Ideas Worth Spreading

One of the best websites on the internet (yes, the entire internet) is, in my opinion, TED.com. TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design), for those who aren't familiar, is an annual conference where some of the world's most extraordinary people -- scientists, artists, entertainers, entrepreneurs, innovators -- convene to share their ideas in concise 20-minute talks that range from thought-provoking to inspiring to mind-blowing. To read more about TED itself, you can go here, but I want to share some of my favourite talks that I've watched recently. Talk descriptions are taken straight from the TED site, and below each video I've included some comments of my own.

Pawan Sinha on how brains learn to see

Pawan Sinha details his groundbreaking research into how the brain's visual system develops. Sinha and his team provide free vision-restoring treatment to children born blind, and then study how their brains learn to interpret visual data. The work offers insights into neuroscience, engineering and even autism.

I'm extremely interested in cognition and how people process information, so in addition to the treatments his groups has been doing, his research and its implications are very exciting.

Dan Ariely on our buggy moral code

Behavioral economist Dan Ariely studies the bugs in our moral code: the hidden reasons we think it's OK to cheat or steal (sometimes). Clever studies help make his point that we're predictably irrational -- and can be influenced in ways we can't grasp.

I actually think the description for this one is somewhat misleading. The studies Ariely describes aren't really about why "we think it's OK", so much as under what circumstances we tend to cheat (and, based on those findings, he suggests explanations for this). However, given that the factors involved in those explanations aren't (in all likelihood) consciously considered by people who are deciding whether to cheat or not, his findings are quite interesting. If we're predictably irrational, we certainly aren't intuitively so.

[As an aside, I recently read the paper of his about what the authors term "coherent arbitrariness", how even when the value people ascribe to something is arbitrary (e.g., the amount of money they would have to be paid to be willing to endure the pain of the vice-grip on their finger, as he mentions in this TED talk), they still make adjustments in "coherent" (predictable) ways (i.e., demanding more money for longer duration of pain). He has also authored a neat paper on how buyers and sellers can value the same good quite differently. If you're interested in either paper, let me know and I can send them to you.]

Temple Grandin: The world needs all kinds of minds

Temple Grandin, diagnosed with autism as a child, talks about how her mind works -- sharing her ability to "think in pictures," which helps her solve problems that neurotypical brains might miss. She makes the case that the world needs people on the autism spectrum: visual thinkers, pattern thinkers, verbal thinkers, and all kinds of smart geeky kids.

This talk actually made me shed tears. I cannot explain why. Maybe it has something to do with how strongly I feel about education and the role it ought to have in tapping into the specific strengths that everyone has -- getting people to realize their potential, especially in spite of what "conventional wisdom", such as academic curricula, would indicate should be expected of them.

Dan Gilbert asks, Why are we happy?

Dan Gilbert, author of Stumbling on Happiness, challenges the idea that we’ll be miserable if we don’t get what we want. Our "psychological immune system" lets us feel truly happy even when things don’t go as planned.

This talk I actually watched years ago. As someone who is given to spending obscene amounts of time deliberating over important (and not-so-important) decisions, often to the point where my indecision ends up making my decision for me, I found this talk Most Excellent. Even aside from never really being able to know which choice will be "best", there's the reality that, even if we could always choose the "best" options, it wouldn't necessarily make much difference to how happy we end up being: by and large, humans make themselves (relatively) happy with the reality they are faced with.

Hm. There are several more talks that I really want to share, but I'll save those for another post.