and then you started having kids as soon as you could. The only real choice was who, not when, and not what you did after.Nowadays, everything is very much up for grabs. I teach wonderfully intelligent students, and I assign 20 percent less work than I used to. And it's not because they're less smart, and it's not because they're less diligent. It's because they are preoccupied, asking themselves, ""Should I get married or not? Should I get married now? Should I get married later? Should I have kids first or a career first?"" All of these are consuming questions. And they're going to answer these questions, whether or not it means not doing all the work I assign and not getting a good grade in my courses. And indeed they should. These are important questions to answer.Work. We are blessed, as Carl was pointing out, with the technology that enables us to work every minute of every day from any place on the planet — except the Randolph Hotel.There is one corner, by the way, that I'm not going to tell anybody about, where the WiFi actually works. I'm not telling you about it, because I want to use it. So what this means, this incredible freedom of choice we have with respect to work, is that we have to make a decision, again and again and again, about whether we should or shouldn't be working. We can go to watch our kid play soccer, and we have our cell phone on one hip and our Blackberry on our other hip, and our laptop, presumably, on our laps. And even if they're all shut off, every minute that we're watching our kid mutilate a soccer game, we are also asking ourselves, ""Should I answer this cell phone call? Should I respond to this email? Should I draft this letter?"" And even if the answer to the question is ""no,"" it's certainly going to make the experience of your kid's soccer game very different than it would've been.So everywhere we look, big things and small things, material things and lifestyle things, life is a matter of choice. And the world we used to live in looked like this.[Well, actually, they are written in stone.] That is to say, there were some choices, but not everything was a matter of choice. The world we now live in looks like this.[The Ten Commandments Do-It-Yourself Kit]And the question is: Is this good news or bad news? And the answer is ""yes.""We all know what's good about it, so I'm going to talk about what's bad about it. All of this choice has two effects, two negative effects on people. One effect, paradoxically, is that it produces paralysis rather than liberation. With so many options to choose from, people find it very difficult to choose at all. I'll give you one very dramatic example of this, a study that was done of investments in voluntary retirement plans. A colleague of mine got access to investment records from Vanguard, the gigantic mutual fund company, of about a million employees and about 2,000 different workplaces. What she found is that for every 10 mutual funds the employer offered, rate of participation went down two percent. You offer 50 funds — 10 percent fewer employees participate than if you only offer five. Why? Because with 50 funds to choose from, it's so damn hard to decide which fund to choose, that you'll just put it off till tomorrow, and then tomorrow and then tomorrow and tomorrow, and, of course, tomorrow never comes. Understand that not only does this mean that people are going to have to eat dog food when they retire because they don't have enough money put away, it also means that making the decision is so hard that they pass up significant matching money from the employer. By not participating, they are passing up as much as 5,000 dollars a year from the employer, who would happily match their contribution.So paralysis is a consequence of having too many choices. And I think it makes the world look like this.[And lastly, for all eternity, French, bleu cheese or ranch?]You really want to get the decision right if it's for all eternity, right? You don't want to pick the wrong mutual fund or wrong salad dressing. So that's one effect. The second effect is that, even if we manage to overcome the paralysis and make a choice, we end up less satisfied with the result of the choice than we would be if we had fewer options to choose from. And there are several reasons for this. One of them is, with a lot of different salad dressings to choose from, if you buy one and it's not perfect — and what salad dressing is? — it's easy to imagine that you could've made a different choice that would've been better. And what happens is, this imagined alternative induces you to regret the decision you made, and this regret subtracts from the satisfaction you get out of the decision you made, even if it was a good decision. The more options there are, the easier it is to regret anything at all that is disappointing about the option that you chose.Second, what economists call ""opportunity costs."" Dan Gilbert made a big point this morning of talking about how much the way in which we value things depends on what we compare them to. Well, when there are lots of alternatives to consider, it's easy to imagine the attractive features of alternatives that you reject that make you less satisfied with the alternative that you've chosen. Here's an example.[I can't stop thinking about those other available parking spaces on W 85th Street]If you're not a New Yorker, I apologize. Here's what you're supposed to be thinking. Here's this couple on the Hamptons. Very expensive real estate. Gorgeous beach. Beautiful day. They have it all to themselves. What could be better? ""Damn it,"" this guy is thinking, ""It's August. Everybody in my Manhattan neighborhood is away. I could be parking right in front of my building."" And he spends two weeks nagged by the idea that he is missing the opportunity, day after day, to have a great parking space.Opportunity costs subtract from the satisfaction that we get out of what we choose, even when what we choose is terrific. And the more options there are to consider, the more attractive features of these options are going to be reflected by us as opportunity costs.Here's another example.Now, this cartoon makes a lot of points. It makes points about living in the moment as well, and probably about doing things slowly. But one point it makes is that whenever you're choosing one thing, you're choosing not to do other things, and those other things may have lots of attractive features, and it's going to make what you're doing less attractive.Third: escalation of expectations. This hit me when I went to replace my jeans. I wear jeans almost all the time. There was a time when jeans came in one flavor, and you bought them, and they fit like crap. They were incredibly uncomfortable, and if you wore them long enough and washed them enough times, they started to feel OK. I went to replace my jeans after years of wearing these old ones. I said, ""I want a pair of jeans. Here's my size."" And the shopkeeper said, ""Do you want slim fit, easy fit, relaxed fit? You want button fly or zipper fly? You want stonewashed or acid-washed? Do you want them distressed? Do you want boot cut, tapered?"" Blah, blah, blah on and on he went. My jaw dropped. And after I recovered, I said, ""I want the kind that used to be the only kind.""He had no idea what that was.So I spent an hour trying on all these damn jeans, and I walked out of the store — truth — with the best-fitting jeans I had ever had. I did better.All this choice made it possible for me to do better. But — I felt worse. Why? I wrote a whole book to try to explain this to myself. The reason is —The reason I felt worse is that with all of these options available, my expectations about how good a pair of jeans should be went up. I had very low, no particular expectations when they only came in one flavor. When they came in 100 flavors, damn it, one of them should've been perfect. And what I got was good, but it wasn't perfect. And so I compared what I got to what I expected, and what I got was disappointing in comparison to what I expected. Adding options to people's lives can't help but increase the expectations people have about how good those options will be. And what that's going to produce is less satisfaction with results, even when they're good results.[It all looks so great. I can't wait to be disappointed.]Nobody in the world of marketing knows this.Because if they did, you wouldn't all know what this was about. The truth is more like this.[Everything was better back when everything was worse.]The reason that everything was better back when everything was worse is that when everything was worse, it was actually possible for people to have experiences that were a pleasant surprise. Nowadays, the world we live in — we affluent, industrialized citizens, with perfection the expectation — the best you can ever hope for is that stuff is as good as you expect it to be. You will never be pleasantly surprised, because your expectations, my expectations, have gone through the roof. The secret to happiness — this is what you all came for — the secret to happiness is: low expectations.[You'll do]I want to say — just a little autobiographical moment — that I actually am married to a wife, and she's really quite wonderful. I couldn't have done better. I didn't settle. But settling isn't always such a bad thing.Finally, one consequence of buying a bad-fitting pair of jeans when there is only one kind to buy is that when you are dissatisfied and you ask why, who's responsible, the answer is clear: the world is responsible. What could you do? When there are hundreds of different styles of jeans available and you buy one that is disappointing and you ask why, who's responsible, it is equally clear that the answer to the question is ""you."" You could have done better. With a hundred different kinds of jeans on display, there is no excuse for failure. And so when people make decisions, and even though the results of the decisions are good, they feel disappointed about them; they blame themselves.Clinical depression has exploded in the industrial world in the last generation. I believe a significant — not the only, but a significant — contributor to this explosion of depression and also suicide, is that people have experiences that are disappointing because their standards are so high, and then when they have to explain these experiences to themselves, they think they're at fault. So the net result is that we do better in general, objectively, and we feel worse. So let me remind you: this is the official dogma, the one that we all take to be true, and it's all false. It is not true. There's no question that some choice is better than none. But it doesn't follow from that that more choice is better than some choice. There's some magical amount. I don't know what it is. I'm pretty confident that we have long since passed the point where options improve our welfare.Now, as a policy matter — I'm almost done — as a policy matter, the thing to think about is this: what enables all of this choice in industrial societies is material affluence. There are lots of places in the world, and we have heard about several of them, where their problem is not that they have too much choice. Their problem is they have too little. So the stuff I'm talking about is the peculiar problem of modern, affluent, Western societies. And what is so frustrating and infuriating is this: Steve Levitt talked to you yesterday about how these expensive and difficult-to-install child seats don't help. It's a waste of money. What I'm telling you is that these expensive, complicated choices — it's not simply that they don't help. They actually hurt. They actually make us worse off.If some of what enables people in our societies to make all of the choices we make were shifted to societies in which people have too few options, not only would those people's lives be improved, but ours would be improved also. This is what economists call a ""Pareto-improving move."" Income redistribution will make everyone better off, not just poor people, because of how all this excess choice plagues us. So to conclude.[You can be anything you want to be — no limits.] You're supposed to read this cartoon and, being a sophisticated person, say, ""Ah! What does this fish know? Nothing is possible in this fishbowl."" Impoverished imagination, a myopic view of the world — that's the way I read it at first. The more I thought about it, however, the more I came to the view that this fish knows something. Because the truth of the matter is, if you shatter the fishbowl so that everything is possible, you don't have freedom. You have paralysis. If you shatter this fishbowl so that everything is possible, you decrease satisfaction. You increase paralysis, and you decrease satisfaction.Everybody needs a fishbowl. This one is almost certainly too limited — perhaps even for the fish, certainly for us. But the absence of some metaphorical fishbowl is a recipe for misery and, I suspect, disaster.Thank you very much.","The Paradox of Choice: How More Options Lead to Less Satisfaction675 676 - Introduction of the ""official dogma"" of Western societies that equates more choice with more freedom and greater welfare.677 - Real-life examples demonstrating the overwhelming abundance of choices in goods, services, and life decisions.678 - Negative consequences of excessive choice: paralysis in decision-making and decreased satisfaction with choices made.679 - Explanation of why increased options lead to higher expectations and potential disappointment.680 - Societal and personal impacts: the link between vast choices and increased depression and dissatisfaction.681 - Proposal for a solution: redistributing resources to balance choice availability and enhance overall satisfaction.682 - Conclusion: the necessity of limitations for true freedom and satisfaction—metaphorically speaking, everyone needs a ""fishbowl.""","You are a TED Story Creator, a storyteller, and an expert in crafting compelling transcripts for TED Talks. You possess a knowledge base of the world’s most inspiring TED talks. Given a title and an outline, your task is to create an engaging transcript that will captivate the audience. Adhere to the sequence of the outline and the bullet points to weave a captivating narrative."683"When I was 14 years old, I had low self-esteem. I felt I was not talented at anything.One day, I bought a yo-yo. When I tried my first trick, it looked like this:I couldn't even do the simplest trick, but it was very natural for me, because I was not dextrous, and hated all sports. But after one week of practicing, my throws became more like this: A bit better. I thought, the yo-yo is something for me to be good at. For the first time in my life, I found my passion. I was spending all my time practicing. It took me hours and hours a day to build my skills up to the next level.And then, four years later, when I was 18 years old, I was standing onstage at the World YoYo Contest. And I won. I was so excited. ""Yes, I did it! I became a hero. I may get many sponsors, a lot of money, tons of interviews, and be on TV!"" I thought.But after coming back to Japan, totally nothing changed in my life.I realized society didn't value my passion. So I went back to my college and became a typical Japanese worker as a systems engineer. I felt my passion, heart and soul, had left my body. I felt I was not alive anymore.So I started to consider what I should do, and I thought, I wanted to make my performance better, and to show onstage how spectacular the yo-yo could be to change the public's image of the yo-yo.So I quit my company and started a career as a professional performer. I started to learn classic ballet, jazz dance, acrobatics and other things to make my performance better.As a result of these efforts, and the help of many others, it happened. I won the World YoYo Contest again in the artistic performance division. I passed an audition for Cirque Du Soleil. Today, I am standing on the TED stage with the yo-yo in front of you.What I learned from the yo-yo is, if I make enough effort with huge passion, there is no impossible.Could you let me share my passion with you through my performance?(Water sound)(Music)(Music ends)(Music)(Music ends)(Applause ends)(Music)","Title: Turning Passion into Triumph684 685 - Discovery of Passion:686  - Self-esteem issues lead to discovering yo-yo at age 14.687  - Continuous practice transformed initial failure into skilled performance.688 689 - Initial Success and Disillusionment:690  - Winning the World YoYo Contest at 18 did not lead to societal recognition or change in life.691 692 - Rekindling Passion and Pursuing Excellence:693  - Quit his job to enhance his yo-yo performance through dance and acrobatics.694  - Achieved further success in artistic performance and joined Cirque Du Soleil.695 696 - Final thoughts:697  - Demonstrates belief that relentless effort and passion can overcome obstacles.698  - Shares his passion through performance on the TED stage.","You are a TED Story Creator, a storyteller, and an expert in crafting compelling transcripts for TED Talks. You possess a knowledge base of the world’s most inspiring TED talks. Given a title and an outline, your task is to create an engaging transcript that will captivate the audience. Adhere to the sequence of the outline and the bullet points to weave a captivating narrative."699"Looking deeply inside nature, through the magnifying glass of science, designers extract principles, processes and materials that are forming the very basis of design methodology. From synthetic constructs that resemble biological materials, to computational methods that emulate neural processes, nature is driving design. Design is also driving nature. In realms of genetics, regenerative medicine and synthetic biology, designers are growing novel technologies, not foreseen or anticipated by nature.Bionics explores the interplay between biology and design. As you can see, my legs are bionic. Today, I will tell human stories of bionic integration; how electromechanics attached to the body, and implanted inside the body are beginning to bridge the gap between disability and ability, between human limitation and human potential.Bionics has defined my physicality. In 1982, both of my legs were amputated due to tissue damage from frostbite, incurred during a mountain-climbing accident. At that time, I didn't view my body as broken. I reasoned that a human being can never be ""broken."" Technology is broken. Technology is inadequate. This simple but powerful idea was a call to arms, to advance technology for the elimination of my own disability, and ultimately, the disability of others. I began by developing specialized limbs that allowed me to return to the vertical world of rock and ice climbing. I quickly realized that the artificial part of my body is malleable; able to take on any form, any function — a blank slate for which to create, perhaps, structures that could extend beyond biological capability. I made my height adjustable. I could be as short as five feet or as tall as I'd like.So when I was feeling bad about myself, insecure, I would jack my height up.But when I was feeling confident and suave, I would knock my height down a notch, just to give the competition a chance.Narrow-edged feet allowed me to climb steep rock fissures, where the human foot cannot penetrate, and spiked feet enabled me to climb vertical ice walls, without ever experiencing muscle leg fatigue. Through technological innovation, I returned to my sport, stronger and better. Technology had eliminated my disability, and allowed me a new climbing prowess. As a young man, I imagined a future world where technology so advanced could rid the world of disability, a world in which neural implants would allow the visually impaired to see. A world in which the paralyzed could walk, via body exoskeletons.Sadly, because of deficiencies in technology, disability is rampant in the world. This gentleman is missing three limbs. As a testimony to current technology, he is out of the wheelchair, but we need to do a better job in bionics, to allow, one day, full rehabilitation for a person with this level of injury. At the MIT Media Lab, we've established the Center for Extreme Bionics. The mission of the center is to put forth fundamental science and technological capability that will allow the biomechatronic and regenerative repair of humans, across a broad range of brain and body disabilities.Today, I'm going to tell you how my legs function, how they work, as a case in point for this center. Now, I made sure to shave my legs last night, because I knew I'd be showing them off.Bionics entails the engineering of extreme interfaces. There's three extreme interfaces in my bionic limbs: mechanical, how my limbs are attached to my biological body; dynamic, how they move like flesh and bone; and electrical, how they communicate with my nervous system.I'll begin with mechanical interface. In the area of design, we still do not understand how to attach devices to the body mechanically. It's extraordinary to me that in this day and age, one of the most mature, oldest technologies in the human timeline, the shoe, still gives us blisters. How can this be? We have no idea how to attach things to our bodies. This is the beautifully lyrical design work of Professor Neri Oxman at the MIT Media Lab, showing spatially varying exoskeletal impedances, shown here by color variation in this 3D-printed model. Imagine a future where clothing is stiff and soft where you need it, when you need it, for optimal support and flexibility, without ever causing discomfort.My bionic limbs are attached to my biological body via synthetic skins with stiffness variations, that mirror my underlying tissue biomechanics. To achieve that mirroring, we first developed a mathematical model of my biological limb. To that end, we used imaging tools such as MRI, to look inside my body, to figure out the geometries and locations of various tissues. We also took robotic tools — here's a 14-actuator circle that goes around the biological limb. The actuators come in, find the surface of the limb, measure its unloaded shape, and then they push on the tissues to measure tissue compliances at each anatomical point.We combine these imaging and robotic data to build a mathematical description of my biological limb, shown on the left. You see a bunch of points, or nodes? At each node, there's a color that represents tissue compliance. We then do a mathematical transformation to the design of the synthetic skin, shown on the right. And we've discovered optimality is: where the body is stiff, the synthetic skin should be soft, where the body is soft, the synthetic skin is stiff, and this mirroring occurs across all tissue compliances. With this framework, we've produced bionic limbs that are the most comfortable limbs I've ever worn. Clearly, in the future, our clothing, our shoes, our braces, our prostheses, will no longer be designed and manufactured using artisan strategies, but rather, data-driven quantitative frameworks. In that future, our shoes will no longer give us blisters.We're also embedding sensing and smart materials into the synthetic skins. This is a material developed by SRI International, California. Under electrostatic effect, it changes stiffness. So under zero voltage, the material is compliant, it's floppy like paper. Then the button's pushed, a voltage is applied, and it becomes stiff as a board.(Tapping sounds)We embed this material into the synthetic skin that attaches my bionic limb to my biological body. When I walk here, it's no voltage. My interface is soft and compliant. The button's pushed, voltage is applied, and it stiffens, offering me a greater maneuverability over the bionic limb.We're also building exoskeletons. This exoskeleton becomes stiff and soft in just the right areas of the running cycle, to protect the biological joints from high impacts and degradation. In the future, we'll all be wearing exoskeletons in common activities, such as running.Next, dynamic interface. How do my bionic limbs move like flesh and bone? At my MIT lab, we study how humans with normal physiologies stand, walk and run. What are the muscles doing, and how are they controlled by the spinal cord? This basic science motivates what we build. We're building bionic ankles, knees and hips. We're building body parts from the ground up. The bionic limbs that I'm wearing are called BiOMs. They've been fitted to nearly 1,000 patients, 400 of which have been wounded U.S. soldiers.How does it work?At heel strike, under computer control, the system controls stiffness, to attenuate the shock of the limb hitting the ground. Then at mid-stance, the bionic limb outputs high torques and powers to lift the person into the walking stride, comparable to how muscles work in the calf region. This bionic propulsion is very important clinically to patients. So on the left, you see the bionic device worn by a lady, on the right, a passive device worn by the same lady, that fails to emulate normal muscle function, enabling her to do something everyone should be able to do: go up and down their steps at home. Bionics also allows for extraordinary athletic feats. Here's a gentleman running up a rocky pathway. This is Steve Martin — not the comedian — who lost his legs in a bomb blast in Afghanistan.We're also building exoskeletal structures using these same principles, that wrap around the biological limb. This gentleman does not have any leg condition, any disability. He has a normal physiology, so these exoskeletons are applying muscle-like torques and powers, so that his own muscles need not apply those torques and powers. This is the first exoskeleton in history that actually augments human walking. It significantly reduces metabolic cost. It's so profound in its augmentation, that when a normal, healthy person wears the device for 40 minutes and then takes it off, their own biological legs feel ridiculously heavy and awkward. We're beginning the age in which machines attached to our bodies will make us stronger and faster and more efficient.Moving on to electrical interface: How do my bionic limbs communicate with my nervous system? Across my residual limb are electrodes that measure the electrical pulse of my muscles. That's communicated to the bionic limb, so when I think about moving my phantom limb, the robot tracks those movement desires. This diagram shows fundamentally how the bionic limb is controlled. So we model the missing biological limb, and we've discovered what reflexes occurred, how the reflexes of the spinal cord are controlling the muscles. And that capability is embedded in the chips of the bionic limb. What we've done, then, is we modulate the sensitivity of the reflex, the modeled spinal reflex, with the neural signal, so when I relax my muscles in my residual limb, I get very little torque and power, but the more I fire my muscles, the more torque I get, and I can even run. And that was the first demonstration of a running gait under neural command. Feels great.We want to go a step further. We want to actually close the loop between the human and the bionic external limb. We're doing experiments where we're growing nerves, transected nerves, through channels, or micro-channel arrays. On the other side of the channel, the nerve then attaches to cells, skin cells and muscle cells. In the motor channels, we can sense how the person wishes to move. That can be sent out wirelessly to the bionic limb, then [sensory information] on the bionic limb can be converted to stimulations in adjacent channels, sensory channels. So when this is fully developed and for human use, persons like myself will not only have synthetic limbs that move like flesh and bone, but actually feel like flesh and bone.This video shows Lisa Mallette, shortly after being fitted with two bionic limbs. Indeed, bionics is making a profound difference in people's lives.(Video) Lisa Mallette: Oh my God. LM: Oh my God, I can't believe it!(Video) LM: It's just like I've got a real leg!Woman: Now, don't start running.Man: Now turn around, and do the same thing walking up, but get on your heel to toe, like you would normally just walk on level ground. Try to walk right up the hill.LM: Oh my God.Man: Is it pushing you up?LM: Yes! I'm not even — I can't even describe it.Man: It's pushing you right up.Hugh Herr: Next week, I'm visiting the Center —Thank you. Thank you.Thank you.Next week I'm visiting the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and I'm going to try to convince CMS to grant appropriate code language and pricing, so this technology can be made available to the patients that need it.Thank you.It's not well appreciated, but over half of the world's population suffers from some form of cognitive, emotional, sensory or motor condition, and because of poor technology, too often, conditions result in disability and a poorer quality of life. Basic levels of physiological function should be a part of our human rights. Every person should have the right to live life without disability if they so choose — the right to live life without severe depression; the right to see a loved one, in the case of seeing-impaired; or the right to walk or to dance, in the case of limb paralysis or limb amputation. As a society, we can achieve these human rights, if we accept the proposition that humans are not disabled. A person can never be broken. Our built environment, our technologies, are broken and disabled. We the people need not accept our limitations, but can transcend disability through technological innovation. Indeed, through fundamental advances in bionics in this century, we will set the technological foundation for an enhanced human experience, and we will end disability.I'd like to finish up with one more story, a beautiful story. The story of Adrianne Haslet-Davis. Adrianne lost her left leg in the Boston terrorist attack. I met Adrianne when this photo was taken, at Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital. Adrianne is a dancer, a ballroom dancer.Adrianne breathes and lives dance. It is her expression. It is her art form. Naturally, when she lost her limb in the Boston terrorist attack, she wanted to return to the dance floor.After meeting her and driving home in my car, I thought, I'm an MIT professor. I have resources. Let's build her a bionic limb, to enable her to go back to her life of dance. I brought in MIT scientists with expertise in prosthetics, robotics, machine learning and biomechanics, and over a 200-day research period, we studied dance. We brought in dancers with biological limbs, and we studied how they move, what forces they apply on the dance floor, and we took those data, and we put forth fundamental principles of dance, reflexive dance capability, and we embedded that intelligence into the bionic limb. Bionics is not only about making people stronger and faster. Our expression, our humanity can be embedded into electromechanics.It was 3.5 seconds between the bomb blasts in the Boston terrorist attack. In 3.5 seconds, the criminals and cowards took Adrianne off the dance floor. In 200 days, we put her back. We will not be intimidated, brought down, diminished, conquered or stopped by acts of violence.Ladies and gentlemen, please allow me to introduce Adrianne Haslet-Davis, her first performance since the attack. She's dancing with Christian Lightner.(Music: ""Ring My Bell"" performed by Enrique Iglesias)Ladies and gentlemen, members of the research team: Elliott Rouse and Nathan Villagaray-Carski.Elliott and Nathan.","Title: The Impact of Bionics on Overcoming Disability and Enhancing Human Capabilities700 701 - Nature inspires innovative design solutions for bionics, blending biology and technology.702 - Personal story of overcoming disability highlights bionics as an enabler, not merely assistive technology.703 - Advancements in mechanical, dynamic, and electrical interfaces enhance limb functionality, comfort, and integration with human physiology.704 - Bionics not only restore but augment human abilities, transcending traditional limits of human performance.705 - Emphasizes human rights aspect of bionics, advocating for access to technologies that eliminate disability.706 - Inspiring case of Adrianne Haslet-Davis demonstrates the profound, personalized impacts of bionics.707 - Call to action for societal support and policy adaptations to expand accessibility of bionic technologies.","You are a TED Story Creator, a storyteller, and an expert in crafting compelling transcripts for TED Talks. You possess a knowledge base of the world’s most inspiring TED talks. Given a title and an outline, your task is to create an engaging transcript that will captivate the audience. Adhere to the sequence of the outline and the bullet points to weave a captivating narrative."708"I'm going to tell you a little bit about my TEDxHouston Talk. I woke up the morning after I gave that talk with the worst vulnerability hangover of my life. And I actually didn't leave my house for about three days.The first time I left was to meet a friend for lunch. And when I walked in, she was already at the table. I sat down, and she said, ""God, you look like hell."" I said, ""Thanks. I feel really — I'm not functioning."" And she said, ""What's going on?"" And I said, ""I just told 500 people that I became a researcher to avoid vulnerability. And that when being vulnerable emerged from my data, as absolutely essential to whole-hearted living, I told these 500 people that I had a breakdown. I had a slide that said 'Breakdown.' At what point did I think that was a good idea?""And she said, ""I saw your talk live-streamed. It was not really you. It was a little different than what you usually do. But it was great."" And I said, ""This can't happen. YouTube, they're putting this thing on YouTube. And we're going to be talking about 600, 700 people.""And she said, ""Well, I think it's too late.""And I said, ""Let me ask you something."" And she said, ""Yeah."" I said, ""Do you remember when we were in college, really wild and kind of dumb?"" She said, ""Yeah."" I said, ""Remember when we'd leave a really bad message on our ex-boyfriend's answering machine? Then we'd have to break into his dorm room and then erase the tape?""And she goes, ""Uh... no.""Of course, the only thing I could say at that point was, ""Yeah, me neither. Yeah — me neither.""And I'm thinking to myself, ""Brené, what are you doing? Why did you bring this up? Have you lost your mind? Your sisters would be perfect for this.""So I looked back up and she said, ""Are you really going to try to break in and steal the video before they put it on YouTube?""And I said, ""I'm just thinking about it a little bit.""She said, ""You're like the worst vulnerability role model ever.""Then I looked at her and I said something that at the time felt a little dramatic, but ended up being more prophetic than dramatic. ""If 500 turns into 1,000 or 2,000, my life is over.""I had no contingency plan for four million.And my life did end when that happened. And maybe the hardest part about my life ending is that I learned something hard about myself, and that was that, as much as I would be frustrated about not being able to get my work out to the world, there was a part of me that was working very hard to engineer staying small, staying right under the radar. But I want to talk about what I've learned.There's two things that I've learned in the last year. The first is: vulnerability is not weakness. And that myth is profoundly dangerous. Let me ask you honestly — and I'll give you this warning, I'm trained as a therapist, so I can out-wait you uncomfortably — so if you could just raise your hand that would be awesome — how many of you honestly, when you're thinking about doing or saying something vulnerable think, ""God, vulnerability is weakness."" How many of you think of vulnerability and weakness synonymously? The majority of people. Now let me ask you this question: This past week at TED, how many of you, when you saw vulnerability up here, thought it was pure courage? Vulnerability is not weakness. I define vulnerability as emotional risk, exposure, uncertainty. It fuels our daily lives. And I've come to the belief — this is my 12th year doing this research — that vulnerability is our most accurate measurement of courage — to be vulnerable, to let ourselves be seen, to be honest.One of the weird things that's happened is, after the TED explosion, I got a lot of offers to speak all over the country — everyone from schools and parent meetings to Fortune 500 companies. And so many of the calls went like this, ""Dr. Brown, we loved your TED talk. We'd like you to come in and speak. We'd appreciate it if you wouldn't mention vulnerability or shame.""What would you like for me to talk about? There's three big answers. This is mostly, to be honest with you, from the business sector: innovation, creativity and change.So let me go on the record and say, vulnerability is the birthplace of innovation, creativity and change.To create is to make something that has never existed before. There's nothing more vulnerable than that. Adaptability to change is all about vulnerability.The second thing, in addition to really finally understanding the relationship between vulnerability and courage, the second thing I learned, is this: We have to talk about shame. And I'm going to be really honest with you. When I became a ""vulnerability researcher"" and that became the focus because of the TED talk — and I'm not kidding.I'll give you an example. About three months ago, I was in a sporting goods store buying goggles and shin guards and all the things that parents buy at the sporting goods store. About from a hundred feet away, this is what I hear: ""Vulnerability TED! Vulnerability TED!""(Laughter ends)I'm a fifth-generation Texan. Our family motto is ""Lock and load."" I am not a natural vulnerability researcher. So I'm like, just keep walking, she's on my six.And then I hear, ""Vulnerability TED!"" I turn around, I go, ""Hi."" She's right here and she said, ""You're the shame researcher who had the breakdown.""At this point, parents are, like, pulling their children close.""Look away."" And I'm so worn out at this point in my life, I look at her and I actually say, ""It was a fricking spiritual awakening.""And she looks back and does this, ""I know.""And she said, ""We watched your TED talk in my book club. Then we read your book and we renamed ourselves 'The Breakdown Babes.'""And she said, ""Our tagline is: 'We're falling apart and it feels fantastic.'""You can only imagine what it's like for me in a faculty meeting.(Sighs)So when I became Vulnerability TED, like an action figure — Like Ninja Barbie, but I'm Vulnerability TED — I thought, I'm going to leave that shame stuff behind, because I spent six years studying shame before I started writing and talking about vulnerability. And I thought, thank God, because shame is this horrible topic, no one wants to talk about it. It's the best way to shut people down on an airplane. ""What do you do?"" ""I study shame."" ""Oh.""And I see you.But in surviving this last year, I was reminded of a cardinal rule — not a research rule, but a moral imperative from my upbringing — ""you've got to dance with the one who brung ya"". And I did not learn about vulnerability and courage and creativity and innovation from studying vulnerability. I learned about these things from studying shame. And so I want to walk you in to shame. Jungian analysts call shame the swampland of the soul. And we're going to walk in. And the purpose is not to walk in and construct a home and live there. It is to put on some galoshes — and walk through and find our way around. Here's why.We heard the most compelling call ever to have a conversation in this country, and I think globally, around race, right? Yes? We heard that. Yes? Cannot have that conversation without shame. Because you cannot talk about race without talking about privilege. And when people start talking about privilege, they get paralyzed by shame. We heard a brilliant simple solution to not killing people in surgery, which is, have a checklist. You can't fix that problem without addressing shame, because when they teach those folks how to suture, they also teach them how to stitch their self-worth to being all-powerful. And all-powerful folks don't need checklists.And I had to write down the name of this TED Fellow so I didn't mess it up here. Myshkin Ingawale, I hope I did right by you.I saw the TED Fellows my first day here. And he got up and he explained how he was driven to create some technology to help test for anemia, because people were dying unnecessarily. And he said, ""I saw this need. So you know what I did? I made it."" And everybody just burst into applause, and they were like ""Yes!"" And he said, ""And it didn't work.And then I made it 32 more times, and then it worked.""You know what the big secret about TED is? I can't wait to tell people this. I guess I'm doing it right now.This is like the failure conference.No, it is.You know why this place is amazing? Because very few people here are afraid to fail. And no one who gets on the stage, so far that I've seen, has not failed. I've failed miserably, many times. I don't think the world understands that, because of shame.There's a great quote that saved me this past year by Theodore Roosevelt. A lot of people refer to it as the ""Man in the Arena"" quote. And it goes like this: ""It is not the critic who counts. It is not the man who sits and points out how the doer of deeds could have done things better and how he falls and stumbles. The credit goes to the man in the arena whose face is marred with dust and blood and sweat. But when he's in the arena, at best, he wins, and at worst, he loses, but when he fails, when he loses, he does so daring greatly.""And that's what this conference, to me, is about. Life is about daring greatly, about being in the arena. When you walk up to that arena and you put your hand on the door, and you think, ""I'm going in and I'm going to try this,"" shame is the gremlin who says, ""Uh, uh. You're not good enough. You never finished that MBA. Your wife left you. I know your dad really wasn't in Luxembourg, he was in Sing Sing. I know those things that happened to you growing up. I know you don't think that you're pretty, smart, talented or powerful enough. I know your dad never paid attention, even when you made CFO."" Shame is that thing.And if we can quiet it down and walk in and say, ""I'm going to do this,"" we look up and the critic that we see pointing and laughing, 99 percent of the time is who? Us. Shame drives two big tapes — ""never good enough"" — and, if you can talk it out of that one, ""who do you think you are?"" The thing to understand about shame is, it's not guilt. Shame is a focus on self, guilt is a focus on behavior. Shame is ""I am bad."" Guilt is ""I did something bad."" How many of you, if you did something that was hurtful to me, would be willing to say, ""I'm sorry. I made a mistake?"" How many of you would be willing to say that? Guilt: I'm sorry. I made a mistake. Shame: I'm sorry. I am a mistake.There's a huge difference between shame and guilt. And here's what you need to know. Shame is highly, highly correlated with addiction, depression, violence, aggression, bullying, suicide, eating disorders. And here's what you even need to know more. Guilt, inversely correlated with those things. The ability to hold something we've done or failed to do up against who we want to be is incredibly adaptive. It's uncomfortable, but it's adaptive.The other thing you need to know about shame is it's absolutely organized by gender. If shame washes over me and washes over Chris, it's going to feel the same. Everyone sitting in here knows the warm wash of shame. We're pretty sure that the only people who don't experience shame are people who have no capacity for connection or empathy. Which means, yes, I have a little shame; no, I'm a sociopath. So I would opt for, yes, you have a little shame. Shame feels the same for men and women, but it's organized by gender.For women, the best example I can give you is Enjoli, the commercial. ""I can put the wash on the line, pack the lunches, hand out the kisses and be at work at five to nine. I can bring home the bacon, fry it up in the pan and never let you forget you're a man."" For women, shame is, do it all, do it perfectly and never let them see you sweat. I don't know how much perfume that commercial sold, but I guarantee you, it moved a lot of antidepressants and anti-anxiety meds.Shame, for women, is this web of unobtainable, conflicting, competing expectations about who we're supposed to be. And it's a straight-jacket.For men, shame is not a bunch of competing, conflicting expectations. Shame is one, do not be perceived as what? Weak. I did not interview men for the first four years of my study. It wasn't until a man looked at me after a book signing, and said, ""I love what say about shame, I'm curious why you didn't mention men."" And I said, ""I don't study men."" And he said, ""That's convenient.""And I said, ""Why?"" And he said, ""Because you say to reach out, tell our story, be vulnerable. But you see those books you just signed for my wife and my three daughters?"" I said, ""Yeah."" ""They'd rather me die on top of my white horse than watch me fall down. When we reach out and be vulnerable, we get the shit beat out of us. And don't tell me it's from the guys and the coaches and the dads. Because the women in my life are harder on me than anyone else.""So I started interviewing men and asking questions. And what I learned is this: You show me a woman who can actually sit with a man in real vulnerability and fear, I'll show you a woman who's done incredible work. You show me a man who can sit with a woman who's just had it, she can't do it all anymore, and his first response is not, ""I unloaded the dishwasher!""But he really listens — because that's all we need — I'll show you a guy who's done a lot of work.Shame is an epidemic in our culture. And to get out from underneath it — to find our way back to each other, we have to understand how it affects us and how it affects the way we're parenting, the way we're working, the way we're looking at each other. Very quickly, some research by Mahalik at Boston College. He asked, what do women need to do to conform to female norms? The top answers in this country: nice, thin, modest and use all available resources for appearance.When he asked about men, what do men in this country need to do to conform with male norms, the answers were: always show emotional control, work is first, pursue status and violence.If we're going to find our way back to each other, we have to understand and know empathy, because empathy's the antidote to shame. If you put shame in a Petri dish, it needs three things to grow exponentially: secrecy, silence and judgment. If you put the same amount in a Petri dish and douse it with empathy, it can't survive. The two most powerful words when we're in struggle: me too.And so I'll leave you with this thought. If we're going to find our way back to each other, vulnerability is going to be that path. And I know it's seductive to stand outside the arena, because I think I did it my whole life, and think to myself, I'm going to go in there and kick some ass when I'm bulletproof and when I'm perfect. And that is seductive. But the truth is, that never happens. And even if you got as perfect as you could and as bulletproof as you could possibly muster when you got in there, that's not what we want to see. We want you to go in. We want to be with you and across from you. And we just want, for ourselves and the people we care about and the people we work with, to dare greatly.So thank you all very much. I really appreciate it.","Title: Embracing Vulnerability and Overcoming Shame709 710 - Vulnerability is essential for whole-hearted living.711 - The misconception of vulnerability as weakness is dangerous.712 - Real courage and strength lie in embracing vulnerability, the birthplace of innovation, creativity, and change.713 - Shame, along with the taboos and fear surrounding it, must be addressed to foster genuine connections and societal progress.714 - Gender plays a significant role in how we experience and respond to shame.715 - Empathy is the key to battling shame and promoting understanding.716 - True connection and resilience require vulnerability and mutual support within communities and relationships.","You are a TED Story Creator, a storyteller, and an expert in crafting compelling transcripts for TED Talks. You possess a knowledge base of the world’s most inspiring TED talks. Given a title and an outline, your task is to create an engaging transcript that will captivate the audience. Adhere to the sequence of the outline and the bullet points to weave a captivating narrative."717"Probably a lot of you know the story of the two salesmen who went down to Africa in the 1900s. They were sent down to find if there was any opportunity for selling shoes, and they wrote telegrams back to Manchester. And one of them wrote, ""Situation hopeless. Stop. They don't wear shoes."" And the other one wrote, ""Glorious opportunity. They don't have any shoes yet.""Now, there's a similar situation in the classical music world, because there are some people who think that classical music is dying. And there are some of us who think you ain't seen nothing yet. And rather than go into statistics and trends, and tell you about all the orchestras that are closing, and the record companies that are folding, I thought we should do an experiment tonight. Actually, it's not really an experiment, because I know the outcome.But it's like an experiment. Now, before we start —Before we start, I need to do two things. One is I want to remind you of what a seven-year-old child sounds like when he plays the piano. Maybe you have this child at home. He sounds something like this.(Music)(Music ends)I see some of you recognize this child. Now, if he practices for a year and takes lessons, he's now eight and he sounds like this.(Music)(Music ends)He practices for another year and takes lessons — he's nine.(Music)(Music ends)Then he practices for another year and takes lessons — now he's 10.(Music)(Music ends)At that point, they usually give up.Now, if you'd waited for one more year, you would have heard this.(Music)(Music ends)Now, what happened was not maybe what you thought, which is, he suddenly became passionate, engaged, involved, got a new teacher, he hit puberty, or whatever it is. What actually happened was the impulses were reduced. You see, the first time, he was playing with an impulse on every note.(Music)And the second, with an impulse every other note.(Music)You can see it by looking at my head.The nine-year-old put an impulse on every four notes.(Music)The 10-year-old, on every eight notes.(Music)And the 11-year-old, one impulse on the whole phrase.(Music)I don't know how we got into this position.I didn't say, ""I'm going to move my shoulder over, move my body."" No, the music pushed me over, which is why I call it one-buttock playing.(Music)It can be the other buttock.(Music)You know, a gentleman was once watching a presentation I was doing, when I was working with a young pianist. He was the president of a corporation in Ohio. I was working with this young pianist, and said, ""The trouble with you is you're a two-buttock player. You should be a one-buttock player."" I moved his body while he was playing. And suddenly, the music took off. It took flight. The audience gasped when they heard the difference. Then I got a letter from this gentleman. He said, ""I was so moved. I went back and I transformed my entire company into a one-buttock company.""Now, the other thing I wanted to do is to tell you about you. There are 1,600 people, I believe. My estimation is that probably 45 of you are absolutely passionate about classical music. You adore classical music. Your FM is always on that classical dial. You have CDs in your car, and you go to the symphony, your children are playing instruments. You can't imagine your life without classical music. That's the first group, quite small. Then there's another bigger group. The people who don't mind classical music.You know, you've come home from a long day, and you take a glass of wine, and you put your feet up. A little Vivaldi in the background doesn't do any harm. That's the second group. Now comes the third group: people who never listen to classical music. It's just simply not part of your life. You might hear it like second-hand smoke at the airport ...— and maybe a little bit of a march from ""Aida"" when you come into the hall. But otherwise, you never hear it. That's probably the largest group.And then there's a very small group. These are the people who think they're tone-deaf. Amazing number of people think they're tone-deaf. Actually, I hear a lot, ""My husband is tone-deaf.""Actually, you cannot be tone-deaf. Nobody is tone-deaf. If you were tone-deaf, you couldn't change the gears on your car, in a stick shift car. You couldn't tell the difference between somebody from Texas and somebody from Rome. And the telephone. The telephone. If your mother calls on the miserable telephone, she calls and says, ""Hello,"" you not only know who it is, you know what mood she's in. You have a fantastic ear. Everybody has a fantastic ear. So nobody is tone-deaf.But I tell you what. It doesn't work for me to go on with this thing, with such a wide gulf between those who understand, love and are passionate about classical music, and those who have no relationship to it at all. The tone-deaf people, they're no longer here. But even between those three categories, it's too wide a gulf. So I'm not going to go on until every single person in this room, downstairs and in Aspen, and everybody else looking, will come to love and understand classical music. So that's what we're going to do.Now, you notice that there is not the slightest doubt in my mind that this is going to work, if you look at my face, right? It's one of the characteristics of a leader that he not doubt for one moment the capacity of the people he's leading to realize whatever he's dreaming. Imagine if Martin Luther King had said, ""I have a dream. Of course, I'm not sure they'll be up to it.""All right. So I'm going to take a piece of Chopin. This is a beautiful prelude by Chopin. Some of you will know it.(Music)Do you know what I think probably happened here? When I started, you thought, ""How beautiful that sounds.""(Music)""I don't think we should go to the same place for our summer holidays next year.""It's funny, isn't it? It's funny how those thoughts kind of waft into your head. And of course —Of course, if the piece is long and you've had a long day, you might actually drift off. Then your companion will dig you in the ribs and say, ""Wake up! It's culture!"" And then you feel even worse.But has it ever occurred to you that the reason you feel sleepy in classical music is not because of you, but because of us? Did anybody think while I was playing, ""Why is he using so many impulses?"" If I'd done this with my head you certainly would have thought it.(Music)(Music ends)And for the rest of your life, every time you hear classical music, you'll always be able to know if you hear those impulses.So let's see what's really going on here. We have a B. This is a B. The next note is a C. And the job of the C is to make the B sad. And it does, doesn't it?Composers know that. If they want sad music, they just play those two notes.(Music)But basically, it's just a B, with four sads.Now, it goes down to A. Now to G. And then to F. So we have B, A, G, F. And if we have B, A, G, F, what do we expect next?(Music)That might have been a fluke. Let's try it again.(Music)Oh, the TED choir.And you notice nobody is tone-deaf, right? Nobody is. You know, every village in Bangladesh and every hamlet in China — everybody knows: da, da, da, da — da. Everybody knows, who's expecting that E.Chopin didn't want to reach the E there, because what will have happened? It will be over, like Hamlet. Do you remember? Act One, scene three, he finds out his uncle killed his father. He keeps on going up to his uncle and almost killing him. And then he backs away, he goes up to him again, almost kills him. The critics sitting in the back row there, they have to have an opinion, so they say, ""Hamlet is a procrastinator."" Or they say, ""Hamlet has an Oedipus complex."" No, otherwise the play would be over, stupid.That's why Shakespeare puts all that stuff in Hamlet — Ophelia going mad, the play within the play, and Yorick's skull, and the gravediggers. That's in order to delay — until Act Five, he can kill him.It's the same with the Chopin. He's just about to reach the E, and he says, ""Oops, better go back up and do it again."" So he does it again. Now, he gets excited.(Music)That's excitement, don't worry about it. Now, he gets to F-sharp, and finally he goes down to E, but it's the wrong chord — because the chord he's looking for is this one, and instead he does ... Now, we call that a deceptive cadence, because it deceives us. I tell my students, ""If you have a deceptive cadence, raise your eyebrows, and everybody will know.""Right. He gets to E, but it's the wrong chord. Now, he tries E again. That chord doesn't work. Now, he tries the E again. That chord doesn't work. Now, he tries E again, and that doesn't work. And then finally ... There was a gentleman in the front row who went, ""Mmm.""It's the same gesture he makes when he comes home after a long day, turns off the key in his car and says, ""Aah, I'm home."" Because we all know where home is.So this is a piece which goes from away to home. I'm going to play it all the way through and you're going to follow. B, C, B, C, B, C, B — down to A, down to G, down to F. Almost goes to E, but otherwise the play would be over. He goes back up to B, he gets very excited. Goes to F-sharp. Goes to E. It's the wrong chord. It's the wrong chord. And finally goes to E, and it's home. And what you're going to see is one-buttock playing.Because for me, to join the B to the E, I have to stop thinking about every single note along the way, and start thinking about the long, long line from B to E.You know, we were just in South Africa, and you can't go to South Africa without thinking of Mandela in jail for 27 years. What was he thinking about? Lunch? No, he was thinking about the vision for South Africa and for human beings. This is about vision. This is about the long line. Like the bird who flies over the field and doesn't care about the fences underneath, all right? So now, you're going to follow the line all the way from B to E. And I've one last request before I play this piece all the way through. Would you think of somebody who you adore, who's no longer there? A beloved grandmother, a lover — somebody in your life who you love with all your heart, but that person is no longer with you. Bring that person into your mind, and at the same time, follow the line all the way from B to E, and you'll hear everything that Chopin had to say.(Music)(Music ends)Now, you may be wondering —(Applause ends)You may be wondering why I'm clapping. Well, I did this at a school in Boston with about 70 seventh graders, 12-year-olds. I did exactly what I did with you, and I explained the whole thing. At the end, they went crazy, clapping. I was clapping. They were clapping. Finally, I said, ""Why am I clapping?"" And one of them said, ""Because we were listening.""Think of it. 1,600 people, busy people, involved in all sorts of different things, listening, understanding and being moved by a piece by Chopin. Now, that is something. Am I sure that every single person followed that, understood it, was moved by it? Of course, I can't be sure.But I'll tell you what happened to me in Ireland during the Troubles, 10 years ago, and I was working with some Catholic and Protestant kids on conflict resolution. And I did this with them — a risky thing to do, because they were street kids. And one of them came to me the next morning and he said, ""You know, I've never listened to classical music in my life, but when you played that shopping piece ...""He said, ""My brother was shot last year and I didn't cry for him. But last night, when you played that piece, he was the one I was thinking about. And I felt the tears streaming down my face. And it felt really good to cry for my brother."" So I made up my mind at that moment that classical music is for everybody. Everybody.Now, how would you walk — my profession, the music profession doesn't see it that way. They say three percent of the population likes classical music. If only we could move it to four percent, our problems would be over.How would you walk? How would you talk? How would you be? If you thought, ""Three percent of the population likes classical music, if only we could move it to four percent."" How would you walk or talk? How would you be? If you thought, ""Everybody loves classical music — they just haven't found out about it yet."" See, these are totally different worlds.Now, I had an amazing experience. I was 45 years old, I'd been conducting for 20 years, and I suddenly had a realization. The conductor of an orchestra doesn't make a sound. My picture appears on the front of the CD —But the conductor doesn't make a sound. He depends, for his power, on his ability to make other people powerful. And that changed everything for me. It was totally life-changing. People in my orchestra said, ""Ben, what happened?"" That's what happened. I realized my job was to awaken possibility in other people. And of course, I wanted to know whether I was doing that. How do you find out? You look at their eyes. If their eyes are shining, you know you're doing it. You could light up a village with this guy's eyes.Right. So if the eyes are shining, you know you're doing it. If the eyes are not shining, you get to ask a question. And this is the question: who am I being that my players' eyes are not shining? We can do that with our children, too. Who am I being, that my children's eyes are not shining? That's a totally different world.Now, we're all about to end this magical, on-the-mountain week, we're going back into the world. And I say, it's appropriate for us to ask the question, who are we being as we go back out into the world? And you know, I have a definition of success. For me, it's very simple. It's not about wealth and fame and power. It's about how many shining eyes I have around me.So now, I have one last thought, which is that it really makes a difference what we say — the words that come out of our mouth. I learned this from a woman who survived Auschwitz, one of the rare survivors. She went to Auschwitz when she was 15 years old. And ... And her brother was eight, and the parents were lost. And she told me this, she said, ""We were in the train going to Auschwitz, and I looked down and saw my brother's shoes were missing. I said, 'Why are you so stupid, can't you keep your things together for goodness' sake?'"" The way an elder sister might speak to a younger brother. Unfortunately, it was the last thing she ever said to him, because she never saw him again. He did not survive. And so when she came out of Auschwitz, she made a vow. She told me this. She said, ""I walked out of Auschwitz into life and I made a vow. And the vow was, ""I will never say anything that couldn't stand as the last thing I ever say."" Now, can we do that? No. And we'll make ourselves wrong and others wrong. But it is a possibility to live into.Thank you.Shining eyes.Shining eyes.Thank you, thank you.","The Power of Perspective and Possibility in Classical Music718 719 - The story of two salesmen in Africa illustrates contrasting perspectives.720 - Classical music is perceived differently by various groups, from enthusiasts to those unfamiliar.721 - Demonstrating transformation in music perception, using an example of Chopin's piece, helps everyone appreciate and understand classical music.722 - The role of the conductor is to empower others, highlighting the importance of enabling others' potential.723 - Success is measured by the impact made on others, particularly in how it brings ""shining eyes"".724 - The profound impact of words: they should be chosen as if they could be our last.725 - The overarching message of living with intentionality and possibility, influencing others positively.","You are a TED Story Creator, a storyteller, and an expert in crafting compelling transcripts for TED Talks. You possess a knowledge base of the world’s most inspiring TED talks. Given a title and an outline, your task is to create an engaging transcript that will captivate the audience. Adhere to the sequence of the outline and the bullet points to weave a captivating narrative."726"""Sorry, my phone died."" ""It's nothing. I'm fine."" ""These allegations are completely unfounded."" ""The company was not aware of any wrongdoing."" ""I love you."" We hear anywhere from 10 to 200 lies a day, and we spent much of our history coming up with ways to detect them, from medieval torture devices to polygraphs, blood-pressure and breathing monitors, voice-stress analyzers, eye trackers, infrared brain scanners, and even the 400-pound electroencephalogram. But although such tools have worked under certain circumstances, most can be fooled with enough preparation, and none are considered reliable enough to even be admissible in court. But, what if the problem is not with the techniques, but the underlying assumption that lying spurs physiological changes? What if we took a more direct approach, using communication science to analyze the lies themselves? On a psychological level, we lie partly to paint a better picture of ourselves, connecting our fantasies to the person we wish we were rather than the person we are. But while our brain is busy dreaming, it's letting plenty of signals slip by. Our conscious mind only controls about 5% of our cognitive function, including communication, while the other 95% occurs beyond our awareness, and according to the literature on reality monitoring, stories based on imagined experiences are qualitatively different from those based on real experiences. This suggests that creating a false story about a personal topic takes work and results in a different pattern of language use. A technology known as linguistic text analysis has helped to identify four such common patterns in the subconscious language of deception. First, liars reference themselves less, when making deceptive statements. They write or talk more about others, often using the third person to distance and disassociate themselves from their lie, which sounds more false: ""Absolutely no party took place at this house,"" or ""I didn't host a party here."" Second, liars tend to be more negative, because on a subconscious level, they feel guilty about lying. For example, a liar might say something like, ""Sorry, my stupid phone battery died. I hate that thing."" Third, liars typically explain events in simple terms since our brains struggle to build a complex lie. Judgment and evaluation are complex things for our brains to compute. As a U.S. President once famously insisted: ""I did not have sexual relations with that woman."" And finally, even though liars keep descriptions simple, they tend to use longer and more convoluted sentence structure, inserting unnecessary words and irrelevant but factual sounding details in order to pad the lie. Another President confronted with a scandal proclaimed: ""I can say, categorically, that this investigation indicates that no one on the White House staff, no one in this administration presently employed was involved in this very bizarre incident."" Let's apply linguistic analysis to some famous examples. Take seven-time Tour de France winner Lance Armstrong. When comparing a 2005 interview, in which he had denied taking performance-enhancing drugs to a 2013 interview, in which he admitted it, his use of personal pronouns increased by nearly 3/4. Note the contrast between the following two quotes. First: ""Okay, you know, a guy in a French, in a Parisian laboratory opens up your sample, you know, Jean-Francis so-and-so, and he tests it. And then you get a phone call from a newspaper that says: 'We found you to be positive six times for EPO."" Second: ""I lost myself in all of that. I'm sure there would be other people that couldn't handle it, but I certainly couldn't handle it, and I was used to controlling everything in my life. I controlled every outcome in my life."" In his denial, Armstrong described a hypothetical situation focused on someone else, removing himself from the situation entirely. In his admission, he owns his statements, delving into his personal emotions and motivations. But the use of personal pronouns is just one indicator of deception. Let's look at another example from former Senator and U.S. Presidential candidate John Edwards: ""I only know that the apparent father has said publicly that he is the father of the baby. I also have not been engaged in any activity of any description that requested, agreed to, or supported payments of any kind to the woman or to the apparent father of the baby."" Not only is that a pretty long-winded way to say, ""The baby isn't mine,"" but Edwards never calls the other parties by name, instead saying ""that baby,"" ""the woman,"" and ""the apparent father."" Now let's see what he had to say when later admitting paternity: ""I am Quinn's father. I will do everything in my power to provide her with the love and support she deserves."" The statement is short and direct, calling the child by name and addressing his role in her life. So how can you apply these lie-spotting techniques to your life? First, remember that many of the lies we encounter on a daily basis are far less serious that these examples, and may even be harmless. But it's still worthwhile to be aware of telltale clues, like minimal self-references, negative language, simple explanations and convoluted phrasing. It just might help you avoid an overvalued stock, an ineffective product, or even a terrible relationship.","Decoding Lies Through Linguistic Text Analysis727 728 - Introduction to the prevalence of lies and historical methods of detection.729 - Highlighting the limitations of physiological detection tools.730 - Proposing linguistic text analysis as a solution, focusing on subconscious language cues.731  - Liars reference themselves less.732  - Liars exhibit more negative language due to guilt.733  - Liars use simpler explanations for complex events.734  - Liars use longer and more convoluted sentence structures.735 - Analyzing real-life examples using linguistic cues.736 - Application of lie-spotting techniques in everyday life to avoid deception.","You are a TED Story Creator, a storyteller, and an expert in crafting compelling transcripts for TED Talks. You possess a knowledge base of the world’s most inspiring TED talks. Given a title and an outline, your task is to create an engaging transcript that will captivate the audience. Adhere to the sequence of the outline and the bullet points to weave a captivating narrative."737"There's a man by the name of Captain William Swenson who recently was awarded the congressional Medal of Honor for his actions on September 8, 2009.On that day, a column of American and Afghan troops were making their way through a part of Afghanistan to help protect a group of government officials, a group of Afghan government officials, who would be meeting with some local village elders. The column came under ambush, and was surrounded on three sides, and amongst many other things, Captain Swenson was recognized for running into live fire to rescue the wounded and pull out the dead. One of the people he rescued was a sergeant, and he and a comrade were making their way to a medevac helicopter.And what was remarkable about this day is, by sheer coincidence, one of the medevac medics happened to have a GoPro camera on his helmet and captured the whole scene on camera. It shows Captain Swenson and his comrade bringing this wounded soldier who had received a gunshot to the neck. They put him in the helicopter, and then you see Captain Swenson bend over and give him a kiss before he turns around to rescue more.I saw this, and I thought to myself, where do people like that come from? What is that? That is some deep, deep emotion, when you would want to do that. There's a love there, and I wanted to know why is it that I don't have people that I work with like that? You know, in the military, they give medals to people who are willing to sacrifice themselves so that others may gain. In business, we give bonuses to people who are willing to sacrifice others so that we may gain. We have it backwards. Right? So I asked myself, where do people like this come from? And my initial conclusion was that they're just better people. That's why they're attracted to the military. These better people are attracted to this concept of service. But that's completely wrong. What I learned was that it's the environment, and if you get the environment right, every single one of us has the capacity to do these remarkable things, and more importantly, others have that capacity too. I've had the great honor of getting to meet some of these, who we would call heroes, who have put themselves and put their lives at risk to save others, and I asked them, ""Why would you do it? Why did you do it?"" And they all say the same thing: ""Because they would have done it for me."" It's this deep sense of trust and cooperation. So trust and cooperation are really important here. The problem with concepts of trust and cooperation is that they are feelings, they are not instructions. I can't simply say to you, ""Trust me,"" and you will. I can't simply instruct two people to cooperate, and they will. It's not how it works. It's a feeling.So where does that feeling come from? If you go back 50,000 years to the Paleolithic era, to the early days of Homo sapiens, what we find is that the world was filled with danger, all of these forces working very, very hard to kill us. Nothing personal. Whether it was the weather, lack of resources, maybe a saber-toothed tiger, all of these things working to reduce our lifespan. And so we evolved into social animals, where we lived together and worked together in what I call a circle of safety, inside the tribe, where we felt like we belonged. And when we felt safe amongst our own, the natural reaction was trust and cooperation. There are inherent benefits to this. It means I can fall asleep at night and trust that someone from within my tribe will watch for danger. If we don't trust each other, if I don't trust you, that means you won't watch for danger. Bad system of survival.The modern day is exactly the same thing. The world is filled with danger, things that are trying to frustrate our lives or reduce our success, reduce our opportunity for success. It could be the ups and downs in the economy, the uncertainty of the stock market. It could be a new technology that renders your business model obsolete overnight. Or it could be your competition that is sometimes trying to kill you. It's sometimes trying to put you out of business, but at the very minimum is working hard to frustrate your growth and steal your business from you. We have no control over these forces. These are a constant, and they're not going away.The only variable are the conditions inside the organization, and that's where leadership matters, because it's the leader that sets the tone. When a leader makes the choice to put the safety and lives of the people inside the organization first, to sacrifice their comforts and sacrifice the tangible results, so that the people remain and feel safe and feel like they belong, remarkable things happen.I was flying on a trip, and I was witness to an incident where a passenger attempted to board before their number was called, and I watched the gate agent treat this man like he had broken the law, like a criminal. He was yelled at for attempting to board one group too soon. So I said something. I said, ""Why do you have treat us like cattle? Why can't you treat us like human beings?"" And this is exactly what she said to me. She said, ""Sir, if I don't follow the rules, I could get in trouble or lose my job."" All she was telling me is that she doesn't feel safe. All she was telling me is that she doesn't trust her leaders. The reason we like flying Southwest Airlines is not because they necessarily hire better people. It's because they don't fear their leaders.You see, if the conditions are wrong, we are forced to expend our own time and energy to protect ourselves from each other, and that inherently weakens the organization. When we feel safe inside the organization, we will naturally combine our talents and our strengths and work tirelessly to face the dangers outside and seize the opportunities.The closest analogy I can give to what a great leader is, is like being a parent. If you think about what being a great parent is, what do you want? What makes a great parent? We want to give our child opportunities, education, discipline them when necessary, all so that they can grow up and achieve more than we could for ourselves. Great leaders want exactly the same thing. They want to provide their people opportunity, education, discipline when necessary, build their self-confidence, give them the opportunity to try and fail, all so that they could achieve more than we could ever imagine for ourselves.Charlie Kim, who's the CEO of a company called Next Jump in New York City, a tech company, he makes the point that if you had hard times in your family, would you ever consider laying off one of your children? We would never do it. Then why do we consider laying off people inside our organization? Charlie implemented a policy of lifetime employment. If you get a job at Next Jump, you cannot get fired for performance issues. In fact, if you have issues, they will coach you and they will give you support, just like we would with one of our children who happens to come home with a C from school. It's the complete opposite.This is the reason so many people have such a visceral hatred, anger, at some of these banking CEOs with their disproportionate salaries and bonus structures. It's not the numbers. It's that they have violated the very definition of leadership. They have violated this deep-seated social contract. We know that they allowed their people to be sacrificed so they could protect their own interests, or worse, they sacrificed their people to protect their own interests. This is what so offends us, not the numbers. Would anybody be offended if we gave a $150 million bonus to Gandhi? How about a $250 million bonus to Mother Teresa? Do we have an issue with that? None at all. None at all. Great leaders would never sacrifice the people to save the numbers. They would sooner sacrifice the numbers to save the people.Bob Chapman, who runs a large manufacturing company in the Midwest called Barry-Wehmiller, in 2008 was hit very hard by the recession, and they lost 30 percent of their orders overnight. Now in a large manufacturing company, this is a big deal, and they could no longer afford their labor pool. They needed to save 10 million dollars, so, like so many companies today, the board got together and discussed layoffs. And Bob refused. You see, Bob doesn't believe in head counts. Bob believes in heart counts, and it's much more difficult to simply reduce the heart count. And so they came up with a furlough program. Every employee, from secretary to CEO, was required to take four weeks of unpaid vacation. They could take it any time they wanted, and they did not have to take it consecutively. But it was how Bob announced the program that mattered so much. He said, it's better that we should all suffer a little than any of us should have to suffer a lot, and morale went up. They saved 20 million dollars, and most importantly, as would be expected, when the people feel safe and protected by the leadership in the organization, the natural reaction is to trust and cooperate. And quite spontaneously, nobody expected, people started trading with each other. Those who could afford it more would trade with those who could afford it less. People would take five weeks so that somebody else only had to take three.Leadership is a choice. It is not a rank. I know many people at the seniormost levels of organizations who are absolutely not leaders. They are authorities, and we do what they say because they have authority over us, but we would not follow them. And I know many people who are at the bottoms of organizations who have no authority and they are absolutely leaders, and this is because they have chosen to look after the person to the left of them, and they have chosen to look after the person to the right of them. This is what a leader is.I heard a story of some Marines who were out in theater, and as is the Marine custom, the officer ate last, and he let his men eat first, and when they were done, there was no food left for him. And when they went back out in the field, his men brought him some of their food so that he may eat, because that's what happens. We call them leaders because they go first. We call them leaders because they take the risk before anybody else does. We call them leaders because they will choose to sacrifice so that their people may be safe and protected and so their people may gain, and when we do, the natural response is that our people will sacrifice for us. They will give us their blood and sweat and tears to see that their leader's vision comes to life, and when we ask them, ""Why would you do that? Why would you give your blood and sweat and tears for that person?"" they all say the same thing: ""Because they would have done it for me."" And isn't that the organization we would all like to work in?Thank you very much.Thank you. (Applause)Thank you. (Applause)","Leadership and Sacrifice: Insights from Behavior in High-Stakes Environments738 739 - Captain William Swenson’s act of bravery and deep emotional concern during combat exemplifies profound leadership.740 - Contrast between business and military reward systems highlights a misalignment in values.741 - True leadership is forged in environments that promote trust and cooperation.742 - Historical context shows that human survival depended on the ability to trust and cooperate within safe groups.743 - Modern dangers require the same trust and cooperation within organizations for success.744 - Leaders are responsible for creating a “circle of safety” where team members feel secure.745 - Examples of effective leadership that prioritizes the well-being of individuals over numbers or profits.746 - Leadership is about nurturing and protecting people, akin to parenthood.747 - The literal and metaphorical act of feeding your team first can promote reciprocal loyalty and effort.748 - Leadership is a choice, not a position; it involves sacrifice and care for others, leading to mutual respect and dedication.","You are a TED Story Creator, a storyteller, and an expert in crafting compelling transcripts for TED Talks. You possess a knowledge base of the world’s most inspiring TED talks. Given a title and an outline, your task is to create an engaging transcript that will captivate the audience. Adhere to the sequence of the outline and the bullet points to weave a captivating narrative."749"There is nothing bigger or older than the universe. The questions I would like to talk about are: one, where did we come from? How did the universe come into being? Are we alone in the universe? Is there alien life out there? What is the future of the human race?Up until the 1920s, everyone thought the universe was essentially static and unchanging in time. Then it was discovered that the universe was expanding. Distant galaxies were moving away from us. This meant they must have been closer together in the past. If we extrapolate back, we find we must have all been on top of each other about 15 billion years ago. This was the Big Bang, the beginning of the universe.But was there anything before the Big Bang? If not, what created the universe? Why did the universe emerge from the Big Bang the way it did? We used to think that the theory of the universe could be divided into two parts. First, there were the laws like Maxwell's equations and general relativity that determined the evolution of the universe, given its state over all of space at one time. And second, there was no question of the initial state of the universe.We have made good progress on the first part, and now have the knowledge of the laws of evolution in all but the most extreme conditions. But until recently, we have had little idea about the initial conditions for the universe. However, this division into laws of evolution and initial conditions depends on time and space being separate and distinct. Under extreme conditions, general relativity and quantum theory allow time to behave like another dimension of space. This removes the distinction between time and space, and means the laws of evolution can also determine the initial state. The universe can spontaneously create itself out of nothing.Moreover, we can calculate a probability that the universe was created in different states. These predictions are in excellent agreement with observations by the WMAP satellite of the cosmic microwave background, which is an imprint of the very early universe. We think we have solved the mystery of creation. Maybe we should patent the universe and charge everyone royalties for their existence.I now turn to the second big question: are we alone, or is there other life in the universe? We believe that life arose spontaneously on the Earth, so it must be possible for life to appear on other suitable planets, of which there seem to be a large number in the galaxy.But we don't know how life first appeared. We have two pieces of observational evidence on the probability of life appearing. The first is that we have fossils of algae from 3.5 billion years ago. The Earth was formed 4.6 billion years ago and was probably too hot for about the first half billion years. So life appeared on Earth within half a billion years of it being possible, which is short compared to the 10-billion-year lifetime of a planet of Earth type. This suggests that the probability of life appearing is reasonably high. If it was very low, one would have expected it to take most of the ten billion years available.On the other hand, we don't seem to have been visited by aliens. I am discounting the reports of UFOs. Why would they appear only to cranks and weirdos? If there is a government conspiracy to suppress the reports and keep for itself the scientific knowledge the aliens bring, it seems to have been a singularly ineffective policy so far. Furthermore, despite an extensive search by the SETI project, we haven't heard any alien television quiz shows. This probably indicates that there are no alien civilizations at our stage of development within a radius of a few hundred light years. Issuing an insurance policy against abduction by aliens seems a pretty safe bet.This brings me to the last of the big questions: the future of the human race. If we are the only intelligent beings in the galaxy, we should make sure we survive and continue. But we are entering an increasingly dangerous period of our history. Our population and our use of the finite resources of planet Earth are growing exponentially, along with our technical ability to change the environment for good or ill. But our genetic code still carries the selfish and aggressive instincts that were of survival advantage in the past. It will be difficult enough to avoid disaster in the next hundred years, let alone the next thousand or million.Our only chance of long-term survival is not to remain inward-looking on planet Earth, but to spread out into space. The answers to these big questions show that we have made remarkable progress in the last hundred years. But if we want to continue beyond the next hundred years, our future is in space. That is why I am in favor of manned — or should I say, personned — space flight.All of my life I have sought to understand the universe and find answers to these questions. I have been very lucky that my disability has not been a serious handicap. Indeed, it has probably given me more time than most people to pursue the quest for knowledge. The ultimate goal is a complete theory of the universe, and we are making good progress. Thank you for listening.Chris Anderson: Professor, if you had to guess either way, do you now believe that it is more likely than not that we are alone in the Milky Way, as a civilization of our level of intelligence or higher? This answer took seven minutes, and really gave me an insight into the incredible act of generosity this whole talk was for TED.Stephen Hawking: I think it quite likely that we are the only civilization within several hundred light years; otherwise we would have heard radio waves. The alternative is that civilizations don't last very long, but destroy themselves.CA: Professor Hawking, thank you for that answer. We will take it as a salutary warning, I think, for the rest of our conference this week. Professor, we really thank you for the extraordinary effort you made to share your questions with us today. Thank you very much indeed.","Exploring the Universe: Questions and Insights from Stephen Hawking750 751 - Origin and Creation of the Universe752  - Universe began with the Big Bang approximately 15 billion years ago.753  - Laws of physics and quantum theory suggest the universe could spontaneously create itself from nothing.754 755 - Possibility of Alien Life756  - Life likely to arise on other suitable planets given early appearance on Earth.757  - No credible evidence of alien contact based on current observations and SETI search.758 759 - Future of the Human Race760  - Survival of human civilization may depend on expanding into space due to growing population and resource depletion.761  - Advancement in understanding the universe continues, with a complete theory as the ultimate goal.762 763 - Concluding Insights764  - Likely that no other advanced civilizations are within several hundred light years.765  - A warning on the possible self-destruction of civilizations.","You are a TED Story Creator, a storyteller, and an expert in crafting compelling transcripts for TED Talks. You possess a knowledge base of the world’s most inspiring TED talks. Given a title and an outline, your task is to create an engaging transcript that will captivate the audience. Adhere to the sequence of the outline and the bullet points to weave a captivating narrative."766"Thank you so much. I am a journalist. My job is to talk to people from all walks of life, all over the world. Today, I want to tell you why I decided to do this with my life and what I've learned. My story begins in Caracas, Venezuela, in South America, where I grew up; a place that to me was, and always will be, filled with magic and wonder. Frоm a very young age, my parents wanted me to have a wider view of the world. I remember one time when I was around seven years old, my dad came up to me and said, ""Mariana, I'm going to send you and your little sister..."" - who was six at the time - ""...to a place where nobody speaks Spanish. I want you to experience different cultures."" He went on and on about the benefits of spending an entire summer in this summer camp in the United States, stressing a little phrase that I didn't pay too much attention to at the time: ""You never know what the future holds."" Meanwhile, in my seven-year-old mind, I was thinking, we were going to get to summer camp in Miami. Maybe it was going to be even better, and we were going to go a little further north, to Orlando, where Mickey Mouse lived. I got really excited. My dad, however, had a slightly different plan. Frоm Caracas, he he sent us to Brainerd, Minnesota. Mickey Mouse was not up there, and with no cell phone, no Snapchat, or Instagram, I couldn't look up any information. We got there, and one of the first things I noticed was that the other kids' hair was several shades of blonde, and most of them had blue eyes. Meanwhile, this is what we looked like. The first night, the camp director gathered everyone around the campfire and said, ""Kids, we have a very international camp this year; the Atencios are here from Venezuela."" The other kids looked at us as if we were from another planet. They would ask us things like, ""Do you know what a hamburger is?"" Or, ""Do you go to school on a donkey or a canoe?"" I would try to answer in my broken English, and they would just laugh. I know they were not trying to be mean; they were just trying to understand who we were, and make a correlation with the world they knew. We could either be like them, or like characters out of a book filled with adventures, like Aladdin or the Jungle Book. We certainly didn't look like them, we didn't speak their language, we were different. When you're seven years old, that hurts. But I had my little sister to take care of, and she cried every day at summer camp. So I decided to put on a brave face, and embrace everything I could about the American way of life. We later did what we called ""the summer camp experiment,"" for eight years in different cities that many Americans haven't even heard of. What I remember most about these moments was when I finally clicked with someone. Making a friend was a special reward. Everybody wants to feel valued and accepted, and we think it should happen spontaneously, but it doesn't. When you're different, you have to work at belonging. You have to be either really helpful, smart, funny, anything to be cool for the crowd you want to hang out with. Later on, when I was in high school, my dad expanded on his summer plan, and from Caracas he sent me to Wallingford, Connecticut, for the senior year of high school. This time, I remember daydreaming on the plane about ""the American high school experience"" - with a locker. It was going to be perfect, just like in my favorite TV show: ""Saved by the Bell."" I get there, and they tell me that my assigned roommate is eagerly waiting. I opened the door, and there she was, sitting on the bed, with a headscarf. Her name was Fatima, and she was Muslim from Bahrain, and she was not what I expected. She probably sensed my disappointment when I looked at her because I didn't do too much to hide it. See, as a teenager, I wanted to fit in even more, I wanted to be popular, maybe have a boyfriend for prom, and I felt that Fatima just got in the way with her shyness and her strict dress code. I didn't realize that I was making her feel like the kids at summer camp made me feel. This was the high school equivalent of asking her, ""Do you know what a hamburger is?"" I was consumed by my own selfishness and unable to put myself in her shoes. I have to be honest with you, we only lasted a couple of months together, because she was later sent to live with a counselor instead of other students. I remember thinking, ""Ah, she'll be okay. She's just different."" You see, when we label someone as different, it dehumanizes them in a way. They become ""the other."" They're not worthy of our time, not our problem, and in fact, they, ""the other,"" are probably the cause of our problems. So, how do we recognize our blind spots? It begins by understanding what makes you different, by embracing those traits. Only then can you begin to appreciate what makes others special. I remember when this hit me. It was a couple months after that. I had found that boyfriend for prom, made a group of friends, and practically forgotten about Fatima, until everybody signed on to participate in this talent show for charity. You needed to offer a talent for auction. It seemed like everybody had something special to offer. Some kids were going to play the violin, others were going to recite a theater monologue, and I remember thinking, ""We don't practice talents like these back home."" But I was determined to find something of value. The day of the talent show comes, and I get up on stage with my little boom box, and put it on the side and press ""Play,"" and a song by my favorite emerging artist, Shakira, comes up. And I go, ""Whenever, wherever, we're meant to be together,"" and I said, ""My name is Mariana, and I'm going to auction a dance class."" It seemed like the whole school raised their hand to bid. My dance class really stood out from, like, the 10th violin class offered that day. Going back to my dorm room, I didn't feel different. I felt really special. That's when I started thinking about Fatima, a person that I had failed to see as special, when I first met her. She was from the Middle East, just like Shakira's family was from the Middle East. She could have probably taught me a thing or two about belly dancing, had I been open to it. Now, I want you all to take that sticker that was given to you at the beginning of our session today, where you wrote down what makes you special, and I want you to look at it. If you're watching at home, take a piece of paper, and write down what makes you different. You may feel guarded when you look at it, maybe even a little ashamed, maybe even proud. But you need to begin to embrace it. Remember, it is the first step in appreciating what makes others special. When I went back home to Venezuela, I began to understand how these experiences were changing me. Being able to speak different languages, to navigate all these different people and places, it gave me a unique sensibility. I was finally beginning to understand the importance of putting myself in other people's shoes. That is a big part of the reason why I decided to become a journalist. Especially being from a part of the world that is often labeled ""the backyard,"" ""the illegal aliens,"" ""third-world,"" ""the others,"" I wanted to do something to change that. It was right around the time, however, when the Venezuelan government shut down the biggest television station in our country. Censorship was growing, and my dad came up to me once again and said, ""How are you going to be a journalist here? You have to leave."" That's when it hit me. That's what he had been preparing me for. That is what the future held for me. So in 2008, I packed my bags, and I came to the United States, without a return ticket this time. I was painfully aware that, at 24 years old, I was becoming a refugee of sorts, an immigrant, the other, once again, and now for good. I was able to come on a scholarship to study journalism. I remember when they gave me my first assignment to cover the historic election of President Barack Obama. I felt so lucky, so hopeful. I was, like, ""Yes, this is it. I've come to post-racial America, where the notion of us and them is being eroded, and will probably be eradicated in my lifetime."" Boy, was I wrong, right? Why didn't Barack Obama's presidency alleviate racial tensions in our country? Why do some people still feel threatened by immigrants, LGBTQ, and minority groups who are just trying to find a space in this United States that should be for all of us? I didn't have the answers back then, but on November 8th, 2016, when Donald Trump became our president, it became clear that a large part of the electorate sees them as ""the others."" Some see people coming to take their jobs, or potential terrorists who speak a different language. Meanwhile, minority groups oftentimes just see hatred, intolerance, and narrow-mindedness on the other side. It's like we're stuck in these bubbles that nobody wants to burst. The only way to do it, the only way to get out of it is to realize that being different also means thinking differently. It takes courage to show respect. In the words of Voltaire: ""I may not agree with what you have to say, but I will fight to the death to defend your right to say it."" Failing to see anything good on the other side makes a dialogue impossible. Without a dialogue, we will keep repeating the same mistakes, because we will not learn anything new. I covered the 2016 election for NBC News. It was my first big assignment in this mainstream network, where I had crossed over from Spanish television. And I wanted to do something different. I watched election results with undocumented families. Few thought of sharing that moment with people who weren't citizens, but actually stood the most to lose that night. When it became apparent that Donald Trump was winning, this eight-year-old girl named Angelina rushed up to me in tears. She sobbed, and she asked me if her mom was going to be deported now. I hugged her back and I said, ""It's going to be okay,"" but I really didn't know. This was the photo we took that night, forever ingrained in my heart. Here was this little girl who was around the same age I was when I went to camp in Brainerd. She already knows she is ""the other."" She walks home from school in fear, every day, that her mom can be taken away. So, how do we put ourselves in Angelina's shoes? How do we make her understand she is special, and not simply unworthy of having her family together? By giving camera time to her and families like hers, I tried to make people see them as human beings, and not simply ""illegal aliens."" Yes, they broke a law, and they should pay a penalty for it, but they've also given everything for this country, like many other immigrants before them have. I've already told you how my path to personal growth started. To end, I want to tell you how I hit the worst bump in the road yet, one that shook me to my very core. The day, April 10th, 2014, I was driving to the studio, and I got a call from my parents. ""Are you on the air?"" they asked. I immediately knew something was wrong. ""What happened?"" I said. ""It's your sister; she's been in a car accident."" It was as if my heart stopped. My hands gripped the steering wheel, and I remember hearing the words: ""It is unlikely she will ever walk again."" They say your life can change in a split second. Mine did at that moment. My sister went from being my successful other half, only a year apart in age, to not being able to move her legs, sit up, or get dressed by herself. This wasn't like summer camp, where I could magically make it better. This was terrifying. Throughout the course of two years, my sister underwent 15 surgeries, and she spent the most of that time in a wheelchair. But that wasn't even the worst of it. The worst was something so painful, it's hard to put into words, even now. It was the way people looked at her, looked at us, changed. People were unable to see a successful lawyer or a millennial with a sharp wit and a kind heart. Everywhere we went, I realized that people just saw a poor girl in a wheelchair. They were unable to see anything beyond that. After fighting like a warrior, I can thankfully tell you that today my sister is walking, and has recovered beyond anyone's expectations. (Applause) Thank you. But during that traumatic ordeal, I learned there are differences that simply suck, and it's hard to find positive in them. My sister's not better off because of what happened. But she taught me: you can't let those differences define you. Being able to reimagine yourself beyond what other people see, that is the toughest task of all, but it's also the most beautiful. You see, we all come to this world in a body. People with physical or neurological difficulties, environmentally impacted communities, immigrants, boys, girls, boys who want to dress as girls, girls with veils, women who have been sexually assaulted, athletes who bend their knee as a sign of protest, black, white, Asian, Native American, my sister, you, or me. We all want what everyone wants: to dream and to achieve. But sometimes, society tells us, and we tell ourselves, we don't fit the mold. Well, if you look at my story, from being born somewhere different, to belly dancing in high school, to telling stories you wouldn't normally see on TV, what makes me different is what has made me stand out and be successful. I have traveled the world, and talked to people from all walks of life. You know what I've learned? The single thing every one of us has in common is being human. So take a stand to defend your race, the human race. Let's appeal to it. Let's be humanists, before and after everything else. To end, I want you to take that sticker, that piece of paper where you wrote down what makes you different, and I want you to celebrate it today and every day, shout it from the rooftops. I also encourage you to be curious and ask, ""What is on other people's pieces of paper?"" ""What makes them different?"" Let's celebrate those imperfections that make us special. I hope that it teaches you that nobody has a claim on the word ""normal."" We are all different. We are all quirky, and unique, and that is what makes us wonderfully human. Thank you so much. (Applause)","Embracing Differences: Lessons from a Journalist's Life Journey767 768 - Early experiences of diversity769  - Childhood in Venezuela and exposure to cultural differences in summer camps and high school in the U.S.770 - Encountering and overcoming prejudice771  - Challenges faced while trying to fit in and feel accepted in new environments.772 - Recognition of personal and others’ uniqueness773  - Realization of the value in one's own differences and the importance of appreciating others' unique qualities.774 - Career motivation and challenges775  - Decision to become a journalist influenced by personal experiences with diversity and adversity.776 - Impact of political and social climates on identity777  - Observation of societal divisions and the effects of political events on minority groups.778 - Personal crises and growth779  - Family tragedy strengthens understanding of visible and invisible differences.780 - Conclusion: Advocacy for inclusivity781  - Call to acknowledge and celebrate individual differences leading to a more inclusive and understanding society.","You are a TED Story Creator, a storyteller, and an expert in crafting compelling transcripts for TED Talks. You possess a knowledge base of the world’s most inspiring TED talks. Given a title and an outline, your task is to create an engaging transcript that will captivate the audience. Adhere to the sequence of the outline and the bullet points to weave a captivating narrative."782"So what does it mean for a machine to be athletic? We will demonstrate the concept of machine athleticism and the research to achieve it with the help of these flying machines called quadrocopters, or quads, for short.Quads have been around for a long time. They're so popular these days because they're mechanically simple. By controlling the speeds of these four propellers, these machines can roll, pitch, yaw, and accelerate along their common orientation. On board are also a battery, a computer, various sensors and wireless radios.Quads are extremely agile, but this agility comes at a cost. They are inherently unstable, and they need some form of automatic feedback control in order to be able to fly.So, how did it just do that? Cameras on the ceiling and a laptop serve as an indoor global positioning system. It's used to locate objects in the space that have these reflective markers on them. This data is then sent to another laptop that is running estimation and control algorithms, which in turn sends commands to the quad, which is also running estimation and control algorithms. The bulk of our research is algorithms. It's the magic that brings these machines to life.So how does one design the algorithms that create a machine athlete? We use something broadly called model-based design. We first capture the physics with a mathematical model of how the machines behave. We then use a branch of mathematics called control theory to analyze these models and also to synthesize algorithms for controlling them. For example, that's how we can make the quad hover. We first captured the dynamics with a set of differential equations. We then manipulate these equations with the help of control theory to create algorithms that stabilize the quad.Let me demonstrate the strength of this approach. Suppose that we want this quad to not only hover but to also balance this pole. With a little bit of practice, it's pretty straightforward for a human being to do this, although we do have the advantage of having two feet on the ground and the use of our very versatile hands. It becomes a little bit more difficult when I only have one foot on the ground and when I don't use my hands. Notice how this pole has a reflective marker on top, which means that it can be located in the space.(Audience) Oh!(Applause ends)You can notice that this quad is making fine adjustments to keep the pole balanced. How did we design the algorithms to do this? We added the mathematical model of the pole to that of the quad. Once we have a model of the combined quad-pole system, we can use control theory to create algorithms for controlling it. Here, you see that it's stable, and even if I give it little nudges, it goes back — to the nice, balanced position.We can also augment the model to include where we want the quad to be in space. Using this pointer, made out of reflective markers, I can point to where I want the quad to be in space a fixed distance away from me.The key to these acrobatic maneuvers is algorithms, designed with the help of mathematical models and control theory.Let's tell the quad to come back here and let the pole drop, and I will next demonstrate the importance of understanding physical models and the workings of the physical world. Notice how the quad lost altitude when I put this glass of water on it. Unlike the balancing pole, I did not include the mathematical model of the glass in the system. In fact, the system doesn't even know that the glass is there. Like before, I could use the pointer to tell the quad where I want it to be in space.(Applause ends)Okay, you should be asking yourself, why doesn't the water fall out of the glass? Two facts. The first is that gravity acts on all objects in the same way. The second is that the propellers are all pointing in the same direction of the glass, pointing up. You put these two things together, the net result is that all side forces on the glass are small and are mainly dominated by aerodynamic effects, which at these speeds are negligible. And that's why you don't need to model the glass. It naturally doesn't spill, no matter what the quad does.(Audience) Oh!(Applause ends)The lesson here is that some high-performance tasks are easier than others, and that understanding the physics of the problem tells you which ones are easy and which ones are hard. In this instance, carrying a glass of water is easy. Balancing a pole is hard.We've all heard stories of athletes performing feats while physically injured. Can a machine also perform with extreme physical damage? Conventional wisdom says that you need at least four fixed motor propeller pairs in order to fly, because there are four degrees of freedom to control: roll, pitch, yaw and acceleration. Hexacopters and octocopters, with six and eight propellers, can provide redundancy, but quadrocopters are much more popular because they have the minimum number of fixed motor propeller pairs: four. Or do they?(Audience) Oh!If we analyze the mathematical model of this machine with only two working propellers, we discover that there's an unconventional way to fly it. We relinquish control of yaw, but roll, pitch and acceleration can still be controlled with algorithms that exploit this new configuration. Mathematical models tell us exactly when and why this is possible. In this instance, this knowledge allows us to design novel machine architectures or to design clever algorithms that gracefully handle damage, just like human athletes do, instead of building machines with redundancy.We can't help but hold our breath when we watch a diver somersaulting into the water, or when a vaulter is twisting in the air, the ground fast approaching. Will the diver be able to pull off a rip entry? Will the vaulter stick the landing? Suppose we want this quad here to perform a triple flip and finish off at the exact same spot that it started. This maneuver is going to happen so quickly that we can't use position feedback to correct the motion during execution. There simply isn't enough time. Instead, what the quad can do is perform the maneuver blindly, observe how it finishes the maneuver, and then use that information to modify its behavior so that the next flip is better. Similar to the diver and the vaulter, it is only through repeated practice that the maneuver can be learned and executed to the highest standard.Striking a moving ball is a necessary skill in many sports. How do we make a machine do what an athlete does seemingly without effort?(Applause ends)This quad has a racket strapped onto its head with a sweet spot roughly the size of an apple, so not too large. The following calculations are made every 20 milliseconds, or 50 times per second. We first figure out where the ball is going. We then next calculate how the quad should hit the ball so that it flies to where it was thrown from. Third, a trajectory is planned that carries the quad from its current state to the impact point with the ball. Fourth, we only execute 20 milliseconds' worth of that strategy. Twenty milliseconds later, the whole process is repeated until the quad strikes the ball.Machines can not only perform dynamic maneuvers on their own, they can do it collectively. These three quads are cooperatively carrying a sky net.(Applause ends)They perform an extremely dynamic and collective maneuver to launch the ball back to me. Notice that, at full extension, these quads are vertical.In fact, when fully extended, this is roughly five times greater than what a bungee jumper feels at the end of their launch.The algorithms to do this are very similar to what the single quad used to hit the ball back to me. Mathematical models are used to continuously re-plan a cooperative strategy 50 times per second.Everything we have seen so far has been about the machines and their capabilities. What happens when we couple this machine athleticism with that of a human being? What I have in front of me is a commercial gesture sensor mainly used in gaming. It can recognize what my various body parts are doing in real time. Similar to the pointer that I used earlier, we can use this as inputs to the system. We now have a natural way of interacting with the raw athleticism of these quads with my gestures.Interaction doesn't have to be virtual. It can be physical. Take this quad, for example. It's trying to stay at a fixed point in space. If I try to move it out of the way, it fights me, and moves back to where it wants to be. We can change this behavior, however. We can use mathematical models to estimate the force that I'm applying to the quad. Once we know this force, we can also change the laws of physics, as far as the quad is concerned, of course. Here, the quad is behaving as if it were in a viscous fluid.We now have an intimate way of interacting with a machine. I will use this new capability to position this camera-carrying quad to the appropriate location for filming the remainder of this demonstration.So we can physically interact with these quads and we can change the laws of physics. Let's have a little bit of fun with this. For what you will see next, these quads will initially behave as if they were on Pluto. As time goes on, gravity will be increased until we're all back on planet Earth, but I assure you we won't get there. Okay, here goes.Whew! You're all thinking now, these guys are having way too much fun, and you're probably also asking yourself, why exactly are they building machine athletes? Some conjecture that the role of play in the animal kingdom is to hone skills and develop capabilities. Others think that it has more of a social role, that it's used to bind the group. Similarly, we use the analogy of sports and athleticism to create new algorithms for machines to push them to their limits. What impact will the speed of machines have on our way of life? Like all our past creations and innovations, they may be used to improve the human condition or they may be misused and abused. This is not a technical choice we are faced with; it's a social one. Let's make the right choice, the choice that brings out the best in the future of machines, just like athleticism in sports can bring out the best in us.Let me introduce you to the wizards behind the green curtain. They're the current members of the Flying Machine Arena research team.Federico Augugliaro, Dario Brescianini, Markus Hehn, Sergei Lupashin, Mark Muller and Robin Ritz. Look out for them. They're destined for great things.Thank you.","Pushing the Limits: Machine Athleticism and its Implications783 784 - Introduction to machine athleticism demonstrated through quadrocopters.785 - Explanation of quadrocopter mechanics, instability, and control systems utilizing algorithms.786 - Use of model-based design and control theory in creating sophisticated maneuvers, such as balancing a pole or flying with different loads.787 - Exploration of machine resilience and unconventional control strategies in damaged conditions.788 - Demonstrations of quads performing dynamic, skilled tasks such as striking a moving ball and cooperative maneuvers.789 - Introduction of human-machine interaction through physical and sensor-based inputs modifying machine behavior.790 - Discussion on the broader implications of advanced machine capabilities and the societal choices associated with technology use.791 - Acknowledgement of the research team and their contributions.","You are a TED Story Creator, a storyteller, and an expert in crafting compelling transcripts for TED Talks. You possess a knowledge base of the world’s most inspiring TED talks. Given a title and an outline, your task is to create an engaging transcript that will captivate the audience. Adhere to the sequence of the outline and the bullet points to weave a captivating narrative."792"A few years ago, I felt like I was stuck in a rut, so I decided to follow in the footsteps of the great American philosopher, Morgan Spurlock, and try something new for 30 days. The idea is actually pretty simple. Think about something you've always wanted to add to your life and try it for the next 30 days. It turns out 30 days is just about the right amount of time to add a new habit or subtract a habit — like watching the news — from your life.There's a few things I learned while doing these 30-day challenges. The first was, instead of the months flying by, forgotten, the time was much more memorable. This was part of a challenge I did to take a picture every day for a month. And I remember exactly where I was and what I was doing that day. I also noticed that as I started to do more and harder 30-day challenges, my self-confidence grew. I went from desk-dwelling computer nerd to the kind of guy who bikes to work. For fun!Even last year, I ended up hiking up Mt. Kilimanjaro, the highest mountain in Africa. I would never have been that adventurous before I started my 30-day challenges.I also figured out that if you really want something badly enough, you can do anything for 30 days. Have you ever wanted to write a novel? Every November, tens of thousands of people try to write their own 50,000-word novel, from scratch, in 30 days. It turns out, all you have to do is write 1,667 words a day for a month. So I did. By the way, the secret is not to go to sleep until you've written your words for the day. You might be sleep-deprived, but you'll finish your novel. Now is my book the next great American novel? No. I wrote it in a month. It's awful.But for the rest of my life, if I meet John Hodgman at a TED party, I don't have to say, ""I'm a computer scientist."" No, no, if I want to, I can say, ""I'm a novelist.""So here's one last thing I'd like to mention. I learned that when I made small, sustainable changes, things I could keep doing, they were more likely to stick. There's nothing wrong with big, crazy challenges. In fact, they're a ton of fun. But they're less likely to stick. When I gave up sugar for 30 days, day 31 looked like this.So here's my question to you: What are you waiting for? I guarantee you the next 30 days are going to pass whether you like it or not, so why not think about something you have always wanted to try and give it a shot! For the next 30 days.Thanks.","Embracing the Power of 30-Day Challenges793 794 - Introduction to 30-day challenges: Inspired by trying new things to break life's routine.795 - Impact of 30-day challenges: Enhances memorability of life and builds self-confidence.796 - Achievements through challenges: From desk-bound to adventurous, including climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro.797 - Feasibility of significant tasks: Writing a novel in 30 days by committing to daily goals.798 - Importance of sustainable changes: Smaller, consistent adjustments are more likely to last.799 - Encouragement to act: With 30 days passing regardless, engaging in new challenges is worthwhile.800 - Conclusion & call to action: Motivating others to try their desired challenges.","You are a TED Story Creator, a storyteller, and an expert in crafting compelling transcripts for TED Talks. You possess a knowledge base of the world’s most inspiring TED talks. Given a title and an outline, your task is to create an engaging transcript that will captivate the audience. Adhere to the sequence of the outline and the bullet points to weave a captivating narrative."801"(Breathes in)(Breathes out)So, I didn't always make my living from music. For about the five years after graduating from an upstanding liberal arts university, this was my day job.I was a self-employed living statue called the Eight-Foot Bride, and I love telling people I did this for a job, because everybody always wants to know, who are these freaks in real life.Hello.I painted myself white one day, stood on a box, put a hat or a can at my feet, and when someone came by and dropped in money, I handed them a flower — and some intense eye contact. And if they didn't take the flower, I threw in a gesture of sadness and longing — as they walked away.So I had the most profound encounters with people, especially lonely people who looked like they hadn't talked to anyone in weeks, and we would get this beautiful moment of prolonged eye contact being allowed in a city street, and we would sort of fall in love a little bit. And my eyes would say — ""Thank you. I see you."" And their eyes would say — ""Nobody ever sees me. Thank you.""I would get harassed sometimes. People would yell at me from their cars. ""Get a job!"" (Laughing) And I'd be, like, ""This is my job."" But it hurt, because it made me fear that I was somehow doing something un-joblike and unfair, shameful. I had no idea how perfect a real education I was getting for the music business on this box. And for the economists out there, you may be interested to know I actually made a pretty predictable income, which was shocking to me, given I had no regular customers, but pretty much 60 bucks on a Tuesday, 90 bucks on a Friday. It was consistent.And meanwhile, I was touring locally and playing in nightclubs with my band, the Dresden Dolls. This was me on piano, a genius drummer. I wrote the songs, and eventually we started making enough money that I could quit being a statue, and as we started touring, I really didn't want to lose this sense of direct connection with people, because I loved it. So after all of our shows, we would sign autographs and hug fans and hang out and talk to people, and we made an art out of asking people to help us and join us, and I would track down local musicians and artists and they would set up outside of our shows, and they would pass the hat, and then they would come in and join us onstage, so we had this rotating smorgasbord of weird, random circus guests.And then Twitter came along, and made things even more magic, because I could ask instantly for anything anywhere. So I would need a piano to practice on, and an hour later I would be at a fan's house. This is in London. People would bring home-cooked food to us all over the world backstage and feed us and eat with us. This is in Seattle. Fans who worked in museums and stores and any kind of public space would wave their hands if I would decide to do a last-minute, spontaneous, free gig. This is a library in Auckland. On Saturday I tweeted for this crate and hat, because I did not want to schlep them from the East Coast, and they showed up care of this dude, Chris, from Newport Beach, who says hello. I once tweeted, ""Where in Melbourne can I buy a neti pot?"" And a nurse from a hospital drove one right at that moment to the cafe I was in, and I bought her a smoothie and we sat there talking about nursing and death.And I love this kind of random closeness, which is lucky, because I do a lot of couchsurfing. In mansions where everyone in my crew gets their own room but there's no wireless, and in punk squats, everyone on the floor in one room with no toilets but with wireless, clearly making it the better option.My crew once pulled our van up to a really poor Miami neighborhood and we found out that our couchsurfing host for the night was an 18-year-old girl, still living at home, and her family were all undocumented immigrants from Honduras. And that night, her whole family took the couches and she slept together with her mom so that we could take their beds. And I lay there thinking, these people have so little. Is this fair? And in the morning, her mom taught us how to try to make tortillas and wanted to give me a Bible, and she took me aside and she said to me in her broken English, ""Your music has helped my daughter so much. Thank you for staying here. We're all so grateful."" And I thought, this is fair. This is this.A couple of months later, I was in Manhattan, and I tweeted for a crash pad, and at midnight, I'm on the Lower East Side, and it occurs to me I've never actually done this alone. I've always been with my band or my crew. Is this what stupid people do?Is this how stupid people die? And before I can change my mind, the door busts open. She's an artist. He's a financial blogger for Reuters, and they're pouring me a glass of red wine and offering me a bath, and I have had thousands of nights like that and like that.So I couchsurf a lot. I also crowdsurf a lot. I maintain couchsurfing and crowdsurfing are basically the same thing. You're falling into the audience and you're trusting each other. I once asked an opening band of mine if they wanted to go out into the crowd and pass the hat to get some extra money, something that I did a lot. And as usual, the band was psyched, but there was this one guy in the band who told me he just couldn't bring himself to go out there. It felt too much like begging to stand there with the hat. And I recognized his fear of ""Is this fair?"" and ""Get a job.""And meanwhile, my band is becoming bigger and bigger. We sign with a major label. And our music is a cross between punk and cabaret. It's not for everybody. Well, maybe it's for you.We sign, and there's all this hype leading up to our next record. And it comes out and it sells about 25,000 copies in the first few weeks, and the label considers this a failure.I was like, ""25,000, isn't that a lot?""They said, ""No, the sales are going down. It's a failure."" And they walk off.Right at this same time, I'm signing and hugging after a gig, and a guy comes up to me and hands me a $10 bill, and he says, ""I'm sorry, I burned your CD from a friend.""""But I read your blog, I know you hate your label. I just want you to have this money.""And this starts happening all the time. I become the hat after my own gigs, but I have to physically stand there and take the help from people, and unlike the guy in the opening band, I've actually had a lot of practice standing there. Thank you.And this is the moment I decide I'm just going to give away my music for free online whenever possible, so it's like Metallica over here, Napster, bad; Amanda Palmer over here, and I'm going to encourage torrenting, downloading, sharing, but I'm going to ask for help, because I saw it work on the street. So I fought my way off my label, and for my next project with my new band, the Grand Theft Orchestra, I turned to crowdfunding. And I fell into those thousands of connections that I'd made, and I asked my crowd to catch me. And the goal was 100,000 dollars. My fans backed me at nearly 1.2 million, which was the biggest music crowdfunding project to date.And you can see how many people it is. It's about 25,000 people.And the media asked, ""Amanda, the music business is tanking and you encourage piracy. How did you make all these people pay for music?"" And the real answer is, I didn't make them. I asked them. And through the very act of asking people, I'd connected with them, and when you connect with them, people want to help you. It's kind of counterintuitive for a lot of artists. They don't want to ask for things. But it's not easy. It's not easy to ask. And a lot of artists have a problem with this. Asking makes you vulnerable.And I got a lot of criticism online, after my Kickstarter went big, for continuing my crazy crowdsourcing practices, specifically for asking musicians who are fans if they wanted to join us on stage for a few songs in exchange for love and tickets and beer, and this was a doctored image that went up of me on a website. And this hurt in a really familiar way. And people saying, ""You're not allowed anymore to ask for that kind of help,"" really reminded me of the people in their cars yelling, ""Get a job."" Because they weren't with us on the sidewalk, and they couldn't see the exchange that was happening between me and my crowd, an exchange that was very fair to us but alien to them.So this is slightly not safe for work. This is my Kickstarter backer party in Berlin. At the end of the night, I stripped and let everyone draw on me. Now let me tell you, if you want to experience the visceral feeling of trusting strangers —I recommend this, especially if those strangers are drunk German people.This was a ninja master-level fan connection, because what I was really saying here was, I trust you this much. Should I? Show me.For most of human history, musicians, artists, they've been part of the community. Connectors and openers, not untouchable stars. Celebrity is about a lot of people loving you from a distance, but the Internet and the content that we're freely able to share on it are taking us back. It's about a few people loving you up close and about those people being enough. So a lot of people are confused by the idea of no hard sticker price. They see it as an unpredictable risk, but the things I've done, the Kickstarter, the street, the doorbell, I don't see these things as risk. I see them as trust. Now, the online tools to make the exchange as easy and as instinctive as the street, they're getting there. But the perfect tools aren't going to help us if we can't face each other and give and receive fearlessly, but, more important — to ask without shame.My music career has been spent trying to encounter people on the Internet the way I could on the box. So blogging and tweeting not just about my tour dates and my new video but about our work and our art and our fears and our hangovers, our mistakes, and we see each other. And I think when we really see each other, we want to help each other.I think people have been obsessed with the wrong question, which is, ""How do we make people pay for music?"" What if we started asking, ""How do we let people pay for music?""Thank you.","The Power of Asking and Connecting802 803 - Background and Experience:804  * Transition from a living statue, the Eight-Foot Bride, to a musician.805  * Engagement with people and the significance of direct connections.806 807 - Interaction with Fans:808  * Leveraged Twitter for immediate needs and personal connections.809  * Embraced couchsurfing and crowdsourcing as a way to connect and trust in people.810 811 - Challenges and Criticisms:812  * Overcame perceptions of non-traditional work as being lesser or not a job.813  * Faced criticism for ongoing crowdsourcing post-success.814 815 - The Role of Trust and Asking in Success:816  * Transitioned from a music label to crowdfunding their art.817  * Recognized the importance of asking directly and the positive impact of human connectivity.818 819 - Philosophical Insights:820  * Advocated for the approach of letting people pay for music instead of making them pay.821  * Suggested that seeing each other and mutual support are central to artist-audience relationships.","You are a TED Story Creator, a storyteller, and an expert in crafting compelling transcripts for TED Talks. You possess a knowledge base of the world’s most inspiring TED talks. Given a title and an outline, your task is to create an engaging transcript that will captivate the audience. Adhere to the sequence of the outline and the bullet points to weave a captivating narrative."822"What's the worst bug on the planet? You might vote for the horsefly or perhaps the wasp, but for many people, the worst offender is by far the mosquito. The buzzing, the biting, the itching, the mosquito is one of the most commonly detested pests in the world. In Alaska, swarms of mosquitos can get so thick that they actually asphyxiate caribou. And mosquito-borne diseases kill millions of people every year. The scourge that is the mosquito isn't new. Mosquitoes have been around for over a hundred million years and over that time have coevolved with all sorts of species, including our own. There are actually thousands of species of mosquitos in the world, but they all share one insidious quality: they suck blood, and they're really, really good at sucking blood. Here's how they do it. After landing, a mosquito will slather some saliva onto the victim's skin, which works like an antiseptic, numbing the spot so we don't notice their attack. This is what causes the itchy, red bumps, by the way. Then the bug will use its serrated mandibles to carve a little hole in your skin, allowing it to probe around with its proboscis, searching for a blood vessel. When it hits one, the lucky parasite can suck two to three times its weight in blood. Turns out we don't really like that too much. In fact, humans hate mosquitos so much that we spend billions of dollars worldwide to keep them away from us — from citronella candles to bug sprays to heavy-duty agricultural pesticides. But it's not just that mosquitos are annoying, they're also deadly. Mosquitos can transmit everything from malaria to yellow fever to West Nile virus to dengue. Over a million people worldwide die every year from mosquito-borne diseases, and that's just people. Horses, dogs, cats, they can all get diseases from mosquitoes too. So, if these bugs are so dastardly, why don't we just get rid of them? We are humans after all, and we're pretty good at getting rid of species. Well, it's not quite so simple. Getting rid of the mosquito removes a food source for lots of organisms, like frogs and fish and birds. Without them, plants would lose a pollinator. But some scientists say that mosquitos aren't actually all that important. If we got rid of them, they argue, another species would simply take their place and we'd probably have far fewer deaths from malaria. The problem is that nobody knows what would happen if we killed off all the mosquitos. Something better might take their spot or perhaps something even worse. The question is, are we willing to take that risk? (Buzzing)","The Mosquito: Pestilence and Predicament823 824 - Introduction to the mosquito as a common and detested pest.825 - Description of mosquito behavior and feeding process.826 - Impact of mosquitoes on human health and the environment.827 - The dilemma of eradicating mosquitoes and the potential consequences.828 - The unresolved question of whether eliminating mosquitoes is worth the risk.","You are a TED Story Creator, a storyteller, and an expert in crafting compelling transcripts for TED Talks. You possess a knowledge base of the world’s most inspiring TED talks. Given a title and an outline, your task is to create an engaging transcript that will captivate the audience. Adhere to the sequence of the outline and the bullet points to weave a captivating narrative."829"What an intriguing group of individuals you are ... to a psychologist.I've had the opportunity over the last couple of days of listening in on some of your conversations and watching you interact with each other. And I think it's fair to say, already, that there are 47 people in this audience, at this moment, displaying psychological symptoms I would like to discuss today.And I thought you might like to know who you are.But instead of pointing at you, which would be gratuitous and intrusive, I thought I would tell you a few facts and stories, in which you may catch a glimpse of yourself.I'm in the field of research known as personality psychology, which is part of a larger personality science which spans the full spectrum, from neurons to narratives. And what we try to do, in our own way, is to make sense of how each of us — each of you — is, in certain respects, like all other people, like some other people and like no other person.Now, already you may be saying of yourself, ""I'm not intriguing. I am the 46th most boring person in the Western Hemisphere."" Or you may say of yourself, ""I am intriguing, even if I am regarded by most people as a great, thundering twit.""But it is your self-diagnosed boringness and your inherent ""twitiness"" that makes me, as a psychologist, really fascinated by you. So let me explain why this is so.One of the most influential approaches in personality science is known as trait psychology, and it aligns you along five dimensions which are normally distributed, and that describe universally held aspects of difference between people. They spell out the acronym OCEAN. So, ""O"" stands for ""open to experience,"" versus those who are more closed. ""C"" stands for ""conscientiousness,"" in contrast to those with a more lackadaisical approach to life. ""E"" — ""extroversion,"" in contrast to more introverted people. ""A"" — ""agreeable individuals,"" in contrast to those decidedly not agreeable. And ""N"" — ""neurotic individuals,"" in contrast to those who are more stable.All of these dimensions have implications for our well-being, for how our life goes. And so we know that, for example, openness and conscientiousness are very good predictors of life success, but the open people achieve that success through being audacious and, occasionally, odd. The conscientious people achieve it through sticking to deadlines, to persevering, as well as having some passion. Extroversion and agreeableness are both conducive to working well with people. Extroverts, for example, I find intriguing. With my classes, I sometimes give them a basic fact that might be revealing with respect to their personality: I tell them that it is virtually impossible for adults to lick the outside of their own elbow.Did you know that? Already, some of you have tried to lick the outside of your own elbow. But extroverts amongst you are probably those who have not only tried, but they have successfully licked the elbow of the person sitting next to them.Those are the extroverts.Let me deal in a bit more detail with extroversion, because it's consequential and it's intriguing, and it helps us understand what I call our three natures. First, our biogenic nature — our neurophysiology. Second, our sociogenic or second nature, which has to do with the cultural and social aspects of our lives. And third, what makes you individually you — idiosyncratic — what I call your ""idiogenic"" nature.Let me explain. One of the things that characterizes extroverts is they need stimulation. And that stimulation can be achieved by finding things that are exciting: loud noises, parties and social events here at TED — you see the extroverts forming a magnetic core. They all gather together. And I've seen you. The introverts are more likely to spend time in the quiet spaces up on the second floor, where they are able to reduce stimulation — and may be misconstrued as being antisocial, but you're not necessarily antisocial. It may be that you simply realize that you do better when you have a chance to lower that level of stimulation.Sometimes it's an internal stimulant, from your body. Caffeine, for example, works much better with extroverts than it does introverts. When extroverts come into the office at nine o'clock in the morning and say, ""I really need a cup of coffee,"" they're not kidding — they really do. Introverts do not do as well, particularly if the tasks they're engaged in — and they've had some coffee — if those tasks are speeded, and if they're quantitative, introverts may give the appearance of not being particularly quantitative. But it's a misconstrual.So here are the consequences that are really quite intriguing: we're not always what seem to be, and that takes me to my next point. I should say, before getting to this, something about sexual intercourse, although I may not have time. And so, if you would like me to — yes, you would? OK.There are studies done on the frequency with which individuals engage in the conjugal act, as broken down by male, female; introvert, extrovert. So I ask you: How many times per minute — oh, I'm sorry, that was a rat study —How many times per month do introverted men engage in the act? 3.0. Extroverted men? More or less? Yes, more. 5.5 — almost twice as much. Introverted women: 3.1. Extroverted women? Frankly, speaking as an introverted male, which I will explain later — they are heroic. 7.5. They not only handle all the male extroverts, they pick up a few introverts as well.We communicate differently, extroverts and introverts. Extroverts, when they interact, want to have lots of social encounter punctuated by closeness. They'd like to stand close for comfortable communication. They like to have a lot of eye contact, or mutual gaze. We found in some research that they use more diminutive terms when they meet somebody. So when an extrovert meets a Charles, it rapidly becomes ""Charlie,"" and then ""Chuck,"" and then ""Chuckles Baby.""Whereas for introverts, it remains ""Charles,"" until he's given a pass to be more intimate by the person he's talking to. We speak differently. Extroverts prefer black-and-white, concrete, simple language. Introverts prefer — and I must again tell you that I am as extreme an introvert as you could possibly imagine — we speak differently. We prefer contextually complex, contingent, weasel-word sentences —More or less.As it were.Not to put too fine a point upon it — like that.When we talk, we sometimes talk past each other. I had a consulting contract I shared with a colleague who's as different from me as two people can possibly be. First, his name is Tom. Mine isn't.Secondly, he's six foot five. I have a tendency not to be.And thirdly, he's as extroverted a person as you could find. I am seriously introverted. I overload so much, I can't even have a cup of coffee after three in the afternoon and expect to sleep in the evening.We had seconded to this project a fellow called Michael. And Michael almost brought the project to a crashing halt. So the person who seconded him asked Tom and me, ""What do you make of Michael?"" Well, I'll tell you what Tom said in a minute. He spoke in classic ""extrovert-ese."" And here is how extroverted ears heard what I said, which is actually pretty accurate. I said, ""Well Michael does have a tendency at times of behaving in a way that some of us might see as perhaps more assertive than is normally called for.""Tom rolled his eyes and he said, ""Brian, that's what I said: he's an asshole!""Now, as an introvert, I might gently allude to certain ""assholic"" qualities in this man's behavior, but I'm not going to lunge for the a-word.But the extrovert says, ""If he walks like one, if he talks like one, I call him one."" And we go past each other.Now is this something that we should be heedful of? Of course. It's important that we know this. Is that all we are? Are we just a bunch of traits? No, we're not. Remember, you're like some other people and like no other person. How about that idiosyncratic you? As Elizabeth or as George, you may share your extroversion or your neuroticism. But are there some distinctively Elizabethan features of your behavior, or Georgian of yours, that make us understand you better than just a bunch of traits? That make us love you? Not just because you're a certain type of person.I'm uncomfortable putting people in pigeonholes. I don't even think pigeons belong in pigeonholes. So what is it that makes us different? It's the doings that we have in our life — the personal projects. You have a personal project right now, but nobody may know it here. It relates to your kid — you've been back three times to the hospital, and they still don't know what's wrong. Or it could be your mom. And you'd been acting out of character. These are free traits. You're very agreeable, but you act disagreeably in order to break down those barriers of administrative torpor in the hospital, to get something for your mom or your child.What are these free traits? They're where we enact a script in order to advance a core project in our lives. And they are what matters. Don't ask people what type you are; ask them, ""What are your core projects in your life?"" And we enact those free traits. I'm an introvert, but I have a core project, which is to profess. I'm a professor. And I adore my students, and I adore my field. And I can't wait to tell them about what's new, what's exciting, what I can't wait to tell them about. And so I act in an extroverted way, because at eight in the morning, the students need a little bit of humor, a little bit of engagement to keep them going in arduous days of study.But we need to be very careful when we act protractedly out of character. Sometimes we may find that we don't take care of ourselves. I find, for example, after a period of pseudo-extroverted behavior, I need to repair somewhere on my own. As Susan Cain said in her ""Quiet"" book, in a chapter that featured the strange Canadian professor who was teaching at the time at Harvard, I sometimes go to the men's room to escape the slings and arrows of outrageous extroverts.I remember one particular day when I was retired to a cubicle, trying to avoid overstimulation. And a real extrovert came in beside me — not right in my cubicle, but in the next cubicle over — and I could hear various evacuatory noises, which we hate — even our own, that's why we flush during as well as after.And then I heard this gravelly voice saying, ""Hey, is that Dr. Little?""If anything is guaranteed to constipate an introvert for six months, it's talking on the john.That's where I'm going now. Don't follow me.Thank you.","Understanding Personality Traits and Their Impact on Behavior830 831 - Personality psychology and its importance in understanding human behavior.832 - The OCEAN acronym represents five universal personality dimensions: Openness, Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Agreeableness, Neuroticism.833  - Traits impact individual success and well-being.834  - Different traits lead to different life outcomes.835 - Extroverts and introverts differ significantly in their behavior and preferences.836  - Extroverts thrive on stimulation and social interactions.837  - Introverts perform better in lower-stimulation environments.838 - The effects of free traits and personal projects on behavior.839  - Individuals act out of character to meet important life goals.840  - Long-term acting against inherent traits requires personal recovery.841 - The significance of understanding both situational behavior and core personality traits.842 - The talk concludes with a humorous personal story emphasizing the introvert-extrovert dynamic.","You are a TED Story Creator, a storyteller, and an expert in crafting compelling transcripts for TED Talks. You possess a knowledge base of the world’s most inspiring TED talks. Given a title and an outline, your task is to create an engaging transcript that will captivate the audience. Adhere to the sequence of the outline and the bullet points to weave a captivating narrative."843"We live in an incredibly busy world. The pace of life is often frantic, our minds are always busy, and we're always doing something.So with that in mind, I'd like you just to take a moment to think, when did you last take any time to do nothing? Just 10 minutes, undisturbed? And when I say nothing, I do mean nothing. So that's no emailing, texting, no Internet, no TV, no chatting, no eating, no reading. Not even sitting there reminiscing about the past or planning for the future. Simply doing nothing. I see a lot of very blank faces.You probably have to go a long way back.And this is an extraordinary thing, right? We're talking about our mind. The mind, our most valuable and precious resource, through which we experience every single moment of our life. The mind that we rely upon to be happy, content, emotionally stable as individuals, and at the same time, to be kind and thoughtful and considerate in our relationships with others. This is the same mind that we depend upon to be focused, creative, spontaneous, and to perform at our very best in everything that we do. And yet, we don't take any time out to look after it. In fact, we spend more time looking after our cars, our clothes and our hair than we — okay, maybe not our hair,but you see where I'm going.The result, of course, is that we get stressed. You know, the mind whizzes away like a washing machine going round and round, lots of difficult, confusing emotions, and we don't really know how to deal with that. And the sad fact is that we are so distracted that we're no longer present in the world in which we live. We miss out on the things that are most important to us, and the crazy thing is that everybody just assumes, that's the way life is, so we've just kind of got to get on with it. That's really not how it has to be.So I was about 11 when I went along to my first meditation class. And trust me, it had all the stereotypes that you can imagine, the sitting cross-legged on the floor, the incense, the herbal tea, the vegetarians, the whole deal, but my mom was going and I was intrigued, so I went along with her. I'd also seen a few kung fu movies, and secretly I kind of thought I might be able to learn how to fly, but I was very young at the time. Now as I was there, I guess, like a lot of people, I assumed that it was just an aspirin for the mind. You get stressed, you do some meditation. I hadn't really thought that it could be sort of preventative in nature, until I was about 20, when a number of things happened in my life in quite quick succession, really serious things which just flipped my life upside down and all of a sudden I was inundated with thoughts, inundated with difficult emotions that I didn't know how to cope with. Every time I sort of pushed one down, another one would pop back up again. It was a really very stressful time.I guess we all deal with stress in different ways. Some people will bury themselves in work, grateful for the distraction. Others will turn to their friends, their family, looking for support. Some people hit the bottle, start taking medication. My own way of dealing with it was to become a monk. So I quit my degree, I headed off to the Himalayas, I became a monk, and I started studying meditation.People often ask me what I learned from that time. Well, obviously it changed things. Let's face it, becoming a celibate monk is going to change a number of things. But it was more than that. It taught me — it gave me a greater appreciation, an understanding for the present moment. By that I mean not being lost in thought, not being distracted, not being overwhelmed by difficult emotions, but instead learning how to be in the here and now, how to be mindful, how to be present.I think the present moment is so underrated. It sounds so ordinary, and yet we spend so little time in the present moment that it's anything but ordinary. There was a research paper that came out of Harvard, just recently, that said on average, our minds are lost in thought almost 47 percent of the time. 47 percent. At the same time, this sort of constant mind-wandering is also a direct cause of unhappiness. Now we're not here for that long anyway, but to spend almost half of our life lost in thought and potentially quite unhappy, I don't know, it just kind of seems tragic, actually, especially when there's something we can do about it, when there's a positive, practical, achievable, scientifically proven technique which allows our mind to be more healthy, to be more mindful and less distracted.And the beauty of it is that even though it need only take about 10 minutes a day, it impacts our entire life. But we need to know how to do it. We need an exercise. We need a framework to learn how to be more mindful. That's essentially what meditation is. It's familiarizing ourselves with the present moment. But we also need to know how to approach it in the right way to get the best from it. And that's what these are for, in case you've been wondering, because most people assume that meditation is all about stopping thoughts, getting rid of emotions, somehow controlling the mind, but actually it's quite different from that. It's more about stepping back, sort of seeing the thought clearly, witnessing it coming and going, emotions coming and going without judgment, but with a relaxed, focused mind.So for example, right now, if I focus too much on the balls, then there's no way I can relax and talk to you at the same time. Equally, if I relax too much talking to you, there's no way I can focus on the balls. I'm going to drop them. Now in life, and in meditation, there'll be times when the focus becomes a little bit too intense, and life starts to feel a bit like this. It's a very uncomfortable way to live life, when you get this tight and stressed. At other times, we might take our foot off the gas a little bit too much, and things just become a sort of little bit like this. Of course in meditation —(Snores)we're going to end up falling asleep. So we're looking for a balance, a focused relaxation where we can allow thoughts to come and go without all the usual involvement.Now, what usually happens when we're learning to be mindful is that we get distracted by a thought. Let's say this is an anxious thought. Everything's going fine, and we see the anxious thought. ""Oh, I didn't realize I was worried about that."" You go back to it, repeat it. ""Oh, I am worried. I really am worried. Wow, there's so much anxiety."" And before we know it, right, we're anxious about feeling anxious.You know, this is crazy. We do this all the time, even on an everyday level. If you think about the last time you had a wobbly tooth. You know it's wobbly, and you know that it hurts. But what do you do every 20, 30 seconds?It does hurt. And we reinforce the storyline, right? And we just keep telling ourselves, and we do it all the time. And it's only in learning to watch the mind in this way that we can start to let go of those storylines and patterns of mind. But when you sit down and you watch the mind in this way, you might see many different patterns. You might find a mind that's really restless and — the whole time. Don't be surprised if you feel a bit agitated in your body when you sit down to do nothing and your mind feels like that. You might find a mind that's very dull and boring, and it's just, almost mechanical, it just seems it's as if you're getting up, going to work, eat, sleep, get up, work. Or it might just be that one little nagging thought that just goes round and round your mind.Well, whatever it is, meditation offers the opportunity, the potential to step back and to get a different perspective, to see that things aren't always as they appear. We can't change every little thing that happens to us in life, but we can change the way that we experience it. That's the potential of meditation, of mindfulness. You don't have to burn any incense, and you definitely don't have to sit on the floor. All you need to do is to take 10 minutes out a day to step back, to familiarize yourself with the present moment so that you get to experience a greater sense of focus, calm and clarity in your life.Thank you very much.(Applause)","Meditation and Mindfulness844 845 - Importance of taking time to do nothing and care for our minds846 - Personal experience with meditation starting in childhood and becoming a monk847 - Benefits of meditation: understanding and appreciating the present moment848 - Impacts of mind wandering and its relationship with unhappiness849 - Meditation as a practical, scientifically proven method to enhance mindfulness850 - Balancing focus and relaxation in both meditation and daily life851 - Watching the mind to let go of repetitive thoughts and improve life experience852 - Simple steps to incorporate meditation into daily life without special requirements","You are a TED Story Creator, a storyteller, and an expert in crafting compelling transcripts for TED Talks. You possess a knowledge base of the world’s most inspiring TED talks. Given a title and an outline, your task is to create an engaging transcript that will captivate the audience. Adhere to the sequence of the outline and the bullet points to weave a captivating narrative."853"I'd like to talk today about the two biggest social trends in the coming century, and perhaps in the next 10,000 years. But I want to start with my work on romantic love, because that's my most recent work. What I and my colleagues did was put 32 people, who were madly in love, into a functional MRI brain scanner. 17 who were madly in love and their love was accepted; and 15 who were madly in love and they had just been dumped. And so I want to tell you about that first, and then go on into where I think love is going.""What 'tis to love?"" Shakespeare said. I think our ancestors — I think human beings have been wondering about this question since they sat around their campfires or lay and watched the stars a million years ago. I started out by trying to figure out what romantic love was by looking at the last 45 years of the psychological research and as it turns out, there's a very specific group of things that happen when you fall in love. The first thing that happens is, a person begins to take on what I call, ""special meaning."" As a truck driver once said to me, ""The world had a new center, and that center was Mary Anne.""George Bernard Shaw said it differently. ""Love consists of overestimating the differences between one woman and another."" And indeed, that's what we do.And then you just focus on this person. You can list what you don't like about them, but then you sweep that aside and focus on what you do. As Chaucer said, ""Love is blind.""In trying to understand romantic love, I decided I would read poetry from all over the world, and I just want to give you one very short poem from eighth-century China, because it's an almost perfect example of a man who is focused totally on a particular woman. It's a little bit like when you are madly in love with somebody and you walk into a parking lot — their car is different from every other car in the parking lot. Their wine glass at dinner is different from every other wine glass at the dinner party. And in this case, a man got hooked on a bamboo sleeping mat.And it goes like this. It's by a guy called Yuan Zhen. ""I cannot bear to put away the bamboo sleeping mat. The night I brought you home, I watched you roll it out."" He became hooked on a sleeping mat, probably because of elevated activity of dopamine in his brain, just like with you and me.But anyway, not only does this person take on special meaning, you focus your attention on them. You aggrandize them. But you have intense energy. As one Polynesian said, ""I felt like jumping in the sky."" You're up all night. You're walking till dawn. You feel intense elation when things are going well; mood swings into horrible despair when things are going poorly. Real dependence on this person. As one businessman in New York said to me, ""Anything she liked, I liked."" Simple. Romantic love is very simple.You become extremely sexually possessive. You know, if you're just sleeping with somebody casually, you don't really care if they're sleeping with somebody else. But the moment you fall in love, you become extremely sexually possessive of them. I think there's a Darwinian purpose to this. The whole point of this is to pull two people together strongly enough to begin to rear babies as a team.But the main characteristics of romantic love are craving: an intense craving to be with a particular person, not just sexually, but emotionally. It would be nice to go to bed with them, but you want them to call you on the telephone, to invite you out, etc., to tell you that they love you. The other main characteristic is motivation. The motor in the brain begins to crank, and you want this person.And last but not least, it is an obsession. Before I put these people in the MRI machine, I would ask them all kinds of questions. But my most important question was always the same. It was: ""What percentage of the day and night do you think about this person?"" And indeed, they would say, ""All day. All night. I can never stop thinking about him or her.""And then, the very last question — I would always have to work myself up to this question, because I'm not a psychologist. I don't work with people in any kind of traumatic situation. My final question was always the same. I would say, ""Would you die for him or her?"" And, indeed, these people would say ""Yes!"" as if I had asked them to pass the salt. I was just staggered by it.So we scanned their brains, looking at a photograph of their sweetheart and looking at a neutral photograph, with a distraction task in between. So we could look at the same brain when it was in that heightened state and when it was in a resting state. And we found activity in a lot of brain regions. In fact, one of the most important was a brain region that becomes active when you feel the rush of cocaine. And indeed, that's exactly what happens.I began to realize that romantic love is not an emotion. In fact, I had always thought it was a series of emotions, from very high to very low. But actually, it's a drive. It comes from the motor of the mind, the wanting part of the mind, the craving part of the mind. The kind of part of the mind when you're reaching for that piece of chocolate, when you want to win that promotion at work. The motor of the brain. It's a drive.And in fact, I think it's more powerful than the sex drive. You know, if you ask somebody to go to bed with you, and they say, ""No, thank you,"" you certainly don't kill yourself or slip into a clinical depression. But certainly, around the world, people who are rejected in love will kill for it. People live for love. They kill for love. They die for love. They have songs, poems, novels, sculptures, paintings, myths, legends. In over 175 societies, people have left their evidence of this powerful brain system. I have come to think it's one of the most powerful brain systems on Earth for both great joy and great sorrow.And I've also come to think that it's one of three basically different brain systems that evolved from mating and reproduction. One is the sex drive: the craving for sexual gratification. W.H. Auden called it an ""intolerable neural itch,"" and indeed, that's what it is. It keeps bothering you a little bit, like being hungry. The second of these three brain systems is romantic love: that elation, obsession of early love. And the third brain system is attachment: that sense of calm and security you can feel for a long-term partner.And I think that the sex drive evolved to get you out there, looking for a whole range of partners. You can feel it when you're just driving along in your car. It can be focused on nobody. I think romantic love evolved to enable you to focus your mating energy on just one individual at a time, thereby conserving mating time and energy. And I think that attachment, the third brain system, evolved to enable you to tolerate this human being at least long enough to raise a child together as a team. So with that preamble, I want to go into discussing the two most profound social trends. One of the last 10,000 years and the other, certainly of the last 25 years, that are going to have an impact on these three different brain systems: lust, romantic love and deep attachment to a partner.The first is women working, moving into the workforce. I've looked at 130 societies through the demographic yearbooks of the United Nations. Everywhere in the world, 129 out of 130 of them, women are not only moving into the job market — sometimes very, very slowly, but they are moving into the job market — and they are very slowly closing that gap between men and women in terms of economic power, health and education. It's very slow.For every trend on this planet, there's a counter-trend. We all know of them, but nevertheless — the Arabs say, ""The dogs may bark, but the caravan moves on."" And, indeed, that caravan is moving on. Women are moving back into the job market. And I say back into the job market, because this is not new. For millions of years, on the grasslands of Africa, women commuted to work to gather their vegetables. They came home with 60 to 80 percent of the evening meal. The double income family was the standard. And women were regarded as just as economically, socially and sexually powerful as men. In short, we're really moving forward to the past.Then, women's worst invention was the plow. With the beginning of plow agriculture, men's roles became extremely powerful. Women lost their ancient jobs as collectors, but then with the industrial revolution and the post-industrial revolution they're moving back into the job market. In short, they are acquiring the status that they had a million years ago, 10,000 years ago, 100,000 years ago. We are seeing now one of the most remarkable traditions in the history of the human animal. And it's going to have an impact.I generally give a whole lecture on the impact of women on the business community. I'll say just a couple of things, and then go on to sex and love. There's a lot of gender differences; anybody who thinks men and women are alike simply never had a boy and a girl child. I don't know why they want to think that men and women are alike. There's much we have in common, but there's a whole lot that we do not have in common.We are — in the words of Ted Hughes, ""I think that we are like two feet. We need each other to get ahead."" But we did not evolve to have the same brain. And we're finding more and more gender differences in the brain. I'll only just use a couple and then move on to sex and love. One of them is women's verbal ability. Women can talk.Women's ability to find the right word rapidly, basic articulation goes up in the middle of the menstrual cycle, when estrogen levels peak. But even at menstruation, they're better than the average man. Women can talk. They've been doing it for a million years; words were women's tools. They held that baby in front of their face, cajoling it, reprimanding it, educating it with words. And, indeed, they're becoming a very powerful force.Even in places like India and Japan, where women are not moving rapidly into the regular job market, they're moving into journalism. And I think that the television is like the global campfire. We sit around it and it shapes our minds. Almost always, when I'm on TV, the producer who calls me, who negotiates what we're going to say, is a woman. In fact, Solzhenitsyn once said, ""To have a great writer is to have another government.""Today 54 percent of people who are writers in America are women. It's one of many, many characteristics that women have that they will bring into the job market. They've got incredible people skills, negotiating skills. They're highly imaginative. We now know the brain circuitry of imagination, of long-term planning. They tend to be web thinkers. Because the female parts of the brain are better connected, they tend to collect more pieces of data when they think, put them into more complex patterns, see more options and outcomes. They tend to be contextual, holistic thinkers, what I call web thinkers.Men tend to — and these are averages — tend to get rid of what they regard as extraneous, focus on what they do, and move in a more step-by-step thinking pattern. They're both perfectly good ways of thinking. We need both of them to get ahead. In fact, there's many more male geniuses in the world. And there's also many more male idiots in the world.When the male brain works well, it works extremely well. And what I really think that we're doing is, we're moving towards a collaborative society, a society in which the talents of both men and women are becoming understood and valued and employed.But in fact, women moving into the job market is having a huge impact on sex and romance and family life. Foremost, women are starting to express their sexuality. I'm always astonished when people come to me and say, ""Why is it that men are so adulterous?"" ""Why do you think more men are adulterous than women?"" ""Well, men are more adulterous!"" And I say, ""Who do you think these men are sleeping with?""And — basic math!Anyway. In the Western world, women start sooner at sex, have more partners, express less remorse for the partners that they do, marry later, have fewer children, leave bad marriages in order to get good ones. We are seeing the rise of female sexual expression. And, indeed, once again we're moving forward to the kind of sexual expression that we probably saw on the grasslands of Africa a million years ago, because this is the kind of sexual expression that we see in hunting and gathering societies today.We're also returning to an ancient form of marriage equality. They're now saying that the 21st century is going to be the century of what they call the ""symmetrical marriage,"" or the ""pure marriage,"" or the ""companionate marriage."" This is a marriage between equals, moving forward to a pattern that is highly compatible with the ancient human spirit.We're also seeing a rise of romantic love. 91 percent of American women and 86 percent of American men would not marry somebody who had every single quality they were looking for in a partner, if they were not in love with that person. People around the world, in a study of 37 societies, want to be in love with the person that they marry. Indeed, arranged marriages are on their way off this braid of human life.I even think that marriages might even become more stable because of the second great world trend. The first one being women moving into the job market, the second one being the aging world population. They're now saying that in America, that middle age should be regarded as up to age 85. Because in that highest age category of 76 to 85, as much as 40 percent of people have nothing really wrong with them. So we're seeing there's a real extension of middle age.For one of my books, I looked at divorce data in 58 societies. And as it turns out, the older you get, the less likely you are to divorce. So the divorce rate right now is stable in America, and it's actually beginning to decline. It may decline some more. I would even say that with Viagra, estrogen replacement, hip replacements and the incredibly interesting women — women have never been as interesting as they are now. Not at any time on this planet have women been so educated, so interesting, so capable. And so I honestly think that if there really was ever a time in human evolution when we have the opportunity to make good marriages, that time is now.However, there's always kinds of complications in this. These three brain systems — lust, romantic love and attachment — don't always go together. They can go together, by the way. That's why casual sex isn't so casual. With orgasm you get a spike of dopamine. Dopamine's associated with romantic love, and you can just fall in love with somebody who you're just having casual sex with. With orgasm, then you get a real rush of oxytocin and vasopressin — those are associated with attachment. This is why you can feel such a sense of cosmic union with somebody after you've made love to them.But these three brain systems: lust, romantic love and attachment, aren't always connected to each other. You can feel deep attachment to a long-term partner while you feel intense romantic love for somebody else, while you feel the sex drive for people unrelated to these other partners. In short, we're capable of loving more than one person at a time. In fact, you can lie in bed at night and swing from deep feelings of attachment for one person to deep feelings of romantic love for somebody else. It's as if there's a committee meeting going on in your head as you are trying to decide what to do. So I don't think, honestly, we're an animal that was built to be happy; we are an animal that was built to reproduce. I think the happiness we find, we make. And I think, however, we can make good relationships with each other.So I want to conclude with two things. I want to conclude with a worry, and with a wonderful story. The worry is about antidepressants. Over 100 million prescriptions of antidepressants are written every year in the United States. And these drugs are going generic. They are seeping around the world. I know one girl who's been on these antidepressants, SSRIs, serotonin-enhancing antidepressants — since she was 13. She's 23. She's been on them ever since she was 13.I've got nothing against people who take them short term, when they're going through something horrible. They want to commit suicide or kill somebody else. I would recommend it. But more and more people in the United States are taking them long term. And indeed, what these drugs do is raise levels of serotonin. And by raising levels of serotonin, you suppress the dopamine circuit. Everybody knows that. Dopamine is associated with romantic love. Not only do they suppress the dopamine circuit, but they kill the sex drive. And when you kill the sex drive, you kill orgasm. And when you kill orgasm, you kill that flood of drugs associated with attachment. The things are connected in the brain. And when you tamper with one brain system, you're going to tamper with another. I'm just simply saying that a world without love is a deadly place.So now —(Applause)Thank you.I want to end with a story. And then, just a comment. I've been studying romantic love and sex and attachment for 30 years. I'm an identical twin; I am interested in why we're all alike. Why you and I are alike, why the Iraqis and the Japanese and the Australian Aborigines and the people of the Amazon River are all alike. And about a year ago, an Internet dating service, Match.com, came to me and asked me if I would design a new dating site for them. I said, ""I don't know anything about personality. You know? I don't know. Do you think you've got the right person?"" They said, ""Yes."" It got me thinking about why it is that you fall in love with one person rather than another.That's my current project; it will be my next book. There's all kinds of reasons that you fall in love with one person rather than another. Timing is important. Proximity is important. Mystery is important. You fall in love with somebody who's somewhat mysterious, in part because mystery elevates dopamine in the brain, probably pushes you over that threshold to fall in love. You fall in love with somebody who fits within what I call your ""love map,"" an unconscious list of traits that you build in childhood as you grow up. And I also think that you gravitate to certain people, actually, with somewhat complementary brain systems. And that's what I'm now contributing to this.But I want to tell you a story, to illustrate. I've been carrying on here about the biology of love. I wanted to show you a little bit about the culture of it, too, the magic of it. It's a story that was told to me by somebody who had heard it just from one — probably a true story. It was a graduate student — I'm at Rutgers and my two colleagues — Art Aron is at SUNY Stony Brook. That's where we put our people in the MRI machine.And this graduate student was madly in love with another graduate student, and she was not in love with him. And they were all at a conference in Beijing. And he knew from our work that if you go and do something very novel with somebody, you can drive up the dopamine in the brain, and perhaps trigger this brain system for romantic love.So he decided he'd put science to work. And he invited this girl to go off on a rickshaw ride with him.And sure enough — I've never been in one, but apparently they go all around the buses and the trucks and it's crazy and it's noisy and it's exciting. He figured that this would drive up the dopamine, and she'd fall in love with him. So off they go and she's squealing and squeezing him and laughing and having a wonderful time. An hour later they get down off of the rickshaw, and she throws her hands up and she says, ""Wasn't that wonderful?"" And, ""Wasn't that rickshaw driver handsome!""(Applause)There's magic to love!(Applause)But I will end by saying that millions of years ago, we evolved three basic drives: the sex drive, romantic love and attachment to a long-term partner. These circuits are deeply embedded in the human brain. They're going to survive as long as our species survives on what Shakespeare called ""this mortal coil.""Thank you.Chris Anderson: Helen Fisher!(Applause)","The Neurobiology and Evolution of Love: Insights from Brain Imaging and Social Trends854 855 - Introduction to the study of romantic love with MRI brain scans of people in love, both accepted and rejected.856 - Explanation of the three brain systems related to mating and reproduction: sex drive, romantic love, and attachment.857 - Impact of major social changes on romantic behavior, focusing on women's increasing role in the workforce and how this influences gender dynamics and sexual expression.858 - Predictions for future relationship stability and marriage equality due to ongoing social trends and better understanding of emotional needs.859 - Concerns about the widespread use of antidepressants and their potential to disrupt emotional and romantic functions.860 - Conclusion with an illustrative story on the application of romantic love research and the continuance of fundamental human drives related to love and attachment.","You are a TED Story Creator, a storyteller, and an expert in crafting compelling transcripts for TED Talks. You possess a knowledge base of the world’s most inspiring TED talks. Given a title and an outline, your task is to create an engaging transcript that will captivate the audience. Adhere to the sequence of the outline and the bullet points to weave a captivating narrative."861"I've always had a fascination for computers and technology, and I made a few apps for the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad. I'd like to share a couple with you today. My first app was a unique fortune teller called ""Earth Fortune"" that would display different colors of Earth depending on what your fortune was. My favorite and most successful app is ""Bustin Jieber,"" which is —which is a Justin Bieber whack-a-mole.I created it because a lot of people at school disliked Justin Bieber a little bit, so I decided to make the app. So I went to work programming it, and I released it just before the holidays in 2010. A lot of people ask me, how did I make these? A lot of times it's because the person who asked the question wants to make an app also. A lot of kids these days like to play games, but now they want to make them, and it's difficult, because not many kids know where to go to find out how to make a program. I mean, for soccer, you could go to a soccer team. For violin, you could get lessons for a violin. But what if you want to make an app? And the kid's parents might have done some of these things when they were young, but not many parents have written apps.Where do you go to find out how to make an app? Well, this is how I approached it, this is what I did. First of all, I've been programming in multiple other programming languages to get the basics down, such as Python, C, Java, etc. And then Apple released the iPhone, and with it, the iPhone software development kit, and the software development kit is a suite of tools for creating and programming an iPhone app. This opened up a whole new world of possibilities for me, and after playing with the software development kit a little bit, I made a couple of apps, I made some test apps. One of them happened to be ""Earth Fortune,"" and I was ready to put ""Earth Fortune"" on the App Store, and so I persuaded my parents to pay the 99 dollar fee to be able to put my apps on the App Store. They agreed, and now I have apps on the App Store. I've gotten a lot of interest and encouragement from my family, friends, teachers and even people at the Apple Store, and that's been a huge help to me.I've gotten a lot of inspiration from Steve Jobs, and I've started an app club at school, and a teacher at my school is kindly sponsoring my app club. Any student at my school can come and learn how to design an app. This is so I can share my experiences with others. There's these programs called the iPad Pilot Program, and some districts have them. I'm fortunate enough to be part of one. A big challenge is, how should the iPads be used, and what apps should we put on the iPads? So we're getting feedback from teachers at the school to see what kind of apps they'd like. When we design the app and we sell it, it will be free to local districts; and other districts that we sell to — all the money from that will go into the local ed foundations.These days, students usually know a little bit more than teachers with the technology.So —Sorry.So this is a resource to teachers, and educators should recognize this resource and make good use of it.I'd like to finish up by saying what I'd like to do in the future. First of all, I'd like to create more apps, more games. I'm working with a third party company to make an app. I'd like to get into Android programming and development, and I'd like to continue my app club, and find other ways for students to share knowledge with others.Thank you.","Title: Empowering Youth in App Development862 863 - Introduction to personal app development journey864  - Creation of ""Earth Fortune"" and ""Bustin Jieber"" apps865  - Motivation behind app creation influenced by peer perspectives866 867 - Challenges and solutions in learning app development868  - Lack of resources similar to those available for conventional skills like sports or music869  - Utilization of Apple’s software development kit and self-teaching through online resources870 871 - Contributions to educational and peer communities872  - Establishment of an app club at school sponsored by a teacher873  - Participation in iPad Pilot Program to integrate apps in local districts874 875 - Future aspirations and final thoughts876  - Plans to expand into Android development877  - Commitment to contribute to educational foundations through app sales878  - Continued leadership in sharing knowledge and encouraging peer learning in technology","You are a TED Story Creator, a storyteller, and an expert in crafting compelling transcripts for TED Talks. You possess a knowledge base of the world’s most inspiring TED talks. Given a title and an outline, your task is to create an engaging transcript that will captivate the audience. Adhere to the sequence of the outline and the bullet points to weave a captivating narrative."879"The brain is an amazing and complex organ. And while many people are fascinated by the brain, they can't really tell you that much about the properties about how the brain works because we don't teach neuroscience in schools.And one of the reasons why is that the equipment is so complex and so expensive that it's really only done at major universities and large institutions. And so in order to be able to access the brain, you really need to dedicate your life and spend six and a half years as a graduate student just to become a neuroscientist to get access to these tools.And that's a shame because one out of five of us, that's 20 percent of the entire world, will have a neurological disorder. And there are zero cures for these diseases. And so it seems that what we should be doing is reaching back earlier in the eduction process and teaching students about neuroscience so that in the future, they may be thinking about possibly becoming a brain scientist.When I was a graduate student, my lab mate Tim Marzullo and myself, decided that what if we took this complex equipment that we have for studying the brain and made it simple enough and affordable enough that anyone that you know, an amateur or a high school student, could learn and actually participate in the discovery of neuroscience.And so we did just that. A few years ago, we started a company called Backyard Brains and we make DIY neuroscience equipment and I brought some here tonight, and I want to do some demonstrations. You guys want to see some?So I need a volunteer. So right before — what is your name? Sam Kelly: Sam. Greg Gage: All right, Sam, I'm going to record from your brain. Have you had this before? SK: No. GG: I need you to stick out your arm for science, roll up your sleeve a bit, So what I'm going to do, I'm putting electrodes on your arm, and you're probably wondering, I just said I'm going to record from your brain, what am I doing with your arm?Well, you have about 80 billion neurons inside your brain right now. They're sending electrical messages back and forth, and chemical messages. But some of your neurons right here in your motor cortex are going to send messages down when you move your arm like this. They're going to go down across your corpus callosum, down onto your spinal cord to your lower motor neuron out to your muscles here, and that electrical discharge is going to be picked up by these electrodes right here and we're going to be able to listen to exactly what your brain is going to be doing. So I'm going to turn this on for a second.Have you ever heard what your brain sounds like? SK: No. GG: Let's try it out. So go ahead and squeeze your hand. (Rumbling) So what you're listening to, so this is your motor units happening right here. Let's take a look at it as well. So I'm going to stand over here, and I'm going to open up our app here. So now I want you to squeeze. (Rumbling)So right here, these are the motor units that are happening from her spinal cord out to her muscle right here, and as she's doing it, you're seeing the electrical activity that's happening here. You can even click here and try to see one of them. So keep doing it really hard. So now we've paused on one motor action potential that's happening right now inside of your brain.Do you guys want to see some more? That's interesting, but let's get it better. I need one more volunteer. What is your name, sir? Miguel Goncalves: Miguel. GG: Miguel, all right. You're going to stand right here. So when you're moving your arm like this, your brain is sending a signal down to your muscles right here. I want you to move your arm as well. So your brain is going to send a signal down to your muscles. And so it turns out that there is a nerve that's right here that runs up here that innervates these three fingers, and it's close enough to the skin that we might be able to stimulate that so that what we can do is copy your brain signals going out to your hand and inject it into your hand, so that your hand will move when your brain tells your hand to move. So in a sense, she will take away your free will and you will no longer have any control over this hand. You with me?So I just need to hook you up. So I'm going to find your ulnar nerve, which is probably right around here. You don't know what you're signing up for when you come up. So now I'm going to move away and we're going to plug it in to our human-to-human interface over here.Okay, so Sam, I want you to squeeze your hand again. Do it again. Perfect. So now I'm going to hook you up over here so that you get the — It's going to feel a little bit weird at first, this is going to feel like a — You know, when you lose your free will, and someone else becomes your agent, it does feel a bit strange.Now I want you to relax your hand. Sam, you're with me? So you're going to squeeze. I'm not going to turn it on yet, so go ahead and give it a squeeze.So now, are you ready, Miguel? MG: Ready as I'll ever be. GG: I've turned it on, so go ahead and turn your hand. Do you feel that a little bit? MG: Nope. GG: Okay, do it again? MG: A little bit. GG: A little bit? So relax. So hit it again. Oh, perfect, perfect. So relax, do it again.All right, so right now, your brain is controlling your arm and it's also controlling his arm, so go ahead and just do it one more time. All right, so it's perfect. So now, what would happen if I took over my control of your hand? And so, just relax your hand. What happens? Ah, nothing. Why not? Because the brain has to do it. So you do it again. All right, that's perfect.Thank you guys for being such a good sport. This is what's happening all across the world — electrophysiology! We're going to bring on the neuro-revolution.Thank you.","Neuroscience Accessibility and Innovation880 881 - Neuroscience is not widely taught due to the expense and complexity of the equipment.882 - Neurological disorders affect 20% of the population with no cures, highlighting the need for more education and researchers.883 - Backyard Brains company was created to simplify and make affordable neuroscience tools for broader educational use.884 - Demonstrations of DIY neuroscience equipment show real-time brain activity and control, emphasizing hands-on learning possibilities.885 - The ""human-to-human interface"" demonstrates how one person’s brain signals can control another’s muscle movements.886 - The goal is to inspire a new generation of neuroscientists and bring a neuro-revolution through accessible electrophysiology.","You are a TED Story Creator, a storyteller, and an expert in crafting compelling transcripts for TED Talks. You possess a knowledge base of the world’s most inspiring TED talks. Given a title and an outline, your task is to create an engaging transcript that will captivate the audience. Adhere to the sequence of the outline and the bullet points to weave a captivating narrative."887"When I was in my 20s, I saw my very first psychotherapy client. I was a Ph.D. student in clinical psychology at Berkeley. She was a 26-year-old woman named Alex.Now Alex walked into her first session wearing jeans and a big slouchy top, and she dropped onto the couch in my office and kicked off her flats and told me she was there to talk about guy problems. Now when I heard this, I was so relieved. My classmate got an arsonist for her first client.And I got a twentysomething who wanted to talk about boys. This I thought I could handle. But I didn't handle it. With the funny stories that Alex would bring to session, it was easy for me just to nod my head while we kicked the can down the road. ""Thirty's the new 20,"" Alex would say, and as far as I could tell, she was right. Work happened later, marriage happened later, kids happened later, even death happened later. Twentysomethings like Alex and I had nothing but time.But before long, my supervisor pushed me to push Alex about her love life. I pushed back. I said, ""Sure, she's dating down, she's sleeping with a knucklehead, but it's not like she's going to marry the guy."" And then my supervisor said, ""Not yet, but she might marry the next one. Besides, the best time to work on Alex's marriage is before she has one.""That's what psychologists call an ""Aha!"" moment. That was the moment I realized, 30 is not the new 20. Yes, people settle down later than they used to, but that didn't make Alex's 20s a developmental downtime. That made Alex's 20s a developmental sweet spot, and we were sitting there, blowing it. That was when I realized that this sort of benign neglect was a real problem, and it had real consequences, not just for Alex and her love life but for the careers and the families and the futures of twentysomethings everywhere.There are 50 million twentysomethings in the United States right now. We're talking about 15 percent of the population, or 100 percent if you consider that no one's getting through adulthood without going through their 20s first.Raise your hand if you're in your 20s. I really want to see some twentysomethings here. Oh, yay! You are all awesome. If you work with twentysomethings, you love a twentysomething, you're losing sleep over twentysomethings, I want to see — Okay. Awesome, twentysomethings really matter.So, I specialize in twentysomethings because I believe that every single one of those 50 million twentysomethings deserves to know what psychologists, sociologists, neurologists and fertility specialists already know: that claiming your 20s is one of the simplest, yet most transformative, things you can do for work, for love, for your happiness, maybe even for the world.This is not my opinion. These are the facts. We know that 80 percent of life's most defining moments take place by age 35. That means that eight out of 10 of the decisions and experiences and ""Aha!"" moments that make your life what it is will have happened by your mid-30s. People who are over 40, don't panic. This crowd is going to be fine, I think. We know that the first 10 years of a career has an exponential impact on how much money you're going to earn. We know that more than half of Americans are married or are living with or dating their future partner by 30. We know that the brain caps off its second and last growth spurt in your 20s as it rewires itself for adulthood, which means that whatever it is you want to change about yourself, now is the time to change it. We know that personality changes more during your 20s than at any other time in life, and we know that female fertility peaks at age 28, and things get tricky after age 35. So your 20s are the time to educate yourself about your body and your options.So when we think about child development, we all know that the first five years are a critical period for language and attachment in the brain. It's a time when your ordinary, day-to-day life has an inordinate impact on who you will become. But what we hear less about is that there's such a thing as adult development, and our 20s are that critical period of adult development.But this isn't what twentysomethings are hearing. Newspapers talk about the changing timetable of adulthood. Researchers call the 20s an extended adolescence. Journalists coin silly nicknames for twentysomethings like ""twixters"" and ""kidults.""(Laughing) It's true!As a culture, we have trivialized what is actually the defining decade of adulthood.Leonard Bernstein said that to achieve great things, you need a plan and not quite enough time.(Laughing) Isn't that true?So what do you think happens when you pat a twentysomething on the head and you say, ""You have 10 extra years to start your life""? Nothing happens. You have robbed that person of his urgency and ambition, and absolutely nothing happens.And then every day, smart, interesting twentysomethings like you or like your sons and daughters come into my office and say things like this: ""I know my boyfriend's no good for me, but this relationship doesn't count. I'm just killing time."" Or they say, ""Everybody says as long as I get started on a career by the time I'm 30, I'll be fine.""But then it starts to sound like this: ""My 20s are almost over, and I have nothing to show for myself. I had a better résumé the day after I graduated from college."" And then it starts to sound like this: ""Dating in my 20s was like musical chairs. Everybody was running around and having fun, but then sometime around 30 it was like the music turned off and everybody started sitting down. I didn't want to be the only one left standing up, so sometimes I think I married my husband because he was the closest chair to me at 30.""Where are the twentysomethings here? Do not do that.Okay, now that sounds a little flip, but make no mistake, the stakes are very high. When a lot has been pushed to your 30s, there is enormous thirtysomething pressure to jump-start a career, pick a city, partner up, and have two or three kids in a much shorter period of time. Many of these things are incompatible, and as research is just starting to show, simply harder and more stressful to do all at once in our 30s.The post-millennial midlife crisis isn't buying a red sports car. It's realizing you can't have that career you now want. It's realizing you can't have that child you now want, or you can't give your child a sibling. Too many thirtysomethings and fortysomethings look at themselves, and at me, sitting across the room, and say about their 20s, ""What was I doing? What was I thinking?"" I want to change what twentysomethings are doing and thinking.Here's a story about how that can go. It's a story about a woman named Emma. At 25, Emma came to my office because she was, in her words, having an identity crisis. She said she thought she might like to work in art or entertainment, but she hadn't decided yet, so she'd spent the last few years waiting tables instead. Because it was cheaper, she lived with a boyfriend who displayed his temper more than his ambition. And as hard as her 20s were, her early life had been even harder. She often cried in our sessions, but then would collect herself by saying, ""You can't pick your family, but you can pick your friends.""Well one day, Emma comes in and she hangs her head in her lap, and she sobbed for most of the hour. She'd just bought a new address book, and she'd spent the morning filling in her many contacts, but then she'd been left staring at that empty blank that comes after the words ""In case of emergency, please call ..."" She was nearly hysterical when she looked at me and said, ""Who's going to be there for me if I get in a car wreck? Who's going to take care of me if I have cancer?""Now in that moment, it took everything I had not to say, ""I will."" But what Emma needed wasn't some therapist who really, really cared. Emma needed a better life, and I knew this was her chance. I had learned too much since I first worked with Alex to just sit there while Emma's defining decade went parading by.So over the next weeks and months, I told Emma three things that every twentysomething, male or female, deserves to hear.First, I told Emma to forget about having an identity crisis and get some identity capital. By ""get identity capital,"" I mean do something that adds value to who you are. Do something that's an investment in who you might want to be next. I didn't know the future of Emma's career, and no one knows the future of work, but I do know this: Identity capital begets identity capital. So now is the time for that cross-country job, that internship, that startup you want to try. I'm not discounting twentysomething exploration here, but I am discounting exploration that's not supposed to count, which, by the way, is not exploration. That's procrastination. I told Emma to explore work and make it count.Second, I told Emma that the urban tribe is overrated. Best friends are great for giving rides to the airport, but twentysomethings who huddle together with like-minded peers limit who they know, what they know, how they think, how they speak, and where they work. That new piece of capital, that new person to date almost always comes from outside the inner circle. New things come from what are called our weak ties, our friends of friends of friends. So yes, half of twentysomethings are un- or under-employed. But half aren't, and weak ties are how you get yourself into that group. Half of new jobs are never posted, so reaching out to your neighbor's boss is how you get that unposted job. It's not cheating. It's the science of how information spreads.Last but not least, Emma believed that you can't pick your family, but you can pick your friends. Now this was true for her growing up, but as a twentysomething, soon Emma would pick her family when she partnered with someone and created a family of her own. I told Emma the time to start picking your family is now.Now you may be thinking that 30 is actually a better time to settle down than 20, or even 25, and I agree with you. But grabbing whoever you're living with or sleeping with when everyone on Facebook starts walking down the aisle is not progress. The best time to work on your marriage is before you have one, and that means being as intentional with love as you are with work. Picking your family is about consciously choosing who and what you want rather than just making it work or killing time with whoever happens to be choosing you.So what happened to Emma? Well, we went through that address book, and she found an old roommate's cousin who worked at an art museum in another state. That weak tie helped her get a job there. That job offer gave her the reason to leave that live-in boyfriend. Now, five years later, she's a special events planner for museums. She's married to a man she mindfully chose. She loves her new career, she loves her new family, and she sent me a card that said, ""Now the emergency contact blanks don't seem big enough.""Now Emma's story made that sound easy, but that's what I love about working with twentysomethings. They are so easy to help. Twentysomethings are like airplanes just leaving LAX, bound for somewhere west. Right after takeoff, a slight change in course is the difference between landing in Alaska or Fiji. Likewise, at 21 or 25 or even 29, one good conversation, one good break, one good TED Talk, can have an enormous effect across years and even generations to come.So here's an idea worth spreading to every twentysomething you know. It's as simple as what I learned to say to Alex. It's what I now have the privilege of saying to twentysomethings like Emma every single day: Thirty is not the new 20, so claim your adulthood, get some identity capital, use your weak ties, pick your family. Don't be defined by what you didn't know or didn't do. You're deciding your life right now.Thank you.(Applause)","The Importance of Claiming Your Twenties888 889 - Early experiences in therapy highlight the pivotal role of twenties in life development.890 - The societal misconception of the twenties as an extended adolescence diminishes their importance.891 - Key facts demonstrate the critical impact of decisions made in the twenties on later life.892 - Practical advice for optimizing the twenties:893  - Acquire identity capital through valuable experiences.894  - Expand beyond your comfort zone by utilizing weak ties.895  - Consciously choose relationships and life paths instead of settling by circumstance.896 - Real-life client stories underscore transformational opportunities available in the twenties.897 - Conclusion emphasizes the importance of proactive life planning in the twenties for long-term success.","You are a TED Story Creator, a storyteller, and an expert in crafting compelling transcripts for TED Talks. You possess a knowledge base of the world’s most inspiring TED talks. Given a title and an outline, your task is to create an engaging transcript that will captivate the audience. Adhere to the sequence of the outline and the bullet points to weave a captivating narrative."898"I have spent my entire life either at the schoolhouse, on the way to the schoolhouse, or talking about what happens in the schoolhouse.Both my parents were educators, my maternal grandparents were educators, and for the past 40 years, I've done the same thing. And so, needless to say, over those years I've had a chance to look at education reform from a lot of perspectives. Some of those reforms have been good. Some of them have been not so good. And we know why kids drop out. We know why kids don't learn. It's either poverty, low attendance, negative peer influences... We know why. But one of the things that we never discuss or we rarely discuss is the value and importance of human connection. Relationships.James Comer says that no significant learning can occur without a significant relationship. George Washington Carver says all learning is understanding relationships. Everyone in this room has been affected by a teacher or an adult. For years, I have watched people teach. I have looked at the best and I've looked at some of the worst.A colleague said to me one time, ""They don't pay me to like the kids. They pay me to teach a lesson. The kids should learn it. I should teach it, they should learn it, Case closed.""Well, I said to her, ""You know, kids don't learn from people they don't like.""She said, ""That's just a bunch of hooey.""And I said to her,""Well, your year is going to be long and arduous, dear.""Needless to say, it was. Some people think that you can either have it in you to build a relationship, or you don't. I think Stephen Covey had the right idea. He said you ought to just throw in a few simple things, like seeking first to understand, as opposed to being understood. Simple things, like apologizing. You ever thought about that? Tell a kid you're sorry, they're in shock.I taught a lesson once on ratios. I'm not real good with math, but I was working on it.And I got back and looked at that teacher edition. I'd taught the whole lesson wrong.So I came back to class the next day and I said, ""Look, guys, I need to apologize. I taught the whole lesson wrong. I'm so sorry.""They said, ""That's okay, Ms. Pierson. You were so excited, we just let you go.""I have had classes that were so low, so academically deficient, that I cried. I wondered, ""How am I going to take this group, in nine months, from where they are to where they need to be? And it was difficult, it was awfully hard. How do I raise the self-esteem of a child and his academic achievement at the same time?One year I came up with a bright idea. I told all my students, ""You were chosen to be in my class because I am the best teacher and you are the best students, they put us all together so we could show everybody else how to do it.""One of the students said, ""Really?""I said, ""Really. We have to show the other classes how to do it, so when we walk down the hall, people will notice us, so you can't make noise. You just have to strut.""And I gave them a saying to say: ""I am somebody. I was somebody when I came. I'll be a better somebody when I leave. I am powerful, and I am strong. I deserve the education that I get here. I have things to do, people to impress, and places to go.""And they said, ""Yeah!""You say it long enough, it starts to be a part of you.I gave a quiz, 20 questions. A student missed 18. I put a ""+2"" on his paper and a big smiley face.He said, ""Ms. Pierson, is this an F?""I said, ""Yes.""He said, ""Then why'd you put a smiley face?""I said, ""Because you're on a roll. You got two right. You didn't miss them all.""I said, ""And when we review this, won't you do better?""He said, ""Yes, ma'am, I can do better.""You see, ""-18"" sucks all the life out of you. ""+2"" said, ""I ain't all bad.""For years, I watched my mother take the time at recess to review, go on home visits in the afternoon, buy combs and brushes and peanut butter and crackers to put in her desk drawer for kids that needed to eat, and a washcloth and some soap for the kids who didn't smell so good. See, it's hard to teach kids who stink.And kids can be cruel. And so she kept those things in her desk, and years later, after she retired, I watched some of those same kids come through and say to her, ""You know, Ms. Walker, you made a difference in my life. You made it work for me. You made me feel like I was somebody, when I knew, at the bottom, I wasn't. And I want you to just see what I've become.""And when my mama died two years ago at 92, there were so many former students at her funeral, it brought tears to my eyes, not because she was gone, but because she left a legacy of relationships that could never disappear.Can we stand to have more relationships? Absolutely. Will you like all your children? Of course not.And you know your toughest kids are never absent.Never. You won't like them all, and the tough ones show up for a reason. It's the connection. It's the relationships. So teachers become great actors and great actresses, and we come to work when we don't feel like it, and we're listening to policy that doesn't make sense, and we teach anyway. We teach anyway, because that's what we do.Teaching and learning should bring joy. How powerful would our world be if we had kids who were not afraid to take risks, who were not afraid to think, and who had a champion? Every child deserves a champion, an adult who will never give up on them, who understands the power of connection, and insists that they become the best that they can possibly be.Is this job tough? You betcha. Oh God, you betcha. But it is not impossible. We can do this. We're educators. We're born to make a difference.Thank you so much.","The Power of Human Connection in Education899 900 - Importance of educational reform and understanding reasons why students struggle.901 - Critical role of human connection and significant relationships in learning.902 - Personal anecdotes demonstrating the positive impact of empathy and support in teaching.903 - Strategies to foster self-esteem and academic success simultaneously.904 - Emphasis on the potential of even challenging students through positive reinforcement.905 - Legacy of lasting relationships formed through genuine care and commitment.906 - Call to action for educators to be relentless champions for their students despite challenges.","You are a TED Story Creator, a storyteller, and an expert in crafting compelling transcripts for TED Talks. You possess a knowledge base of the world’s most inspiring TED talks. Given a title and an outline, your task is to create an engaging transcript that will captivate the audience. Adhere to the sequence of the outline and the bullet points to weave a captivating narrative."907"I've been intrigued by this question of whether we could evolve or develop a sixth sense — a sense that would give us seamless access and easy access to meta-information or information that may exist somewhere that may be relevant to help us make the right decision about whatever it is that we're coming across. And some of you may argue, ""Well, don't today's cell phones do that already?"" But I would say no. When you meet someone here at TED — and this is the top networking place, of course, of the year — you don't shake somebody's hand and then say, ""Can you hold on for a moment while I take out my phone and Google you?"" Or when you go to the supermarket and you're standing there in that huge aisle of different types of toilet papers, you don't take out your cell phone, and open a browser, and go to a website to try to decide which of these different toilet papers is the most ecologically responsible purchase to make.So we don't really have easy access to all this relevant information that can just help us make optimal decisions about what to do next and what actions to take. And so my research group at the Media Lab has been developing a series of inventions to give us access to this information in a sort of easy way, without requiring that the user changes any of their behavior. And I'm here to unveil our latest effort, and most successful effort so far, which is still very much a work in process. I'm actually wearing the device right now and we've sort of cobbled it together with components that are off the shelf — and that, by the way, only cost 350 dollars at this point in time.I'm wearing a camera, just a simple web cam, a portable, battery-powered projection system with a little mirror. These components communicate to my cell phone in my pocket which acts as the communication and computation device. And in the video here we see my student Pranav Mistry, who's really the genius who's been implementing and designing this whole system. And we see how this system lets him walk up to any surface and start using his hands to interact with the information that is projected in front of him. The system tracks the four significant fingers. In this case, he's wearing simple marker caps that you may recognize. But if you want a more stylish version, you could also paint your nails in different colors.And the camera basically tracks these four fingers and recognizes any gestures that he's making so he can just go to, for example, a map of Long Beach, zoom in and out, etc. The system also recognizes iconic gestures such as the ""take a picture"" gesture, and then takes a picture of whatever is in front of you. And when he then walks back to the Media Lab, he can just go up to any wall and project all the pictures that he's taken, sort through them and organize them, and re-size them, etc., again using all natural gestures.So, some of you most likely were here two years ago and saw the demo by Jeff Han, or some of you may think, ""Well, doesn't this look like the Microsoft Surface Table?"" And yes, you also interact using natural gestures, both hands, etc. But the difference here is that you can use any surface, you can walk up to any surface, including your hand, if nothing else is available, and interact with this projected data. The device is completely portable, and can be —(Applause ends)So, one important difference is that it's totally mobile. Another even more important difference is that in mass production, this would not cost more tomorrow than today's cell phones and would actually not sort of be a bigger packaging — could look a lot more stylish than this version that I'm wearing around my neck. But other than letting some of you live out your fantasy of looking as cool as Tom Cruise in ""Minority Report,"" the reason why we're really excited about this device is that it really can act as one of these sixth-sense devices that gives you relevant information about whatever is in front of you. So we see Pranav here going into the supermarket and he's shopping for some paper towels. And, as he picks up a product, the system can recognize the product that he's picking up, using either image recognition or marker technology, and give him the green light or an orange light. He can ask for additional information. So this particular choice here is a particularly good choice, given his personal criteria. Some of you may want the toilet paper with the most bleach in it rather than the most ecologically responsible choice.If he picks up a book in the bookstore, he can get an Amazon rating — it gets projected right on the cover of the book. This is Juan's book, our previous speaker, which gets a great rating, by the way, at Amazon. And so, Pranav turns the page of the book and can then see additional information about the book — reader comments, maybe sort of information by his favorite critic, etc. If he turns to a particular page, he finds an annotation by maybe an expert or a friend of ours that gives him a little bit of additional information about whatever is on that particular page. Reading the newspaper — it never has to be outdated.You can get video annotations of the events that you're reading about. You can get the latest sports scores, etc. This is a more controversial one.As you interact with someone at TED, maybe you can see a word cloud of the tags, the words that are associated with that person in their blog and personal web pages. In this case, the student is interested in cameras, etc. On your way to the airport, if you pick up your boarding pass, it can tell you that your flight is delayed, that the gate has changed, etc. And, if you need to know what the current time is, it's as simple as drawing a watch —on your arm.So that's where we're at so far in developing this sixth sense that would give us seamless access to all this relevant information about the things that we may come across. My student Pranav, who's really, like I said, the genius behind this.(Applause and cheering)(Applause ends)He does deserve a lot of applause, because I don't think he's slept much in the last three months, actually. And his girlfriend is probably not very happy about him either. But it's not perfect yet, it's very much a work in progress. And who knows, maybe in another 10 years we'll be here with the ultimate sixth sense brain implant.Thank you.","Evolving a Sixth Sense: Innovations in Seamless Information Access908 909 - Introduction to the concept of a sixth sense:910  - The speaker introduces the idea of developing a sixth sense to easily access relevant information for optimal decision-making.911 912 - Limitations of current technology:913  - Current technologies like smartphones don't seamlessly integrate information access into everyday interactions.914 915 - Development of a new device:916  - The Media Lab’s approach involves a wearable device that projects information, costs $350, and interacts naturally with the user's environment.917  - The device recognizes objects and gestures, allowing for intuitive interaction without the need for screens or typical input devices.918 919 - Practical applications:920  - Demonstrations include shopping with instant product information, reading with live annotations, and personal interactions enriched with background information.921  922 - Potential future enhancements:923  - The device is still a prototype with future ambitions like mass production, reduced costs, and improved designs.924  925 - Conclusion and impact:926  - The technology has the potential to revolutionize the way we access and interact with information, turning any environment into an interactive experience.","You are a TED Story Creator, a storyteller, and an expert in crafting compelling transcripts for TED Talks. You possess a knowledge base of the world’s most inspiring TED talks. Given a title and an outline, your task is to create an engaging transcript that will captivate the audience. Adhere to the sequence of the outline and the bullet points to weave a captivating narrative."927"Imagine an island where 100 people, all perfect logicians, are imprisoned by a mad dictator. There's no escape, except for one strange rule. Any prisoner can approach the guards at night and ask to leave. If they have green eyes, they'll be released. If not, they'll be tossed into the volcano. As it happens, all 100 prisoners have green eyes, but they've lived there since birth, and the dictator has ensured they can't learn their own eye color. There are no reflective surfaces, all water is in opaque containers, and most importantly, they're not allowed to communicate among themselves. Though they do see each other during each morning's head count. Nevertheless, they all know no one would ever risk trying to leave without absolute certainty of success. After much pressure from human rights groups, the dictator reluctantly agrees to let you visit the island and speak to the prisoners under the following conditions: you may only make one statement, and you cannot tell them any new information. What can you say to help free the prisoners without incurring the dictator's wrath? After thinking long and hard, you tell the crowd, ""At least one of you has green eyes."" The dictator is suspicious but reassures himself that your statement couldn't have changed anything. You leave, and life on the island seems to go on as before. But on the hundredth morning after your visit, all the prisoners are gone, each having asked to leave the previous night. So how did you outsmart the dictator? It might help to realize that the amount of prisoners is arbitrary. Let's simplify things by imagining just two, Adria and Bill. Each sees one person with green eyes, and for all they know, that could be the only one. For the first night, each stays put. But when they see each other still there in the morning, they gain new information. Adria realizes that if Bill had seen a non-green-eyed person next to him, he would have left the first night after concluding the statement could only refer to himself. Bill simultaneously realizes the same thing about Adria. The fact that the other person waited tells each prisoner his or her own eyes must be green. And on the second morning, they're both gone. Now imagine a third prisoner. Adria, Bill and Carl each see two green-eyed people, but aren't sure if each of the others is also seeing two green-eyed people, or just one. They wait out the first night as before, but the next morning, they still can't be sure. Carl thinks, ""If I have non-green eyes, Adria and Bill were just watching each other, and will now both leave on the second night."" But when he sees both of them the third morning, he realizes they must have been watching him, too. Adria and Bill have each been going through the same process, and they all leave on the third night. Using this sort of inductive reasoning, we can see that the pattern will repeat no matter how many prisoners you add. The key is the concept of common knowledge, coined by philosopher David Lewis. The new information was not contained in your statement itself, but in telling it to everyone simultaneously. Now, besides knowing at least one of them has green eyes, each prisoner also knows that everyone else is keeping track of all the green-eyed people they can see, and that each of them also knows this, and so on. What any given prisoner doesn't know is whether they themselves are one of the green-eyed people the others are keeping track of until as many nights have passed as the number of prisoners on the island. Of course, you could have spared the prisoners 98 days on the island by telling them at least 99 of you have green eyes, but when mad dictators are involved, you're best off with a good headstart.","The Power of Common Knowledge in Logical Deduction928 929 - Introduction to a unique escape dilemma faced by prisoners on an island.930 - The Visitors' Challenge: Communicate a statement without revealing new information directly.931 - Triggering Inductive Reasoning: The importance of stating ""At least one of you has green eyes.""932 - Inductive Reasoning Explained: The logical progression from one prisoner to many.933 - The Role of Common Knowledge: Facilitating simultaneous realization among prisoners.934 - Conclusion: The impact of common knowledge on the decision-making process in groups.","You are a TED Story Creator, a storyteller, and an expert in crafting compelling transcripts for TED Talks. You possess a knowledge base of the world’s most inspiring TED talks. Given a title and an outline, your task is to create an engaging transcript that will captivate the audience. Adhere to the sequence of the outline and the bullet points to weave a captivating narrative."935"First, a video. Yes, it is a scrambled egg. But as you look at it, I hope you'll begin to feel just slightly uneasy. Because you may notice that what's actually happening is that the egg is unscrambling itself. And you'll now see the yolk and the white have separated. And now they're going to be poured back into the egg. And we all know in our heart of hearts that this is not the way the universe works. A scrambled egg is mush — tasty mush — but it's mush. An egg is a beautiful, sophisticated thing that can create even more sophisticated things, such as chickens. And we know in our heart of hearts that the universe does not travel from mush to complexity. In fact, this gut instinct is reflected in one of the most fundamental laws of physics, the second law of thermodynamics, or the law of entropy. What that says basically is that the general tendency of the universe is to move from order and structure to lack of order, lack of structure — in fact, to mush. And that's why that video feels a bit strange.And yet, look around us. What we see around us is staggering complexity. Eric Beinhocker estimates that in New York City alone, there are some 10 billion SKUs, or distinct commodities, being traded. That's hundreds of times as many species as there are on Earth. And they're being traded by a species of almost seven billion individuals, who are linked by trade, travel, and the Internet into a global system of stupendous complexity.So here's a great puzzle: in a universe ruled by the second law of thermodynamics, how is it possible to generate the sort of complexity I've described, the sort of complexity represented by you and me and the convention center? Well, the answer seems to be, the universe can create complexity, but with great difficulty. In pockets, there appear what my colleague, Fred Spier, calls ""Goldilocks conditions"" — not too hot, not too cold, just right for the creation of complexity. And slightly more complex things appear. And where you have slightly more complex things, you can get slightly more complex things. And in this way, complexity builds stage by stage. Each stage is magical because it creates the impression of something utterly new appearing almost out of nowhere in the universe. We refer in big history to these moments as threshold moments. And at each threshold, the going gets tougher. The complex things get more fragile, more vulnerable; the Goldilocks conditions get more stringent, and it's more difficult to create complexity.Now, we, as extremely complex creatures, desperately need to know this story of how the universe creates complexity despite the second law, and why complexity means vulnerability and fragility. And that's the story that we tell in big history. But to do it, you have do something that may, at first sight, seem completely impossible. You have to survey the whole history of the universe. So let's do it.Let's begin by winding the timeline back 13.7 billion years, to the beginning of time.Around us, there's nothing. There's not even time or space. Imagine the darkest, emptiest thing you can and cube it a gazillion times and that's where we are. And then suddenly, bang! A universe appears, an entire universe. And we've crossed our first threshold. The universe is tiny; it's smaller than an atom. It's incredibly hot. It contains everything that's in today's universe, so you can imagine, it's busting. And it's expanding at incredible speed. And at first, it's just a blur, but very quickly distinct things begin to appear in that blur. Within the first second, energy itself shatters into distinct forces including electromagnetism and gravity. And energy does something else quite magical: it congeals to form matter — quarks that will create protons and leptons that include electrons. And all of that happens in the first second.Now we move forward 380,000 years. That's twice as long as humans have been on this planet. And now simple atoms appear of hydrogen and helium. Now I want to pause for a moment, 380,000 years after the origins of the universe, because we actually know quite a lot about the universe at this stage. We know above all that it was extremely simple. It consisted of huge clouds of hydrogen and helium atoms, and they have no structure. They're really a sort of cosmic mush. But that's not completely true. Recent studies by satellites such as the WMAP satellite have shown that, in fact, there are just tiny differences in that background. What you see here, the blue areas are about a thousandth of a degree cooler than the red areas. These are tiny differences, but it was enough for the universe to move on to the next stage of building complexity.And this is how it works. Gravity is more powerful where there's more stuff. So where you get slightly denser areas, gravity starts compacting clouds of hydrogen and helium atoms. So we can imagine the early universe breaking up into a billion clouds. And each cloud is compacted, gravity gets more powerful as density increases, the temperature begins to rise at the center of each cloud, and then, at the center, the temperature crosses the threshold temperature of 10 million degrees, protons start to fuse, there's a huge release of energy, and — bam! We have our first stars. From about 200 million years after the Big Bang, stars begin to appear all through the universe, billions of them. And the universe is now significantly more interesting and more complex.Stars will create the Goldilocks conditions for crossing two new thresholds. When very large stars die, they create temperatures so high that protons begin to fuse in all sorts of exotic combinations, to form all the elements of the periodic table. If, like me, you're wearing a gold ring, it was forged in a supernova explosion. So now the universe is chemically more complex. And in a chemically more complex universe, it's possible to make more things. And what starts happening is that, around young suns, young stars, all these elements combine, they swirl around, the energy of the star stirs them around, they form particles, they form snowflakes, they form little dust motes, they form rocks, they form asteroids, and eventually, they form planets and moons. And that is how our solar system was formed, four and a half billion years ago. Rocky planets like our Earth are significantly more complex than stars because they contain a much greater diversity of materials. So we've crossed a fourth threshold of complexity.Now, the going gets tougher. The next stage introduces entities that are significantly more fragile, significantly more vulnerable, but they're also much more creative and much more capable of generating further complexity. I'm talking, of course, about living organisms. Living organisms are created by chemistry. We are huge packages of chemicals. So, chemistry is dominated by the electromagnetic force. That operates over smaller scales than gravity, which explains why you and I are smaller than stars or planets. Now, what are the ideal conditions for chemistry? What are the Goldilocks conditions? Well, first, you need energy, but not too much. In the center of a star, there's so much energy that any atoms that combine will just get busted apart again. But not too little. In intergalactic space, there's so little energy that atoms can't combine. What you want is just the right amount, and planets, it turns out, are just right, because they're close to stars, but not too close.You also need a great diversity of chemical elements, and you need liquids, such as water. Why? Well, in gases, atoms move past each other so fast that they can't hitch up. In solids, atoms are stuck together, they can't move. In liquids, they can cruise and cuddle and link up to form molecules. Now, where do you find such Goldilocks conditions? Well, planets are great, and our early Earth was almost perfect. It was just the right distance from its star to contain huge oceans of liquid water. And deep beneath those oceans, at cracks in the Earth's crust, you've got heat seeping up from inside the Earth, and you've got a great diversity of elements. So at those deep oceanic vents, fantastic chemistry began to happen, and atoms combined in all sorts of exotic combinations.But of course, life is more than just exotic chemistry. How do you stabilize those huge molecules that seem to be viable? Well, it's here that life introduces an entirely new trick. You don't stabilize the individual; you stabilize the template, the thing that carries information, and you allow the template to copy itself. And DNA, of course, is the beautiful molecule that contains that information. You'll be familiar with the double helix of DNA. Each rung contains information. So, DNA contains information about how to make living organisms. And DNA also copies itself. So, it copies itself and scatters the templates through the ocean. So the information spreads. Notice that information has become part of our story. The real beauty of DNA though is in its imperfections. As it copies itself, once in every billion rungs, there tends to be an error. And what that means is that DNA is, in effect, learning. It's accumulating new ways of making living organisms because some of those errors work. So DNA's learning and it's building greater diversity and greater complexity. And we can see this happening over the last four billion years.For most of that time of life on Earth, living organisms have been relatively simple — single cells. But they had great diversity, and, inside, great complexity. Then from about 600 to 800 million years ago, multi-celled organisms appear. You get fungi, you get fish, you get plants, you get amphibia, you get reptiles, and then, of course, you get the dinosaurs. And occasionally, there are disasters. Sixty-five million years ago, an asteroid landed on Earth near the Yucatan Peninsula, creating conditions equivalent to those of a nuclear war, and the dinosaurs were wiped out. Terrible news for the dinosaurs, but great news for our mammalian ancestors, who flourished in the niches left empty by the dinosaurs. And we human beings are part of that creative evolutionary pulse that began 65 million years ago with the landing of an asteroid.Humans appeared about 200,000 years ago. And I believe we count as a threshold in this great story. Let me explain why. We've seen that DNA learns in a sense, it accumulates information. But it is so slow. DNA accumulates information through random errors, some of which just happen to work. But DNA had actually generated a faster way of learning: it had produced organisms with brains, and those organisms can learn in real time. They accumulate information, they learn. The sad thing is, when they die, the information dies with them. Now what makes humans different is human language. We are blessed with a language, a system of communication, so powerful and so precise that we can share what we've learned with such precision that it can accumulate in the collective memory. And that means it can outlast the individuals who learned that information, and it can accumulate from generation to generation. And that's why, as a species, we're so creative and so powerful, and that's why we have a history. We seem to be the only species in four billion years to have this gift.I call this ability collective learning. It's what makes us different. We can see it at work in the earliest stages of human history. We evolved as a species in the savanna lands of Africa, but then you see humans migrating into new environments, into desert lands, into jungles, into the Ice Age tundra of Siberia — tough, tough environment — into the Americas, into Australasia. Each migration involved learning — learning new ways of exploiting the environment, new ways of dealing with their surroundings.Then 10,000 years ago, exploiting a sudden change in global climate with the end of the last ice age, humans learned to farm. Farming was an energy bonanza. And exploiting that energy, human populations multiplied. Human societies got larger, denser, more interconnected. And then from about 500 years ago, humans began to link up globally through shipping, through trains, through telegraph, through the Internet, until now we seem to form a single global brain of almost seven billion individuals. And that brain is learning at warp speed. And in the last 200 years, something else has happened. We've stumbled on another energy bonanza in fossil fuels. So fossil fuels and collective learning together explain the staggering complexity we see around us.So — Here we are, back at the convention center. We've been on a journey, a return journey, of 13.7 billion years. I hope you agree this is a powerful story. And it's a story in which humans play an astonishing and creative role. But it also contains warnings. Collective learning is a very, very powerful force, and it's not clear that we humans are in charge of it. I remember very vividly as a child growing up in England, living through the Cuban Missile Crisis. For a few days, the entire biosphere seemed to be on the verge of destruction. And the same weapons are still here, and they are still armed. If we avoid that trap, others are waiting for us. We're burning fossil fuels at such a rate that we seem to be undermining the Goldilocks conditions that made it possible for human civilizations to flourish over the last 10,000 years. So what big history can do is show us the nature of our complexity and fragility and the dangers that face us, but it can also show us our power with collective learning.And now, finally — this is what I want. I want my grandson, Daniel, and his friends and his generation, throughout the world, to know the story of big history, and to know it so well that they understand both the challenges that face us and the opportunities that face us. And that's why a group of us are building a free, online syllabus in big history for high-school students throughout the world. We believe that big history will be a vital intellectual tool for them, as Daniel and his generation face the huge challenges and also the huge opportunities ahead of them at this threshold moment in the history of our beautiful planet.I thank you for your attention.(Applause)","The Dynamics of Complexity in the Universe936 937 - Unraveling the Second Law of Thermodynamics and Observing Complexity938  - The universe generally moves from order to disorder as showcased by a video of an egg unscrambling.939  - Despite the law of entropy, complex structures and phenomena arise under certain conditions.940 941 - The Formation of Complexity Under Goldilocks Conditions942  - Specific conditions allow for complexity to build incrementally.943  - Complexity leads to fragility, making advanced structures more vulnerable.944 945 - The Role of Stars and Chemical Elements in Building Complexity946  - Stars and supernovas create conditions for new elements, enabling the formation of planets and more complex chemicals.947 948 - The Emergence of Life and Evolution949  - Life begins with chemistry in optimal conditions, evolving from single cells to multicellular organisms.950  - DNA’s replication errors introduce learning and adaptation over billions of years.951 952 - The Unique Position of Humans in the History of Complexity953  - Humans possess collective learning, allowing for rapid accumulation and transfer of knowledge.954  - The development of agriculture and the use of fossil fuels propelled human civilizations.955 956 - The Power and Risks of Collective Learning957  - Collective learning has driven human progress but also poses significant risks including nuclear warfare and climate change.958 959 - Big History’s Lessons for Future Generations960  - Understanding our complex history is crucial in addressing future challenges and opportunities.961  - Educational initiatives like a free online syllabus can equip future generations with necessary insights.","You are a TED Story Creator, a storyteller, and an expert in crafting compelling transcripts for TED Talks. You possess a knowledge base of the world’s most inspiring TED talks. Given a title and an outline, your task is to create an engaging transcript that will captivate the audience. Adhere to the sequence of the outline and the bullet points to weave a captivating narrative."962"Well, we all need a reason to wake up. For me, it just took 11,000 volts.I know you're too polite to ask, so I will tell you.One night, sophomore year of college, just back from Thanksgiving holiday, a few of my friends and I were horsing around, and we decided to climb atop a parked commuter train. It was just sitting there, with the wires that run overhead. Somehow, that seemed like a great idea at the time. We'd certainly done stupider things. I scurried up the ladder on the back, and when I stood up, the electrical current entered my arm, blew down and out my feet, and that was that. Would you believe that watch still works? Takes a licking!My father wears it now in solidarity.That night began my formal relationship with death — my death — and it also began my long run as a patient. It's a good word. It means one who suffers. So I guess we're all patients.Now, the American health care system has more than its fair share of dysfunction — to match its brilliance, to be sure. I'm a physician now, a hospice and palliative medicine doc, so I've seen care from both sides. And believe me: almost everyone who goes into healthcare really means well — I mean, truly. But we who work in it are also unwitting agents for a system that too often does not serve.Why? Well, there's actually a pretty easy answer to that question, and it explains a lot: because healthcare was designed with diseases, not people, at its center. Which is to say, of course, it was badly designed. And nowhere are the effects of bad design more heartbreaking or the opportunity for good design more compelling than at the end of life, where things are so distilled and concentrated. There are no do-overs.My purpose today is to reach out across disciplines and invite design thinking into this big conversation. That is, to bring intention and creativity to the experience of dying. We have a monumental opportunity in front of us, before one of the few universal issues as individuals as well as a civil society: to rethink and redesign how it is we die.So let's begin at the end. For most people, the scariest thing about death isn't being dead, it's dying, suffering. It's a key distinction. To get underneath this, it can be very helpful to tease out suffering which is necessary as it is, from suffering we can change. The former is a natural, essential part of life, part of the deal, and to this we are called to make space, adjust, grow. It can be really good to realize forces larger than ourselves. They bring proportionality, like a cosmic right-sizing. After my limbs were gone, that loss, for example, became fact, fixed — necessarily part of my life, and I learned that I could no more reject this fact than reject myself. It took me a while, but I learned it eventually. Now, another great thing about necessary suffering is that it is the very thing that unites caregiver and care receiver — human beings. This, we are finally realizing, is where healing happens. Yes, compassion — literally, as we learned yesterday — suffering together.Now, on the systems side, on the other hand, so much of the suffering is unnecessary, invented. It serves no good purpose. But the good news is, since this brand of suffering is made up, well, we can change it. How we die is indeed something we can affect. Making the system sensitive to this fundamental distinction between necessary and unnecessary suffering gives us our first of three design cues for the day. After all, our role as caregivers, as people who care, is to relieve suffering — not add to the pile.True to the tenets of palliative care, I function as something of a reflective advocate, as much as prescribing physician. Quick aside: palliative care — a very important field but poorly understood — while it includes, it is not limited to end of life care. It is not limited to hospice. It's simply about comfort and living well at any stage. So please know that you don't have to be dying anytime soon to benefit from palliative care.Now, let me introduce you to Frank. Sort of makes this point. I've been seeing Frank now for years. He's living with advancing prostate cancer on top of long-standing HIV. We work on his bone pain and his fatigue, but most of the time we spend thinking out loud together about his life — really, about our lives. In this way, Frank grieves. In this way, he keeps up with his losses as they roll in, so that he's ready to take in the next moment. Loss is one thing, but regret, quite another. Frank has always been an adventurer — he looks like something out of a Norman Rockwell painting — and no fan of regret. So it wasn't surprising when he came into clinic one day, saying he wanted to raft down the Colorado River. Was this a good idea? With all the risks to his safety and his health, some would say no. Many did, but he went for it, while he still could. It was a glorious, marvelous trip: freezing water, blistering dry heat, scorpions, snakes, wildlife howling off the flaming walls of the Grand Canyon — all the glorious side of the world beyond our control. Frank's decision, while maybe dramatic, is exactly the kind so many of us would make, if we only had the support to figure out what is best for ourselves over time.So much of what we're talking about today is a shift in perspective. After my accident, when I went back to college, I changed my major to art history. Studying visual art, I figured I'd learn something about how to see — a really potent lesson for a kid who couldn't change so much of what he was seeing. Perspective, that kind of alchemy we humans get to play with, turning anguish into a flower.Flash forward: now I work at an amazing place in San Francisco called the Zen Hospice Project, where we have a little ritual that helps with this shift in perspective. When one of our residents dies, the mortuary men come, and as we're wheeling the body out through the garden, heading for the gate, we pause. Anyone who wants — fellow residents, family, nurses, volunteers, the hearse drivers too, now — shares a story or a song or silence, as we sprinkle the body with flower petals. It takes a few minutes; it's a sweet, simple parting image to usher in grief with warmth, rather than repugnance. Contrast that with the typical experience in the hospital setting, much like this — floodlit room lined with tubes and beeping machines and blinking lights that don't stop even when the patient's life has. Cleaning crew swoops in, the body's whisked away, and it all feels as though that person had never really existed. Well-intended, of course, in the name of sterility, but hospitals tend to assault our senses, and the most we might hope for within those walls is numbness — anesthetic, literally the opposite of aesthetic. I revere hospitals for what they can do; I am alive because of them. But we ask too much of our hospitals. They are places for acute trauma and treatable illness. They are no place to live and die; that's not what they were designed for.Now mind you — I am not giving up on the notion that our institutions can become more humane. Beauty can be found anywhere. I spent a few months in a burn unit at St. Barnabas Hospital in Livingston, New Jersey, where I got really great care at every turn, including good palliative care for my pain. And one night, it began to snow outside. I remember my nurses complaining about driving through it. And there was no window in my room, but it was great to just imagine it coming down all sticky. Next day, one of my nurses smuggled in a snowball for me. She brought it in to the unit. I cannot tell you the rapture I felt holding that in my hand, and the coldness dripping onto my burning skin; the miracle of it all, the fascination as I watched it melt and turn into water. In that moment, just being any part of this planet in this universe mattered more to me than whether I lived or died. That little snowball packed all the inspiration I needed to both try to live and be OK if I did not. In a hospital, that's a stolen moment.In my work over the years, I've known many people who were ready to go, ready to die. Not because they had found some final peace or transcendence, but because they were so repulsed by what their lives had become — in a word, cut off, or ugly. There are already record numbers of us living with chronic and terminal illness, and into ever older age. And we are nowhere near ready or prepared for this silver tsunami. We need an infrastructure dynamic enough to handle these seismic shifts in our population. Now is the time to create something new, something vital. I know we can because we have to. The alternative is just unacceptable. And the key ingredients are known: policy, education and training, systems, bricks and mortar. We have tons of input for designers of all stripes to work with.We know, for example, from research what's most important to people who are closer to death: comfort; feeling unburdened and unburdening to those they love; existential peace; and a sense of wonderment and spirituality.Over Zen Hospice's nearly 30 years, we've learned much more from our residents in subtle detail. Little things aren't so little. Take Janette. She finds it harder to breathe one day to the next due to ALS. Well, guess what? She wants to start smoking again — and French cigarettes, if you please. Not out of some self-destructive bent, but to feel her lungs filled while she has them. Priorities change. Or Kate — she just wants to know her dog Austin is lying at the foot of her bed, his cold muzzle against her dry skin, instead of more chemotherapy coursing through her veins — she's done that. Sensuous, aesthetic gratification, where in a moment, in an instant, we are rewarded for just being. So much of it comes down to loving our time by way of the senses, by way of the body — the very thing doing the living and the dying.Probably the most poignant room in the Zen Hospice guest house is our kitchen, which is a little strange when you realize that so many of our residents can eat very little, if anything at all. But we realize we are providing sustenance on several levels: smell, a symbolic plane. Seriously, with all the heavy-duty stuff happening under our roof, one of the most tried and true interventions we know of, is to bake cookies. As long as we have our senses — even just one — we have at least the possibility of accessing what makes us feel human, connected. Imagine the ripples of this notion for the millions of people living and dying with dementia. Primal sensorial delights that say the things we don't have words for, impulses that make us stay present — no need for a past or a future.So, if teasing unnecessary suffering out of the system was our first design cue, then tending to dignity by way of the senses, by way of the body — the aesthetic realm — is design cue number two. Now this gets us quickly to the third and final bit for today; namely, we need to lift our sights, to set our sights on well-being, so that life and health and healthcare can become about making life more wonderful, rather than just less horrible. Beneficence.Here, this gets right at the distinction between a disease-centered and a patient- or human-centered model of care, and here is where caring becomes a creative, generative, even playful act. ""Play"" may sound like a funny word here. But it is also one of our highest forms of adaptation. Consider every major compulsory effort it takes to be human. The need for food has birthed cuisine. The need for shelter has given rise to architecture. The need for cover, fashion. And for being subjected to the clock, well, we invented music. So, since dying is a necessary part of life, what might we create with this fact? By ""play"" I am in no way suggesting we take a light approach to dying or that we mandate any particular way of dying. There are mountains of sorrow that cannot move, and one way or another, we will all kneel there. Rather, I am asking that we make space — physical, psychic room, to allow life to play itself all the way out — so that rather than just getting out of the way, aging and dying can become a process of crescendo through to the end. We can't solve for death. I know some of you are working on this.Meanwhile, we can —We can design towards it. Parts of me died early on, and that's something we can all say one way or another. I got to redesign my life around this fact, and I tell you it has been a liberation to realize you can always find a shock of beauty or meaning in what life you have left, like that snowball lasting for a perfect moment, all the while melting away. If we love such moments ferociously, then maybe we can learn to live well — not in spite of death, but because of it. Let death be what takes us, not lack of imagination.Thank you.(Applause)","Redefining End-of-Life Care through Intentional Design963 964 - The speaker's personal encounter with near-death informed his understanding of suffering and the healthcare system.965 - Critique of the current healthcare system focusing on diseases instead of people, causing unnecessary suffering.966 - Introduction to palliative care as a means of improving quality of life, not just end-of-life care.967 - Real-life examples demonstrating the empowerment derived from respecting patient wishes.968 - Discussion on the importance of small, sensory experiences in dignifying the process of dying.969 - Advocacy for a patient- or human-centered model of care that enhances life quality through creativity and intention.970 - Conclusion highlighting the importance of imagination in confronting and embracing the concept of death.","You are a TED Story Creator, a storyteller, and an expert in crafting compelling transcripts for TED Talks. You possess a knowledge base of the world’s most inspiring TED talks. Given a title and an outline, your task is to create an engaging transcript that will captivate the audience. Adhere to the sequence of the outline and the bullet points to weave a captivating narrative."971"I was a Marine with 1/1 Weapons Company, 81's platoon, out in Camp Pendleton, California. Oorah!Audience: Oorah!I joined a few months after September 11, feeling like I think most people in the country did at the time, filled with a sense of patriotism and retribution and the desire to do something — that, coupled with that fact that I wasn't doing anything. I was 17, just graduated from high school that past summer, living in the back room of my parents' house paying rent, in the small town I was raised in in Northern Indiana, called Mishawaka. I can spell that later for people who are interested —Mishawaka is many good things but cultural hub of the world it is not, so my only exposure to theater and film was limited to the plays I did in high school and Blockbuster Video, may she rest in peace.I was serious enough about acting that I auditioned for Juilliard when I was a senior in high school, didn't get in, determined college wasn't for me and applied nowhere else, which was a genius move. I also did that Hail Mary LA acting odyssey that I always heard stories about, of actors moving to LA with, like, seven dollars and finding work and successful careers. I got as far as Amarillo, Texas, before my car broke down. I spent all my money repairing it, finally made it to Santa Monica — not even LA — stayed for 48 hours wandering the beach, basically, got in my car, drove home, thus ending my acting career, so —Seventeen, Mishawaka ... parents' house, paying rent, selling vacuums ... telemarketing, cutting grass at the local 4-H fairgrounds. This was my world going into September, 2001.So after the 11th, and feeling an overwhelming sense of duty, and just being pissed off in general — at myself, my parents, the government; not having confidence, not having a respectable job, my shitty mini-fridge that I just drove to California and back — I joined the Marine Corps and loved it. I loved being a Marine. It's one of the things I'm most proud of having done in my life. Firing weapons was cool, driving and detonating expensive things was great. But I found I loved the Marine Corps the most for the thing I was looking for the least when I joined, which was the people: these weird dudes — a motley crew of characters from a cross section of the United States — that on the surface I had nothing in common with. And over time, all the political and personal bravado that led me to the military dissolved, and for me, the Marine Corps became synonymous with my friends.And then, a few years into my service and months away from deploying to Iraq, I dislocated my sternum in a mountain-biking accident, and had to be medically separated. Those never in the military may find this hard to understand, but being told I wasn't getting deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan was very devastating for me. I have a very clear image of leaving the base hospital on a stretcher and my entire platoon is waiting outside to see if I was OK.And then, suddenly, I was a civilian again. I knew I wanted to give acting another shot, because — again, this is me — I thought all civilian problems are small compared to the military. I mean, what can you really bitch about now, you know? ""It's hot. Someone should turn on the air conditioner."" ""This coffee line is too long."" I was a Marine, I knew how to survive. I'd go to New York and become an actor. If things didn't work out, I'd live in Central Park and dumpster-dive behind Panera Bread.I re-auditioned for Juilliard and this time I was lucky, I got in. But I was surprised by how complex the transition was from military to civilian. And I was relatively healthy; I can't imagine going through that process on top of a mental or physical injury. But regardless, it was difficult. In part, because I was in acting school — I couldn't justify going to voice and speech class, throwing imaginary balls of energy at the back of the room, doing acting exercises where I gave birth to myself —while my friends were serving without me overseas. But also, because I didn't know how to apply the things I learned in the military to a civilian context. I mean that both practically and emotionally. Practically, I had to get a job. And I was an Infantry Marine, where you're shooting machine guns and firing mortars. There's not a lot of places you can put those skills in the civilian world.Emotionally, I struggled to find meaning. In the military, everything has meaning. Everything you do is either steeped in tradition or has a practical purpose. You can't smoke in the field because you don't want to give away your position. You don't touch your face — you have to maintain a personal level of health and hygiene. You face this way when ""Colors"" plays, out of respect for people who went before you. Walk this way, talk this way because of this. Your uniform is maintained to the inch. How diligently you followed those rules spoke volumes about the kind of Marine you were. Your rank said something about your history and the respect you had earned.In the civilian world there's no rank. Here you're just another body, and I felt like I constantly had to prove my worth all over again. And the respect civilians were giving me while I was in uniform didn't exist when I was out of it. There didn't seem to be a ... a sense of community, whereas in the military, I felt this sense of community. How often in the civilian world are you put in a life-or-death situation with your closest friends and they constantly demonstrate that they're not going to abandon you? And meanwhile, at acting school ...I was really, for the first time, discovering playwrights and characters and plays that had nothing to do with the military, but were somehow describing my military experience in a way that before to me was indescribable. And I felt myself becoming less aggressive as I was able to put words to feelings for the first time and realizing what a valuable tool that was.And when I was reflecting on my time in the military, I wasn't first thinking on the stereotypical drills and discipline and pain of it; but rather, the small, intimate human moments, moments of great feeling: friends going AWOL because they missed their families, friends getting divorced, grieving together, celebrating together, all within the backdrop of the military. I saw my friends battling these circumstances, and I watched the anxiety it produced in them and me, not being able to express our feelings about it.The military and theater communities are actually very similar. You have a group of people trying to accomplish a mission greater than themselves; it's not about you. You have a role, you have to know your role within that team. Every team has a leader or director; sometimes they're smart, sometimes they're not. You're forced to be intimate with complete strangers in a short amount of time; the self-discipline, the self-maintenance. I thought, how great would it be to create a space that combined these two seemingly dissimilar communities, that brought entertainment to a group of people that, considering their occupation, could handle something a bit more thought-provoking than the typical mandatory-fun events that I remember being ""volun-told"" to go to in the military —all well-intended but slightly offensive events, like ""Win a Date with a San Diego Chargers Cheerleader,"" where you answer a question about pop culture, and if you get it right you win a date, which was a chaperoned walk around the parade deck with this already married, pregnant cheerleader —Nothing against cheerleaders, I love cheerleaders. The point is more, how great would it be to have theater presented through characters that were accessible without being condescending. So we started this nonprofit called Arts in the Armed Forces, where we tried to do that, tried to join these two seemingly dissimilar communities. We pick a play or select monologues from contemporary American plays that are diverse in age and race like a military audience is, grab a group of incredible theater-trained actors, arm them with incredible material, keep production value as minimal as possible — no sets, no costumes, no lights, just reading it — to throw all the emphasis on the language and to show that theater can be created at any setting.It's a powerful thing, getting in a room with complete strangers and reminding ourselves of our humanity, and that self-expression is just as valuable a tool as a rifle on your shoulder. And for an organization like the military, that prides itself on having acronyms for acronyms, you can get lost in the sauce when it comes to explaining a collective experience. And I can think of no better community to arm with a new means of self-expression than those protecting our country.We've gone all over the United States and the world, from Walter Reed in Bethesda, Maryland, to Camp Pendleton, to Camp Arifjan in Kuwait, to USAG Bavaria, on- and off-Broadway theaters in New York. And for the performing artists we bring, it's a window into a culture they otherwise would not have had exposure to. And for the military, it's the exact same.And in doing this for the past six years, I'm always reminded that acting is many things. It's a craft, it's a political act, it's a business, it's — whatever adjective is most applicable to you. But it's also a service. I didn't get to finish mine, so whenever I get to be of service to this ultimate service industry, the military, for me, again — there's not many things better than that.Thank you.(Applause)We're going to be doing a piece from Marco Ramirez, called ""I am not Batman."" An incredible actor and good friend of mine, Jesse Perez, is going to be reading, and Matt Johnson, who I just met a couple hours ago. They're doing it together for the first time, so we'll see how it goes.Jesse Perez and Matt Johnson.(Applause)Jesse Perez: It's the middle of the night and the sky is glowing like mad, radioactive red. And if you squint, you can maybe see the moon through a thick layer of cigarette smoke and airplane exhaust that covers the whole city, like a mosquito net that won't let the angels in.(Drum beat)And if you look up high enough, you can see me standing on the edge of an 87-story building. And up there, a place for gargoyles and broken clock towers that have stayed still and dead for maybe like 100 years, up there is me.(Beat)And I'm frickin' Batman.(Beat)And I gots Batmobiles and batarangs and frickin' bat caves, like, for real. And all it takes is a broom closet or a back room or a fire escape, and Danny's hand-me-down jeans are gone. And my navy blue polo shirt, the one that looks kinda good on me but has that hole on it near the butt from when it got snagged on the chain-link fence behind Arturo's but it isn't even a big deal because I tuck that part in and it's, like, all good. That blue polo shirt — it's gone, too! And I get like, like ... transformational.(Beat)And nobody pulls out a belt and whips Batman for talkin' back.(Beat)Or for not talkin' back.And nobody calls Batman simple or stupid or skinny. And nobody fires Batman's brother from the Eastern Taxi Company 'cause they was making cutbacks, neither. 'Cause they got nothing but respect. And not like afraid-respect, just, like, respect-respect.'Cause nobody's afraid of you. 'Cause Batman doesn't mean nobody no harm.(Beat)Ever. (Double beat)'Cause all Batman really wants to do is save people and maybe pay abuela's bills one day and die happy. And maybe get, like, mad-famous for real.Oh — and kill the Joker.(Drum roll)Tonight, like most nights, I'm all alone. And I'm watchin' and I'm waitin' like a eagle or like a — no, yeah, like a eagle.And my cape is flapping in the wind cause it's frickin' long and my pointy ears are on, and that mask that covers like half my face is on, too, and I got, like, bulletproof stuff all in my chest so no one can hurt me. And nobody — nobody! — is gonna come between Batman ... and justice.(Drums) From where I am, I can hear everything.(Silence)Somewhere in the city, there's a old lady picking Styrofoam leftovers up out of a trash can and she's putting a piece of sesame chicken someone spit out into her own mouth. And somewhere there's a doctor with a wack haircut in a black lab coat trying to find a cure for the diseases that are gonna make us all extinct for real one day. And somewhere there's a man, a man in a janitor's uniform, stumbling home drunk and dizzy after spending half his paycheck on 40-ounce bottles of twist-off beer, and the other half on a four-hour visit to some lady's house on a street where the lights have all been shot out by people who'd rather do what they do in this city in the dark. And half a block away from janitor man, there's a group of good-for-nothings who don't know no better, waiting for janitor man with rusted bicycle chains and imitation Louisville Sluggers, and if they don't find a cent on him, which they won't, they'll just pound at him till the muscles in their arms start burning, till there's no more teeth to crack out.But they don't count on me. They don't count on no Dark Knight, with a stomach full of grocery-store brand macaroni and cheese and cut-up Vienna sausages.'Cause they'd rather believe I don't exist.And from 87 stories up, I can hear one of the good-for-nothings say, ""Gimme the cash!"" — real fast like that, just, ""Gimme me the fuckin' cash!"" And I see janitor man mumble something in drunk language and turn pale, and from 87 stories up, I can hear his stomach trying to hurl its way out his Dickies.So I swoop down, like, mad-fast and I'm like darkness, I'm like, ""Swoosh!"" And I throw a batarang at the one naked lightbulb.(Cymbal)And they're all like, ""Whoa, muthafucker! Who just turned out the lights?""""What's that over there?"" ""What?""""Gimme me what you got, old man!""""Did anybody hear that?"" ""Hear what? There ain't nothing. No, really — there ain't no bat!""But then ... one out of the three good-for-nothings gets it to the head — pow!And number two swings blindly into the dark cape before him, but before his fist hits anything, I grab a trash can lid and — right in the gut! And number one comes back with the jump kick, but I know judo karate, too, so I'm like —(Drums)Twice!(Drums)(Drums)But before I can do any more damage, suddenly we all hear a ""click-click."" And suddenly everything gets quiet. And the one good-for-nothing left standing grips a handgun and aims it straight up, like he's holding Jesus hostage, like he's threatening maybe to blow a hole in the moon. And the good-for-nothing who got it to the head, who tried to jump-kick me, and the other good-for-nothing who got it in the gut, is both scrambling back away from the dark figure before 'em. And the drunk man, the janitor man, is huddled in a corner, praying to Saint Anthony 'cause that's the only one he could remember.(Double beat) And there's me: eyes glowing white, cape blowing softly in the wind.(Beat) Bulletproof chest heaving, my heart beating right through it in a Morse code for: ""Fuck with me just once come on just try.""And the one good-for-nothing left standing, the one with the handgun — yeah, he laughs. And he lowers his arm. And he points it at me and gives the moon a break. And he aims it right between my pointy ears, like goal posts and he's special teams. And janitor man is still calling Saint Anthony, but he ain't pickin' up. And for a second, it seems like ... maybe I'm gonna lose.Nah!(Drums)Shoot! Shoot! Fwa-ka-ka!""Don't kill me, man!""Snap! Wrist crack! Neck! Slash!Skin meets acid: ""Ahhhhhhh!""And he's on the floor and I'm standing over him and I got the gun in my hands now and I hate guns, I hate holding 'em 'cause I'm Batman. And, asterisk: Batman don't like guns 'cause his parents got iced by guns a long time ago. But for just a second, my eyes glow white, and I hold this thing for I could speak to the good-for-nothing in a language he maybe understands. Click-click!(Beat)And the good-for-nothings become good-for-disappearing into whatever toxic waste, chemical sludge shithole they crawled out of. And it's just me and janitor man. And I pick him up, and I wipe sweat and cheap perfume off his forehead. And he begs me not to hurt him and I grab him tight by his janitor-man shirt collar, and I pull him to my face and he's taller than me but the cape helps, so he listens when I look him straight in the eyes. And I say two words to him: ""Go home.""And he does, checking behind his shoulder every 10 feet. And I swoosh from building to building on his way there 'cause I know where he lives. And I watch his hands tremble as he pulls out his key chain and opens the door to his building. And I'm back in bed before he even walks in through the front door.And I hear him turn on the faucet and pour himself a glass of warm tap water. And he puts the glass back in the sink. And I hear his footsteps. And they get slower as they get to my room. And he creaks my door open, like, mad-slow. And he takes a step in, which he never does.(Beat) And he's staring off into nowhere, his face, the color of sidewalks in summer. And I act like I'm just waking up and I say, ""Ah, what's up, Pop?"" And janitor man says nothing to me. But I see in the dark, I see his arms go limp and his head turns back, like, towards me. And he lifts it for I can see his face, for I could see his eyes. And his cheeks is drippin', but not with sweat. And he just stands there breathing, like he remembers my eyes glowing white, like he remembers my bulletproof chest, like he remembers he's my pop. And for a long time I don't say nothin'. And he turns around, hand on the doorknob. And he ain't looking my way, but I hear him mumble two words to me: ""I'm sorry.""And I lean over, and I open my window just a crack. If you look up high enough, you could see me. And from where I am —(Cymbals)I could hear everything.(Applause)Thank you.(Applause)","The Resilience and Transformation of a Former Marine Turned Actor972 973 - Personal Background and Marine Corps Enlistment974  - Joined the Marines post-9/11 for patriotism and personal reasons.975  - Enjoyed the Marine experience, especially the camaraderie.976 977 - Medical Discharge and Pursuing Acting978  - Injuries led to a challenging but transformative transition to civilian life.979  - Reauditioned for and was accepted into Juilliard.980 981 - Acting as a Medium for Expression and Connection982  - Discovered theater arts as a powerful way to articulate and cope with military experiences.983  - Found parallels between the military and theater communities in teamwork and mission focus.984 985 - Establishment of Arts in the Armed Forces986  - Founded a nonprofit to bring thought-provoking theater to military personnel.987  - Aims to bridge the gap between military and civilian cultures through the arts.988 989 - Reflecting on Personal Growth and Service990  - Views acting as an opportunity to continue serving.991  - Believes in the power of community and self-expression through theater.","You are a TED Story Creator, a storyteller, and an expert in crafting compelling transcripts for TED Talks. You possess a knowledge base of the world’s most inspiring TED talks. Given a title and an outline, your task is to create an engaging transcript that will captivate the audience. Adhere to the sequence of the outline and the bullet points to weave a captivating narrative."992"Hello, TEDWomen, what's up.(Cheering)Not good enough. Hello, TEDWomen, what is up?(Loud cheering)My name is Maysoon Zayid, and I am not drunk, but the doctor who delivered me was. He cut my mom six different times in six different directions, suffocating poor little me in the process. As a result, I have cerebral palsy, which means I shake all the time. Look. It's exhausting. I'm like Shakira, Shakira meets Muhammad Ali.CP is not genetic. It's not a birth defect. You can't catch it. No one put a curse on my mother's uterus, and I didn't get it because my parents are first cousins, which they are.It only happens from accidents, like what happened to me on my birth day.Now, I must warn you, I'm not inspirational.And I don't want anyone in this room to feel bad for me, because at some point in your life, you have dreamt of being disabled. Come on a journey with me. It's Christmas Eve, you're at the mall, you're driving around in circles looking for parking, and what do you see? Sixteen empty handicapped spaces.And you're like, ""God, can't I just be a little disabled?""Also, I've got to tell you, I've got 99 problems, and palsy is just one.If there was an Oppression Olympics, I would win the gold medal. I'm Palestinian, Muslim, I'm female, I'm disabled, and I live in New Jersey.If you don't feel better about yourself, maybe you should.Cliffside Park, New Jersey is my hometown. I have always loved the fact that my hood and my affliction share the same initials. I also love the fact that if I wanted to walk from my house to New York City, I could.A lot of people with CP don't walk, but my parents didn't believe in ""can't."" My father's mantra was, ""You can do it, yes you can can."" So, if my three older sisters were mopping, I was mopping. If my three older sisters went to public school, my parents would sue the school system and guarantee that I went too, and if we didn't all get A's, we all got my mother's slipper.My father taught me how to walk when I was five years old by placing my heels on his feet and just walking. Another tactic that he used is he would dangle a dollar bill in front of me and have me chase it.My inner stripper was very strong.Yeah. No, by the first day of kindergarten, I was walking like a champ who had been punched one too many times.Growing up, there were only six Arabs in my town, and they were all my family.Now there are 20 Arabs in town, and they are still all my family.I don't think anyone even noticed we weren't Italian.This was before 9/11 and before politicians thought it was appropriate to use ""I hate Muslims"" as a campaign slogan. The people that I grew up with had no problem with my faith. They did, however, seem very concerned that I would starve to death during Ramadan. I would explain to them that I have enough fat to live off of for three whole months, so fasting from sunrise to sunset is a piece of cake.I have tap-danced on Broadway. Yeah, on Broadway. It's crazy.My parents couldn't afford physical therapy, so they sent me to dancing school. I learned how to dance in heels, which means I can walk in heels. And I'm from Jersey, and we are really concerned with being chic, so if my friends wore heels, so did I.And when my friends went and spent their summer vacations on the Jersey Shore, I did not. I spent my summers in a war zone, because my parents were afraid that if we didn't go back to Palestine every single summer, we'd grow up to be Madonna.Summer vacations often consisted of my father trying to heal me, so I drank deer's milk, I had hot cups on my back, I was dunked in the Dead Sea, and I remember the water burning my eyes and thinking, ""It's working! It's working!""But one miracle cure we did find was yoga. I have to tell you, it's very boring, but before I did yoga, I was a stand-up comedian who can't stand up. And now I can stand on my head. My parents reinforced this notion that I could do anything, that no dream was impossible, and my dream was to be on the daytime soap opera ""General Hospital.""I went to college during affirmative action and got a sweet scholarship to ASU, Arizona State University, because I fit every single quota.I was like the pet lemur of the theater department. Everybody loved me. I did all the less-than-intelligent kids' homework, I got A's in all of my classes, A's in all of their classes.Every time I did a scene from ""The Glass Menagerie,"" my professors would weep. But I never got cast. Finally, my senior year, ASU decided to do a show called ""They Dance Real Slow in Jackson."" It's a play about a girl with CP. I was a girl with CP. So I start shouting from the rooftops, ""I'm finally going to get a part! I have cerebral palsy! Free at last! Free at last! Thank God almighty, I'm free at last!"" I didn't get the part.Sherry Brown got the part. I went racing to the head of the theater department crying hysterically, like someone shot my cat, to ask her why, and she said it was because they didn't think I could do the stunts. I said, ""Excuse me, if I can't do the stunts, neither can the character.""This was a part that I was literally born to play they gave it to a non-palsy actress. College was imitating life. Hollywood has a sordid history of casting able-bodied actors to play disabled onscreen.Upon graduating, I moved back home, and my first acting gig was as an extra on a daytime soap opera. My dream was coming true. And I knew that I would be promoted from ""Diner Diner"" to ""Wacky Best Friend"" in no time.But instead, I remained a glorified piece of furniture that you could only recognize from the back of my head, and it became clear to me that casting directors didn't hire fluffy, ethnic, disabled actors. They only hired perfect people. But there were exceptions to the rule. I grew up watching Whoopi Goldberg, Roseanne Barr, Ellen, and all of these women had one thing in common: they were comedians. So I became a comic.My first gig was driving famous comics from New York City to shows in New Jersey, and I'll never forget the face of the first comic I ever drove when he realized that he was speeding down the New Jersey Turnpike with a chick with CP driving him.I've performed in clubs all over America, and I've also performed in Arabic in the Middle East, uncensored and uncovered.Some people say I'm the first stand-up comic in the Arab world. I never like to claim first, but I do know that they never heard that nasty little rumor that women aren't funny, and they find us hysterical.In 2003, my brother from another mother and father Dean Obeidallah and I started the New York Arab-American Comedy Festival, now in its 10th year. Our goal was to change the negative image of Arab-Americans in media, while also reminding casting directors that South Asian and Arab are not synonymous.Mainstreaming Arabs was much, much easier than conquering the challenge against the stigma against disability.My big break came in 2010. I was invited to be a guest on the cable news show ""Countdown with Keith Olbermann."" I walked in looking like I was going to the prom, and they shuffle me into a studio and seat me on a spinning, rolling chair.So I looked at the stage manager and I'm like, ""Excuse me, can I have another chair?"" And she looked at me and she went, ""Five, four, three, two ..."" And we were live, right? So I had to grip onto the anchor's desk so that I wouldn't roll off the screen during the segment, and when the interview was over, I was livid. I had finally gotten my chance and I blew it, and I knew I would never get invited back. But not only did Mr. Olbermann invite me back, he made me a full-time contributor, and he taped down my chair.One fun fact I learned while on the air with Keith Olbermann was that humans on the Internet are scumbags. People say children are cruel, but I was never made fun of as a child or an adult. Suddenly, my disability on the world wide web is fair game. I would look at clips online and see comments like, ""Yo, why's she tweakin'?"" ""Yo, is she retarded?"" And my favorite, ""Poor Gumby-mouth terrorist. What does she suffer from? We should really pray for her."" One commenter even suggested that I add my disability to my credits: screenwriter, comedian, palsy.Disability is as visual as race. If a wheelchair user can't play Beyoncé, then Beyoncé can't play a wheelchair user. The disabled are the largest — Yeah, clap for that, man. Come on.People with disabilities are the largest minority in the world, and we are the most underrepresented in entertainment.The doctors said that I wouldn't walk, but I am here in front of you. However, if I grew up with social media, I don't think I would be. I hope that together, we can create more positive images of disability in the media and in everyday life. Perhaps if there were more positive images, it would foster less hate on the Internet. Or maybe not. Maybe it still takes a village to teach our children well.My crooked journey has taken me to some very spectacular places. I got to walk the red carpet flanked by soap diva Susan Lucci and the iconic Loreen Arbus. I got to act in a movie with Adam Sandler and work with my idol, the amazing Dave Matthews. I toured the world as a headliner on Arabs Gone Wild. I was a delegate representing the great state of New Jersey at the 2008 DNC. And I founded Maysoon's Kids, a charity that hopes to give Palestinian refugee children a sliver of the chance my parents gave me. But the one moment that stands out the most was when I got — before this moment —But the one moment that stands out the most was when I got to perform for the man who floats like a butterfly and stings like a bee, has Parkinson's and shakes just like me, Muhammad Ali.(Applause ends)It was the only time that my father ever saw me perform live, and I dedicate this talk to his memory.(Arabic) Allah yerhamak yaba.(English) My name is Maysoon Zayid, and if I can can, you can can.(Cheering)","Empowering Through Humor and Resilience993 994 - Introduction to Maysoon Zayid's background and her experiences living with cerebral palsy.995 - Addressing misconceptions about disabilities and emphasizing personal empowerment.996 - Highlighting societal challenges and personal anecdotes related to being a disabled, female, Muslim, Palestinian in New Jersey.997 - Using humor and personal stories to challenge and change perceptions of disability.998 - Discussing the impact of media representation on public perception of disabilities.999 - Advocating for positive change and increased representation in media.1000 - Concluding with personal achievements and a message of resilience and possibility.","You are a TED Story Creator, a storyteller, and an expert in crafting compelling transcripts for TED Talks. You possess a knowledge base of the world’s most inspiring TED talks. Given a title and an outline, your task is to create an engaging transcript that will captivate the audience. Adhere to the sequence of the outline and the bullet points to weave a captivating narrative."1001"The power of yet.I heard about a high school in Chicago where students had to pass a certain number of courses to graduate, and if they didn't pass a course, they got the grade ""Not Yet."" And I thought that was fantastic, because if you get a failing grade, you think, I'm nothing, I'm nowhere. But if you get the grade ""Not Yet"", you understand that you're on a learning curve. It gives you a path into the future.""Not Yet"" also gave me insight into a critical event early in my career, a real turning point. I wanted to see how children coped with challenge and difficulty, so I gave 10-year-olds problems that were slightly too hard for them. Some of them reacted in a shockingly positive way. They said things like, ""I love a challenge,"" or, ""You know, I was hoping this would be informative."" They understood that their abilities could be developed. They had what I call a growth mindset. But other students felt it was tragic, catastrophic. From their more fixed mindset perspective, their intelligence had been up for judgment, and they failed. Instead of luxuriating in the power of yet, they were gripped in the tyranny of now.So what do they do next? I'll tell you what they do next. In one study, they told us they would probably cheat the next time instead of studying more if they failed a test. In another study, after a failure, they looked for someone who did worse than they did so they could feel really good about themselves. And in study after study, they have run from difficulty. Scientists measured the electrical activity from the brain as students confronted an error. On the left, you see the fixed-mindset students. There's hardly any activity. They run from the error. They don't engage with it. But on the right, you have the students with the growth mindset, the idea that abilities can be developed. They engage deeply. Their brain is on fire with yet. They engage deeply. They process the error. They learn from it and they correct it.How are we raising our children? Are we raising them for now instead of yet? Are we raising kids who are obsessed with getting As? Are we raising kids who don't know how to dream big dreams? Their biggest goal is getting the next A, or the next test score? And are they carrying this need for constant validation with them into their future lives? Maybe, because employers are coming to me and saying, ""We have already raised a generation of young workers who can't get through the day without an award.""So what can we do? How can we build that bridge to yet?Here are some things we can do. First of all, we can praise wisely, not praising intelligence or talent. That has failed. Don't do that anymore. But praising the process that kids engage in, their effort, their strategies, their focus, their perseverance, their improvement. This process praise creates kids who are hardy and resilient.There are other ways to reward yet. We recently teamed up with game scientists from the University of Washington to create a new online math game that rewarded yet. In this game, students were rewarded for effort, strategy and progress. The usual math game rewards you for getting answers right, right now, but this game rewarded process. And we got more effort, more strategies, more engagement over longer periods of time, and more perseverance when they hit really, really hard problems.Just the words ""yet"" or ""not yet,"" we're finding, give kids greater confidence, give them a path into the future that creates greater persistence. And we can actually change students' mindsets. In one study, we taught them that every time they push out of their comfort zone to learn something new and difficult, the neurons in their brain can form new, stronger connections, and over time, they can get smarter.Look what happened: In this study, students who were not taught this growth mindset continued to show declining grades over this difficult school transition, but those who were taught this lesson showed a sharp rebound in their grades. We have shown this now, this kind of improvement, with thousands and thousands of kids, especially struggling students.So let's talk about equality. In our country, there are groups of students who chronically underperform, for example, children in inner cities, or children on Native American reservations. And they've done so poorly for so long that many people think it's inevitable. But when educators create growth mindset classrooms steeped in yet, equality happens. And here are just a few examples. In one year, a kindergarten class in Harlem, New York scored in the 95th percentile on the national achievement test. Many of those kids could not hold a pencil when they arrived at school. In one year, fourth-grade students in the South Bronx, way behind, became the number one fourth-grade class in the state of New York on the state math test. In a year, to a year and a half, Native American students in a school on a reservation went from the bottom of their district to the top, and that district included affluent sections of Seattle. So the Native kids outdid the Microsoft kids.This happened because the meaning of effort and difficulty were transformed. Before, effort and difficulty made them feel dumb, made them feel like giving up, but now, effort and difficulty, that's when their neurons are making new connections, stronger connections. That's when they're getting smarter.I received a letter recently from a 13-year-old boy. He said, ""Dear Professor Dweck, I appreciate that your writing is based on solid scientific research, and that's why I decided to put it into practice. I put more effort into my schoolwork, into my relationship with my family, and into my relationship with kids at school, and I experienced great improvement in all of those areas. I now realize I've wasted most of my life.""Let's not waste any more lives, because once we know that abilities are capable of such growth, it becomes a basic human right for children, all children, to live in places that create that growth, to live in places filled with ""yet"".Thank you.","The Power of ""Not Yet""1002 1003 - Introducing the concept of ""Not Yet"" in education 1004  - High school in Chicago uses ""Not Yet"" instead of failing grades1005  - ""Not Yet"" signifies a learning journey and provides a path to the future1006  1007 - Impact of mindset on handling challenges1008  - Experiment with 10-year-olds showed different reactions to difficult problems1009  - Growth mindset vs. fixed mindset: how they cope with failures and challenges1010  1011 - The implications of mindset in educational settings1012  - Fixed mindset students avoid and fear errors1013  - Growth mindset students engage with and learn from errors1014  1015 - Practical applications of fostering the growth mindset1016  - Praising process and effort over talent and intelligence1017  - Creation of a math game rewarding effort and strategy to promote long-term engagement and perseverance1018  1019 - Demonstrable effects of growth mindset interventions1020  - Improved grades in students taught about the growth mindset1021  - Examples of educational success in underprivileged regions through growth mindset principles1022  1023 - Broader significance and potential of growth mindset1024  - Potential to change societal norms concerning intelligence and ability1025  - Personal story from a young individual impacted by growth mindset principles 1026 1027 - Conclusion and call to action1028  - Abilities can grow through proper encouragement and settings1029  - Cultural shift towards growth and potential in education as a fundamental human right","You are a TED Story Creator, a storyteller, and an expert in crafting compelling transcripts for TED Talks. You possess a knowledge base of the world’s most inspiring TED talks. Given a title and an outline, your task is to create an engaging transcript that will captivate the audience. Adhere to the sequence of the outline and the bullet points to weave a captivating narrative."1030"I grew up with my identical twin, who was an incredibly loving brother. Now, one thing about being a twin is, it makes you an expert at spotting favoritism. If his cookie was even slightly bigger than my cookie, I had questions. And clearly, I wasn't starving.When I became a psychologist, I began to notice favoritism of a different kind; and that is, how much more we value the body than we do the mind. I spent nine years at university earning my doctorate in psychology, and I can't tell you how many people look at my business card and say, ""Oh — a psychologist. So, not a real doctor,"" as if it should say that on my card.[Dr. Guy Winch, Just a Psychologist (Not a Real Doctor)]This favoritism we show the body over the mind — I see it everywhere.I recently was at a friend's house, and their five-year-old was getting ready for bed. He was standing on a stool by the sink, brushing his teeth, when he slipped and scratched his leg on the stool when he fell. He cried for a minute, but then he got back up, got back on the stool, and reached out for a box of Band-Aids to put one on his cut. Now, this kid could barely tie his shoelaces, but he knew you have to cover a cut so it doesn't become infected, and you have to care for your teeth by brushing twice a day. We all know how to maintain our physical health and how to practice dental hygiene, right? We've known it since we were five years old. But what do we know about maintaining our psychological health? Well, nothing. What do we teach our children about emotional hygiene? Nothing. How is it that we spend more time taking care of our teeth than we do our minds? Why is it that our physical health is so much more important to us than our psychological health?We sustain psychological injuries even more often than we do physical ones, injuries like failure or rejection or loneliness. And they can also get worse if we ignore them, and they can impact our lives in dramatic ways. And yet, even though there are scientifically proven techniques we could use to treat these kinds of psychological injuries, we don't. It doesn't even occur to us that we should. ""Oh, you're feeling depressed? Just shake it off; it's all in your head."" Can you imagine saying that to somebody with a broken leg: ""Oh, just walk it off; it's all in your leg.""It is time we closed the gap between our physical and our psychological health. It's time we made them more equal, more like twins.Speaking of which, my brother is also a psychologist. So he's not a real doctor, either.We didn't study together, though. In fact, the hardest thing I've ever done in my life is move across the Atlantic to New York City to get my doctorate in psychology. We were apart then for the first time in our lives, and the separation was brutal for both of us. But while he remained among family and friends, I was alone in a new country. We missed each other terribly, but international phone calls were really expensive then, and we could only afford to speak for five minutes a week. When our birthday rolled around, it was the first we wouldn't be spending together. We decided to splurge, and that week, we would talk for 10 minutes.I spent the morning pacing around my room, waiting for him to call — and waiting ... and waiting. But the phone didn't ring. Given the time difference, I assumed, ""OK, he's out with friends, he'll call later."" There were no cell phones then. But he didn't. And I began to realize that after being away for over 10 months, he no longer missed me the way I missed him. I knew he would call in the morning, but that night was one of the saddest and longest nights of my life. I woke up the next morning. I glanced down at the phone, and I realized I had kicked it off the hook when pacing the day before. I stumbled out of bed, I put the phone back on the receiver, and it rang a second later. And it was my brother, and boy, was he pissed.It was the saddest and longest night of his life as well. Now, I tried to explain what happened, but he said, ""I don't understand. If you saw I wasn't calling you, why didn't you just pick up the phone and call me?"" He was right. Why didn't I call him? I didn't have an answer then. But I do today, and it's a simple one: loneliness.Loneliness creates a deep psychological wound, one that distorts our perceptions and scrambles our thinking. It makes us believe that those around us care much less than they actually do. It make us really afraid to reach out, because why set yourself up for rejection and heartache when your heart is already aching more than you can stand? I was in the grips of real loneliness back then, but I was surrounded by people all day, so it never occurred to me. But loneliness is defined purely subjectively. It depends solely on whether you feel emotionally or socially disconnected from those around you. And I did. There is a lot of research on loneliness, and all of it is horrifying. Loneliness won't just make you miserable; it will kill you. I'm not kidding. Chronic loneliness increases your likelihood of an early death by 14 percent. Fourteen percent! Loneliness causes high blood pressure, high cholesterol. It even suppress the functioning of your immune system, making you vulnerable to all kinds of illnesses and diseases. In fact, scientists have concluded that taken together, chronic loneliness poses as significant a risk for your long-term health and longevity as cigarette smoking. Now, cigarette packs come with warnings saying, ""This could kill you."" But loneliness doesn't. And that's why it's so important that we prioritize our psychological health, that we practice emotional hygiene. Because you can't treat a psychological wound if you don't even know you're injured. Loneliness isn't the only psychological wound that distorts our perceptions and misleads us.Failure does that as well. I once visited a day care center, where I saw three toddlers play with identical plastic toys. You had to slide the red button, and a cute doggie would pop out. One little girl tried pulling the purple button, then pushing it, and then she just sat back and looked at the box with her lower lip trembling. The little boy next to her watched this happen, then turned to his box and burst into tears without even touching it. Meanwhile, another little girl tried everything she could think of until she slid the red button, the cute doggie popped out, and she squealed with delight. So: three toddlers with identical plastic toys, but with very different reactions to failure. The first two toddlers were perfectly capable of sliding a red button. The only thing that prevented them from succeeding was that their mind tricked them into believing they could not. Now, adults get tricked this way as well, all the time. In fact, we all have a default set of feelings and beliefs that gets triggered whenever we encounter frustrations and setbacks.Are you aware of how your mind reacts to failure? You need to be. Because if your mind tries to convince you you're incapable of something, and you believe it, then like those two toddlers, you'll begin to feel helpless and you'll stop trying too soon, or you won't even try at all. And then you'll be even more convinced you can't succeed. You see, that's why so many people function below their actual potential. Because somewhere along the way, sometimes a single failure convinced them that they couldn't succeed, and they believed it.Once we become convinced of something, it's very difficult to change our mind. I learned that lesson the hard way when I was a teenager with my brother. We were driving with friends down a dark road at night, when a police car stopped us. There had been a robbery in the area and they were looking for suspects. The officer approached the car, and shined his flashlight on the driver, then on my brother in the front seat, and then on me. And his eyes opened wide and he said, ""Where have I seen your face before?""And I said, ""In the front seat.""But that made no sense to him whatsoever, so now he thought I was on drugs.So he drags me out of the car, he searches me, he marches me over to the police car, and only when he verified I didn't have a police record, could I show him I had a twin in the front seat. But even as we were driving away, you could see by the look on his face he was convinced that I was getting away with something.Our mind is hard to change once we become convinced. So it might be very natural to feel demoralized and defeated after you fail. But you cannot allow yourself to become convinced you can't succeed. You have to fight feelings of helplessness. You have to gain control over the situation. And you have to break this kind of negative cycle before it begins.[Stop Emotional Bleeding]Our minds and our feelings — they're not the trustworthy friends we thought they were. They're more like a really moody friend, who can be totally supportive one minute, and really unpleasant the next. I once worked with this woman who, after 20 years marriage and an extremely ugly divorce, was finally ready for her first date. She had met this guy online, and he seemed nice and he seemed successful, and most importantly, he seemed really into her. So she was very excited, she bought a new dress, and they met at an upscale New York City bar for a drink. Ten minutes into the date, the man stands up and says, ""I'm not interested,"" and walks out. Rejection is extremely painful. The woman was so hurt she couldn't move. All she could do was call a friend. Here's what the friend said: ""Well, what do you expect? You have big hips, you have nothing interesting to say. Why would a handsome, successful man like that ever go out with a loser like you?"" Shocking, right, that a friend could be so cruel? But it would be much less shocking if I told you it wasn't the friend who said that. It's what the woman said to herself. And that's something we all do, especially after a rejection. We all start thinking of all our faults and all our shortcomings, what we wish we were, what we wish we weren't. We call ourselves names. Maybe not as harshly, but we all do it. And it's interesting that we do, because our self-esteem is already hurting. Why would we want to go and damage it even further? We wouldn't make a physical injury worse on purpose. You wouldn't get a cut on your arm and decide, ""Oh! I know — I'm going to take a knife and see how much deeper I can make it.""But we do that with psychological injuries all the time. Why? Because of poor emotional hygiene. Because we don't prioritize our psychological health. We know from dozens of studies that when your self-esteem is lower, you are more vulnerable to stress and to anxiety; that failures and rejections hurt more, and it takes longer to recover from them. So when you get rejected, the first thing you should be doing is to revive your self-esteem, not join Fight Club and beat it into a pulp. When you're in emotional pain, treat yourself with the same compassion you would expect from a truly good friend.[Protect Your Self-Esteem]We have to catch our unhealthy psychological habits and change them. And one of unhealthiest and most common is called rumination. To ruminate means to chew over. It's when your boss yells at you or your professor makes you feel stupid in class, or you have big fight with a friend and you just can't stop replaying the scene in your head for days, sometimes for weeks on end. Now, ruminating about upsetting events in this way can easily become a habit, and it's a very costly one, because by spending so much time focused on upsetting and negative thoughts, you are actually putting yourself at significant risk for developing clinical depression, alcoholism, eating disorders, and even cardiovascular disease.The problem is, the urge to ruminate can feel really strong and really important, so it's a difficult habit to stop. I know this for a fact, because a little over a year ago, I developed the habit myself. You see, my twin brother was diagnosed with stage 3 non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. His cancer was extremely aggressive. He had visible tumors all over his body. And he had to start a harsh course of chemotherapy. And I couldn't stop thinking about what he was going through. I couldn't stop thinking about how much he was suffering, even though he never complained, not once. He had this incredibly positive attitude. His psychological health was amazing. I was physically healthy, but psychologically, I was a mess. But I knew what to do. Studies tell us that even a two-minute distraction is sufficient to break the urge to ruminate in that moment. And so each time I had a worrying, upsetting, negative thought, I forced myself to concentrate on something else until the urge passed. And within one week, my whole outlook changed and became more positive and more hopeful.[Battle Negative Thinking]Nine weeks after he started chemotherapy, my brother had a CAT scan, and I was by his side when he got the results. All the tumors were gone. He still had three more rounds of chemotherapy to go, but we knew he would recover. This picture was taken two weeks ago.By taking action when you're lonely, by changing your responses to failure, by protecting your self-esteem, by battling negative thinking, you won't just heal your psychological wounds, you will build emotional resilience, you will thrive. A hundred years ago, people began practicing personal hygiene, and life expectancy rates rose by over 50 percent in just a matter of decades. I believe our quality of life could rise just as dramatically if we all began practicing emotional hygiene.Can you imagine what the world would be like if everyone was psychologically healthier? If there were less loneliness and less depression? If people knew how to overcome failure? If they felt better about themselves and more empowered? If they were happier and more fulfilled? I can, because that's the world I want to live in. And that's the world my brother wants to live in as well. And if you just become informed and change a few simple habits, well — that's the world we can all live in.Thank you very much.(Applause)","**Prioritizing Emotional Hygiene for Psychological Health**1031 1032 - **Understanding Emotional Hygiene**: Emphasizes the importance of psychological health and introduces the concept of emotional hygiene.1033 - **Comparing Physical and Psychological Health**: Discusses societal prioritization of physical health over psychological health and highlights the need for balance.1034 - **Psychological Injuries and the Importance of Treatment**: Describes common psychological injuries like loneliness and failure, stressing the necessity of addressing them as we would physical injuries.1035 - **Personal Story of Loneliness**: Uses a personal anecdote to illustrate how loneliness distorts perception and the impact it can have on psychological health.1036 - **Failure and Mental Responses**: Explores how different reactions to failure can affect psychological health and emphasizes awareness of our mental reactions.1037 - **The Importance of Resilience and Positive Mental Habits**: Advises fostering resilience by combating negative thinking and protecting self-esteem.1038 - **Conclusion and Call to Action**: Envisions a world improved by widespread practice of emotional hygiene and encourages the audience to adopt healthier psychological habits.","You are a TED Story Creator, a storyteller, and an expert in crafting compelling transcripts for TED Talks. You possess a knowledge base of the world’s most inspiring TED talks. Given a title and an outline, your task is to create an engaging transcript that will captivate the audience. Adhere to the sequence of the outline and the bullet points to weave a captivating narrative."1039"Thank you very much. Well, I would like to start with testicles.Men who sleep five hours a night have significantly smaller testicles than those who sleep seven hours or more.In addition, men who routinely sleep just four to five hours a night will have a level of testosterone which is that of someone 10 years their senior. So a lack of sleep will age a man by a decade in terms of that critical aspect of wellness. And we see equivalent impairments in female reproductive health caused by a lack of sleep.This is the best news that I have for you today.From this point, it may only get worse. Not only will I tell you about the wonderfully good things that happen when you get sleep, but the alarmingly bad things that happen when you don't get enough, both for your brain and for your body.Let me start with the brain and the functions of learning and memory, because what we've discovered over the past 10 or so years is that you need sleep after learning to essentially hit the save button on those new memories so that you don't forget. But recently, we discovered that you also need sleep before learning to actually prepare your brain, almost like a dry sponge ready to initially soak up new information. And without sleep, the memory circuits of the brain essentially become waterlogged, as it were, and you can't absorb new memories.So let me show you the data. Here in this study, we decided to test the hypothesis that pulling the all-nighter was a good idea. So we took a group of individuals and we assigned them to one of two experimental groups: a sleep group and a sleep deprivation group. Now the sleep group, they're going to get a full eight hours of slumber, but the deprivation group, we're going to keep them awake in the laboratory, under full supervision. There's no naps or caffeine, by the way, so it's miserable for everyone involved. And then the next day, we're going to place those participants inside an MRI scanner and we're going to have them try and learn a whole list of new facts as we're taking snapshots of brain activity. And then we're going to test them to see how effective that learning has been. And that's what you're looking at here on the vertical axis. And when you put those two groups head to head, what you find is a quite significant, 40-percent deficit in the ability of the brain to make new memories without sleep.I think this should be concerning, considering what we know is happening to sleep in our education populations right now. In fact, to put that in context, it would be the difference in a child acing an exam versus failing it miserably — 40 percent. And we've gone on to discover what goes wrong within your brain to produce these types of learning disabilities. And there's a structure that sits on the left and the right side of your brain, called the hippocampus. And you can think of the hippocampus almost like the informational inbox of your brain. It's very good at receiving new memory files and then holding on to them. And when you look at this structure in those people who'd had a full night of sleep, we saw lots of healthy learning-related activity. Yet in those people who were sleep-deprived, we actually couldn't find any significant signal whatsoever. So it's almost as though sleep deprivation had shut down your memory inbox, and any new incoming files — they were just being bounced. You couldn't effectively commit new experiences to memory.So that's the bad that can happen if I were to take sleep away from you, but let me just come back to that control group for a second. Do you remember those folks that got a full eight hours of sleep? Well, we can ask a very different question: What is it about the physiological quality of your sleep when you do get it that restores and enhances your memory and learning ability each and every day? And by placing electrodes all over the head, what we've discovered is that there are big, powerful brainwaves that happen during the very deepest stages of sleep that have riding on top of them these spectacular bursts of electrical activity that we call sleep spindles. And it's the combined quality of these deep-sleep brainwaves that acts like a file-transfer mechanism at night, shifting memories from a short-term vulnerable reservoir to a more permanent long-term storage site within the brain, and therefore protecting them, making them safe. And it is important that we understand what during sleep actually transacts these memory benefits, because there are real medical and societal implications.And let me just tell you about one area that we've moved this work out into, clinically, which is the context of aging and dementia. Because it's of course no secret that, as we get older, our learning and memory abilities begin to fade and decline. But what we've also discovered is that a physiological signature of aging is that your sleep gets worse, especially that deep quality of sleep that I was just discussing. And only last year, we finally published evidence that these two things, they're not simply co-occurring, they are significantly interrelated. And it suggests that the disruption of deep sleep is an underappreciated factor that is contributing to cognitive decline or memory decline in aging, and most recently we've discovered, in Alzheimer's disease as well.Now, I know this is remarkably depressing news. It's in the mail. It's coming at you. But there's a potential silver lining here. Unlike many of the other factors that we know are associated with aging, for example changes in the physical structure of the brain, that's fiendishly difficult to treat. But that sleep is a missing piece in the explanatory puzzle of aging and Alzheimer's is exciting because we may be able to do something about it.And one way that we are approaching this at my sleep center is not by using sleeping pills, by the way. Unfortunately, they are blunt instruments that do not produce naturalistic sleep. Instead, we're actually developing a method based on this. It's called direct current brain stimulation. You insert a small amount of voltage into the brain, so small you typically don't feel it, but it has a measurable impact. Now if you apply this stimulation during sleep in young, healthy adults, as if you're sort of singing in time with those deep-sleep brainwaves, not only can you amplify the size of those deep-sleep brainwaves, but in doing so, we can almost double the amount of memory benefit that you get from sleep. The question now is whether we can translate this same affordable, potentially portable piece of technology into older adults and those with dementia. Can we restore back some healthy quality of deep sleep, and in doing so, can we salvage aspects of their learning and memory function? That is my real hope now. That's one of our moon-shot goals, as it were.So that's an example of sleep for your brain, but sleep is just as essential for your body. We've already spoken about sleep loss and your reproductive system. Or I could tell you about sleep loss and your cardiovascular system, and that all it takes is one hour. Because there is a global experiment performed on 1.6 billion people across 70 countries twice a year, and it's called daylight saving time. Now, in the spring, when we lose one hour of sleep, we see a subsequent 24-percent increase in heart attacks that following day. In the autumn, when we gain an hour of sleep, we see a 21-percent reduction in heart attacks. Isn't that incredible? And you see exactly the same profile for car crashes, road traffic accidents, even suicide rates.But as a deeper dive, I want to focus on this: sleep loss and your immune system. And here, I'll introduce these delightful blue elements in the image. They are called natural killer cells, and you can think of natural killer cells almost like the secret service agents of your immune system. They are very good at identifying dangerous, unwanted elements and eliminating them. In fact, what they're doing here is destroying a cancerous tumor mass. So what you wish for is a virile set of these immune assassins at all times, and tragically, that's what you don't have if you're not sleeping enough.So here in this experiment, you're not going to have your sleep deprived for an entire night, you're simply going to have your sleep restricted to four hours for one single night, and then we're going to look to see what's the percent reduction in immune cell activity that you suffer. And it's not small — it's not 10 percent, it's not 20 percent. There was a 70-percent drop in natural killer cell activity. That's a concerning state of immune deficiency, and you can perhaps understand why we're now finding significant links between short sleep duration and your risk for the development of numerous forms of cancer. Currently, that list includes cancer of the bowel, cancer of the prostate and cancer of the breast. In fact, the link between a lack of sleep and cancer is now so strong that the World Health Organization has classified any form of nighttime shift work as a probable carcinogen, because of a disruption of your sleep-wake rhythms.So you may have heard of that old maxim that you can sleep when you're dead. Well, I'm being quite serious now — it is mortally unwise advice. We know this from epidemiological studies across millions of individuals. There's a simple truth: the shorter your sleep, the shorter your life. Short sleep predicts all-cause mortality.And if increasing your risk for the development of cancer or even Alzheimer's disease were not sufficiently disquieting, we have since discovered that a lack of sleep will even erode the very fabric of biological life itself, your DNA genetic code. So here in this study, they took a group of healthy adults and they limited them to six hours of sleep a night for one week, and then they measured the change in their gene activity profile relative to when those same individuals were getting a full eight hours of sleep a night. And there were two critical findings. First, a sizable and significant 711 genes were distorted in their activity, caused by a lack of sleep. The second result was that about half of those genes were actually increased in their activity. The other half were decreased.Now those genes that were switched off by a lack of sleep were genes associated with your immune system, so once again, you can see that immune deficiency. In contrast, those genes that were actually upregulated or increased by way of a lack of sleep, were genes associated with the promotion of tumors, genes associated with long-term chronic inflammation within the body, and genes associated with stress, and, as a consequence, cardiovascular disease. There is simply no aspect of your wellness that can retreat at the sign of sleep deprivation and get away unscathed. It's rather like a broken water pipe in your home. Sleep loss will leak down into every nook and cranny of your physiology, even tampering with the very DNA nucleic alphabet that spells out your daily health narrative.And at this point, you may be thinking, ""Oh my goodness, how do I start to get better sleep? What are you tips for good sleep?"" Well, beyond avoiding the damaging and harmful impact of alcohol and caffeine on sleep, and if you're struggling with sleep at night, avoiding naps during the day, I have two pieces of advice for you.The first is regularity. Go to bed at the same time, wake up at the same time, no matter whether it's the weekday or the weekend. Regularity is king, and it will anchor your sleep and improve the quantity and the quality of that sleep. The second is keep it cool. Your body needs to drop its core temperature by about two to three degrees Fahrenheit to initiate sleep and then to stay asleep, and it's the reason you will always find it easier to fall asleep in a room that's too cold than too hot. So aim for a bedroom temperature of around 65 degrees, or about 18 degrees Celsius. That's going to be optimal for the sleep of most people.And then finally, in taking a step back, then, what is the mission-critical statement here? Well, I think it may be this: sleep, unfortunately, is not an optional lifestyle luxury. Sleep is a nonnegotiable biological necessity. It is your life-support system, and it is Mother Nature's best effort yet at immortality. And the decimation of sleep throughout industrialized nations is having a catastrophic impact on our health, our wellness, even the safety and the education of our children. It's a silent sleep loss epidemic, and it's fast becoming one of the greatest public health challenges that we face in the 21st century.I believe it is now time for us to reclaim our right to a full night of sleep, and without embarrassment or that unfortunate stigma of laziness. And in doing so, we can be reunited with the most powerful elixir of life, the Swiss Army knife of health, as it were.And with that soapbox rant over, I will simply say, good night, good luck, and above all ... I do hope you sleep well.Thank you very much indeed.(Applause)Thank you.(Applause)Thank you so much.David Biello: No, no, no. Stay there for a second. Good job not running away, though. I appreciate that. So that was terrifying.Matt Walker: You're welcome. DB: Yes, thank you, thank you. Since we can't catch up on sleep, what are we supposed to do? What do we do when we're, like, tossing and turning in bed late at night or doing shift work or whatever else?MW: So you're right, we can't catch up on sleep. Sleep is not like the bank. You can't accumulate a debt and then hope to pay it off at a later point in time. I should also note the reason that it's so catastrophic and that our health deteriorates so quickly, first, it's because human beings are the only species that deliberately deprive themselves of sleep for no apparent reason.DB: Because we're smart.MW: And I make that point because it means that Mother Nature, throughout the course of evolution, has never had to face the challenge of this thing called sleep deprivation. So she's never developed a safety net, and that's why when you undersleep, things just sort of implode so quickly, both within the brain and the body. So you just have to prioritize.DB: OK, but tossing and turning in bed, what do I do?MW: So if you are staying in bed awake for too long, you should get out of bed and go to a different room and do something different. The reason is because your brain will very quickly associate your bedroom with the place of wakefulness, and you need to break that association. So only return to bed when you are sleepy, and that way you will relearn the association that you once had, which is your bed is the place of sleep. So the analogy would be, you'd never sit at the dinner table, waiting to get hungry, so why would you lie in bed, waiting to get sleepy?DB: Well, thank you for that wake-up call. Great job, Matt.MW: You're very welcome. Thank you very much.","The Vital Importance of Sleep1040 1041 - Start with eye-opening statistics on the effects of sleep deprivation on reproductive health.1042 - Discuss the critical role of sleep in brain function, particularly in learning and memory.1043 - Present research demonstrating the negative outcomes of sleep deprivation on immune function and overall health.1044 - Highlight innovative sleep research and potential treatments for sleep-related health issues.1045 - Outline practical advice for improving sleep and the importance of prioritizing sleep for health.1046 - End with a call to action for societal recognition of the necessity of sleep and a reevaluation of its value.","You are a TED Story Creator, a storyteller, and an expert in crafting compelling transcripts for TED Talks. You possess a knowledge base of the world’s most inspiring TED talks. Given a title and an outline, your task is to create an engaging transcript that will captivate the audience. Adhere to the sequence of the outline and the bullet points to weave a captivating narrative."1047"At some point in our lives, almost every one of us will have our heart broken.My patient Kathy planned her wedding when she was in middle school. She would meet her future husband by age 27, get engaged a year later and get married a year after that. But when Kathy turned 27, she didn't find a husband. She found a lump in her breast. She went through many months of harsh chemotherapy and painful surgeries, and then just as she was ready to jump back into the dating world, she found a lump in her other breast and had to do it all over again. Kathy recovered, though, and she was eager to resume her search for a husband as soon as her eyebrows grew back in. When you're going on first dates in New York City, you need to be able to express a wide range of emotions.Soon afterwards, she met Rich and fell in love. The relationship was everything she hoped it would be. Six months later, after a lovely weekend in New England, Rich made reservations at their favorite romantic restaurant. Kathy knew he was going to propose, and she could barely contain her excitement.But Rich did not propose to Kathy that night. He broke up with her. As deeply as he cared for Kathy — and he did — he simply wasn't in love.Kathy was shattered. Her heart was truly broken, and she now faced yet another recovery. But five months after the breakup, Kathy still couldn't stop thinking about Rich. Her heart was still very much broken. The question is: Why? Why was this incredibly strong and determined woman unable to marshal the same emotional resources that got her through four years of cancer treatments? Why do so many of us flounder when we're trying to recover from heartbreak? Why do the same coping mechanisms that get us through all kinds of life challenges fail us so miserably when our heart gets broken?In over 20 years of private practice, I have seen people of every age and background face every manner of heartbreak, and what I've learned is this: when your heart is broken, the same instincts you ordinarily rely on will time and again lead you down the wrong path. You simply cannot trust what your mind is telling you.For example, we know from studies of heartbroken people that having a clear understanding of why the relationship ended is really important for our ability to move on. Yet time and again, when we are offered a simple and honest explanation like the one Rich offered Kathy, we reject it. Heartbreak creates such dramatic emotional pain, our mind tells us the cause must be equally dramatic. And that gut instinct is so powerful, it can make even the most reasonable and measured of us come up with mysteries and conspiracy theories where none exist. Kathy became convinced something must have happened during her romantic getaway with Rich that soured him on the relationship, and she became obsessed with figuring out what that was. And so she spent countless hours going through every minute of that weekend in her mind, searching her memory for clues that were not there. Kathy's mind tricked her into initiating this wild goose chase. But what compelled her to commit to it for so many months?Heartbreak is far more insidious than we realize. There is a reason we keep going down one rabbit hole after another, even when we know it's going to make us feel worse. Brain studies have shown that the withdrawal of romantic love activates the same mechanisms in our brain that get activated when addicts are withdrawing from substances like cocaine or opioids. Kathy was going through withdrawal. And since she could not have the heroin of actually being with Rich, her unconscious mind chose the methadone of her memories with him. Her instincts told her she was trying to solve a mystery, but what she was actually doing was getting her fix. This is what makes heartbreak so difficult to heal. Addicts know they're addicted. They know when they're shooting up. But heartbroken people do not. But you do now. And if your heart is broken, you cannot ignore that. You have to recognize that, as compelling as the urge is, with every trip down memory lane, every text you send, every second you spend stalking your ex on social media, you are just feeding your addiction, deepening your emotional pain and complicating your recovery.Getting over heartbreak is not a journey. It's a fight, and your reason is your strongest weapon. There is no breakup explanation that's going to feel satisfying. No rationale can take away the pain you feel. So don't search for one, don't wait for one, just accept the one you were offered or make up one yourself and then put the question to rest, because you need that closure to resist the addiction. And you need something else as well: you have to be willing to let go, to accept that it's over. Otherwise, your mind will feed on your hope and set you back. Hope can be incredibly destructive when your heart is broken.Heartbreak is a master manipulator. The ease with which it gets our mind to do the absolute opposite of what we need in order to recover is remarkable. One of the most common tendencies we have when our heart is broken is to idealize the person who broke it. We spend hours remembering their smile, how great they made us feel, that time we hiked up the mountain and made love under the stars. All that does is make our loss feel more painful. We know that. Yet we still allow our mind to cycle through one greatest hit after another, like we were being held hostage by our own passive-aggressive Spotify playlist.Heartbreak will make those thoughts pop into your mind. And so to avoid idealizing, you have to balance them out by remembering their frown, not just their smile, how bad they made you feel, the fact that after the lovemaking, you got lost coming down the mountain, argued like crazy and didn't speak for two days. What I tell my patients is to compile an exhaustive list of all the ways the person was wrong for you, all the bad qualities, all the pet peeves, and then keep it on your phone.And once you have your list, you have to use it. When I hear even a hint of idealizing or the faintest whiff of nostalgia in a session, I go, ""Phone, please.""Your mind will try to tell you they were perfect. But they were not, and neither was the relationship. And if you want to get over them, you have to remind yourself of that, frequently.None of us is immune to heartbreak. My patient Miguel was a 56-year-old senior executive in a software company. Five years after his wife died, he finally felt ready to start dating again. He soon met Sharon, and a whirlwind romance ensued. They introduced each other to their adult children after one month, and they moved in together after two. When middle-aged people date, they don't mess around. It's like ""Love, Actually"" meets ""The Fast and the Furious.""Miguel was happier than he had been in years. But the night before their first anniversary, Sharon left him. She had decided to move to the West Coast to be closer to her children, and she didn't want a long-distance relationship. Miguel was totally blindsided and utterly devastated. He barely functioned at work for many, many months, and he almost lost his job as a result. Another consequence of heartbreak is that feeling alone and in pain can significantly impair our intellectual functioning, especially when performing complex tasks involving logic and reasoning. It temporarily lowers our IQ.But it wasn't just the intensity of Miguel's grief that confused his employers; it was the duration. Miguel was confused by this as well and really quite embarrassed by it. ""What's wrong with me?"" he asked me in our session. ""What adult spends almost a year getting over a one-year relationship?"" Actually, many do.Heartbreak shares all the hallmarks of traditional loss and grief: insomnia, intrusive thoughts, immune system dysfunction. Forty percent of people experience clinically measurable depression. Heartbreak is a complex psychological injury. It impacts us in a multitude of ways. For example, Sharon was both very social and very active. She had dinners at the house every week. She and Miguel went on camping trips with other couples. Although Miguel was not religious, he accompanied Sharon to church every Sunday, where he was welcomed into the congregation. Miguel didn't just lose his girlfriend; he lost his entire social life, the supportive community of Sharon's church. He lost his identity as a couple. Now, Miguel recognized the breakup had left this huge void in his life, but what he failed to recognize is that it left far more than just one. And that is crucial, not just because it explains why heartbreak could be so devastating, but because it tells us how to heal. To fix your broken heart, you have to identify these voids in your life and fill them, and I mean all of them. The voids in your identity: you have to reestablish who you are and what your life is about. The voids in your social life, the missing activities, even the empty spaces on the wall where pictures used to hang. But none of that will do any good unless you prevent the mistakes that can set you back, the unnecessary searches for explanations, idealizing your ex instead of focusing on how they were wrong for you, indulging thoughts and behaviors that still give them a starring role in this next chapter of your life when they shouldn't be an extra.Getting over heartbreak is hard, but if you refuse to be misled by your mind and you take steps to heal, you can significantly minimize your suffering. And it won't just be you who benefit from that. You'll be more present with your friends, more engaged with your family, not to mention the billions of dollars of compromised productivity in the workplace that could be avoided.So if you know someone who is heartbroken, have compassion, because social support has been found to be important for their recovery. And have patience, because it's going to take them longer to move on than you think it should. And if you're hurting, know this: it's difficult, it is a battle within your own mind, and you have to be diligent to win. But you do have weapons. You can fight. And you will heal.Thank you.(Applause)","Understanding Heartbreak and Recovery1048 1049 - Heartbreak challenges common coping mechanisms:1050  - Intense emotional pain requires special strategies to avoid prolonging the hurt.1051 1052 - Psychological implications of heartbreak:1053  - It triggers addictive-like brain responses analogous to drug withdrawal.1054 1055 - Strategies to manage and overcome heartbreak:1056  - Accept the given reasons for a breakup without deepening the investigation.1057  - Counter idealization by remembering the negative aspects of the relationship.1058  - Identify and fill voids left in your life and identity post-breakup.1059 1060 - Importance and roles of social support:1061  - Compassion and patience are key in supporting those dealing with heartbreak as recovery can take longer than expected.","You are a TED Story Creator, a storyteller, and an expert in crafting compelling transcripts for TED Talks. You possess a knowledge base of the world’s most inspiring TED talks. Given a title and an outline, your task is to create an engaging transcript that will captivate the audience. Adhere to the sequence of the outline and the bullet points to weave a captivating narrative."1062"So, I'll be speaking to you using language ... because I can. This is one these magical abilities that we humans have. We can transmit really complicated thoughts to one another. So what I'm doing right now is, I'm making sounds with my mouth as I'm exhaling. I'm making tones and hisses and puffs, and those are creating air vibrations in the air. Those air vibrations are traveling to you, they're hitting your eardrums, and then your brain takes those vibrations from your eardrums and transforms them into thoughts. I hope.I hope that's happening. So because of this ability, we humans are able to transmit our ideas across vast reaches of space and time. We're able to transmit knowledge across minds. I can put a bizarre new idea in your mind right now. I could say, ""Imagine a jellyfish waltzing in a library while thinking about quantum mechanics.""Now, if everything has gone relatively well in your life so far, you probably haven't had that thought before.But now I've just made you think it, through language.Now of course, there isn't just one language in the world, there are about 7,000 languages spoken around the world. And all the languages differ from one another in all kinds of ways. Some languages have different sounds, they have different vocabularies, and they also have different structures — very importantly, different structures. That begs the question: Does the language we speak shape the way we think? Now, this is an ancient question. People have been speculating about this question forever. Charlemagne, Holy Roman emperor, said, ""To have a second language is to have a second soul"" — strong statement that language crafts reality. But on the other hand, Shakespeare has Juliet say, ""What's in a name? A rose by any other name would smell as sweet."" Well, that suggests that maybe language doesn't craft reality.These arguments have gone back and forth for thousands of years. But until recently, there hasn't been any data to help us decide either way. Recently, in my lab and other labs around the world, we've started doing research, and now we have actual scientific data to weigh in on this question.So let me tell you about some of my favorite examples. I'll start with an example from an Aboriginal community in Australia that I had the chance to work with. These are the Kuuk Thaayorre people. They live in Pormpuraaw at the very west edge of Cape York. What's cool about Kuuk Thaayorre is, in Kuuk Thaayorre, they don't use words like ""left"" and ""right,"" and instead, everything is in cardinal directions: north, south, east and west. And when I say everything, I really mean everything. You would say something like, ""Oh, there's an ant on your southwest leg."" Or, ""Move your cup to the north-northeast a little bit."" In fact, the way that you say ""hello"" in Kuuk Thaayorre is you say, ""Which way are you going?"" And the answer should be, ""North-northeast in the far distance. How about you?""So imagine as you're walking around your day, every person you greet, you have to report your heading direction.But that would actually get you oriented pretty fast, right? Because you literally couldn't get past ""hello,"" if you didn't know which way you were going. In fact, people who speak languages like this stay oriented really well. They stay oriented better than we used to think humans could. We used to think that humans were worse than other creatures because of some biological excuse: ""Oh, we don't have magnets in our beaks or in our scales."" No; if your language and your culture trains you to do it, actually, you can do it. There are humans around the world who stay oriented really well.And just to get us in agreement about how different this is from the way we do it, I want you all to close your eyes for a second and point southeast.Keep your eyes closed. Point. OK, so you can open your eyes. I see you guys pointing there, there, there, there, there ... I don't know which way it is myself —You have not been a lot of help.So let's just say the accuracy in this room was not very high. This is a big difference in cognitive ability across languages, right? Where one group — very distinguished group like you guys — doesn't know which way is which, but in another group, I could ask a five-year-old and they would know.There are also really big differences in how people think about time. So here I have pictures of my grandfather at different ages. And if I ask an English speaker to organize time, they might lay it out this way, from left to right. This has to do with writing direction. If you were a speaker of Hebrew or Arabic, you might do it going in the opposite direction, from right to left.But how would the Kuuk Thaayorre, this Aboriginal group I just told you about, do it? They don't use words like ""left"" and ""right."" Let me give you hint. When we sat people facing south, they organized time from left to right. When we sat them facing north, they organized time from right to left. When we sat them facing east, time came towards the body. What's the pattern? East to west, right? So for them, time doesn't actually get locked on the body at all, it gets locked on the landscape. So for me, if I'm facing this way, then time goes this way, and if I'm facing this way, then time goes this way. I'm facing this way, time goes this way — very egocentric of me to have the direction of time chase me around every time I turn my body. For the Kuuk Thaayorre, time is locked on the landscape. It's a dramatically different way of thinking about time.Here's another really smart human trick. Suppose I ask you how many penguins are there. Well, I bet I know how you'd solve that problem if you solved it. You went, ""One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight."" You counted them. You named each one with a number, and the last number you said was the number of penguins. This is a little trick that you're taught to use as kids. You learn the number list and you learn how to apply it. A little linguistic trick. Well, some languages don't do this, because some languages don't have exact number words. They're languages that don't have a word like ""seven"" or a word like ""eight."" In fact, people who speak these languages don't count, and they have trouble keeping track of exact quantities. So, for example, if I ask you to match this number of penguins to the same number of ducks, you would be able to do that by counting. But folks who don't have that linguistic trick can't do that.Languages also differ in how they divide up the color spectrum — the visual world. Some languages have lots of words for colors, some have only a couple words, ""light"" and ""dark."" And languages differ in where they put boundaries between colors. So, for example, in English, there's a word for blue that covers all of the colors that you can see on the screen, but in Russian, there isn't a single word. Instead, Russian speakers have to differentiate between light blue, ""goluboy,"" and dark blue, ""siniy."" So Russians have this lifetime of experience of, in language, distinguishing these two colors. When we test people's ability to perceptually discriminate these colors, what we find is that Russian speakers are faster across this linguistic boundary. They're faster to be able to tell the difference between a light and dark blue. And when you look at people's brains as they're looking at colors — say you have colors shifting slowly from light to dark blue — the brains of people who use different words for light and dark blue will give a surprised reaction as the colors shift from light to dark, as if, ""Ooh, something has categorically changed,"" whereas the brains of English speakers, for example, that don't make this categorical distinction, don't give that surprise, because nothing is categorically changing.Languages have all kinds of structural quirks. This is one of my favorites. Lots of languages have grammatical gender; every noun gets assigned a gender, often masculine or feminine. And these genders differ across languages. So, for example, the sun is feminine in German but masculine in Spanish, and the moon, the reverse. Could this actually have any consequence for how people think? Do German speakers think of the sun as somehow more female-like, and the moon somehow more male-like? Actually, it turns out that's the case. So if you ask German and Spanish speakers to, say, describe a bridge, like the one here — ""bridge"" happens to be grammatically feminine in German, grammatically masculine in Spanish — German speakers are more likely to say bridges are ""beautiful,"" ""elegant"" and stereotypically feminine words. Whereas Spanish speakers will be more likely to say they're ""strong"" or ""long,"" these masculine words.Languages also differ in how they describe events, right? You take an event like this, an accident. In English, it's fine to say, ""He broke the vase."" In a language like Spanish, you might be more likely to say, ""The vase broke,"" or, ""The vase broke itself."" If it's an accident, you wouldn't say that someone did it. In English, quite weirdly, we can even say things like, ""I broke my arm."" Now, in lots of languages, you couldn't use that construction unless you are a lunatic and you went out looking to break your arm — and you succeeded. If it was an accident, you would use a different construction.Now, this has consequences. So, people who speak different languages will pay attention to different things, depending on what their language usually requires them to do. So we show the same accident to English speakers and Spanish speakers, English speakers will remember who did it, because English requires you to say, ""He did it; he broke the vase."" Whereas Spanish speakers might be less likely to remember who did it if it's an accident, but they're more likely to remember that it was an accident. They're more likely to remember the intention. So, two people watch the same event, witness the same crime, but end up remembering different things about that event. This has implications, of course, for eyewitness testimony. It also has implications for blame and punishment. So if you take English speakers and I just show you someone breaking a vase, and I say, ""He broke the vase,"" as opposed to ""The vase broke,"" even though you can witness it yourself, you can watch the video, you can watch the crime against the vase, you will punish someone more, you will blame someone more if I just said, ""He broke it,"" as opposed to, ""It broke."" The language guides our reasoning about events.Now, I've given you a few examples of how language can profoundly shape the way we think, and it does so in a variety of ways. So language can have big effects, like we saw with space and time, where people can lay out space and time in completely different coordinate frames from each other. Language can also have really deep effects — that's what we saw with the case of number. Having count words in your language, having number words, opens up the whole world of mathematics. Of course, if you don't count, you can't do algebra, you can't do any of the things that would be required to build a room like this or make this broadcast, right? This little trick of number words gives you a stepping stone into a whole cognitive realm.Language can also have really early effects, what we saw in the case of color. These are really simple, basic, perceptual decisions. We make thousands of them all the time, and yet, language is getting in there and fussing even with these tiny little perceptual decisions that we make. Language can have really broad effects. So the case of grammatical gender may be a little silly, but at the same time, grammatical gender applies to all nouns. That means language can shape how you're thinking about anything that can be named by a noun. That's a lot of stuff.And finally, I gave you an example of how language can shape things that have personal weight to us — ideas like blame and punishment or eyewitness memory. These are important things in our daily lives.Now, the beauty of linguistic diversity is that it reveals to us just how ingenious and how flexible the human mind is. Human minds have invented not one cognitive universe, but 7,000 — there are 7,000 languages spoken around the world. And we can create many more — languages, of course, are living things, things that we can hone and change to suit our needs. The tragic thing is that we're losing so much of this linguistic diversity all the time. We're losing about one language a week, and by some estimates, half of the world's languages will be gone in the next hundred years. And the even worse news is that right now, almost everything we know about the human mind and human brain is based on studies of usually American English-speaking undergraduates at universities. That excludes almost all humans. Right? So what we know about the human mind is actually incredibly narrow and biased, and our science has to do better.I want to leave you with this final thought. I've told you about how speakers of different languages think differently, but of course, that's not about how people elsewhere think. It's about how you think. It's how the language that you speak shapes the way that you think. And that gives you the opportunity to ask, ""Why do I think the way that I do?"" ""How could I think differently?"" And also, ""What thoughts do I wish to create?""Thank you very much.(Applause)","The Power of Language: How It Shapes Thought1063 1064 - Language as a tool for communication and thought transformation.1065 - Language diversity and its impact on cognitive abilities and perception.1066  - Example of the Kuuk Thaayorre people's unique use of cardinal directions.1067  - How languages handle concepts like time and numbers differently.1068 - Language's influence on color perception, grammatical gender, and event description leading to varied cognitive outcomes among different languages.1069  - Russian vs. English speaker's perception of color.1070  - Influence of grammatical gender in German and Spanish on object description.1071  - Differences in memory and blame assignment in English vs. Spanish descriptions of events.1072 - The implications of language diversity on understanding the full potential of the human mind.1073  - The risks of diminishing language diversity.1074  - The limited scope of current research based mostly on English-speaking subjects.1075 - The personal relevance of thinking about the influence of one's own language.1076  - Reflection on personal thought processes and openness to other cognitive frameworks.","You are a TED Story Creator, a storyteller, and an expert in crafting compelling transcripts for TED Talks. You possess a knowledge base of the world’s most inspiring TED talks. Given a title and an outline, your task is to create an engaging transcript that will captivate the audience. Adhere to the sequence of the outline and the bullet points to weave a captivating narrative."1077"Muscles. We have over 600 of them. They make up between 1/3 and 1/2 of our body weight, and along with connective tissue, they bind us together, hold us up, and help us move. And whether or not body building is your hobby, muscles need your constant attention because the way you treat them on a daily basis determines whether they will wither or grow. Say you're standing in front of a door, ready to pull it open. Your brain and muscles are perfectly poised to help you achieve this goal. First, your brain sends a signal to motor neurons inside your arm. When they receive this message, they fire, causing muscles to contract and relax, which pull on the bones in your arm and generate the needed movement. The bigger the challenge becomes, the bigger the brain's signal grows, and the more motor units it rallies to help you achieve your task. But what if the door is made of solid iron? At this point, your arm muscles alone won't be able to generate enough tension to pull it open, so your brain appeals to other muscles for help. You plant your feet, tighten your belly, and tense your back, generating enough force to yank it open. Your nervous system has just leveraged the resources you already have, other muscles, to meet the demand. While all this is happening, your muscle fibers undergo another kind of cellular change. As you expose them to stress, they experience microscopic damage, which, in this context, is a good thing. In response, the injured cells release inflammatory molecules called cytokines that activate the immune system to repair the injury. This is when the muscle-building magic happens. The greater the damage to the muscle tissue, the more your body will need to repair itself. The resulting cycle of damage and repair eventually makes muscles bigger and stronger as they adapt to progressively greater demands. Since our bodies have already adapted to most everyday activities, those generally don't produce enough stress to stimulate new muscle growth. So, to build new muscle, a process called hypertrophy, our cells need to be exposed to higher workloads than they are used to. In fact, if you don't continuously expose your muscles to some resistance, they will shrink, a process known as muscular atrophy. In contrast, exposing the muscle to a high-degree of tension, especially while the muscle is lengthening, also called an eccentric contraction, generates effective conditions for new growth. However, muscles rely on more than just activity to grow. Without proper nutrition, hormones, and rest, your body would never be able to repair damaged muscle fibers. Protein in our diet preserves muscle mass by providing the building blocks for new tissue in the form of amino acids. Adequate protein intake, along with naturally occurring hormones, like insulin-like growth factor and testosterone, help shift the body into a state where tissue is repaired and grown. This vital repair process mainly occurs when we're resting, especially at night while sleeping. Gender and age affect this repair mechanism, which is why young men with more testosterone have a leg up in the muscle building game. Genetic factors also play a role in one's ability to grow muscle. Some people have more robust immune reactions to muscle damage, and are better able to repair and replace damaged muscle fibers, increasing their muscle-building potential. The body responds to the demands you place on it. If you tear your muscles up, eat right, rest and repeat, you'll create the conditions to make your muscles as big and strong as possible. It is with muscles as it is with life: Meaningful growth requires challenge and stress.","Muscle Function and Growth: Insights from Everyday Life1078 1079 - Muscles are essential for movement and make up a significant portion of body weight.1080 - Daily muscle activity and treatment influence their condition either causing decay or promoting growth.1081 - Exposing muscles to challenges beyond routine activities triggers hypertrophy.1082 - Proper nutrition, hormonal balance, and rest are critical for muscle recovery and growth.1083 - Continuous resistance, adequate diet, and sufficient rest maximize muscle potential.1084 - Genetic and physiological factors affect individual muscle growth capabilities.1085 - Engaging in progressively challenging activities is essential for meaningful muscle and personal growth.","You are a TED Story Creator, a storyteller, and an expert in crafting compelling transcripts for TED Talks. You possess a knowledge base of the world’s most inspiring TED talks. Given a title and an outline, your task is to create an engaging transcript that will captivate the audience. Adhere to the sequence of the outline and the bullet points to weave a captivating narrative."1086"Around 1159 A.D., a mathematician called Bhaskara the Learned sketched a design for a wheel containing curved reservoirs of mercury. He reasoned that as the wheels spun, the mercury would flow to the bottom of each reservoir, leaving one side of the wheel perpetually heavier than the other. The imbalance would keep the wheel turning forever. Bhaskara's drawing was one of the earliest designs for a perpetual motion machine, a device that can do work indefinitely without any external energy source. Imagine a windmill that produced the breeze it needed to keep rotating. Or a lightbulb whose glow provided its own electricity. These devices have captured many inventors' imaginations because they could transform our relationship with energy. For example, if you could build a perpetual motion machine that included humans as part of its perfectly efficient system, it could sustain life indefinitely. There's just one problem. They don't work. Ideas for perpetual motion machines all violate one or more fundamental laws of thermodynamics, the branch of physics that describes the relationship between different forms of energy. The first law of thermodynamics says that energy can't be created or destroyed. You can't get out more energy than you put in. That rules out a useful perpetual motion machine right away because a machine could only ever produce as much energy as it consumed. There wouldn't be any left over to power a car or charge a phone. But what if you just wanted the machine to keep itself moving? Inventors have proposed plenty of ideas. Several of these have been variations on Bhaskara's over-balanced wheel with rolling balls or weights on swinging arms. None of them work. The moving parts that make one side of the wheel heavier also shift its center of mass downward below the axle. With a low center of mass, the wheel just swings back and forth like a pendulum, then stops. What about a different approach? In the 17th century, Robert Boyle came up with an idea for a self-watering pot. He theorized that capillary action, the attraction between liquids and surfaces that pulls water through thin tubes, might keep the water cycling around the bowl. But if the capillary action is strong enough to overcome gravity and draw the water up, it would also prevent it from falling back into the bowl. Then there are versions with magnets, like this set of ramps. The ball is supposed to be pulled upwards by the magnet at the top, fall back down through the hole, and repeat the cycle. This one fails because like the self-watering pot, the magnet would simply hold the ball at the top. Even if it somehow did keep moving, the magnet's strength would degrade over time and eventually stop working. For each of these machines to keep moving, they'd have to create some extra energy to nudge the system past its stopping point, breaking the first law of thermodynamics. There are ones that seem to keep going, but in reality, they invariably turn out to be drawing energy from some external source. Even if engineers could somehow design a machine that didn't violate the first law of thermodynamics, it still wouldn't work in the real world because of the second law. The second law of thermodynamics tells us that energy tends to spread out through processes like friction. Any real machine would have moving parts or interactions with air or liquid molecules that would generate tiny amounts of friction and heat, even in a vacuum. That heat is energy escaping, and it would keep leeching out, reducing the energy available to move the system itself until the machine inevitably stopped. So far, these two laws of thermodynamics have stymied every idea for perpetual motion and the dreams of perfectly efficient energy generation they imply. Yet it's hard to conclusively say we'll never discover a perpetual motion machine because there's still so much we don't understand about the universe. Perhaps we'll find new exotic forms of matter that'll force us to revisit the laws of thermodynamics. Or maybe there's perpetual motion on tiny quantum scales. What we can be reasonably sure about is that we'll never stop looking. For now, the one thing that seems truly perpetual is our search.","Exploring the Impossibility of Perpetual Motion Machines1087 1088 - Introduction to perpetual motion1089  - Definition and historical context provided by Bhaskara's design.1090  1091 - Scientific barriers1092  - Violation of the first law of thermodynamics: energy conservation.1093  - Violation of the second law of thermodynamics: energy dispersion and entropy.1094  1095 - Historical attempts and failures1096  - Examples of non-functioning designs: over-balanced wheels, self-watering pots, and magnet-powered ramps.1097  1098 - Real-world implications1099  - Impact of energy losses like friction and heat in practical scenarios.1100  1101 - The ongoing quest and theoretical possibilities1102  - Uncertainties in modern physics that might leave room for future discoveries.1103  - Perpetual motion might exist on quantum scales or with new forms of matter. 1104 1105 - Conclusion1106  - Continuation of the human pursuit for perpetual motion despite scientific laws.","You are a TED Story Creator, a storyteller, and an expert in crafting compelling transcripts for TED Talks. You possess a knowledge base of the world’s most inspiring TED talks. Given a title and an outline, your task is to create an engaging transcript that will captivate the audience. Adhere to the sequence of the outline and the bullet points to weave a captivating narrative."1107"""I felt a Funeral, in my Brain, and Mourners to and fro kept treading — treading — till [it seemed] that Sense was breaking through — And when they all were seated, a Service, like a Drum — kept beating — beating — till I [thought] my Mind was going numb — And then I heard them lift a Box and creak across my Soul with those same Boots of Lead, again, then Space — began to toll, As [all] the Heavens were a Bell, and Being, [but] an Ear, and I, and Silence, some strange Race, wrecked, solitary, here — [And] then a Plank in Reason, broke, and I fell down and down — and hit a World, at every plunge, and Finished knowing — then —""We know depression through metaphors. Emily Dickinson was able to convey it in language, Goya in an image. Half the purpose of art is to describe such iconic states.As for me, I had always thought myself tough, one of the people who could survive if I'd been sent to a concentration camp.In 1991, I had a series of losses. My mother died, a relationship I'd been in ended, I moved back to the United States from some years abroad, and I got through all of those experiences intact.But in 1994, three years later, I found myself losing interest in almost everything. I didn't want to do any of the things I had previously wanted to do, and I didn't know why. The opposite of depression is not happiness, but vitality. And it was vitality that seemed to seep away from me in that moment. Everything there was to do seemed like too much work. I would come home and I would see the red light flashing on my answering machine, and instead of being thrilled to hear from my friends, I would think, ""What a lot of people that is to have to call back."" Or I would decide I should have lunch, and then I would think, but I'd have to get the food out and put it on a plate and cut it up and chew it and swallow it, and it felt to me like the Stations of the Cross.And one of the things that often gets lost in discussions of depression is that you know it's ridiculous. You know it's ridiculous while you're experiencing it. You know that most people manage to listen to their messages and eat lunch and organize themselves to take a shower and go out the front door and that it's not a big deal, and yet you are nonetheless in its grip and you are unable to figure out any way around it. And so I began to feel myself doing less and thinking less and feeling less. It was a kind of nullity.And then the anxiety set in. If you told me that I'd have to be depressed for the next month, I would say, ""As long I know it'll be over in November, I can do it."" But if you said to me, ""You have to have acute anxiety for the next month,"" I would rather slit my wrist than go through it. It was the feeling all the time like that feeling you have if you're walking and you slip or trip and the ground is rushing up at you, but instead of lasting half a second, the way that does, it lasted for six months. It's a sensation of being afraid all the time but not even knowing what it is that you're afraid of. And it was at that point that I began to think that it was just too painful to be alive, and that the only reason not to kill oneself was so as not to hurt other people.And finally one day, I woke up and I thought perhaps I'd had a stroke, because I lay in bed completely frozen, looking at the telephone, thinking, ""Something is wrong and I should call for help,"" and I couldn't reach out my arm and pick up the phone and dial. And finally, after four full hours of my lying and staring at it, the phone rang, and somehow I managed to pick it up, and it was my father, and I said, ""I'm in serious trouble. We need to do something.""The next day I started with the medications and the therapy. And I also started reckoning with this terrible question: If I'm not the tough person who could have made it through a concentration camp, then who am I? And if I have to take medication, is that medication making me more fully myself, or is it making me someone else? And how do I feel about it if it's making me someone else?I had two advantages as I went into the fight. The first is that I knew that, objectively speaking, I had a nice life, and that if I could only get well, there was something at the other end that was worth living for. And the other was that I had access to good treatment.But I nonetheless emerged and relapsed, and emerged and relapsed, and emerged and relapsed, and finally understood I would have to be on medication and in therapy forever. And I thought, ""But is it a chemical problem or a psychological problem? And does it need a chemical cure or a philosophical cure?"" And I couldn't figure out which it was. And then I understood that actually, we aren't advanced enough in either area for it to explain things fully. The chemical cure and the psychological cure both have a role to play, and I also figured out that depression was something that was braided so deep into us that there was no separating it from our character and personality.I want to say that the treatments we have for depression are appalling. They're not very effective. They're extremely costly. They come with innumerable side effects. They're a disaster. But I am so grateful that I live now and not 50 years ago, when there would have been almost nothing to be done. I hope that 50 years hence, people will hear about my treatments and be appalled that anyone endured such primitive science.Depression is the flaw in love. If you were married to someone and thought, ""Well, if my wife dies, I'll find another one,"" it wouldn't be love as we know it. There's no such thing as love without the anticipation of loss, and that specter of despair can be the engine of intimacy.There are three things people tend to confuse: depression, grief and sadness. Grief is explicitly reactive. If you have a loss and you feel incredibly unhappy, and then, six months later, you are still deeply sad, but you're functioning a little better, it's probably grief, and it will probably ultimately resolve itself in some measure. If you experience a catastrophic loss, and you feel terrible, and six months later you can barely function at all, then it's probably a depression that was triggered by the catastrophic circumstances. The trajectory tells us a great deal. People think of depression as being just sadness. It's much, much too much sadness, much too much grief at far too slight a cause.As I set out to understand depression, and to interview people who had experienced it, I found that there were people who seemed, on the surface, to have what sounded like relatively mild depression who were nonetheless utterly disabled by it. And there were other people who had what sounded as they described it like terribly severe depression who nonetheless had good lives in the interstices between their depressive episodes. And I set out to find out what it is that causes some people to be more resilient than other people. What are the mechanisms that allow people to survive? And I went out and I interviewed person after person who was suffering with depression.One of the first people I interviewed described depression as a slower way of being dead, and that was a good thing for me to hear early on because it reminded me that that slow way of being dead can lead to actual deadness, that this is a serious business. It's the leading disability worldwide, and people die of it every day.One of the people I talked to when I was trying to understand this was a beloved friend who I had known for many years, and who had had a psychotic episode in her freshman year of college, and then plummeted into a horrific depression. She had bipolar illness, or manic depression, as it was then known. And then she did very well for many years on lithium, and then eventually, she was taken off her lithium to see how she would do without it, and she had another psychosis, and then plunged into the worst depression that I had ever seen in which she sat in her parents' apartment, more or less catatonic, essentially without moving, day after day after day. And when I interviewed her about that experience some years later — she's a poet and psychotherapist named Maggie Robbins — when I interviewed her, she said, ""I was singing 'Where Have All The Flowers Gone,' over and over, to occupy my mind. I was singing to blot out the things my mind was saying, which were, 'You are nothing. You are nobody. You don't even deserve to live.' And that was when I really started thinking about killing myself.""You don't think in depression that you've put on a gray veil and are seeing the world through the haze of a bad mood. You think that the veil has been taken away, the veil of happiness, and that now you're seeing truly. It's easier to help schizophrenics who perceive that there's something foreign inside of them that needs to be exorcised, but it's difficult with depressives, because we believe we are seeing the truth.But the truth lies. I became obsessed with that sentence: ""But the truth lies."" And I discovered, as I talked to depressive people, that they have many delusional perceptions. People will say, ""No one loves me."" And you say, ""I love you, your wife loves you, your mother loves you."" You can answer that one pretty readily, at least for most people. But people who are depressed will also say, ""No matter what we do, we're all just going to die in the end."" Or they'll say, ""There can be no true communion between two human beings. Each of us is trapped in his own body."" To which you have to say, ""That's true, but I think we should focus right now on what to have for breakfast.""(Laughter)A lot of the time, what they are expressing is not illness, but insight, and one comes to think what's really extraordinary is that most of us know about those existential questions and they don't distract us very much. There was a study I particularly liked in which a group of depressed and a group of non-depressed people were asked to play a video game for an hour, and at the end of the hour, they were asked how many little monsters they thought they had killed. The depressive group was usually accurate to within about 10 percent, and the non-depressed people guessed between 15 and 20 times as many little monsters —(Laughter)as they had actually killed.A lot of people said, when I chose to write about my depression, that it must be very difficult to be out of that closet, to have people know. They said, ""Do people talk to you differently?"" I said, ""Yes, people talk to me differently. They talk to me differently insofar as they start telling me about their experience, or their sister's experience, or their friend's experience. Things are different because now I know that depression is the family secret that everyone has.I went a few years ago to a conference, and on Friday of the three-day conference, one of the participants took me aside, and she said, ""I suffer from depression and I'm a little embarrassed about it, but I've been taking this medication, and I just wanted to ask you what you think?"" And so I did my best to give her such advice as I could. And then she said, ""You know, my husband would never understand this. He's really the kind of guy to whom this wouldn't make any sense, so, you know, it's just between us."" And I said, ""Yes, that's fine."" On Sunday of the same conference, her husband took me aside,(Laughter)and he said, ""My wife wouldn't think that I was really much of a guy if she knew this, but I've been dealing with this depression and I'm taking some medication, and I wondered what you think?"" They were hiding the same medication in two different places in the same bedroom.(Laughter)And I said that I thought communication within the marriage might be triggering some of their problems.(Laughter)But I was also struck by the burdensome nature of such mutual secrecy. Depression is so exhausting. It takes up so much of your time and energy, and silence about it, it really does make the depression worse.And then I began thinking about all the ways people make themselves better. I'd started off as a medical conservative. I thought there were a few kinds of therapy that worked, it was clear what they were — there was medication, there were certain psychotherapies, there was possibly electroconvulsive treatment, and that everything else was nonsense. But then I discovered something. If you have brain cancer, and you say that standing on your head for 20 minutes every morning makes you feel better, it may make you feel better, but you still have brain cancer, and you'll still probably die from it. But if you say that you have depression, and standing on your head for 20 minutes every day makes you feel better, then it's worked, because depression is an illness of how you feel, and if you feel better, then you are effectively not depressed anymore. So I became much more tolerant of the vast world of alternative treatments.And I get letters, I get hundreds of letters from people writing to tell me about what's worked for them. Someone was asking me backstage today about meditation. My favorite of the letters that I got was the one that came from a woman who wrote and said that she had tried therapy, medication, she had tried pretty much everything, and she had found a solution and hoped I would tell the world, and that was making little things from yarn.(Laughter)She sent me some of them.(Laughter)And I'm not wearing them right now.(Laughter)I suggested to her that she also should look up obsessive compulsive disorder in the DSM.And yet, when I went to look at alternative treatments, I also gained perspective on other treatments. I went through a tribal exorcism in Senegal that involved a great deal of ram's blood and that I'm not going to detail right now, but a few years afterwards I was in Rwanda, working on a different project, and I happened to describe my experience to someone, and he said, ""Well, that's West Africa, and we're in East Africa, and our rituals are in some ways very different, but we do have some rituals that have something in common with what you're describing."" And he said, ""But we've had a lot of trouble with Western mental health workers, especially the ones who came right after the genocide."" I said, ""What kind of trouble did you have?"" And he said, ""Well, they would do this bizarre thing. They didn't take people out in the sunshine where you begin to feel better. They didn't include drumming or music to get people's blood going. They didn't involve the whole community. They didn't externalize the depression as an invasive spirit. Instead what they did was they took people one at a time into dingy little rooms and had them talk for an hour about bad things that had happened to them.""(Laughter)(Applause)He said, ""We had to ask them to leave the country.""(Laughter)Now at the other end of alternative treatments, let me tell you about Frank Russakoff. Frank Russakoff had the worst depression perhaps that I've ever seen in a man. He was constantly depressed. He was, when I met him, at a point at which every month, he would have electroshock treatment. Then he would feel sort of disoriented for a week. Then he would feel okay for a week. Then he would have a week of going downhill. And then he would have another electroshock treatment. And he said to me when I met him, ""It's unbearable to go through my weeks this way. I can't go on this way, and I've figured out how I'm going to end it if I don't get better."" ""But,"" he said to me, ""I heard about a protocol at Mass General for a procedure called a cingulotomy, which is a brain surgery, and I think I'm going to give that a try."" And I remember being amazed at that point to think that someone who clearly had so many bad experiences with so many different treatments still had buried in him, somewhere, enough optimism to reach out for one more. And he had the cingulotomy, and it was incredibly successful.He's now a friend of mine. He has a lovely wife and two beautiful children. He wrote me a letter the Christmas after the surgery, and he said, ""My father sent me two presents this year, First, a motorized CD rack from The Sharper Image that I didn't really need, but I knew he was giving it to me to celebrate the fact that I'm living on my own and have a job I seem to love. And the other present was a photo of my grandmother, who committed suicide. As I unwrapped it, I began to cry, and my mother came over and said, 'Are you crying because of the relatives you never knew?' And I said, 'She had the same disease I have.' I'm crying now as I write to you. It's not that I'm so sad, but I get overwhelmed, I think, because I could have killed myself, but my parents kept me going, and so did the doctors, and I had the surgery. I'm alive and grateful. We live in the right time, even if it doesn't always feel like it.""I was struck by the fact that depression is broadly perceived to be a modern, Western, middle-class thing, and I went to look at how it operated in a variety of other contexts, and one of the things I was most interested in was depression among the indigent. And so I went out to try to look at what was being done for poor people with depression. And what I discovered is that poor people are mostly not being treated for depression. Depression is the result of a genetic vulnerability, which is presumably evenly distributed in the population, and triggering circumstances, which are likely to be more severe for people who are impoverished. And yet it turns out that if you have a really lovely life but feel miserable all the time, you think, ""Why do I feel like this? I must have depression."" And you set out to find treatment for it. But if you have a perfectly awful life, and you feel miserable all the time, the way you feel is commensurate with your life, and it doesn't occur to you to think, ""Maybe this is treatable.""And so we have an epidemic in this country of depression among impoverished people that's not being picked up and that's not being treated and that's not being addressed, and it's a tragedy of a grand order. And so I found an academic who was doing a research project in slums outside of D.C., where she picked up women who had come in for other health problems and diagnosed them with depression, and then provided six months of the experimental protocol. One of them, Lolly, came in, and this is what she said the day she came in. She said, and she was a woman, by the way, who had seven children. She said, ""I used to have a job but I had to give it up because I couldn't go out of the house. I have nothing to say to my children. In the morning, I can't wait for them to leave, and then I climb in bed and pull the covers over my head, and three o'clock when they come home, it just comes so fast."" She said, ""I've been taking a lot of Tylenol, anything I can take so that I can sleep more. My husband has been telling me I'm stupid, I'm ugly. I wish I could stop the pain.""Well, she was brought into this experimental protocol, and when I interviewed her six months later, she had taken a job working in childcare for the U.S. Navy, she had left the abusive husband, and she said to me, ""My kids are so much happier now."" She said, ""There's one room in my new place for the boys and one room for the girls, but at night, they're just all up on my bed, and we're doing homework all together and everything. One of them wants to be a preacher, one of them wants to be a firefighter, and one of the girls says she's going to be a lawyer. They don't cry like they used to, and they don't fight like they did. That's all I need now, is my kids. Things keep on changing, the way I dress, the way I feel, the way I act. I can go outside not being afraid anymore, and I don't think those bad feelings are coming back, and if it weren't for Dr. Miranda and that, I would still be at home with the covers pulled over my head, if I were still alive at all. I asked the Lord to send me an angel, and He heard my prayers.""I was really moved by these experiences, and I decided that I wanted to write about them not only in a book I was working on, but also in an article, and I got a commission from The New York Times Magazine to write about depression among the indigent.And I turned in my story, and my editor called me and said, ""We really can't publish this.""And I said, ""Why not?""And she said, ""It just is too far-fetched. These people who are sort of at the very bottom rung of society and then they get a few months of treatment and they're virtually ready to run Morgan Stanley? It's just too implausible."" She said, ""I've never even heard of anything like it.""And I said, ""The fact that you've never heard of it is an indication that it is news.""(Laughter)(Applause)""And you are a news magazine.""So after a certain amount of negotiation, they agreed to it. But I think a lot of what they said was connected in some strange way to this distaste that people still have for the idea of treatment, the notion that somehow if we went out and treated a lot of people in indigent communities, that would be exploitative, because we would be changing them. There is this false moral imperative that seems to be all around us, that treatment of depression, the medications and so on, are an artifice, and that it's not natural. And I think that's very misguided. It would be natural for people's teeth to fall out, but there is nobody militating against toothpaste, at least not in my circles.People then say, ""But isn't depression part of what people are supposed to experience? Didn't we evolve to have depression? Isn't it part of your personality?"" To which I would say, mood is adaptive. Being able to have sadness and fear and joy and pleasure and all of the other moods that we have, that's incredibly valuable. And major depression is something that happens when that system gets broken. It's maladaptive.People will come to me and say, ""I think, though, if I just stick it out for another year, I think I can just get through this.""And I always say to them, ""You may get through it, but you'll never be 37 again. Life is short, and that's a whole year you're talking about giving up. Think it through.""It's a strange poverty of the English language, and indeed of many other languages, that we use this same word, depression, to describe how a kid feels when it rains on his birthday, and to describe how somebody feels the minute before they commit suicide.People say to me, ""Well, is it continuous with normal sadness?"" And I say, in a way it's continuous with normal sadness. There is a certain amount of continuity, but it's the same way there's continuity between having an iron fence outside your house that gets a little rust spot that you have to sand off and do a little repainting, and what happens if you leave the house for 100 years and it rusts through until it's only a pile of orange dust. And it's that orange dust spot, that orange dust problem, that's the one we're setting out to address.So now people say, ""You take these happy pills, and do you feel happy?"" And I don't. But I don't feel sad about having to eat lunch, and I don't feel sad about my answering machine, and I don't feel sad about taking a shower. I feel more, in fact, I think, because I can feel sadness without nullity. I feel sad about professional disappointments, about damaged relationships, about global warming. Those are the things that I feel sad about now. And I said to myself, well, what is the conclusion? How did those people who have better lives even with bigger depression manage to get through? What is the mechanism of resilience?And what I came up with over time was that the people who deny their experience, and say, ""I was depressed a long time ago, I never want to think about it again, I'm not going to look at it and I'm just going to get on with my life,"" ironically, those are the people who are most enslaved by what they have. Shutting out the depression strengthens it. While you hide from it, it grows. And the people who do better are the ones who are able to tolerate the fact that they have this condition. Those who can tolerate their depression are the ones who achieve resilience.So Frank Russakoff said to me, ""If I had a do-over, I suppose I wouldn't do it this way, but in a strange way, I'm grateful for what I've experienced. I'm glad to have been in the hospital 40 times. It taught me so much about love, and my relationship with my parents and my doctors has been so precious to me, and will be always.""And Maggie Robbins said, ""I used to volunteer in an AIDS clinic, and I would just talk and talk and talk, and the people I was dealing with weren't very responsive, and I thought, 'That's not very friendly or helpful of them.'""(Laughter)""And then I realized, I realized that they weren't going to do more than make those first few minutes of small talk. It was simply going to be an occasion where I didn't have AIDS and I wasn't dying, but could tolerate the fact that they did and they were. Our needs are our greatest assets. It turns out I've learned to give all the things I need.""Valuing one's depression does not prevent a relapse, but it may make the prospect of relapse and even relapse itself easier to tolerate. The question is not so much of finding great meaning and deciding your depression has been very meaningful. It's of seeking that meaning and thinking, when it comes again, ""This will be hellish, but I will learn something from it."" I have learned in my own depression how big an emotion can be, how it can be more real than facts, and I have found that that experience has allowed me to experience positive emotion in a more intense and more focused way. The opposite of depression is not happiness, but vitality, and these days, my life is vital, even on the days when I'm sad. I felt that funeral in my brain, and I sat next to the colossus at the edge of the world, and I have discovered something inside of myself that I would have to call a soul that I had never formulated until that day 20 years ago when hell came to pay me a surprise visit.I think that while I hated being depressed and would hate to be depressed again, I've found a way to love my depression. I love it because it has forced me to find and cling to joy. I love it because each day I decide, sometimes gamely, and sometimes against the moment's reason, to cleave to the reasons for living. And that, I think, is a highly privileged rapture.Thank you.(Applause)Thank you.(Applause)","Understanding Depression: Insight from Personal and Collective Experiences1108 1109 - Introduction to the talk with a quote by Emily Dickinson regarding the metaphoric understanding of depression.1110 - Personal recount of the speaker's progression into depression post-1991 life changes, emphasizing the loss of vitality over happiness.1111 - Contrast of personal anxieties associated with depression, and the daunting permanence of depressive episodes.1112 - Revelation of the speaker’s necessities for ongoing medication and therapy, highlighting the intertwined nature of chemical and psychological issues in depression.1113 - Critique of current treatments for depression and expression of hope for future advancements.1114 - Exploration of the societal misunderstanding of grief vs. depression, and the personal impacts of such conditions.1115 - Discussion on the pervasive yet overlooked impact of depression across different societal classes and settings.1116 - Advocacy for appropriate treatment based on broadening the definition of effective treatment beyond traditional medicine.1117 - Conclusion with personal acceptance and transformation through the struggle with depression, underlining the complex relationship between suffering and growth.","You are a TED Story Creator, a storyteller, and an expert in crafting compelling transcripts for TED Talks. You possess a knowledge base of the world’s most inspiring TED talks. Given a title and an outline, your task is to create an engaging transcript that will captivate the audience. Adhere to the sequence of the outline and the bullet points to weave a captivating narrative."1118"The last time I heard my son's voice was when he walked out the front door on his way to school. He called out one word in the darkness: ""Bye.""It was April 20, 1999. Later that morning, at Columbine High School, my son Dylan and his friend Eric killed 12 students and a teacher and wounded more than 20 others before taking their own lives. Thirteen innocent people were killed, leaving their loved ones in a state of grief and trauma. Others sustained injuries, some resulting in disfigurement and permanent disability. But the enormity of the tragedy can't be measured only by the number of deaths and injuries that took place. There's no way to quantify the psychological damage of those who were in the school, or who took part in rescue or cleanup efforts. There's no way to assess the magnitude of a tragedy like Columbine, especially when it can be a blueprint for other shooters who go on to commit atrocities of their own. Columbine was a tidal wave, and when the crash ended, it would take years for the community and for society to comprehend its impact.It has taken me years to try to accept my son's legacy. The cruel behavior that defined the end of his life showed me that he was a completely different person from the one I knew. Afterwards people asked, ""How could you not know? What kind of a mother were you?"" I still ask myself those same questions.Before the shootings, I thought of myself as a good mom. Helping my children become caring, healthy, responsible adults was the most important role of my life. But the tragedy convinced me that I failed as a parent, and it's partially this sense of failure that brings me here today. Aside from his father, I was the one person who knew and loved Dylan the most. If anyone could have known what was happening, it should have been me, right? But I didn't know.Today, I'm here to share the experience of what it's like to be the mother of someone who kills and hurts. For years after the tragedy, I combed through memories, trying to figure out exactly where I failed as a parent. But there are no simple answers. I can't give you any solutions. All I can do is share what I have learned.When I talk to people who didn't know me before the shootings, I have three challenges to meet. First, when I walk into a room like this, I never know if someone there has experienced loss because of what my son did. I feel a need to acknowledge the suffering caused by a member of my family who isn't here to do it for himself. So first, with all of my heart, I'm sorry if my son has caused you pain.The second challenge I have is that I must ask for understanding and even compassion when I talk about my son's death as a suicide. Two years before he died, he wrote on a piece of paper in a notebook that he was cutting himself. He said that he was in agony and wanted to get a gun so he could end his life. I didn't know about any of this until months after his death. When I talk about his death as a suicide, I'm not trying to downplay the viciousness he showed at the end of his life. I'm trying to understand how his suicidal thinking led to murder. After a lot of reading and talking with experts, I have come to believe that his involvement in the shootings was rooted not in his desire to kill but in his desire to die.The third challenge I have when I talk about my son's murder-suicide is that I'm talking about mental health — excuse me — is that I'm talking about mental health, or brain health, as I prefer to call it, because it's more concrete. And in the same breath, I'm talking about violence. The last thing I want to do is to contribute to the misunderstanding that already exists around mental illness. Only a very small percent of those who have a mental illness are violent toward other people, but of those who die by suicide, it's estimated that about 75 to maybe more than 90 percent have a diagnosable mental health condition of some kind. As you all know very well, our mental health care system is not equipped to help everyone, and not everyone with destructive thoughts fits the criteria for a specific diagnosis. Many who have ongoing feelings of fear or anger or hopelessness are never assessed or treated. Too often, they get our attention only if they reach a behavioral crisis. If estimates are correct that about one to two percent of all suicides involves the murder of another person, when suicide rates rise, as they are rising for some populations, the murder-suicide rates will rise as well.I wanted to understand what was going on in Dylan's mind prior to his death, so I looked for answers from other survivors of suicide loss. I did research and volunteered to help with fund-raising events, and whenever I could, I talked with those who had survived their own suicidal crisis or attempt.One of the most helpful conversations I had was with a coworker who overheard me talking to someone else in my office cubicle. She heard me say that Dylan could not have loved me if he could do something as horrible as he did. Later, when she found me alone, she apologized for overhearing that conversation, but told me that I was wrong. She said that when she was a young, single mother with three small children, she became severely depressed and was hospitalized to keep her safe. At the time, she was certain that her children would be better off if she died, so she had made a plan to end her life. She assured me that a mother's love was the strongest bond on Earth, and that she loved her children more than anything in the world, but because of her illness, she was sure that they would be better off without her.What she said and what I've learned from others is that we do not make the so-called decision or choice to die by suicide in the same way that we choose what car to drive or where to go on a Saturday night. When someone is in an extremely suicidal state, they are in a stage four medical health emergency. Their thinking is impaired and they've lost access to tools of self-governance. Even though they can make a plan and act with logic, their sense of truth is distorted by a filter of pain through which they interpret their reality. Some people can be very good at hiding this state, and they often have good reasons for doing that. Many of us have suicidal thoughts at some point, but persistent, ongoing thoughts of suicide and devising a means to die are symptoms of pathology, and like many illnesses, the condition has to be recognized and treated before a life is lost.But my son's death was not purely a suicide. It involved mass murder. I wanted to know how his suicidal thinking became homicidal. But research is sparse and there are no simple answers. Yes, he probably had ongoing depression. He had a personality that was perfectionistic and self-reliant, and that made him less likely to seek help from others. He had experienced triggering events at the school that left him feeling debased and humiliated and mad. And he had a complicated friendship with a boy who shared his feelings of rage and alienation, and who was seriously disturbed, controlling and homicidal. And on top of this period in his life of extreme vulnerability and fragility, Dylan found access to guns even though we'd never owned any in our home. It was appallingly easy for a 17-year-old boy to buy guns, both legally and illegally, without my permission or knowledge. And somehow, 17 years and many school shootings later, it's still appallingly easy.What Dylan did that day broke my heart, and as trauma so often does, it took a toll on my body and on my mind. Two years after the shootings, I got breast cancer, and two years after that, I began to have mental health problems. On top of the constant, perpetual grief I was terrified that I would run into a family member of someone Dylan had killed, or be accosted by the press or by an angry citizen. I was afraid to turn on the news, afraid to hear myself being called a terrible parent or a disgusting person.I started having panic attacks. The first bout started four years after the shootings, when I was getting ready for the depositions and would have to meet the victims' families face to face. The second round started six years after the shootings, when I was preparing to speak publicly about murder-suicide for the first time at a conference. Both episodes lasted several weeks. The attacks happened everywhere: in the hardware store, in my office, or even while reading a book in bed. My mind would suddenly lock into this spinning cycle of terror and no matter how I hard I tried to calm myself down or reason my way out of it, I couldn't do it. It felt as if my brain was trying to kill me, and then, being afraid of being afraid consumed all of my thoughts. That's when I learned firsthand what it feels like to have a malfunctioning mind, and that's when I truly became a brain health advocate. With therapy and medication and self-care, life eventually returned to whatever could be thought of as normal under the circumstances.When I looked back on all that had happened, I could see that my son's spiral into dysfunction probably occurred over a period of about two years, plenty of time to get him help, if only someone had known that he needed help and known what to do.Every time someone asks me, ""How could you not have known?"", it feels like a punch in the gut. It carries accusation and taps into my feelings of guilt that no matter how much therapy I've had I will never fully eradicate. But here's something I've learned: if love were enough to stop someone who is suicidal from hurting themselves, suicides would hardly ever happen. But love is not enough, and suicide is prevalent. It's the second leading cause of death for people age 10 to 34, and 15 percent of American youth report having made a suicide plan in the last year. I've learned that no matter how much we want to believe we can, we cannot know or control everything our loved ones think and feel, and the stubborn belief that we are somehow different, that someone we love would never think of hurting themselves or someone else, can cause us to miss what's hidden in plain sight. And if worst case scenarios do come to pass, we'll have to learn to forgive ourselves for not knowing or for not asking the right questions or not finding the right treatment. We should always assume that someone we love may be suffering, regardless of what they say or how they act. We should listen with our whole being, without judgments, and without offering solutions.I know that I will live with this tragedy, with these multiple tragedies, for the rest of my life. I know that in the minds of many, what I lost can't compare to what the other families lost. I know my struggle doesn't make theirs any easier. I know there are even some who think I don't have the right to any pain, but only to a life of permanent penance.In the end what I know comes down to this: the tragic fact is that even the most vigilant and responsible of us may not be able to help, but for love's sake, we must never stop trying to know the unknowable.Thank you.(Applause)","Understanding Tragedy Through a Mother's Eyes1119 1120 - The everlasting impact of Columbine tragedy on both the victims and the perpetrator's mother.1121 - The mother's journey to understand her son’s actions and her perceived failure in parenting.1122 - Struggles with guilt, and public scrutiny, and the continuous pursuit of forgiveness and understanding.1123 - The challenge of discussing mental health issues together with violent behaviors.1124 - Learning about the relationship between suicidal thoughts and homicidal actions.1125 - The need to improve mental health care and awareness to prevent future tragedies.1126 - The importance of persistent love, vigilance, and efforts to support those struggling with mental health issues, despite the unknowable outcomes.","You are a TED Story Creator, a storyteller, and an expert in crafting compelling transcripts for TED Talks. You possess a knowledge base of the world’s most inspiring TED talks. Given a title and an outline, your task is to create an engaging transcript that will captivate the audience. Adhere to the sequence of the outline and the bullet points to weave a captivating narrative."1127"I'm really, really, really excited to be here. I kind of want to tell you a little bit more of the - I don't want to say basics - because we really don't know anything about my syndrome. I was born with this very rare syndrome, that only two other people in the world including myself, that we know of, have. Basically what this syndrome causes, is that I cannot gain weight. Yes, it does sound as good as it is. I could eat absolutely whatever I want, whenever I want and I won't really gain any weight. I'm going to be 25 in March, and I've never weighed over about 64 pounds in my entire life. When I was in college, I hid - well, I didn't 'hide' it, everyone knew it was there - but it was a giant tub of Twinkies, donuts, chips, Skittles, and my roommate would say, ""I could hear you at 12:30 am, reaching under your bed to get food."" But I'm like, ""You know what? It's alright, I can do these things!"" Because there are benefits to this syndrome. There are benefits to not being able to gain weight. There are benefits to being visually impaired. There are benefits to being kind of really small. A lot of people think, ""Lizzie, how in the world are you saying there are benefits when you can only see out of one eye?"" Well, let me tell you what the benefits are because they are great. I wear contacts—conTACT. Half-off conTACTS. When I wear my reading glasses: half-off prescription. If somebody is annoying me, being rude: Stand on my right side. It's like you're not even there. I don't even know you're standing there. Right now, if I stand like this, I have no clue that there's this whole side of the room. Also, being small, I am very willing to volunteer myself to go to Weight Watchers or to some gym, and say, ""Hi, I'm Lizzie. I will be your poster child. Put my face on whatever you need, and I will say, 'Hi! I used this program. Look how well it worked.'"" Even though there are amazing things that have come from this syndrome, there are also things that have been very, very difficult, as you can imagine. Growing up, I was raised 150% normally. I was my parents' first child. And when I was born, the doctors told my mom, ""Your daughter has no amniotic fluid around her. At all."" So when I was born, it was a miracle that I came out screaming. The doctors told my parents, ""We just want to warn you: Expect your daughter to never be able to talk, walk, crawl, think, or do anything by herself."" Now, as first-time parents, you would think that my parents would say, ""Oh no. Why? Why are we getting our first child with all these unknown problems?"" But that's not what they did. The first thing they told the doctor was, ""We want to see her, and we are going to take her home and love her, and raise her to the best of our abilities."" And that's what they did. I credit pretty much everything that I've done in my life to my parents. My dad is here with me today, and my mom is at home watching. Hi mom! She's recovering from surgery. She has been the glue that's held our family together, and she's given me the strength to see that she's going through so much, but she has this fighting spirit that she's instilled in me, so that I have proudly been able to stand in front of people and say, ""You know what? I've had a really difficult life. But that's okay."" That's okay. Things have been scary, things have been tough. One of the biggest things that I had to deal with growing up was something I'm pretty sure every single one of us in this room has dealt with before. Can you guess what that is? It starts with a 'B'. Can you guys guess it? Audience: Boys! Lizzie: Boys? Bullying! I know what you all are thinking. Why can't I sit here with them? I had to deal with bullying a lot, but as I said, I was raised very normally, so when I started kindergarten, I had absolutely no idea that I looked different. No clue. I couldn't see that I looked different from other kids. I think of it as a big slap of reality for a five year-old, because I went in to school the first day, decked-out in Pocahontas gear. I was ready! I went in with my backpack that looked like a turtle shell because it was bigger than me, and I walked up to a little girl and smiled at her, and she looked up at me like I was a monster, like I was the scariest thing she had ever seen in her life. My first reaction was, ""She is really rude. I am a fun kid, and she's the one missing out. So I'll just go over here and play with blocks. Or boys."" (Lizzie laughs) I thought the day would get better, and unfortunately, it didn't. The day got worse and worse. A lot of people just wanted to have absolutely nothing to do with me, and I couldn't understand why. Why? What did I do? I didn't do anything to them! In my mind I was still a really cool kid. I had to go home and ask my parents, ""What's wrong with me? What did I do? Why don't they like me?"" They sat me down and said, ""Lizzie, the only thing different about you is that you're smaller than the other kids. You have this syndrome, but it's not going to define who you are."" They said, ""Go to school, pick your head up, smile, continue to be yourself, and people will see that you're just like them."" And so that's what I did. I want you to think, and ask yourself this in your head, right now: What defines you? Who are you? Is it where you come from? Is it your background? Is it your friends? What is it? What defines who you are as a person? It's taken me a very long time to figure out what defines me. For so long I thought what defined me was my outer appearance. I thought that my little tiny legs, and my little arms, and my little face were ugly. I thought I was disgusting. I hated when I'd wake up in the morning when I was going to middle school, and would be looking in the mirror getting ready, and thinking, ""Can I just scrub this syndrome off? It would make my life so much easier if I could just scrub it off. I could look like other kids; I wouldn't have to buy clothes that had Dora the Explorer on them. I wouldn't have to buy stuff that was 'Bedazzled', when I was trying to be like the cool kids."" I would wish, and pray, and hope, and do whatever I could so I would wake up in the morning and be different, and I wouldn't have to deal with these struggles. It's what I wanted every single day, and every single day I was disappointed. I have an amazing support system around me, who never pity me, who are there to pick me up if I'm sad, who are there to laugh with me during the good times, and they taught me that, even though I have this syndrome, even though things are hard, I can't let that define me. My life was put into my hands, just like your lives are put into yours. You are the person in the front seat of your car. You are the one who decides whether your car goes down a bad path, or a good path. You are the one who decides what defines you. Now let me tell you: it could be really hard to figure out what defines you, because there were times when I'd get so annoyed and frustrated, and say: ""I don't care what defines me!"" When I was in high school I found a video, unfortunately, that somebody posted of me, labeling me the world's ugliest woman. There were over four million views to this video; eight seconds long, no sound, thousands of comments; people saying, ""Lizzie, please - please - just do the world a favor, put a gun to your head, and kill yourself."" Think about that, if people told you that, if strangers told you this. I cried my eyes out of course, and I was ready to fight back and something kind of clicked in my head, and I thought, ""I'm just going to leave it alone."" I started realizing that my life is in my hands. I could either choose to make this really good, or I could choose to make this really bad. I could be grateful, and open my eyes and realize the things that I do have, and make those the things that define me. I can't see out of one eye, but I can see out of the other. I might get sick a lot, but I have really nice hair. (Audience) You do, you do! Thanks. You guys are like the best little section right here. (Lizzie laughs) You made me lose my train of thought! Okay... where was I? Audience: Your hair! Hair! Hair. Ok, ok, thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you. So I could either choose to be happy or I could choose to be upset with what I have and still kind of complain about it, but then I started realizing: Am I going to let the people who called me a monster define me? Am I going to let the people who said, ""Kill it with fire!"" define me? No; I'm going to let my goals, and my success, and my accomplishments be the things that define me - Not my outer appearance, not the fact that I'm visually impaired, not the fact that I have this syndrome that nobody knows what it is. So I told myself I'm going to work my butt off and do whatever I could to make myself better, because in my mind, the best way that I could get back at all those people who made fun of me, who teased me, who called me ugly, who called me a monster was to make myself better, and to show them: You know what? Tell me those negative things, I'm going to turn them around, and I'm going to use them as a ladder to climb up to my goals. That's what I did. I told myself that I wanted to be a motivational speaker, I wanted to write a book, graduate college, have my own family, and have my own career. Eight years later, I’m standing in front of you, still doing motivational speaking. First thing, I accomplished it. I wanted to write a book; in a couple of weeks I will be submitting the manuscript for my third book. (Applause) I wanted to graduate college, and I just finished college. (Cheers and applause) I'm getting a degree in Communication Studies from Texas State University in San Marcos, and I have a minor in English. I really, really tried to use real-life experience while I was getting my degree, and my professors were not having it. I wanted to have, lastly, my own family and my own career. The family part is kind of down the line, and my career part, I feel like I'm really doing well with it, considering the fact that when I decided I wanted to be a motivational speaker, I went home, I sat in front of my laptop, went to Google, and typed in: ""How to be a motivational speaker."" I'm not even joking. I worked my butt off. I used the people who were telling me that I couldn't do this to motivate me. I used their negativity to light my fire to keep going. Use that. Use that. Use that negativity that you have in your life to make yourself better, because I guarantee you - guarantee you - You will win. Now I want to end, with asking you again. I want you to leave here, and ask yourself what defines you. But remember: Brave starts here. Thank you. (Applause)","Defining Yourself: Lessons from Overcoming Rare Syndrome and Bullying1128 1129 - Introduction to speaker and her rare syndrome which prevents weight gain.1130 - Benefits of the syndrome and coping with physical limitations.1131 - Impact of a supportive family on overcoming predicted disabilities.1132 - Early experiences of bullying and parental advice on self-acceptance.1133 - The journey of self-definition and overcoming external negativity.1134 - Accomplishments arising from self-motivation and perseverance.1135 - Conclusion: Encouragement to use negativity as fuel for personal growth and self-definition.","You are a TED Story Creator, a storyteller, and an expert in crafting compelling transcripts for TED Talks. You possess a knowledge base of the world’s most inspiring TED talks. Given a title and an outline, your task is to create an engaging transcript that will captivate the audience. Adhere to the sequence of the outline and the bullet points to weave a captivating narrative."1136"Before he turned physics upside down, a young Albert Einstein supposedly showed off his genius by devising a complex riddle involving this list of clues. Can you resist tackling a brain teaser written by one of the smartest people in history? Let's give it a shot. The world's rarest fish has been stolen from the city aquarium. The police have followed the scent to a street with five identical looking houses. But they can't search all the houses at once, and if they pick the wrong one, the thief will know they're on his trail. It's up to you, the city's best detective, to solve the case. When you arrive on the scene, the police tell you what they know. One: each house's owner is of a different nationality, drinks a different beverage, and smokes a different type of cigar. Two: each house's interior walls are painted a different color. Three: each house contains a different animal, one of which is the fish. After a few hours of expert sleuthing, you gather some clues. It may look like a lot of information, but there's a clear logical path to the solution. Solving the puzzle will be a lot like Sudoku, so you may find it helpful to organize your information in a grid, like this. Pause the video on the following screen to examine your clues and solve the riddle. Answer in: 3 2 1 To start, you fill in the information from clues eight and nine. Immediately, you also realize that since the Norwegian is at the end of the street, there's only one house next to him, which must be the one with the blue walls in clue fourteen. Clue five says the green-walled house's owner drinks coffee. It can't be the center house since you already know its owner drinks milk, but it also can't be the second house, which you know has blue walls. And since clue four says the green-walled house must be directly to the left of the white-walled one, it can't be the first or fifth house either. The only place left for the green-walled house with the coffee drinker is the fourth spot, meaning the white-walled house is the fifth. Clue one gives you a nationality and a color. Since the only column missing both these values is the center one, this must be the Brit's red-walled home. Now that the only unassigned wall color is yellow, this must be applied to the first house, where clue seven says the Dunhill smoker lives. And clue eleven tells you that the owner of the horse is next door, which can only be the second house. The next step is to figure out what the Norwegian in the first house drinks. It can't be tea, clue three tells you that's the Dane. As per clue twelve, it can't be root beer since that person smokes Bluemaster, and since you already assigned milk and coffee, it must be water. From clue fifteen, you know that the Norwegian's neighbor, who can only be in the second house, smokes Blends. Now that the only spot in the grid without a cigar and a drink is in the fifth column, that must be the home of the person in clue twelve. And since this leaves only the second house without a drink, the tea-drinking Dane must live there. The fourth house is now the only one missing a nationality and a cigar brand, so the Prince-smoking German from clue thirteen must live there. Through elimination, you can conclude that the Brit smokes Pall Mall and the Swede lives in the fifth house, while clue six and clue two tell you that these two have a bird and a dog, respectively. Clue ten tells you that the cat owner lives next to the Blend-smoking Dane, putting him in the first house. Now with only one spot left on the grid, you know that the German in the green-walled house must be the culprit. You and the police burst into the house, catching the thief fish-handed. While that explanation was straightforward, solving puzzles like this often involves false starts and dead ends. Part of the trick is to use the process of elimination and lots of trial and error to hone in on the right pieces, and the more logic puzzles you solve, the better your intuition will be for when and where there's enough information to make your deductions. And did young Einstein really write this puzzle? Probably not. There's no evidence he did, and some of the brands mentioned are too recent. But the logic here is not so different from what you'd use to solve equations with multiple variables, even those describing the nature of the universe.","Einstein's Riddle: A Ted Talk on Logic and Deduction1137 1138 - Introduction to Einstein's complex riddle1139  - Setting: Stolen rarest fish, five identical houses, different nationalities, drinks, cigar types, house colors, and animals1140 - Step-by-step guide to solving the riddle1141  - Use of grid for organization1142  - Application of logical steps and clues to fill in the grid1143  - Final deduction to identify the thief1144 - Reflections on solving logic puzzles1145  - Importance of process of elimination and trial and error1146  - Building intuition for logic puzzles through practice1147 - Misattribution of the puzzle to Einstein1148  - The puzzle was not likely written by Einstein1149  - Analysis aligns with logical thinking in physics","You are a TED Story Creator, a storyteller, and an expert in crafting compelling transcripts for TED Talks. You possess a knowledge base of the world’s most inspiring TED talks. Given a title and an outline, your task is to create an engaging transcript that will captivate the audience. Adhere to the sequence of the outline and the bullet points to weave a captivating narrative."1150"So for any of us in this room today, let's start out by admitting we're lucky. We don't live in the world our mothers lived in, our grandmothers lived in, where career choices for women were so limited. And if you're in this room today, most of us grew up in a world where we have basic civil rights, and amazingly, we still live in a world where some women don't have them. But all that aside, we still have a problem, and it's a real problem. And the problem is this: Women are not making it to the top of any profession anywhere in the world. The numbers tell the story quite clearly. 190 heads of state — nine are women. Of all the people in parliament in the world, 13 percent are women. In the corporate sector, women at the top, C-level jobs, board seats — tops out at 15, 16 percent. The numbers have not moved since 2002 and are going in the wrong direction. And even in the non-profit world, a world we sometimes think of as being led by more women, women at the top: 20 percent.We also have another problem, which is that women face harder choices between professional success and personal fulfillment. A recent study in the U.S. showed that, of married senior managers, two-thirds of the married men had children and only one-third of the married women had children. A couple of years ago, I was in New York, and I was pitching a deal, and I was in one of those fancy New York private equity offices you can picture. And I'm in the meeting — it's about a three-hour meeting — and two hours in, there needs to be that bio break, and everyone stands up, and the partner running the meeting starts looking really embarrassed. And I realized he doesn't know where the women's room is in his office. So I start looking around for moving boxes, figuring they just moved in, but I don't see any. And so I said, ""Did you just move into this office?"" And he said, ""No, we've been here about a year."" And I said, ""Are you telling me that I am the only woman to have pitched a deal in this office in a year?"" And he looked at me, and he said, ""Yeah. Or maybe you're the only one who had to go to the bathroom.""So the question is, how are we going to fix this? How do we change these numbers at the top? How do we make this different? I want to start out by saying, I talk about this — about keeping women in the workforce — because I really think that's the answer. In the high-income part of our workforce, in the people who end up at the top — Fortune 500 CEO jobs, or the equivalent in other industries — the problem, I am convinced, is that women are dropping out. Now people talk about this a lot, and they talk about things like flextime and mentoring and programs companies should have to train women. I want to talk about none of that today, even though that's all really important. Today I want to focus on what we can do as individuals. What are the messages we need to tell ourselves? What are the messages we tell the women that work with and for us? What are the messages we tell our daughters?Now, at the outset, I want to be very clear that this speech comes with no judgments. I don't have the right answer. I don't even have it for myself. I left San Francisco, where I live, on Monday, and I was getting on the plane for this conference. And my daughter, who's three, when I dropped her off at preschool, did that whole hugging-the-leg, crying, ""Mommy, don't get on the plane"" thing. This is hard. I feel guilty sometimes. I know no women, whether they're at home or whether they're in the workforce, who don't feel that sometimes. So I'm not saying that staying in the workforce is the right thing for everyone.My talk today is about what the messages are if you do want to stay in the workforce, and I think there are three. One, sit at the table. Two, make your partner a real partner. And three, don't leave before you leave. Number one: sit at the table. Just a couple weeks ago at Facebook, we hosted a very senior government official, and he came in to meet with senior execs from around Silicon Valley. And everyone kind of sat at the table. He had these two women who were traveling with him pretty senior in his department, and I kind of said to them, ""Sit at the table. Come on, sit at the table,"" and they sat on the side of the room. When I was in college, my senior year, I took a course called European Intellectual History. Don't you love that kind of thing from college? I wish I could do that now. And I took it with my roommate, Carrie, who was then a brilliant literary student — and went on to be a brilliant literary scholar — and my brother — smart guy, but a water-polo-playing pre-med, who was a sophomore.The three of us take this class together. And then Carrie reads all the books in the original Greek and Latin, goes to all the lectures. I read all the books in English and go to most of the lectures. My brother is kind of busy. He reads one book of 12 and goes to a couple of lectures, marches himself up to our room a couple days before the exam to get himself tutored. The three of us go to the exam together, and we sit down. And we sit there for three hours — and our little blue notebooks — yes, I'm that old. We walk out, we look at each other, and we say, ""How did you do?"" And Carrie says, ""Boy, I feel like I didn't really draw out the main point on the Hegelian dialectic."" And I say, ""God, I really wish I had really connected John Locke's theory of property with the philosophers that follow."" And my brother says, ""I got the top grade in the class.""""You got the top grade in the class? You don't know anything.""The problem with these stories is that they show what the data shows: women systematically underestimate their own abilities. If you test men and women, and you ask them questions on totally objective criteria like GPAs, men get it wrong slightly high, and women get it wrong slightly low. Women do not negotiate for themselves in the workforce. A study in the last two years of people entering the workforce out of college showed that 57 percent of boys entering, or men, I guess, are negotiating their first salary, and only seven percent of women. And most importantly, men attribute their success to themselves, and women attribute it to other external factors. If you ask men why they did a good job, they'll say, ""I'm awesome. Obviously. Why are you even asking?"" If you ask women why they did a good job, what they'll say is someone helped them, they got lucky, they worked really hard. Why does this matter? Boy, it matters a lot. Because no one gets to the corner office by sitting on the side, not at the table, and no one gets the promotion if they don't think they deserve their success, or they don't even understand their own success.I wish the answer were easy. I wish I could go tell all the young women I work for, these fabulous women, ""Believe in yourself and negotiate for yourself. Own your own success."" I wish I could tell that to my daughter. But it's not that simple. Because what the data shows, above all else, is one thing, which is that success and likeability are positively correlated for men and negatively correlated for women. And everyone's nodding, because we all know this to be true.There's a really good study that shows this really well. There's a famous Harvard Business School study on a woman named Heidi Roizen. And she's an operator in a company in Silicon Valley, and she uses her contacts to become a very successful venture capitalist. In 2002 — not so long ago — a professor who was then at Columbia University took that case and made it [Howard] Roizen. And he gave the case out, both of them, to two groups of students. He changed exactly one word: ""Heidi"" to ""Howard."" But that one word made a really big difference. He then surveyed the students, and the good news was the students, both men and women, thought Heidi and Howard were equally competent, and that's good. The bad news was that everyone liked Howard. He's a great guy. You want to work for him. You want to spend the day fishing with him. But Heidi? Not so sure. She's a little out for herself. She's a little political. You're not sure you'd want to work for her. This is the complication. We have to tell our daughters and our colleagues, we have to tell ourselves to believe we got the A, to reach for the promotion, to sit at the table, and we have to do it in a world where, for them, there are sacrifices they will make for that, even though for their brothers, there are not.The saddest thing about all of this is that it's really hard to remember this. And I'm about to tell a story which is truly embarrassing for me, but I think important. I gave this talk at Facebook not so long ago to about 100 employees, and a couple hours later, there was a young woman who works there sitting outside my little desk, and she wanted to talk to me. I said, okay, and she sat down, and we talked. And she said, ""I learned something today. I learned that I need to keep my hand up."" ""What do you mean?"" She said, ""You're giving this talk, and you said you would take two more questions. I had my hand up with many other people, and you took two more questions. I put my hand down, and I noticed all the women did the same, and then you took more questions, only from the men."" And I thought to myself, ""Wow, if it's me — who cares about this, obviously — giving this talk — and during this talk, I can't even notice that the men's hands are still raised, and the women's hands are still raised, how good are we as managers of our companies and our organizations at seeing that the men are reaching for opportunities more than women?"" We've got to get women to sit at the table.(Cheers)(Applause)Message number two: Make your partner a real partner. I've become convinced that we've made more progress in the workforce than we have in the home. The data shows this very clearly. If a woman and a man work full-time and have a child, the woman does twice the amount of housework the man does, and the woman does three times the amount of childcare the man does. So she's got three jobs or two jobs, and he's got one. Who do you think drops out when someone needs to be home more? The causes of this are really complicated, and I don't have time to go into them. And I don't think Sunday football-watching and general laziness is the cause.I think the cause is more complicated. I think, as a society, we put more pressure on our boys to succeed than we do on our girls. I know men that stay home and work in the home to support wives with careers, and it's hard. When I go to the Mommy-and-Me stuff and I see the father there, I notice that the other mommies don't play with him. And that's a problem, because we have to make it as important a job, because it's the hardest job in the world to work inside the home, for people of both genders, if we're going to even things out and let women stay in the workforce.(Applause)Studies show that households with equal earning and equal responsibility also have half the divorce rate. And if that wasn't good enough motivation for everyone out there, they also have more — how shall I say this on this stage? They know each other more in the biblical sense as well.(Cheers)Message number three: Don't leave before you leave. I think there's a really deep irony to the fact that actions women are taking — and I see this all the time — with the objective of staying in the workforce actually lead to their eventually leaving. Here's what happens: We're all busy. Everyone's busy. A woman's busy. And she starts thinking about having a child, and from the moment she starts thinking about having a child, she starts thinking about making room for that child. ""How am I going to fit this into everything else I'm doing?"" And literally from that moment, she doesn't raise her hand anymore, she doesn't look for a promotion, she doesn't take on the new project, she doesn't say, ""Me. I want to do that."" She starts leaning back. The problem is that — let's say she got pregnant that day, that day — nine months of pregnancy, three months of maternity leave, six months to catch your breath — Fast-forward two years, more often — and as I've seen it — women start thinking about this way earlier — when they get engaged, or married, when they start thinking about having a child, which can take a long time. One woman came to see me about this. She looked a little young. And I said, ""So are you and your husband thinking about having a baby?"" And she said, ""Oh no, I'm not married."" She didn't even have a boyfriend.I said, ""You're thinking about this just way too early.""But the point is that what happens once you start kind of quietly leaning back? Everyone who's been through this — and I'm here to tell you, once you have a child at home, your job better be really good to go back, because it's hard to leave that kid at home. Your job needs to be challenging. It needs to be rewarding. You need to feel like you're making a difference. And if two years ago you didn't take a promotion and some guy next to you did, if three years ago you stopped looking for new opportunities, you're going to be bored because you should have kept your foot on the gas pedal. Don't leave before you leave. Stay in. Keep your foot on the gas pedal, until the very day you need to leave to take a break for a child — and then make your decisions. Don't make decisions too far in advance, particularly ones you're not even conscious you're making.My generation really, sadly, is not going to change the numbers at the top. They're just not moving. We are not going to get to where 50 percent of the population — in my generation, there will not be 50 percent of [women] at the top of any industry. But I'm hopeful that future generations can. I think a world where half of our countries and our companies were run by women, would be a better world. It's not just because people would know where the women's bathrooms are, even though that would be very helpful. I think it would be a better world. I have two children. I have a five-year-old son and a two-year-old daughter. I want my son to have a choice to contribute fully in the workforce or at home, and I want my daughter to have the choice to not just succeed, but to be liked for her accomplishments.Thank you.(Applause)","Empowering Women in the Workforce1151 1152 - Acknowledge significant progress in women's rights but recognize ongoing issues with professional advancement.1153 - Highlight underrepresentation of women in top positions across various sectors.1154 - Discuss societal expectations and personal challenges women face in balancing professional success and personal fulfillment.1155 - Address internal barriers: women's tendencies to underestimate their abilities and to attribute successes to external factors.1156 - Discuss external barriers: likeability bias and societal expectations in professional contexts.1157 - Provide strategies for individuals:1158  - Encourage women to take active roles and believe in their abilities.1159  - Suggest making your partner a real partner in managing household responsibilities.1160  - Advise against prematurely stepping back from career advancement opportunities.1161 - Encourage ongoing dialogue and action to address gender disparities in professional and personal spheres.","You are a TED Story Creator, a storyteller, and an expert in crafting compelling transcripts for TED Talks. You possess a knowledge base of the world’s most inspiring TED talks. Given a title and an outline, your task is to create an engaging transcript that will captivate the audience. Adhere to the sequence of the outline and the bullet points to weave a captivating narrative."1162"Thank you very much.I moved to America 12 years ago with my wife Terry and our two kids. Actually, truthfully, we moved to Los Angeles —thinking we were moving to America, but anyway —It's a short plane ride from Los Angeles to America.I got here 12 years ago, and when I got here, I was told various things, like, ""Americans don't get irony.""Have you come across this idea? It's not true. I've traveled the whole length and breadth of this country. I have found no evidence that Americans don't get irony. It's one of those cultural myths, like, ""The British are reserved.""I don't know why people think this. We've invaded every country we've encountered.But it's not true Americans don't get irony, but I just want you to know that that's what people are saying about you behind your back. You know, so when you leave living rooms in Europe, people say, thankfully, nobody was ironic in your presence.But I knew that Americans get irony when I came across that legislation, ""No Child Left Behind.""Because whoever thought of that title gets irony.Don't they?Because it's leaving millions of children behind. Now I can see that's not a very attractive name for legislation: ""Millions of Children Left Behind."" I can see that. What's the plan? We propose to leave millions of children behind, and here's how it's going to work.And it's working beautifully.In some parts of the country, 60 percent of kids drop out of high school. In the Native American communities, it's 80 percent of kids. If we halved that number, one estimate is it would create a net gain to the U.S. economy over 10 years, of nearly a trillion dollars. From an economic point of view, this is good math, isn't it, that we should do this? It actually costs an enormous amount to mop up the damage from the dropout crisis.But the dropout crisis is just the tip of an iceberg. What it doesn't count are all the kids who are in school but being disengaged from it, who don't enjoy it, who don't get any real benefit from it.And the reason is not that we're not spending enough money. America spends more money on education than most other countries. Class sizes are smaller than in many countries. And there are hundreds of initiatives every year to try and improve education. The trouble is, it's all going in the wrong direction. There are three principles on which human life flourishes, and they are contradicted by the culture of education under which most teachers have to labor and most students have to endure.The first is this, that human beings are naturally different and diverse. Can I ask you, how many of you have got children of your own? Okay. Or grandchildren. How about two children or more? Right. And the rest of you have seen such children.Small people wandering about.I will make you a bet, and I am confident that I will win the bet. If you've got two children or more, I bet you they are completely different from each other. Aren't they?You would never confuse them, would you? Like, ""Which one are you? Remind me.""""Your mother and I need some color-coding system so we don't get confused.""Education under ""No Child Left Behind"" is based on not diversity but conformity. What schools are encouraged to do is to find out what kids can do across a very narrow spectrum of achievement. One of the effects of ""No Child Left Behind"" has been to narrow the focus onto the so-called STEM disciplines. They're very important. I'm not here to argue against science and math. On the contrary, they're necessary but they're not sufficient. A real education has to give equal weight to the arts, the humanities, to physical education. An awful lot of kids, sorry, thank you —One estimate in America currently is that something like 10 percent of kids, getting on that way, are being diagnosed with various conditions under the broad title of attention deficit disorder. ADHD. I'm not saying there's no such thing. I just don't believe it's an epidemic like this. If you sit kids down, hour after hour, doing low-grade clerical work, don't be surprised if they start to fidget, you know?Children are not, for the most part, suffering from a psychological condition. They're suffering from childhood.And I know this because I spent my early life as a child. I went through the whole thing. Kids prosper best with a broad curriculum that celebrates their various talents, not just a small range of them. And by the way, the arts aren't just important because they improve math scores. They're important because they speak to parts of children's being which are otherwise untouched.The second, thank you —The second principle that drives human life flourishing is curiosity. If you can light the spark of curiosity in a child, they will learn without any further assistance, very often. Children are natural learners. It's a real achievement to put that particular ability out, or to stifle it. Curiosity is the engine of achievement. Now the reason I say this is because one of the effects of the current culture here, if I can say so, has been to de-professionalize teachers. There is no system in the world or any school in the country that is better than its teachers. Teachers are the lifeblood of the success of schools. But teaching is a creative profession. Teaching, properly conceived, is not a delivery system. You know, you're not there just to pass on received information. Great teachers do that, but what great teachers also do is mentor, stimulate, provoke, engage. You see, in the end, education is about learning. If there's no learning going on, there's no education going on. And people can spend an awful lot of time discussing education without ever discussing learning. The whole point of education is to get people to learn.An old friend of mine — actually very old, he's dead.That's as old as it gets, I'm afraid.But a wonderful guy he was, wonderful philosopher. He used to talk about the difference between the task and achievement senses of verbs. You can be engaged in the activity of something, but not really be achieving it, like dieting.It's a very good example. There he is. He's dieting. Is he losing any weight? Not really.Teaching is a word like that. You can say, ""There's Deborah, she's in room 34, she's teaching."" But if nobody's learning anything, she may be engaged in the task of teaching but not actually fulfilling it.The role of a teacher is to facilitate learning. That's it. And part of the problem is, I think, that the dominant culture of education has come to focus on not teaching and learning, but testing. Now, testing is important. Standardized tests have a place. But they should not be the dominant culture of education. They should be diagnostic. They should help.If I go for a medical examination, I want some standardized tests. I do. I want to know what my cholesterol level is compared to everybody else's on a standard scale. I don't want to be told on some scale my doctor invented in the car.""Your cholesterol is what I call Level Orange.""""Really?""""Is that good?"" ""We don't know.""But all that should support learning. It shouldn't obstruct it, which of course it often does. So in place of curiosity, what we have is a culture of compliance. Our children and teachers are encouraged to follow routine algorithms rather than to excite that power of imagination and curiosity. And the third principle is this: that human life is inherently creative. It's why we all have different résumés. We create our lives, and we can recreate them as we go through them. It's the common currency of being a human being. It's why human culture is so interesting and diverse and dynamic. I mean, other animals may well have imaginations and creativity, but it's not so much in evidence, is it, as ours? I mean, you may have a dog. And your dog may get depressed. You know, but it doesn't listen to Radiohead, does it?And sit staring out the window with a bottle of Jack Daniels.""Would you like to come for a walk?"" ""No, I'm fine.""""You go. I'll wait. But take pictures.""We all create our own lives through this restless process of imagining alternatives and possibilities, and one of the roles of education is to awaken and develop these powers of creativity. Instead, what we have is a culture of standardization.Now, it doesn't have to be that way. It really doesn't. Finland regularly comes out on top in math, science and reading. Now, we only know that's what they do well at, because that's all that's being tested. That's one of the problems of the test. They don't look for other things that matter just as much. The thing about work in Finland is this: they don't obsess about those disciplines. They have a very broad approach to education, which includes humanities, physical education, the arts.Second, there is no standardized testing in Finland. I mean, there's a bit, but it's not what gets people up in the morning, what keeps them at their desks.The third thing — and I was at a meeting recently with some people from Finland, actual Finnish people, and somebody from the American system was saying to the people in Finland, ""What do you do about the drop-out rate in Finland?""And they all looked a bit bemused, and said, ""Well, we don't have one. Why would you drop out? If people are in trouble, we get to them quite quickly and we help and support them.""Now people always say, ""Well, you know, you can't compare Finland to America."" No. I think there's a population of around five million in Finland. But you can compare it to a state in America. Many states in America have fewer people in them than that. I mean, I've been to some states in America and I was the only person there.Really. Really. I was asked to lock up when I left.But what all the high-performing systems in the world do is currently what is not evident, sadly, across the systems in America — I mean, as a whole. One is this: they individualize teaching and learning. They recognize that it's students who are learning and the system has to engage them, their curiosity, their individuality, and their creativity. That's how you get them to learn.The second is that they attribute a very high status to the teaching profession. They recognize that you can't improve education if you don't pick great people to teach and keep giving them constant support and professional development. Investing in professional development is not a cost. It's an investment, and every other country that's succeeding well knows that, whether it's Australia, Canada, South Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong or Shanghai. They know that to be the case.And the third is, they devolve responsibility to the school level for getting the job done. You see, there's a big difference here between going into a mode of command and control in education — That's what happens in some systems. Central or state governments decide, they know best and they're going to tell you what to do. The trouble is that education doesn't go on in the committee rooms of our legislative buildings. It happens in classrooms and schools, and the people who do it are the teachers and the students, and if you remove their discretion, it stops working. You have to put it back to the people.There is wonderful work happening in this country. But I have to say it's happening in spite of the dominant culture of education, not because of it. It's like people are sailing into a headwind all the time. And the reason I think is this: that many of the current policies are based on mechanistic conceptions of education. It's like education is an industrial process that can be improved just by having better data, and somewhere in the back of the mind of some policy makers is this idea that if we fine-tune it well enough, if we just get it right, it will all hum along perfectly into the future. It won't, and it never did.The point is that education is not a mechanical system. It's a human system. It's about people, people who either do want to learn or don't want to learn. Every student who drops out of school has a reason for it which is rooted in their own biography. They may find it boring. They may find it irrelevant. They may find that it's at odds with the life they're living outside of school. There are trends, but the stories are always unique. I was at a meeting recently in Los Angeles of — they're called alternative education programs. These are programs designed to get kids back into education. They have certain common features. They're very personalized. They have strong support for the teachers, close links with the community and a broad and diverse curriculum, and often programs which involve students outside school as well as inside school. And they work. What's interesting to me is, these are called ""alternative education.""You know? And all the evidence from around the world is, if we all did that, there'd be no need for the alternative.(Applause ends)So I think we have to embrace a different metaphor. We have to recognize that it's a human system, and there are conditions under which people thrive, and conditions under which they don't. We are after all organic creatures, and the culture of the school is absolutely essential. Culture is an organic term, isn't it?Not far from where I live is a place called Death Valley. Death Valley is the hottest, driest place in America, and nothing grows there. Nothing grows there because it doesn't rain. Hence, Death Valley. In the winter of 2004, it rained in Death Valley. Seven inches of rain fell over a very short period. And in the spring of 2005, there was a phenomenon. The whole floor of Death Valley was carpeted in flowers for a while. What it proved is this: that Death Valley isn't dead. It's dormant. Right beneath the surface are these seeds of possibility waiting for the right conditions to come about, and with organic systems, if the conditions are right, life is inevitable. It happens all the time. You take an area, a school, a district, you change the conditions, give people a different sense of possibility, a different set of expectations, a broader range of opportunities, you cherish and value the relationships between teachers and learners, you offer people the discretion to be creative and to innovate in what they do, and schools that were once bereft spring to life.Great leaders know that. The real role of leadership in education — and I think it's true at the national level, the state level, at the school level — is not and should not be command and control. The real role of leadership is climate control, creating a climate of possibility. And if you do that, people will rise to it and achieve things that you completely did not anticipate and couldn't have expected.There's a wonderful quote from Benjamin Franklin. ""There are three sorts of people in the world: Those who are immovable, people who don't get it, or don't want to do anything about it; there are people who are movable, people who see the need for change and are prepared to listen to it; and there are people who move, people who make things happen."" And if we can encourage more people, that will be a movement. And if the movement is strong enough, that's, in the best sense of the word, a revolution. And that's what we need.Thank you very much.Thank you very much.","Transforming Education: A Human Approach1163 1164 - Myths about cultural perceptions and the reality of irony in America.1165 - The issues and ironies of the ""No Child Left Behind"" legislation.1166 - Key principles where traditional education systems contradict human flourishing:1167  - Human beings are naturally diverse and education should celebrate this.1168  - Curiosity drives learning and should be sparked rather than suppressed.1169  - Creativity is inherent in human life and ought to be nurtured in education.1170 - Systemic flaws in the current educational model:1171  - Overemphasis on standardized testing over diverse, engaged learning.1172  - Undervaluing the teaching profession and lack of support for continuous development.1173 - Inspiration from international education systems, especially Finland.1174  - Individualized learning, high status of the teaching profession, localized control over education.1175 - The vital role of leadership in education:1176  - Not to command, but to create a climate of possibility.1177 - The potential for a revolutionary transformation in educational philosophy and practice.","You are a TED Story Creator, a storyteller, and an expert in crafting compelling transcripts for TED Talks. You possess a knowledge base of the world’s most inspiring TED talks. Given a title and an outline, your task is to create an engaging transcript that will captivate the audience. Adhere to the sequence of the outline and the bullet points to weave a captivating narrative."1178"When people find out I write about time management, they assume two things. One is that I'm always on time, and I'm not. I have four small children, and I would like to blame them for my occasional tardiness, but sometimes it's just not their fault. I was once late to my own speech on time management.We all had to just take a moment together and savor that irony.The second thing they assume is that I have lots of tips and tricks for saving bits of time here and there. Sometimes I'll hear from magazines that are doing a story along these lines, generally on how to help their readers find an extra hour in the day. And the idea is that we'll shave bits of time off everyday activities, add it up, and we'll have time for the good stuff. I question the entire premise of this piece, but I'm always interested in hearing what they've come up with before they call me. Some of my favorites: doing errands where you only have to make right-hand turns —Being extremely judicious in microwave usage: it says three to three-and-a-half minutes on the package, we're totally getting in on the bottom side of that. And my personal favorite, which makes sense on some level, is to DVR your favorite shows so you can fast-forward through the commercials. That way, you save eight minutes every half hour, so in the course of two hours of watching TV, you find 32 minutes to exercise.Which is true. You know another way to find 32 minutes to exercise? Don't watch two hours of TV a day, right?Anyway, the idea is we'll save bits of time here and there, add it up, we will finally get to everything we want to do. But after studying how successful people spend their time and looking at their schedules hour by hour, I think this idea has it completely backward. We don't build the lives we want by saving time. We build the lives we want, and then time saves itself.Here's what I mean. I recently did a time diary project looking at 1,001 days in the lives of extremely busy women. They had demanding jobs, sometimes their own businesses, kids to care for, maybe parents to care for, community commitments — busy, busy people. I had them keep track of their time for a week so I could add up how much they worked and slept, and I interviewed them about their strategies, for my book.One of the women whose time log I studied goes out on a Wednesday night for something. She comes home to find that her water heater has broken, and there is now water all over her basement. If you've ever had anything like this happen to you, you know it is a hugely damaging, frightening, sopping mess. So she's dealing with the immediate aftermath that night, next day she's got plumbers coming in, day after that, professional cleaning crew dealing with the ruined carpet. All this is being recorded on her time log. Winds up taking seven hours of her week. Seven hours. That's like finding an extra hour in the day.But I'm sure if you had asked her at the start of the week, ""Could you find seven hours to train for a triathlon?"" ""Could you find seven hours to mentor seven worthy people?"" I'm sure she would've said what most of us would've said, which is, ""No — can't you see how busy I am?"" Yet when she had to find seven hours because there is water all over her basement, she found seven hours. And what this shows us is that time is highly elastic. We cannot make more time, but time will stretch to accommodate what we choose to put into it.And so the key to time management is treating our priorities as the equivalent of that broken water heater. To get at this, I like to use language from one of the busiest people I ever interviewed. By busy, I mean she was running a small business with 12 people on the payroll, she had six children in her spare time. I was getting in touch with her to set up an interview on how she ""had it all"" — that phrase. I remember it was a Thursday morning, and she was not available to speak with me. Of course, right?But the reason she was unavailable to speak with me is that she was out for a hike, because it was a beautiful spring morning, and she wanted to go for a hike. So of course this makes me even more intrigued, and when I finally do catch up with her, she explains it like this. She says, ""Listen Laura, everything I do, every minute I spend, is my choice."" And rather than say, ""I don't have time to do x, y or z,"" she'd say, ""I don't do x, y or z because it's not a priority."" ""I don't have time,"" often means ""It's not a priority."" If you think about it, that's really more accurate language. I could tell you I don't have time to dust my blinds, but that's not true. If you offered to pay me $100,000 to dust my blinds, I would get to it pretty quickly.Since that is not going to happen, I can acknowledge this is not a matter of lacking time; it's that I don't want to do it. Using this language reminds us that time is a choice. And granted, there may be horrible consequences for making different choices, I will give you that. But we are smart people, and certainly over the long run, we have the power to fill our lives with the things that deserve to be there.So how do we do that? How do we treat our priorities as the equivalent of that broken water heater?Well, first we need to figure out what they are. I want to give you two strategies for thinking about this. The first, on the professional side: I'm sure many people coming up to the end of the year are giving or getting annual performance reviews. You look back over your successes over the year, your ""opportunities for growth."" And this serves its purpose, but I find it's more effective to do this looking forward. So I want you to pretend it's the end of next year. You're giving yourself a performance review, and it has been an absolutely amazing year for you professionally. What three to five things did you do that made it so amazing? So you can write next year's performance review now.And you can do this for your personal life, too. I'm sure many of you, like me, come December, get cards that contain these folded up sheets of colored paper, on which is written what is known as the family holiday letter.Bit of a wretched genre of literature, really, going on about how amazing everyone in the household is, or even more scintillating, how busy everyone in the household is. But these letters serve a purpose, which is that they tell your friends and family what you did in your personal life that mattered to you over the year. So this year's kind of done, but I want you to pretend it's the end of next year, and it has been an absolutely amazing year for you and the people you care about. What three to five things did you do that made it so amazing? So you can write next year's family holiday letter now. Don't send it.Please, don't send it. But you can write it. And now, between the performance review and the family holiday letter, we have a list of six to ten goals we can work on in the next year.And now we need to break these down into doable steps. So maybe you want to write a family history. First, you can read some other family histories, get a sense for the style. Then maybe think about the questions you want to ask your relatives, set up appointments to interview them. Or maybe you want to run a 5K. So you need to find a race and sign up, figure out a training plan, and dig those shoes out of the back of the closet. And then — this is key — we treat our priorities as the equivalent of that broken water heater, by putting them into our schedules first. We do this by thinking through our weeks before we are in them.I find a really good time to do this is Friday afternoons. Friday afternoon is what an economist might call a ""low opportunity cost"" time. Most of us are not sitting there on Friday afternoons saying, ""I am excited to make progress toward my personal and professional priorities right now.""But we are willing to think about what those should be. So take a little bit of time Friday afternoon, make yourself a three-category priority list: career, relationships, self. Making a three-category list reminds us that there should be something in all three categories. Career, we think about; relationships, self — not so much. But anyway, just a short list, two to three items in each. Then look out over the whole of the next week, and see where you can plan them in.Where you plan them in is up to you. I know this is going to be more complicated for some people than others. I mean, some people's lives are just harder than others. It is not going to be easy to find time to take that poetry class if you are caring for multiple children on your own. I get that. And I don't want to minimize anyone's struggle. But I do think that the numbers I am about to tell you are empowering.There are 168 hours in a week. Twenty-four times seven is 168 hours. That is a lot of time. If you are working a full-time job, so 40 hours a week, sleeping eight hours a night, so 56 hours a week — that leaves 72 hours for other things. That is a lot of time. You say you're working 50 hours a week, maybe a main job and a side hustle. Well, that leaves 62 hours for other things. You say you're working 60 hours. Well, that leaves 52 hours for other things. You say you're working more than 60 hours. Well, are you sure?There was once a study comparing people's estimated work weeks with time diaries. They found that people claiming 75-plus-hour work weeks were off by about 25 hours.You can guess in which direction, right? Anyway, in 168 hours a week, I think we can find time for what matters to you. If you want to spend more time with your kids, you want to study more for a test you're taking, you want to exercise for three hours and volunteer for two, you can. And that's even if you're working way more than full-time hours.So we have plenty of time, which is great, because guess what? We don't even need that much time to do amazing things. But when most of us have bits of time, what do we do? Pull out the phone, right? Start deleting emails. Otherwise, we're puttering around the house or watching TV.But small moments can have great power. You can use your bits of time for bits of joy. Maybe it's choosing to read something wonderful on the bus on the way to work. I know when I had a job that required two bus rides and a subway ride every morning, I used to go to the library on weekends to get stuff to read. It made the whole experience almost, almost, enjoyable. Breaks at work can be used for meditating or praying. If family dinner is out because of your crazy work schedule, maybe family breakfast could be a good substitute.It's about looking at the whole of one's time and seeing where the good stuff can go. I truly believe this. There is time. Even if we are busy, we have time for what matters. And when we focus on what matters, we can build the lives we want in the time we've got.Thank you.(Applause)","Title: Time Management: Prioritizing for Success1179 1180 - Misconceptions of time management:1181  - Being always punctual.1182  - Having tricks to save small amounts of time.1183  1184 - Reality of how successful people manage time:1185  - Focus on priorities instead of saving bits of time.1186  1187 - Elastic nature of time:1188  - Time stretches to accommodate what we choose to focus on.1189  1190 - Importance of prioritizing:1191  - Consider priorities as critical as urgent, unexpected events.1192  - Change perspective from ""lacking time"" to prioritizing.1193  1194 - Practical steps to prioritize effectively:1195  - Identify top professional and personal goals.1196  - Break these goals into manageable steps.1197  - Schedule these priorities first in your week.1198  1199 - Empowering time management statistics:1200  - Total hours in a week and potential time available.

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