Wade Davis about endangered crops.
With exciting pictures and stories, the National Geographic Wade Davis explorer honors the extraordinary diversity of indigenous cultures in the world, which are disappearing on our planet at an alarming speed.
You know, one of the intense pleasures of travel and one of the ethnographic research tricks is the possibility of living among those who have not forgotten the old habits, who still experience their past wind-dwelling, who touch it in the polite stones with rain, tear it down into the ather sheets of plants.
The fact that the shaman of Jaguar still travels beyond the lacted path, or the myths of the former Inuit still resonate, or though in the Himalayas, the Buddhists continue to look for the breath of Dharma, is to remind himself of the essential revelation of anthropology, and that means that the world we live in doesn't exist in an absolute sense, but is just an example of reality, the consequence of a particular set of choices made by our lineage successfully, there are several generations.
Of course, we all share the same adaptive imperatives.
We're all born. We're bringing our children into this world.
We're going to do it with the rites of invitations.
We need to face the inexorable separation of death, so it shouldn't surprise us that we sing, we dance, we are all artists.
On the other hand, the remarkable cadence of the song is interesting, the pace of dance in all cultures.
And whether it's the Penan in the forests of Borneo, or the Acolytes Voodoo in Haiti, or the warriors in the killing desert in northern Kenya, the Curendero in the mountains of the Andes, or a caravansah in the middle of the Sahara. And by the way, that's the person I've traveled to the desert a month ago, or indeed, the herd of Yaks on the Comolangma flancs, Mt. Everest, the goddess of the world.
All these people teach us that there are other ways of being, other ways of thinking, other ways of orienting on Earth.
And this is an idea, if you think about it, that can only fill you with hope.
Today, the countless cultures in the world are a fabric of spiritual and cultural life that envelops the planet, and is as important for the well-being of the planet as well as biological fabric of life as you know it as a biosphere.
And you could consider this cultural fabric of life as an athnospher, and you could define the athnospher as the overall sum of all thoughts, dreams, myths, ideas, inspirations, intuitions caused by the human imagination from the dawn of consciousness.
Anthnospher is the legacy of humanity.
It's the symbol of everything that we are and everything that we can be as a species that has amazing curiosity.
And when the biosphere was seriously eroded, the athnospher was also -- and maybe much more quickly.
No biologist, for example, would suggest that 50 percent or more of all species have been or two fingers of extinction because it's simply not true, and yet -- that the most apocalyptic scenario in the realm of biological diversity -- rarely come close to what we consider to be the most optimistic scenario in cultural diversity.
And the most reliable indicator of that is, of course, the extinction of language.
When each of you in this room was born, 6,000 languages were practiced on the planet.
Nowadays, a language is not just a set of vocabulary or a set of grammar rules.
A language is a spark of the human mind.
This is a vehicle through which the soul of every specific culture comes into the material world.
Each language is an ancient forest of mind, a sharing, a thought, an ecosystem of spiritual possibilities.
And amongst those 6,000 languages, as we're in Monterey today, a good half is no longer in the ears of children.
They're no longer taught to babies, which actually means that less than a change happens, they're already dead.
How can't you feel alone, enveloped in silence, and be the last of your people to speak your language, so that there's no way that you can transmit the wisdom of your ancestors or let the promise of your children?
And yet, this horrible fatality is indeed the hopelessness of someone on the ground, every 15 days or so, because every 15 days, an elder dies and takes the last syllabes with him to the grave of an ancient language.
And I know some of you are saying, "Wouldn't it be better? The world wouldn't be a better place if we were only talking one language?" And I said, "Well, that language would be Yoruba. Du Cantone.
Du Kogi."
And you will discover what it would be like to be unable to speak your own language.
Well, what I'd like to do with you today is take you, sort of, a journey in the era -- a short journey in the era to try and explain to you, in fact, what's lost.
Many of us forget a little bit when I say, "to different ways of being," I really mean different ways of being.
Take, for example, this kid from Barasana in the northwestern of the amazonia, the people of theanaconda who believe in mythology, that they raised the Eastern milk stream into the belly of sacred snakes.
It's a people whose state of knowledge cannot tell the distinction between the blue and the green color because the canopy of the sky is equal to the forest canopy that the people depend on.
They have a particular language and marriage rule called linguistic exogamia: You have to marry a person who speaks a different language.
And all of this is the souche of the mythological past, however, it's curious that in these large houses six or seven languages are spoken because of consanguin marriage. You never hear a person practicing language.
They just listen and then start talking.
Or, one of the most fascinating tribes I've ever had, the Waorani of the northeastern Ecuadori, a people who were supretingly contacted in 1958.
In 1957, five missionaries tried to get in touch and committed critical error.
They dropped out of the sky from the bright pictures, from themselves, eight to 10, what you might call friendship testimony, forgetting that these rainforests had never seen anything in two dimensions of their lives.
They picked up these photos fell on the ground, tried to look behind the face and see a shape, a silhouette, didn't find anything, and then they figured out it was some maps coming from the devil, so they shot the five launch missionaries.
But Waorani didn't just go down to strangers.
They were killing each other.
54 percent of the death rate was due to killing each other.
We renamed the genealogy of eight generations, and we found two natural death circumstances, and when we forced people to speak about them, they said that one of the compatriots was so old that he died old, and we shot him anyway.
However, they had the same opportunity a perspicacy of the forest, which was astonishing.
Their hunters could feel animal urine at 40 steps and tell you what species it came out.
In the '80s, I had been given an amazing mission when my Harvard professor asked me if I was interested in going to Haiti to infiltrate me in secret societies, the foundation of the force of Duvalier and Tonton Macouts, and to strain the poison to make zombies.
In order to ration that sensation, of course, I had to understand this remarkable faith by Vodoun, and the Voodoo is not a cult of black magic.
It's the opposite, a metaphysical view of the world.
It's interesting.
If I asked you to name the big religions in the world, what would you say?
Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Judaism, whatever.
There's always a continent that is excluded, sosuming that sub-Saharan Africa had no religious belief, but, of course, they had it and the Voodoo is simply distilling these very profound religious ideas that emerged in the tragic diaspora of the Age of slavery.
What makes Voodoo so interesting is this living relationship between living and dead.
Livings give rise to the mind.
The mind can be called from the Great Eau, responding to the rhythm of the dance in order to shift the mind of the living, and in that brief, shining moment, the acolyte becomes the god.
That's why Voodoo says, "You white people go to church and talk about God.
We dance in the temple and become God."
And being possessed, the mind takes control, how can you suffer?
So you see these astonishing demonstrations: Acolytes Voodoo in a state of transe manipulating ardent coals, a rather surprising demonstration of the capabilities that the mind affects the body when they're catalysed in a state of extreme arousal.
Of all the people I've been with, the most extraordinary are the Kogi of the Sierra Nevadas of Santa Marta in northern Columbia.
Now, former tyrannical civilizations occupying the coastal plain of the Caribbean of Columbia in the wake of the conquest, the people retreated into a isolated volcanic massif that rises over the coastal plain of the Caribbean.
In a bloody continent, these people were never conquered by the Espagnols.
At that day, they're led by a ritual priesthood though, their training to the priesthood is quite extraordinary.
The young acolytes are removed from their families at the age of three or four, and they're located in a dark and dark world in stone huts at the feet of the glaciers for 18 years, two nine-year periods deliberately chosen to mimic the nine months of gestation that's gone into the belly of their natural mother, and they're now in the womb of the great mother, metaphorically speaking.
And all the time, the values of their society are inculated, values that govern the fact that their prayers and only their prayers maintain the balance of the universe -- what we would call ecological equilibrium.
And at the end of this amazing initiation, they come out one day and for the first time in their life, at the age of 18, they discover the rising of the day, and at that moment of light awareness of this first glint of the sun, which floods the flancs of this beautiful landscape, and suddenly, everything they learn in abstract fashion is concretized in a sensational glory, and then the priest does a step back and says, "You see? It's really like I've described to you.
It's as beautiful and it's for you to protect it."
They call themselves the old brothers, and they say, we young brothers, are responsible for the destruction of the world.
This level of intuition becomes primordial.
Every time we think about indigenous peoples and the landscape, we're talking about Rousseau and the old idea of the wild, a racist idea in its simplicity, or, we're talking about Thoreau and we're saying that these people are closer to the Earth than we are.
Well, indigenous people are not sentimental or weakened by nostalgia.
There's not a lot of room for both of these in the palaces of the Asmat or in the glacial winds of Tibet, but they have, nevertheless, through time and rituals, a traditional mystic of the Earth that's not based on being willing to be, but based on a much more subtle intuition: the fact that the Earth itself could only exist through human consciousness.
What does that mean?
That means that a young child from Andes has been taught that this mountain is an Apu spirit that will decide from his destiny, become a completely different human being and will have a different relationship with that resource or this place that a young child from Montana who has been taught that a mountain is a pile of stones that are prepared to be exploited.
Whether it's the rest of a mind or a bunch of minerals, it's unrelated.
Metaphor is interesting, defined the relationship between the individual and the natural world.
I grew up in the forests of British Columbia where I was taught that these forests existed to be cut.
This made me a different human being from my friends, the Kwakiutl, who believes that these forests are the remains of Hukuk and the curled up of the sky and the cannibal spirits that used to leave the world, minds that they should engage in their state of Hamatsa.
Now, if you start to think that these cultures can create different realities, you could start to understand some of their extraordinary discoveries. Take this plant, for example.
This is a picture I took in the northwest of the Amazon last April.
This is an ayahuasca, which many of you have heard about, the most powerful psychoactive preparation of the shaman's repertoire.
What makes it amazing is not just the pharmacological potential of this preparation, but the process of making it work. It's prepared by two different sources. On the one hand, there's this lian that has a series of beta-carbolines, malnalines, slightly hallucinogenics, and only the climbing plant is, it's more like a smoke like a blue cloud through your consciousness, but it's mixed with the leaves in a pool of coffee called psychotria viridis.
This plant contains very powerful tryptamines, very similar to brain serotonin, dimethyltriptamine, 5methoxydimethyltriptamine.
If you've seen the Yanomanö renifler this tobacco by the nose, this substance that they prepare from a set of different species also contains methoxidimethyltriptamine.
Having this powder go up into the nose is like coming out of a gun cannon that doubles baroque paintings and lands on a sea of electricity.
It doesn't cause a distortion of reality, but rather a resolution of reality.
In fact, I had some discussions with my teacher, Richard Evan Shultes -- a man who triggered the psychedelic era after his discovery of magic mushrooms in the 1930s in Mexico, and I argued that you couldn't rank these eptamines as estrogen, because once they did, there's no one at home to make a hallucination.
Unlike tryptamines, cannot be consumed by a oral basis by an enzyme, finds itself in a natural way in the human gut: monoamine-oxydase.
They can only be eaten if they're made of synergie with another chemical that's mimicking MAO.
What's even more fascinating is that the beta-carbolines that are made of the lian are MAO inhibitors of a particular kind, necessary to increase the effect of the tryptamine, so we've just asked the question.
How is it that in a flore of 80,000 species of aritic plants, these people are coming to find these two plants without any morphological link that when a synergie in this way created a kind of biochemist version that is more important than the sum of the two parts?
Well, we use this euphemism, which is done by treasury, which is meaningless.
But when we ask the Indians, they say, "Well, plants talk to us."
What does that mean?
This tribe, the Cofan, has 17 different varieties of ayahuasca, which it can distinguish from a distance to the forest, even though to our eyes, they seem to be the same species.
Then they ask them how they define their taxonomist and they say, "I thought you knew about plants.
You don't know anything about it?" I said, "No."
In fact, you take every 17 varieties per night of full moon, and the melody will not be the same.
Of course, that's not how you get a Ph.D. from Harvard, but it's much more interesting than just counting seams.
Now the problem is that even those of us who deal with the challenges of the indigenous people view them as original and colorful, but slightly at the fringes of history when the real world is, our world is changing.
In fact, in 300 years, the 20th century will not be recognized for its wars or its technological innovation, but rather as an age in which we have lived and actively embraced or actively embraced the massive destruction of biological diversity and cultural diversity on the planet. The problem today is not change.
Every culture across time has constantly entered a dance with new possibilities of life.
And the problem isn't technology itself.
The Sioux Indians didn't stop being the Sioux when they dropped the bow and the arrow more than Americans were no longer Americans when they dropped the horse and the cart.
It's not change or technology that threatens the integrity of the athnospher, it's power. It's the rustling face of domination.
And when you look around the world, you find that it's not a set of crops that will disappear. It's a living and dynamic people that will move away from their existence through currents that exceed their adaptive ability. Whether it's the famous deboisement in the country of Penan -- a people of Southern nomads from Asia, Sarawak -- a people who lived freely in the forest up to the previous generation, and are now reduced to slavery and prostitution in the rivers, where you can see that the river is souilled with vase giving rise to the sea half of Borneo to the south of China, where the Japanese cargos vote to the horizon and charge the timber from the forest. Or in the case of the Yaami, it's the disease that's evaporating the trails of the gold discovery.
However, if we go to the mountains of Tibet, where I'm currently doing a lot of research, you'll see a aspect of the political dominance of the raw state.
You know the genocide, the physical extinction of a whole people is condemned universally, but the euthnocide, the destruction of the practices of a people, is not just doomed, but universally -- in many places -- celebrated as a developmental strategy.
It's impossible to understand the pain of Tibet without seeing it at its lowest level.
I've traveled about six-and-a-half miles from Chengdu in the west of China through the Southern Tibet to Lhasa with a young colleague, and it's only when I reached Lhasa that I understood what's behind the statistics that are communicated to us: 6,000 sacred monuments reduced in dust and cendres. 1,2 million people killed by executives at the Cultural Revolution.
The father of this young man was affected by the Panchen Lama.
Which meant he was killed on top of the Chinese invasion.
Her uncle fled in the diaspora with his Holiness driving the people in Nepal.
Her mother was imprisoned for the price of -- to have committed the crime of being rich.
He was smuggled into prison at the age of two, hidden under his skirt because she didn't want to be without him.
The sister who created this act of kindness was placed in a rotting camp.
One day she walked by a mere looking at an armard of Mao, and as a result of that transgression, she was sentenced at seven years of forced labor.
The pain of Tibet is unbearable, however, the redemptive mind of the people is a place to consider.
And finally, it boils down to a choice: Do we want to live in a monochromatic monotone or enjoy a polychromatic world of diversity?
Before we die, Margaret Mead, an anthropologist said that his greatest fear was that as we evolved to see a generic and amorphe world, not only will we see the extent of human imagination reduced to a narrower modality of thought, but one day we will wake up from a dream and have forgotten that there are other possibilities.
And it's modest to remember that our species exists, perhaps, for 600,000 years.
The Néolithic Revolution -- which emerged agriculture, when we succumbed to the cult of the grain, the poetry of the shaman was replaced with the prosecution, and we created the surplus of the hierarchical specialization -- only 10,000 years ago.
The new industrial world as we know it has just 300 years.
This superficial story doesn't agree that we are undermining all the answers to all the challenges that we will face in the future millennia.
When this mixture of global cultures has to give meaning to the fact that it's human, they respond with 10,000 different voices.
This is through this song that we all rediscover the possibility of what we are: a completely conscious species, very aware that all peoples and gardens find a way to flourish, and there's a lot of optimism.
This is a picture I took north of the Hee of Baffin when I was chased the narwhal with the Inuit, and this man, Olayuk, told me a beautiful story about his grandfather.
The Canadian government hasn't always been right with the Inuit people and in the 1950s, we colonized them to impose our sovereignty.
The great father of this man refused to leave.
The family got fed up with all the weapons that he had for his life, and all of his tools.
You can understand that the inuits didn't fear the cold, they enjoyed it.
The hinds of their tails were originally wrapped fish in caribou skin.
And the great father of this man was not intimidated by the arctic nights or by the storm that blew.
He just came out, lowered his seals' skin pants and cracked in his hand, and when his heels were frozen, he gave them the shape of a blade.
He's got a saliva on the tranchant's tranchant of shit and when he finishes geling, he's using it to run a dog.
He sued it and improvised it, took the dog's thoracic cage and improvised it, thoracic it, thoracic it, thoracic it, put a dog that wasn't far away, and disappeared on the ice caps, the knife in his seatbelt.
How do we deal with nothing?
And this, in many ways, is an example of the resources of the Inuit people and of all indigenous peoples in the world.
In April 1999, the Canadian government gave the Inuit the full control of a much larger area than California and Texas put together.
It's our new country. It's called Wellavut.
It's an independent territory. They control all the mineral resources.
An amazing example of how a nation as a state can search for restitution with its people.
And finally, I think it's pretty obvious, at least for all of us who have traveled to these farthest reaches of the planet, to realize that they're not far from it at all.
This is somebody's land.
They represent the bulk of the human imagination that goes back to the dawn of time, and for all of us, the dreams of these children, like the dreams of our children, become part of geography in the pure state, of hope.
So what we're trying to do at National Geographic, eventually, is we think politicians won't do anything.
We think the controversy -- we think the controversy is far from being persuasive, but we think that telling stories can change the world, and so we're probably the best news institution in the world, and we're reaching 35 million connections to our website every month.
156 countries subsidize our television network.
Our stores are read by millions of people.
And we're making travels to the era where we take our audience to places like this cultural marvel that they can't help but be overwhelmed by what they've seen, and so hopefully it will understand through through and through, one by one, the core revelation of anthropology: that this world deserves to exist in all of its diversity, that we can find a way to live in a truly multicultural world where all of the wisdom of all people can contribute to our collective well-being.
Thank you very much.
Blaise Aguera y Arcas presents Photosynth.
Blaise Aguera y Arcas leads an astonishing demonstration of Photosynth, a software that could transform our way of looking at digital images, using photographs from the Web, Photosynth builds dreaming visions to blow up and allow us to go through them.
What I'm going to show you first, as quickly as possible, is a seminal work, a new technology that we brought to Microsoft as part of an acquisition almost exactly a year ago. This is Seadragon, and it's an environment in which you can, locally or remotely, interact with vast amounts of visual data.
We have here in front of the eyes a lot, a lot of gigabytes of digital photographs, and we zoom in before we go on and sort of fluidly, we navigate through the thing, we rearrange it in the way we want it.
And regardless of the amount of information you're looking at, the size of those collections or the size of the images.
Most of them are pictures of ordinary digital devices, but this one, for example, is from the Library of Congress, and it's done in the 300 mega-pixels.
It doesn't make any difference because the only thing that should limit the performance of a system like this is the number of pixels on your screen at a time "t" -- it's also a very flexible architecture.
Here's a whole book, an example of data that's not a picture.
This is Bleak House of Dickens. Every column is a chapter.
To prove to you that it's really text, and not an image, you can do something like this, so to show that it's a real representation of text; it's not a picture.
Maybe it's a little bit of an artificial way of reading an e-book.
I don't recommend it.
Here's a more realistic example. This is a game by The Guardian.
Every big picture is the beginning of a section.
And that really gives you the joy and experience of reading the true print of a magazine or a newspaper, which is a kind of multi-dimensional media by definition.
We also put something at the corner of this particular Guardian issue.
We've created a very high-resolution ad, much higher-resolution ad that you could get in a standard ad, and we've added additional content.
If you want to see the features of this car, you can see them here.
Or other models, or even technical specs.
And we're really getting to some of these ideas to really get rid of the limits of the space on the screen.
We hope that that means the end of the pop-ups and other kinds of pollution -- shouldn't be needed anymore.
Of course, mapping is one of the obvious applications for technology like this.
And this one I'm going to run very quickly, if not to say we have things to contribute to this area as well.
These are all U.S. roads.
Superposed to a geospatial image of NASA.
Okay, now let's look for something else.
All of this is online right now, you can go and check.
This is a project called Photosynth, which actually marrys two different technologies.
One of them is Seadragon and the other one is from a wonderful research on computerized vision run by Noah Snavely, a graduate student at the University of Washington, co-dirigated by Steve Everz in the UW.
and Rick Szeliski from Microsoft's search. Very nice collaboration.
And so it's online. It works with Seadragon technology.
You can see it when you use these kinds of visualizations, where you can dive into the images and have this kind of multi-resolution experience.
But the organizer in the space of images in this case actually has a meaning.
Informatized vision algorithms have recorded these images together to match the actual space in which these pictures have been taken, so you can see elements here of slides stabilized or panoramic imagery, and all of these things have been linked to each other in space.
I'm not sure I have time to show you other environments.
Some of them are much more spatial.
I'd like to jump directly to one of the first data sets of Noah -- this is from a first prototype of Photosynth that we've run for the first time this summer -- to show you what I think is really the strong point of this technology, Photosynth technology, and it's not necessarily that clear when you look at the environments that we've put online on the website.
We have to worry about lawyers and things like that.
This is a reconstruction of the Notre Dame cathedral, which was done entirely by computer computation from picked up images on Flickr, and we just put our Dame on Flickr, and we find pictures of T-shirts, the campus and so on, and each of these orange cones represents a picture that was identified as being part of this model.
And so these are all Flickr images, and they've all been connected to each other in the space in this way.
And we can navigate in this very simple way.
You know, I never thought I would end up working at Microsoft.
It's very empowering to be received here in this way.
I think you can see that it's a lot of different types of camera types: there's everything from cell phone cameras to the kind of mono-purposes of professionals, quite a lot of photos, sitting together in this environment.
And if I get there, I'm going to find some strange ones.
Many of them are occculted by faces, and so on.
Somewhere there's even a series of photographs -- here we are.
This is actually a poster from Notre Dame who was recorded as a correct one.
We can dive from the poster into a physical view of the environment.
The real point of all of this is that we can do things with the social environment. We're now taking the data from everybody -- from all the collective memory of what the Earth looks like, visually -- and we're linking it all together.
All these pictures become connected to each other, and they emerge something larger than the sum of the parts.
There's a model of the entire Earth that emerges.
Think of it as the long tail of Stephen Lawler's work on Virtual Earth.
And it's something that becomes more and more complex as people use it, and whose benefits it for users as they use it.
Their own photos are tagged with meta-does that someone else has entered.
If someone has been bothered to mark all of these saints and give all their names, my picture of our Queen's cathedral would be enriched by all of this data, and I could use it as an entry point to dive into that space, into that self-help, using photos of everyone, to make a kind of trans-modal and cross-human social experience in that way.
And of course, a sub-produit of that, they're all incredibly rich virtual models of all the interesting parts of the Earth, not just being harvested by altitude flights and by satellite images and so on, but by collective memory.
Thank you very much.
Do I understand? What will your software allow, at some point, really in the next few years, all the photos that are being shared by anyone in the world, are going to be basically connected to each other?
Yes. What the software does is it's discovered.
It creates hyperliens, if you will, between images.
And he does it by building on the contents of the images.
And it's really exciting when you think about the richness of semantic information that many of these images have.
For example, when you do web research on images, you type sentences, and the web text has a lot of information about the subject of this picture.
Now, what happens if this photo is connected to all your pictures?
In this case, the amount of cross-connectedness and the amount of wealth that comes out of it is really huge. It's a classic network effect.
Blaise, it's really amazing. Félicitations.
Thank you very much.
Barry Schwartz elds the paradox of the timing.
The psychologist Barry Schwartz is attacking a rock of Western societies: the freedom of choice. According to him, choice has not made us free, but more paralyzed, not happier, but more insatisfact.
I'm going to talk about something that's in my book that I hope will resonate with things that you've heard, and I'm going to try and make connections, if you miss them.
I start with what I call the officialdogme.
The official dog of what?
The official dogma of all Western societies.
He says this: to maximize the well-being of citizens, you have to maximize individual freedom.
Because freedom is inherently good, value and essential to human beings.
Because if people have freedom, then everyone can act independently, do things that will maximize our well-being, and no one decides our place.
Maximizing freedom is maximizing choice.
The more choices the people have, the more they're free, and the more they're free, the more they have welfare.
This is so integrated into the thought that no one would think to challenge it.
It's deeply embedded in our lives.
I'm going to give you a few examples of what progress has made possible.
This is my supermarket. Not very big.
One word about wine.
175 different kinds of vinegar in my supermarket, and you couldn't count the 10 kind of pristine olive oil and the 12 different kinds of balegars to make a lot of house vinegars, if you didn't like any of the 175 vinegars in the store.
This is what a supermarket looks like.
Then you go to the electronic beam to look for a stereo -- loudspeakers, CDs, cassettes, maker, ampli. In this one electronic store, there's so many stereo systems.
You can build 6.5 million different kinds of components out of them.
That's a lot of choice.
In another area -- communication.
When I was a kid, you could have all the phone services you wanted, as long as they came from Ma Bell.
You rent your phone. You didn't buy it.
So the phone was never broken.
These days are gone.
We now have an almost unlimited choice of telephones, especially cell phones.
These are the cellular mobile phones of the future.
My favorite is in the middle -- the MP3, the nose switch, and the torch for the burnt cremes.
If it's not in your store yet, make sure it's going to happen.
This brings the clients to ask, "Do you have a phone that doesn't do too much?"
And nowadays.
The answer is no.
You can't buy a phone like this.
For other aspects of life, more significant, there is the same explosion of choice.
Health -- in the United States you can't go to the doctor anymore, and the doctor says you can do it.
Now, you go to the doctor, and he says, "Well, we can do A, or B."
"As got these benefits, and these risks."
"B has these benefits, and those risks. Who do you want?"
You say, "What do I have to do, doctor?"
He said, "There are benefits and risks, and B too."
"Which one do you want?"
You say, "What would you do to my place?"
And the doctor says, "I'm not you."
The result is what's called patient autonomy, which seems to be a good thing, but in fact, it moves the weight of the responsibility for someone who knows -- the doctor -- to someone who doesn't know anything about it and is certainly ill -- and therefore it's not in the condition of making decisions -- the patient.
There's a huge marketing of drugs that are headed towards you and me, and that, if you think about it, doesn't make sense, because we can't buy them.
Why do they advertise?
They want us to call our doctor the next morning to ask for a prescription change.
Something as important as identity is now a matter of choice, as you see here.
We don't have identity; we have to invent it.
And we can re-invent ourselves in leisure.
Every morning you have to decide which person you want to be.
Speaking of marriage and family, it was a time or almost everybody was getting married as soon as possible, having children as soon as possible.
The only choice was who, not when, and not what you did.
Today, it's all about choice.
I teach brilliant students, and I give them 20 percent work in less than before.
Not because they're less good, not because they're less workers.
But because they're worried. They're like, "Am I getting married? Now?
Should I get married later? Can I get kids first? Or a career?"
These are hot questions.
And they have to answer that, whatever job I give them and their grades.
They're right. They're important questions.
Work -- we're lucky, as Carl said, because of technology, we can work every moment since any time or -- except for the hotel Randolph.
Notice, there's a corner, that I'll keep secret, or the Wi-Fi works.
I don't tell you because I want to be able to use it.
This incredible freedom of choice in the work imposes us to choose again and again, if you have to work or not.
You can go and see your kid play the football, the hip cell, and the Blackberry on the other hip, and the laptop on the lap.
And even though they're all gone extinct, as our child is playing soccer, we're asking ourselves, "Do I respond to the phone?
Can I answer that email? Can I write that letter?"
And even though the answer is no, it makes the experience of the football game very different.
Everywhere, big things and small things, material things and lifestyles, life is about choice.
The front world looked like this.
There were choices, but it wasn't all about choosing.
The world today is like this.
Is it good or bad news?
The answer is yes.
We all know what it's good, I'm going to talk about what's not good.
All this choice has two negative effects on people.
The effect, paradoxically, is paralysis, is the promise of liberation.
With so many choices, people find it hard to choose.
I'll give you an example of this: a 4011 study of voluntary retirement investments.
One of my colleagues had access to Vanguard's investment registers, the giant mutual fund company of one million employees and 2,000 branches.
She found that every 10 mutual funds offered by employees, participation rates decrease by two percent.
When you offer 50 bucks -- 10 percent less juicer than if you offer five. Why?
Because with 50 funds, it's so hard to decide that you're going to make the decision tomorrow.
and tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow never comes.
That means that people will have to eat dogs food when they retire because they don't have enough economies, and the decision is so hard that they lose the contribution of their employer.
By no means they lose 5,000 dollars a year from the employer, who would be happy to participate.
paralysis is a consequence of too many choices.
And that makes the world like this.
You want to make the right decision if it's for eternity, right?
You don't want to get over the mutual fund or the vinegar.
The second effect is that if we manage to overcome paralysis and to choose, we are ultimately moreatisfied than if we have fewer choices.
For several reasons.
With such a vinegar choice, if you buy one, and it's not perfect, you can imagine that you would have to choose another one that would have been better, and those imagined alternatives would make you regret your decision, and regret would end up with your satisfaction, even if you had made the right decision.
The more choice there is, the easier it is to regret the determining aspects of your choice.
Secondly, the cost of opportunity.
Dan Gilbert said something important this morning: the value we give to things depends on what we compare them.
If there are many alternatives, it's easy to imagine the right aspects of the possibilities that you've rejected and make you less happy about the alternatives that you've chosen.
For example. I apologize to those of you who are not in New York.
This is what you're supposed to think.
Here's a couple on the Hamptons.
Very dispendated real estate.
Superbe beach. Good day. They have everything.
Would it be better? "Yeah!" the guy said, "That's enough.
All my neighbors in Manhattan left.
I could park at the bottom of my building."
And the idea is, for two weeks, it's worth the opportunity, every day, to have a good parking lot.
The cost of opportunity would be under our satisfaction even though what we choose is extra.
And the more options they have, and the more they have left, the more it reflects in the cost of opportunity.
Another example.
This drawing is long.
It shows you have to live the present moment, and do things slowly.
And when you choose something you don't choose to do with others.
It can be very attractive, and it will make you less attractive.
Third point: climbing expectations.
It struck me when I wanted to change jeans.
I'm wearing it almost all the time.
There was a time or there was only one way, you bought them, they didn't do well, they were very uncomfortable, and if you took them quite often, they started to be OK.
I wanted to change my jeans after several years. I said, "I want a pair of jeans, this is my size."
The vendor told me, "Would you like to fit beautifully, fit easily, relaxably fit?"
"Bouton or closeture? Lavage to stone or acid?"
"Do you want them relaxed?"
"Puted sub, fused, blah blah." And so on.
I was a bee. I said, "I want the model before was the one model."
He didn't know what I was talking about. I spent an hour trying all these jeans, and I left the store, right, with the best jeans I've ever had.
These choices allowed me to do better.
But I felt less good.
I wrote a book to try and explain why.
The reason is, with all these options available to me, my expectations about the jeans had gone up.
I had low expectations when there was only one model.
With 100 models, my God, one of them had to be perfect.
I had something good, but not perfect.
Compared with my expectations, what I had was chosen.
Adding options to people's lives increases their expectations of the quality of each option.
Which makes less satisfaction with outcomes, even when they're good.
No one in the world of marketing knows this. Otherwise you wouldn't know it yourself.
The truth is more like that.
Everything was better when it was worse because then people could have surprises.
Nowadays, we industrialized citizens, we expect perfect -- at best, the thing is as good as you hope it.
You'll never be happy to be surprised, because your expectations cover the ceiling.
The secret of happiness -- what you came to -- is to have low expectations.
I'd like to say -- little autobiographical moment -- that I'm married to a woman, and she's quite wonderful.
I couldn't do better. I didn't decide.
But deciding is not always a bad thing.
Finally, a consequence of buying the jeans that will hurt you when there's no other choice is that when you're uninsatisfied and you ask, why, to whom the answer is clear. The world is responsible. What do you do?
When there are hundreds of different jeans, and you buy one that takes you, and you say, "What's responsible?"
It's clear that the reputation is "you."
You could have done better.
With hundreds of jeans in the show, there's no excuse to be wrong.
Also when people make decisions, and even though their choices are good, they feel disappointed, and they want to.
The depressions have exploded in the industrial world in one generation.
I believe that an important cause of this explosion of depression, and suicide, is that people have determined experiments because their standards are too high, and when they have to explain those deputies, they think that's their fault.
Clearly, we do better generally, and we feel less good.
Let me remind you.
This is the official dogma, the one that we believe is true, and it's completely wrong.
Of course having a choice is better than not having it, but it doesn't mean that a lot of choices are better than a little.
There's a magic amount. I don't know which one.
I'm convinced we've crossed this limit of the number of options that increase our well being.
I'm almost done. You have to think about this: What makes all these possible choices possible is opulence.
There are many places in the world, and we know some of them, or the problem is not to have too many choices.
Their problem is they have too little.
What I'm talking about is specific to modern, opulent societies.
What's frustrating and irritating is that Steve Levitt told you how much a difficult, expensive car seat doesn't bring anything to it. It's waste of money.
I'm telling you that these complicated and expensive choices -- not just serving nothing.
They do bad.
They make us more miserable.
If we could send all these choices to societies or people didn't have enough, they would live better, and we did.
That's what economists call a Pareto improvement.
The redistribution of wealth would make everyone happier because the excess of choice is our flake.
So to conclude. You're supposed to read this, and as a sophisticated person, say, "What does this fish know?
You know nothing is possible in a jar of fish."
Imagination appauvry, vision of the world, and that's what I understood the first time.
But the more I thought about it, the more I understood the fish knows something.
Because the truth is, if you blow up the jar to make it possible, you don't get freedom but paralysis.
If you blow up the jar, you decrease satisfaction.
And you increase paralysis.
Everyone needs a fish jar.
This one is probably too small -- even for a fish, and certainly for us.
But the absence of a metaphorical jar leads to poverty, and, I suspect, to disaster.
Thank you very much.
Craig Venter is about to create synthetic life.
Craig Venter says, "Can we create new forms of life from our digital universe?" And his answer is "yes," and pretty quickly. He presents his latest research and make sure that we will soon be able to produce and activate synthetic chromosomes.
I've already talked about some of these projects, of the human genome and what it might be, and the discovery of new genes.
We're now at a new stage: we've digitized biology, and now we're trying to move from this digital code to a new phase of biology: design and synthesis of life.
We've always been asking great questions.
"What is life?" I think many biologists have sought to understand at different levels.
We tried different approaches, tried to boil it down to minimal components.
We've been doing it for about 20 years now. When we sequenced the human genome, we've mapped it from the analog world of biology to the digital world of computers.
Now the question is, can we regenerate life, or can we create new forms of life, based on this digital universe?
This is the map of the genome of a simple organism, the Mycoplasma genitalium bacteria, the simplest genome organism to self-replicating in the laboratory, and we tried to see if we could get to a smaller genome.
We were able to eliminate about a hundred genes from the few 500 that were initially available.
When we look at the map of its metabolism, it's relatively simple compared to ours. Believe me, it's simple, but when we look at all the genes that we can eliminate one by one, it's very unlikely that the result would produce a living cell.
So we decided that the only way to make progress was to actually synthesize this chromosome so that we could vary the components and be able to ask some of these fundamental questions.
So we're focused on this problem: "Can we synthesize a chromosome?"
Can chemistry build these huge molecules, which has never been done?
And if that's possible, can we activate a chromosome?
A chromosome, by the way, is just a piece of inert chemical material.
Although the pace of our digitization of life is expanding exponentially.
Our ability to write a genetic code has grown slower, but has gone up even, and our latest breakthrough would show a start of exponential growth.
We started this work over 15 years ago.
It's actually done in several steps, starting with a bioéthique report before the first experiments.
But it turns out that synthesizing DNA is very difficult.
There are tens of thousands of machines in the world that can synthesize little pieces of DNA, from 30 to 50 long letters, but it's a degeneration process, so the longer the piece is, the more errors there are.
So we had to create a new method to assemble these little pieces together and correct all the mistakes.
This was our first attempt, using the digital information of the Phi X 174 genome.
A little virus that kills bacteria.
We built the pieces, we corrected the mistakes, and created a DNA molecule of about 5,000 long letters.
The most exciting moment was when we took this inert chemical material and we placed it in a bacteria; the bacteria began to read the genetic code and make viral particles.
The viral particles were then ejected out of these cells, and they came back and destroyed the E. coli bacteria.
I was talking to the oil industry recently, and I told them they clearly understood this model.
They're more fun than you are.
So this is actually a situation where software can build its own hardware in a biological system.
But we wanted to see bigger. We wanted to create a whole bacterial chromosome. That's more than 580,000 letters of genetic code, so we thought about putting them together from pieces of the size of a virus, so we could vary these pieces to our shape and figure out what are the components that a living cell is needed.
Design is very important, and if you go to computer data, you have to be extremely precise.
When we sequenced this genome in 1995, the standard accuracy was mistaken for 10,000 base pairs.
By sequencing this genome again, we found 30 errors. If we used the original sequence, the recurrent chromosome would never have worked.
The design needs to be defined by literally 50-letter longs that it's going to have to ring with all the other 50-letter parts to build smaller sub-ensembles that it's going to have to assemble.
We could also integrate special elements.
You may have read it, we've put in signatures.
Think about it a little bit: The genetic code has four letters: A, C, G and T.
Now, triplets of these letters allow you to code for 20 amino acids, each amino acidic acid being its own right by a letter that's clean.
So we can use the genetic code to write words, phrases, thoughts.
First of all, we just put our autograph on it.
Some people have been disappointed that it's not poetry.
We designed these pieces so they're a little bit rognated by enzymes. There are enzymes that repair them and assemble them.
So we started building pieces, starting with 5,000 to 7,000 letters, which are put together to form pieces of 24,000 letters that are put together to get to 72,000 letters.
At every step, we've created a lot of these pieces so we can sequence them, because we're trying to create an extremely robust process -- you'll see that in a minute.
What we're looking for is automation of the process.
In total, it looks like a table of elimitators.
When you get to the sizes of large chunks, you can't grow them easily in an E. coli bacteria, you get the limitations of the tools of modern molecular biology. So we've gone to other mechanisms.
We know one called the homologous recombinaison, which nature uses to fix DNA, which could assemble these large chunks.
Here's an example. There's an organism called Deinococcus radiodurans that can survive three million rads of radiation.
You see it in the image of the top, its chromosome literally explodes.
12 to 24 hours later, he repaired exactly the same way he was before.
There are thousands of organisms that have this capacity.
They can be totally watered. They can survive in the total vacuum.
I'm absolutely sure that there can be life in space, that it can move around and find another aquish environment.
In fact, NASA showed that there were many examples.
This is a micrograph of the molecule that we built using these processes -- actually just the yeast mechanisms with the appropriate design of the pieces being used -- the yeast self-assembles them.
It's not an electronic micrograph; it's just a normal photomicrography.
This molecule is so big that you can see with a simple microscope.
These pictures were taken over a six-second period.
This is the publication we did a little while ago.
That's over 580,000 letters of genetic code, and that's the largest molecule of a determined structure ever created by man.
His molecular mass is up to 300 million ama.
If you used a police 10 without space, it would take 142 pages just to print that genetic code.
How do you start a chromosome? How do you fire it?
Obviously it's pretty simple with a virus, but it's a lot more complicated when you work with bacteria.
It's also much easier for eukaryotic organisms like ourselves, just to eject the core and insert it into another, like we're doing for clôning.
In Archaea bacteria, the chromosome is embedded in the cell, but we've recently shown that it's possible to completely transplant a chromosome from one cell to another and turn it on.
We first purified a chromosome of a microbial species, basically the microbe and the bacteria are as removed from each other as the mouse man, and we added some genes to be able to select this particular chromosome, and we digested it through enzymes to destroy all the proteins, and when we put that into the cell, it's quite amazing -- and you'll enjoy the sophistication of our graphics.
The new chromosome came into the cell.
In fact, we thought it might stop there, but we tried to go further into the process.
You're looking at a major mechanism in evolution.
There are lots of species that have embedded in a second chromosome or a third from another organism, adding thousands of new features to this organism in a second.
People who still believe that evolution happens in the modification of one gene at a time have missed a lot in biology.
There are enzymes called restriction enzymes that can digest DNA.
The chromosome that was in the cell doesn't have it. The chromosome that we've embedded in has.
The enzyme was made from our chromosome, and he recognized the other chromosome as an alien material, swallowed it, and so we ended up with a cell with a new chromosome.
She turned to the blue because of genes that we've inserted.
And in a very short period of time, all the characteristics of the initial organism disappeared, and it's completely transformed into a new organism, based on the new software that we've introduced in the cell.
All the proteins have been altered, the membranes have changed -- and when you read the genetic code, you find exactly what we've transferred.
This can look like genetic achimie, but we can actually, by transferring the software DNA here and there, make dramatic changes.
To me, it's not as much the genesis of life, it's the continuation of 3.5 billion years of evolution.
But I think we may be about to create a new version of the Cambrian Explosion with the massive creation of new species from this digital design.
Why do we do that?
I think it's pretty obvious when we look at our needs.
We're going to move from 6.5 to nine billion human beings over the next 40 years.
If I take that to my person, I was born in 1946.
There are now three people on this planet for every person who lived in 1946; by 40 years, there will be four.
We have problems to feed, to provide clean water, medicine, 6.5 billion breast fuel.
It's going to be so much more difficult to do it for nine.
We consume five billion tons of coal every year, and over 30 billion barrels of oil, or 100 million barrels a day.
When we try to design processes, biological or other things, to replace that, we understand that this is a huge challenge.
And there's also, of course, all this carbon dioxide produced by this process that's being rejected in the atmosphere.
We're asking, as far as our discoveries around the world, a database of about 20 million genes, and I think of them as just as many components for our future creations.
The electronic industry only has about a dozen components and look at the diversity that's going on.
We are limited mainly by biological reality and by our imagination.
We now have techniques, through these rapid synthetic methods, to do what we call combinatorial genomics.
We now have the ability to build a large robot that can create a million chromosomes a day.
Imagine what we can create with these 20 million genes, or processes that we can optimize to produce octane or drugs, or new vaccines -- we can, with a small team, invent more molecular biology than any scientific discoveries in the last 20 years.
All this through a simple process of selection: we can prevent viability, fuel production, chemicals, vaccines, etc.
This is a screen shot of a real design software that we're working on to allow us to create computer organisms.
We don't necessarily know what they're going to look like, but we'll know exactly what their gene code is.
We're focusing right now on four-generation fuels.
You've seen recently that the generation of ethanol corn is just a bad experiment.
The second and third generations fuel is not going to go down to appear, the ones that turn sugar into fuel are much more powerful than the octane or different kinds of butanol.
But we think that the only way for biology to have a major impact without increasing the cost of producing food as well as increasing the availability is to use CO2 as a raw material, so we're working to design cells to move that way.
And we think we can get the first four generation fuels in about 18 months.
The sun and CO2 is one of the predictable methods.
But we discovered by the world a whole bunch of other methods.
This is an organism we described in 1996.
It lives in the deep ocean, at 12,000 feet deep, in temperatures of about 100 degrees.
It turns CO2 into methane using molecular hydrogen as a source of energy.
We're trying to see if we can collect capte CO2, which we can easily transport instead of pipes, and convert that carbon into fuel to power that process.
In a very short time, we think we can go far beyond just looking for the answer to the question, "What is life?"
You see, we have a very modest ambition to replace all the petrochemical industry, yeah. Where on the TED side can we do that? To become a major energy producer.
We're also working on using these same tools to create instantaneous vaccines.
You saw this year with flu, we still have a year delay and we still have a dollar to find the right vaccine.
I think we can change that by building vaccines as a combination in advance.
This is what the future could begin to look like by changing the tree of evolution today, accelerating evolution with synthetic organisms, bacteria, archeae, and eventually eukaryotes.
We're still nowhere to be able to change the human being, and our goal is just to make sure we have a chance to survive long enough to be able to get to this stage. Thank you very much.
Brian Cox: What did wrong with the LHC?
In this short talk from TED U. 2009, Brian Cox shares news about the great Hadron Collider at CERN, and it deals with the repairs that are underway and what the future is for the biggest scientific project ever achieved.
Last year I announced the LHC.
And I promised to come back to give you a sense of how this machine works.
So here it is. And for those of you who weren't there, the LHC is the largest scientific project ever done. It's 27 kilometers of circumference.
His work is to recreate the conditions that were present less than a billionth of a second after the birth of the universe to 600 million times a second.
It's really ambitious.
This is the machine underneath Geneva.
We take pictures of these mini-Big Bangs that are inside detectors.
This is the one that I work on. It's called the ATLAS 400 feet wide and 22 meters diameter.
This is a spectacular image of ATLAS building so you can see the scale.
Last 10th of September last year we turned the machine on for the first time.
And this picture was taken by ATLAS.
It caused a huge party in the control room.
This is a picture of the first particle beam that went around the accelerator, collided with part of the LHC, deliberately, and bombarded particles into the detector.
In other words, when we saw this image on September 10, we knew the machine was working, which is a great victory.
I don't know if this was received with such great acclamations that this: when someone came to Google and saw the foster page like this.
That means we have made a cultural impact as much as a scientific impact.
After about a week, we had a problem with the machine that was actually attached to these strands of wire -- these golden wires.
These son travels a thousand grandfathers when the machine works full power.
Now, the engineers of you, if you look at them, will say, "This is not the case. They're too small."
They can do this because when they're very cold, they become what's called superconductors.
So when it's less than 271 degrees, which is cooler than the space between stars, those golden threads can spread that power.
In one of those joints, between the top nine thousand magnets of the LHC, there was an industrial failure.
So the wire came off a little bit, and those 13 thousand fathers suddenly encountered the electric resistance.
Here's the result.
It's even more impressive when you consider these magnets to weigh more than 20 tons and they've been moved by an inch of an inch.
We've damaged about 50 of these magnets.
We had to get them out, what we did.
We've all renovated them and repaired them.
Now they're all back underground.
Before the end of Mars, the LHC will be again intact.
We're going to turn it on and count it in June or July and continue with our quest to figure out what the components of the universe are.
Well, naturally, in a way, these accidents have triggered an argument about the value of science and engineering before-garde. It's easy to disprove.
I think the fact that it's so difficult, the fact that we wanted to make too much of it is the value of things like the LHC.
I'll leave the last word to an English scientist, Humphrey Davy, who, I suspect, defending the "inable" experiments from his protected area, his protected area being Michael Faraday, said, "Nothing is also dangerous to the progress of the human mind than to make sure that our views of science are final, that there are no more mysteries in nature, that our triumphs are complete, and there are no new worlds to conquer."
Thank you.
Elizabeth Gilbert talks about the genius.
Elizabeth Gilbert is about the impossible expectations that we have about artists and geniuses, and she's moving forward a radical idea: instead of saying that a few rare individuals are "gea" of geniuses, we might say we all have a genius. It's a funny, personal and surprisingly moving intervention.
I'm a writer.
Writing books is my job and more.
It's also my great love and fascination.
And I don't think that's going to change.
It said, I've recently arrived something weird about my life and my career, which has transformed my relationship to this work.
That is to say, I wrote a book recently, a memory called "Mange, Prie, Aime," which, unlike my previous books, went around the world, we don't know how, and became an international sensational best-seller.
So, now, everywhere I go, people talk to me like I'm doomed.
Really, convicted!
They come to me, they're all worried, and they say, "You're not afraid you're never going to do better?
You're not afraid to spend your life writing and never make an interest book that's in the world, never?"
It's reassuring, you know.
But it would be even worse, if I didn't remember that more than 20 years ago, when I started saying, in adolescence, that I wanted to be a writer, I was confronted with the same kind of apeured response.
People would say, "You're not afraid you're never going to do it?
You're not afraid that the humiliation of rejection will cause you?
You're not afraid to take your life to write without outcome and die on a bunch of broken dreams with, in your mouth, taste of failure's asses?"
That was it, you know.
The answer to all of these questions is yes.
Yes, I'm afraid of that.
I've always been afraid of it.
I'm also afraid of many other things that people couldn't even guess.
Like algae and other scary things.
But in terms of writing what I've been thinking about recently, and I'm surprised by that, why?
Is it rational?
Does it make sense that we're supposed to be afraid of the work that we think is destined to accomplish?
And what is particular about creative companies that we care about mental health in one way that doesn't exist for other jobs?
My father, for example, was a chemical engineer, and I don't have the memory that in his 40 years of chemical engineering he was asked if he was afraid to be a chemical engineer.
Like, John, your blockage in chemical engineering, how is that going to happen?
It just didn't happen, you know?
But to admit, chemical engineers have not really acquired a reputation of maniaco-depressive alcoholics over the centuries.
We writers tend to have this reputation and not just writers, but designers of any hair seem to have this reputation of enormous mental instability.
All you have to do is look at the sinister number of dead, just in the 20th century, wonderful creators who died young, and often volunteers.
Even those who didn't get sued seem to have been destroyed by their talent.
Norman Mailer, just before he died, in his last interview, said, "Every one of my books killed me a little bit more."
An incredible statement to do about the work of his life.
But we don't even respond to that kind of thing because we've heard it so long that we've embraced and collectively embraced that notion that creativity and suffering are bounded in inherent ways and that the practice of art always leads to anxiety.
Today, I want to ask you this question to all of you, this idea?
Is that the idea right for you? Because if you take a minimum of distance, that statement isn't going to be at all.
I find itody.
I find it also dangerous, and I don't want it to continue in the next century.
I think it's better to encourage our great makers to live.
And I know for certain that in my case it would be very dangerous to begin to slide out on this darkening slope, especially given the point that I'm in my career.
That is, in short, I'm pretty young, I'm only 40 years old.
Maybe I have four more decades of work in front of me.
And it's likely that all I'm going to write now will be judged as the work that will be followed by the monstrous success of my last book.
I have to say this honestly, because we're all a few friends here, it's likely that my greatest success is behind me.
My God, what an idea!
You know, it's the kind of idea that can make someone drink a nine o'clock in the morning and I don't want to get there.
I would like to continue doing the work that I like.
So the question becomes, how?
And it seems to me, after thinking, that what I need to do to keep writing is to create a kind of protective mental construct.
I have to figure out a way to keep a healthy distance between me writing, and my very natural anxiety about the reaction that my writings will now cause.
And last year, looking for patterns for inspiration, I looked in the past and looked in other societies to see if they had better, healthier ideas than ours to help makers deal with the emotional risks inherent in creativity.
This research has led me to the Greek and Roman Antiquity.
Be aware, because I'm going to do a few rides.
In the Greek and Roman Antiquity, people didn't believe that creativity came from human beings at the time, OK?
People believed that creativity was a vivid spirit that came to people from a distant and impenetrable source, for distant and impenetrable reasons.
The Greeks used to call these divine, creative spirits and welcome the "Datas."
Socrate, especially, believed that he had a devil that inspired him the wisdom from a long way away.
The Romans thought about it, but they called this creative spirit a genius.
Which is great, because the Romans didn't think that a genius was a particularly good person.
They believed that a genius was a kind of divine and magical entity to literally live in the walls of an artist's shop, like Dobby the housefee, and that manifested itself to help the artist in his work without being seen and influence this work.
It's a brilliant idea: here it is, the distance I'm talking about, this mental construct to protect itself from the results of their work.
Everybody knew it was happening like this.
So the artist in the Antiquity was protected by some things, like excessive narcissism, for example.
If the work was great, we weren't totally responsible for it, everyone knew that a deincarned genius had come to help.
If the work was a flop, we weren't the only guilty.
Everybody knew we had a minable genius.
Long times, that's how we view creativity in the West.
And then the Renaissance came along and it changed, and we had a big idea: let's put the human being in the center of the universe above the gods and mystery, more space for the mysterious creatures inspired by the divine.
It's the beginning of rational humanism, and people started to believe that creativity was entirely of the individual.
For the first time in history, we started to call this or this genius artist, instead of saying he had a genius.
To me, it was a big mistake.
I think to automate a single individual to believe that he or she is the containment, the fountain, the essence and the source of all the divine, craftsmans, unthinkable and eternal mysteries is to impose too much responsibility to a fragile human spirit.
It's like asking someone to swallow the sun.
It deforms and disrupts the ego and creates undesirable expectations about performance.
And I think it's this pressure that kills our artists for the last 500 years.
And if that's true, and I think that's true, the question becomes, and now?
Can we do it differently?
Maybe we could go back to an older understanding of the relationship between human beings and the mystery of creation.
Maybe not.
Maybe we can't erase 500 years of rational humanistic thinking in just an 18-minute talk.
There's probably some people here who would pick up legitimate scientific doubts, eventually, the concept of hairs that follow people and throw pearl powder on their work.
I'm probably not going to convince all of you.
But the question I'd like to ask is, why not?
Why don't we see things like this?
It's not less reasonable than anything I've ever heard to explain the extraordinary capricious of the process of creation.
This process, everyone who's tried to do something -- that's everybody here -- knows that it's not always logical.
Sometimes it may even seem completely paranormal.
I recently met the great American Ruth Stone poet, who's now in her 90s, but she's been appointed all of her life, and she told me that in her camping youth in Virginia, when she was working in the fields, she could feel and hear a poem come to her from the landscape.
It was like a thunder wind.
It was moving towards her through the landscape.
She felt it was coming to the earthquakes beneath her feet.
She knew that there was only one thing left to do, depending on her own terms, "Sure like a crazy one."
She was running like a crazy home and the poem was running for her, and he needed absolutely to find paper and a pencil soon enough so that, by the way of the poem into her, she could take it and sleep on the written word.
Other times she wasn't quick enough, she was running, running, running, running, but couldn't get home and the poem would go through the trombe and she would missing it and she would say that he kept his way to research, in his own terms, "a different poet."
And then sometimes -- this, I never forgot this -- she told me that sometimes she nearly missed it.
So, she runs home, looks for the paper, the poem crosses it, she grabs a pencil when he crosses it, and then it's like, from her other hand, she grabs the poem.
She catches the poem by the tail, and flips it back into her body as she translates it.
In these cases, the poem was intact on the page, in perfect condition, but backwards from the last word to the first.
When I heard that, I thought, "How odd it is, it's right in my design process.
My process is not about that. I'm not a drive!
I'm a mule, my way of working is to stand up at the same time each day and sweat and roll in the mule hardly.
But even myself, in my mule work, even I scratched this thing, sometimes.
I guess it's also true for many of you.
You know, even I've had works or ideas coming from a source that I can't identify.
What is this thing?
How proud of ourselves in a way that doesn't make us crazy, but can preserve our mental health?
To me, the best contemporary example of how to do this is the Tom Wars musician, whom I interviewed several years ago for a magazine.
We were talking about it, and you know, Tom, for a lot of his life, embodyed the contemporary, modern and twisted artist who tries to control, manage and dominate these uncontrollable creative impulses completely interiorized.
Then he got older, he got more sitting, and he told me that one day, driving on the L.A. highway, everything changed for him.
He was walking down the road, and suddenly he heard this little melody, which came to him as often the inspiration, unbeatable and glamorous, he wanted it, it was beautiful, he wanted it, but he couldn't catch it.
He had no paper, no pencil, he didn't have a phone.
He started to feel the old anguish about him, "I'm going to lose it and I'm going to be haunted by this song forever.
I'm not good enough, I'll never do it."
Instead of panic, he stopped.
He ended this whole process of thinking and did something quite new.
He looked at the sky, and he said, "Excuse me, but you can't see I'm driving?"
"Do I seem to be able to write a song here, right now?
If you really want to exist, come back to a more opportun moment when I'm going to take care of you.
Otherwise, you're going to bother somebody else today.
I'll be annoyed by Leonard Cohen."
Her entire way of working has changed in the end.
Not his piece, which was often as dark as before.
But the process, yes. And the anguish around him dropped off when he pulled out the genius of his being, where he would only take turns, to release him where he came from, and he understood that it didn't have to be this broken and crazy thing.
It could be a strange and wonderful collaboration, a kind of conversation between Tom and this weird outside thing that wasn't quite Tom.
When I heard this story, it changed my way of working, and saved me once.
This idea saved me while I was writing "Mange, Prie, Aime," and I had one of those accessing despair that we all have when we work on something that doesn't take and begin to think that it's going to be a disaster, that it's going to be the worst book ever written.
Not just bad: the worst book ever written.
I started to think that I should let go.
Then I remembered Tom talking to the sky, and I tried.
I looked up at the manuscript and talked to my comments at a blank corner of the room.
I said to the high voice, "So, something, we all know that if this book isn't great, it's not entirely my fault, right?
Because you can see I put my whole heart into it, I give everything I have.
So if you want it to be better, you just point and do your part of the market.
OK. But if you don't do it, you know what, so many shots.
I'm going to keep writing because that's my job.
And I'd like to take a good note that I've done my work today."
Because at the end of the day, it comes back centuries ago in the deserts of North Africa, people would gather at night for sacred dances and music that would last hours, until dawn.
They were still gorgeous, because dancers were professional and they were great.
But sometimes, very rarely, something happened, and one of these artists reached transcendance.
I know you know what I'm talking about, because you've all seen, at some point, a show like this.
It's as though time stopped, and as though the dancer crossed a threshold and did nothing but it's already done 1,000 nights before, except that it's all in place.
And all of a sudden, it doesn't seem like a simple human being.
It's lit up from within, and from below, and everything is lit up and down by divinity.
When that happened, at the time, people knew what it was and called it by their name.
They would join their hands and paint, "Allah, Allah, God, God, God."
That's God, you know.
Little curious historical note when the Maures invaded southern Spain, they took that custom and the prononciation changed over the centuries of "Allah, Allah, Allah," "Ole, ole, ole," which we still hear in the Corridas and the flamescos.
In Spain, when an artist does an impossible and magical thing, "Allah, ole, ole, Allah, wonderful, bravo." It's incomprehensible, it's there: a glimpse of God.
Which is great, because we need it.
But the hard part comes the next morning, for the dancer himself, when he wakes up, he realizes we're on Tuesday, 11 o'clock, and he doesn't reflect God anymore.
It's just an aging fatal who's struggling with his knees, maybe he's never going to get to that height.
And perhaps nobody will psalmodie the name of God when he will turn to himself, and what is he left to do with his life?
It's hard.
This is one of the most difficult reconciles to make for a creator.
But all this anxiety is perhaps not necessary if you've never thought, from the very beginning, that the most extraordinary aspects of it have come from yourself.
If we simply believe that they've been loaned by an unimaginable source for an extraordinary amount of life to go through, once finished, to someone else.
If we think about it that way, everything changes.
I started thinking like this, and I saw things like this in the last few months while I was working on this book that's about to be published soon, as a number of waiting, dangerous and scary ways, of my monstrous success.
And what I have to keep telling me when I'm stroking too much about this is: Don't be afraid.
Don't be afraid.
Do your work.
Keep expressing yourself to do whatever you need, whatever it is.
If your work is dancing, dancing.
If the divine and absurd genius that comes with you decides to put together wonders, for a moment through your efforts, then "Olele!"
Otherwise, dancing anyway.
And "Ole!" for you, what happens.
I believe it and I think we have to teach it.
"Ole!" for you, whatever happens, just for having human love and determination to keep expressing you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Whoa!
Al Gore has the latest climate trends.
At TED 2009, Al Gore presents some slides updated from the latest data showing that the climate change evolution is even worse than the climate projections of scientists used to see, also providing his position, no call, to the clean food.
Last year, I showed you these two slides that showed that the Arctic Circle, which for the past three million years had the size of the United States without Alaska, which for the last three million years had the size of the United States without Alaska, had declined 40 percent.
But this tends to cause the problem because you can't see the thickness of the ice.
You can see the arctic ice caps like the heart of the global climate system, and you can see the arctic ice caps like the heart of the global climate system.
It extends into winter and contracts in summer.
The next slide I'm going to show you is an accelerated view of what's happened in the last 25 years.
The eternal ice is in red.
As you can see, they stretch in blue. These are the winter ices. And they get in summer. These are the winter ices. And they get in summer.
The so-called eternal ice, five years or so, looks almost like blood flowing from a body, looks almost like blood coming from a body.
In 25 years we've gone from this to this.
This poses a problem because global warming is affecting the pargisol, which is around the Arctic Ocean, where there's a huge amount of frozen carbon, and when it's frozen, it's transformed into methane by microbes.
The total amount of greenhouse pollution in the atmosphere could double if we had just triggered the diffusion of that gas.
Already, in some deep Alaskan lakes, methane comes out of boiling water.
The professor Katey Walter at the University of Alaska went with a team on one of these lakes this winter.
Whoa!
Al Gore: She's okay, maybe not our case.
Because this huge radiator heats Greenland by the north.
This is a river in the wild.
But volumes are much more important than in the past.
This is the Kangerlussuaq river in southern Greenland.
If you want to see how sea level rises because of the melting of land ice, this is where or the river flows into the sea.
The flow is very fast up.
On the other side of the planet, Antarctica is the largest number of ice on Earth.
Last month, scientists announced that the continent is now losing ice, and last month, scientists announced that the continent is now losing ice.
The Eastern region of Antarctica, hunting on underwater islands, is particularly affected. The western region of Antarctica, hunting on underwater islands, is particularly affected.
The continent is six meters of potential increases in sea levels, like Greenland.
In the Himalayas, the third largest amount of ice, you can now see altitude lakes, which were still glaciers a few years ago.
Forty percent of the world's population is taking half its fresh water out of the ice cream, 40 percent of the world's population is taking half its fresh water out of the ice cream.
In the Andes, this glacier is the water source of this city, and in the Andes, this glacier is the water source of this city.
The flow has increased.
It's as much wasted drinking water.
In California, the snow pack of the Sierras has declined 40 percent, and in California, the snow pack of the Sierras has declined 40 percent.
This affects tanks.
And the predictions, as you've seen, are disturbing.
This global storm has caused a dramatic rise in the number of fires, and this global storm has caused a dramatic rise in the number of fires.
At the global level, these disasters are growing at an absolutely incredible rate, and at the global level, these disasters are growing at an absolutely incredible rate. We've never seen this.
Four times more in the last 30 years than in the last 75 years.
It's absolutely impossible to continue on that trend.
If you put it back in context, you can see what that trend looks like.
Over the past five years, we've been rejected in the atmosphere 70 million tons of CO2 every 24 hours -- 25 million tons in the ocean every day.
Look at the Eastern Pacific Ocean from Americas to the west, and both sides of the Indian subcontinent, the oxygen depletion is dramatic.
The biggest cause of global warming, deforestation, 20 percent of it, is burning fossil fuels.
The oil is problematic, but the coal is still more.
The United States is one of the two largest emitters of CO2 with China.
And they're projecting to build more coal-fired plants.
But we're starting to see a trend shift.
These are the power plants that have been abandoned over the last few years and some green replacement solutions.
However, there is a political struggle in our country.
And coal and oil industries have spent 250 million dollars in the last year in civil growth to promote clean coal, which is a nice example of oxymore.
This image reminded me of something.
In Noel, in my natal Tennessee, three billion liters of coal-fired mud were covered.
You've probably heard about it.
This is the second most important water-based pollution in the United States.
It happened around Christmas.
This is one of the Christmas commercials of the coal industry.
Frosty the coal is a happy man.
It's plentiful here in America, and it's helping our economy grow.
Correal is more and more clean.
It's cheap and too cute, and it allows the workers to save.
This is the source of much of the coal in Virginia.
The most exploitant of the mountaintop minage is the leader of massy coal.
Don Blakenship: I'm going to be very clear. Al Gore, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, they don't know what they're talking about.
Al Gore: The Alliance for Climate Protection has launched two campaigns.
Here's one, finally, a piece.
Actor: We at CHARBONergie, we think climate change is a real danger for our industry.
That's why we decided to spend massive amounts on a communication campaign to say, and to bride, the truth about coal.
The fact is that coal, it's not dirty.
We say coal is clean and it even smells good.
So don't worry about climate change.
Let's take care of it.
Actor: clean coal, we're just talking about that.
So let's go to this top coal plant.
Incredible! The machines are pretty noisy.
But this is the clean coal technology that wants this.
And while coal is one of the major causes of global warming, this wonderful coal-fire technology that you see here changes everything.
Look carefully. This is the current coal technology.
And finally, a positive proposition that goes into the sense of our economic interests and finally, a positive proposition that goes into the sense of our economic interests and national security.
America is faced with several crises: economics, national security, global warming.
The wire that connects them is our dependence on carbon emitters, like coal and oil that we import.
But there's a bold solution for us to get out of it.
Live 100 percent clean electricity in America by 10 years.
A plan to challenge America to work, to promote the security of the country and to fight global warming.
In a word, a solution to the height of our problems.
Let's give a new energy to America. Check it out.
That's the last one.
We need to give new energy to America.
One of the quickest ways is to remove our dependence on fossil fuels destroying our planet.
The future is there. Wind, sun, new electric grid.
New investments to create well-funded jobs.
Let's give new energy to America. It's time to go to action.
There's an old African proverb that says, "If you want to go quick, move by yourself.
If you want to go far, go ahead."
We need to go far and fast.
Thank you very much.
David Merrill presents the Siftables, the cubes of play that think.
Now, in the third cycle of MIT, David Merrill presents the Siftable, computerized squares of the size of a cookie that you can stack and mix with your hands. These future toys can do math, play music, and also talk to their peers. Is this the next stage of practical learning?
I'm going to start by asking you to remember when you were a kid, and you played with cubes.
While you were discovering how to reach out and grab them, lift them and move them, you were actually beginning to think and solve problems by understanding and manipulating relationships in space.
Space reasoning is deeply linked to how we understand a lot of the world around us.
So as a computer scientist, inspired by this use of our interactions with physical objects, with the help of my Patty advice, and from my collaborator Jeevan Kalanithi, I began to wonder -- what would happen if to use a computer, instead of having this mouse cursor that's using a digital finger walking around a flat office, you could take both hands and physically grab the information, to shape the way you want it?
So this question was so fascinating that we decided to study the answer by making the Siftable.
So to sum up, a siftable is an interactive computer about the size of a cookie.
You can move them by hand, they can recognize each other, they can feel their movement, and they're equipped with a screen and a wireless radio.
More importantly, they're physical objects, so just like the cubes, you can just move them by holding the arm and taking them by hand.
And siftables are an example of a new ecosystem of tools to manipulate digital information.
As these tools become increasingly physical, more aware of their movement, of the presence of others, and aware of the nuances in how we move them, we can start to study new kinds of fun interactions.
So I'm going to start with just a few simple examples.
This simulator is configured to show the video, and if I tilt it in one direction, it will advance the video in that sense, if I tilt it in the other direction the video will come back.
And these interactive portraits are aware of the presence of others.
So if I put them next to each other, they're interested in it.
If they find each other's circled, they realize each other too, and they can become a little bit agitated.
They can also feel their movement and their pitch.
We started to realize that one of the interesting implications of interaction was that you could use everyday gestures with data, like pouring a color in the same way that you pour a liquid.
So in this case, we have three configures in pots of paint, and I can use them to pour colors in the middle, where they mix.
If you put too much of it, you can take a little bit of it off.
It also opens up beautiful opportunities in terms of education, such as languages, math and logic games, where we want to give people the opportunity to do trials quick, and see the results immediately.
So here I am -- this is a Fibonacci number I do with a simple equation program.
Here we have a letter game that's sort of a mixture of the Scrabble and the Boggle.
Basically, every turn of a letter is randomized on every candidate, and as you try to make words, it checks into a dictionary.
Then, after 30 seconds, it mixes again, and we have a new set of letters and new possibilities to explore.
Thank you.
These are kids who came to the Media Lab for a school trip, and I managed to try them, under the camera's eye.
They really loved it.
Also, one of the interesting things about this kind of application is that you don't have to give people lots of instruction.
All we have to say is, "Do words," and they know exactly what to do.
Here's another group of people trying to do it.
This is our youngest testeur on the bottom right.
In fact, all they were interested in was stacking the whistles.
It was just cubes for him.
There's an interactive cartoon application.
We wanted to build a learning tool for those who learn language.
Well, here's Felix.
He can bring new characters into the stage, just by lifting the whistles by putting this character in.
Here he's raising the Sun.
The Sun rises.
He's added a tractor to the stage.
The orange tractor.
Good job! Yeah!
So by listening to the siftables and putting them next to each other, they can actually interact with the characters.
and invent his own story.
Hi there.
It's a story with an open end to choose the denomination.
Fake up, the cat.
The last example I have time to show you today is a live musical and performance tool that we've built recently, in which the smarts play the role of sounds like the main voice, the low and the battery.
Each one of them has four variations, one can choose the one we want to use.
And we can integrate these sounds into a sequence that we can assemble within the design we want.
And it's just coveted the whistle of the whistle against a sequence.
There are effects that you can control in direct, like reverberation and filter.
We tie it to a particular sound, and then we bow to it.
In addition, there are general effects like tempo and volume that apply to all of the sequence.
Let's take a look.
We're going to start by putting a main voice into two siftable sequences, we're going to put them next, we're going to put the next one with a little bit more main voices.
There's a lower line there.
Now I'm going to add percussion.
And now I'm going to hook up the battery filter, so I can control direct effects.
I can speed up the whole sequence by putting the tempo in one way or another.
And now I'm going to attach the filter to the lower, to more expressivity.
I can rearrange the sequence during the reading.
So I don't need to plan it in advance, but I can improvise, I can stretch it or shortcut it in the middle.
And finally, I can slowly lower the volume of the sequence using the volume-sizeable, inclinated on the left.
Thank you.
So, as you can see, my passion is to create new interfaces between humans and computers that are better at how our brains work and how our bodies work.
Today I've had time to show you a point about this new design space, and some of the possibilities that we're looking for to take out of the lab.
The last thought I want to leave you with is that this new generation of tools are coming up to interact with digital media, which will bring information to our world in our own way.
Thank you very much.
I'm looking forward to talking to all of you.
Daniel Kahneman: The puzzle of experience and memory.
Throughout examples, from vacations to coloscopy, Daniel Kahneman, Nobel laureates and precursors to behavioral economics, explains how our experience and memory perceive happiness differently. These new perspectives have significant repercussions on economic science, public policy, but also on our own conscience of ourselves.
Today, everyone speaks about happiness.
There was somebody who wanted to count the number of books published over the last five years, and the title had "bonheur," and he gave up at the end of the 40th, and there were many more.
The theme of happiness becomes fashion amongst researchers.
There are lots of techniques of happiness coaching.
Everyone wants to make other people happier.
But despite the incalculable number of works, there are cognitive biases that prevent a correct view of happiness.
My talk today will be mainly about these cognitive biases.
We're going to look at the bugs that think about their own happiness, but also the scholars who think about happiness, because, in the end, we're all equally blinded to each other.
The first trap is the rejection of complexity.
This comes from the fact that the word "black" is simply no longer a useful word, because we use it for too much.
In my view, we may turn it into a particular meaning, but ultimately it's a path to give up and we're going to have to embrace the more complex notion of what well-being is.
Second cognitive bias is the confusion between experience and memory: it's just the difference between being happy in your life and being happy in your life, or with your life.
And these two concepts are very different, and they're mixed up in the notion of the bean.
The third is focus, and it's this unfortunate phenomenon that allows us to consider any event that affects our well-being without deforming its importance.
I mean, that's a real cognitive trap.
It's impossible to perceive it properly.
I'm going to take the example now of a person who's been through after one of my talks.
He said he had listened to a symphony, and she was fabulous, and at the end of the reading, there was a horrible bow.
And he added, quite moved, that it ruined all the experience.
No!
These are the memories of the experience that had been spoiled.
He had this experience.
He had had 20 minutes of fantastic music.
They didn't have any value anymore, because what was left of them was a memory, and the memory was damn, and that memory was all that was left.
It teaches us, at the bottom, that we can only perceive ourselves and others in two very distinct entities.
There's a self that experiences, which lives in the present and knows the present, and it's able to revive the past, but essentially what it has is the present.
This is the experiment that the doctor gets near -- you know, when the doctor says, "Is that bad about you?"
And then there's the self that remembers, and that's the one that holds the accounts, and saves the story of our life, and that's the one that the doctor gets up and says, "How did you feel in the last few days?"
Or, "How did your living in Albania?" or something like that.
These two entities are very different, the self of experience and the self of memory and confuse them is one of the sources of the problem in the notion of happiness.
The self of memory is a storyteller.
And it really starts with an elemental reflex in our memory -- it happens right away.
You don't just tell stories, when you start telling a story.
This is our memory that tells us stories, in fact, what we hold out of our experience is a story.
And let me start with an example.
This is from an old study.
Real patients have painful surgery.
I'm not going to go into the details. It's no longer painful now, but it was at the time of this study in the '90s.
They were asked to describe their pain every 60 seconds.
This is the recording.
Two patients.
The question is, "Which one suffered the most?"
It's a very simple question.
Clearly the patient B suffered more.
His coloscopy lasted longer, and for every minute of suffering for the patient A, B was also suffering, but even more.
But here's a second question: "How much do these patients think they've suffered?"
And here's a surprise: The patient A has a far worse memory of coloscopy than the patient B.
The unfolding of coloscopies was different, a very important point in these stories is how they end -- and none of these experiments were nice or motivating -- but one of them can distinguish.
But one of them is obviously worse than the other.
And the worst is where pain hits a peak at the end.
It's a dirty story.
How do we know this?
Because we asked these people, right after their coloscopy, and then long after, "Well, how hard was it?"
And A had worse memories than B.
In fact, it's a direct conflict between the self of experience and the self of memory.
From the standpoint of the experience, clearly B went through a worse time.
Now, what we could have done with the patient A, and, in fact, we did medical trials, and it's done, and it works, we could have run the patient A's coloscopy just by keeping the tube inside, without getting rid of it too much.
It's got to get the patient to suffer, but just a little bit, and much less than before.
And if you do that for a few minutes, you'll get an aggregator for the experience of the patient A's "My experience," and a nice improvement for the patient "My memory," because you've now given the patient A a better story about what he's been through.
What defines a story?
And it's true stories that are provided to us by our memory, as stories that we make.
What defines a story is the changes, the important moments and the end.
The final process is very, very significant, and in this example, the end determines everything.
So the "me of experience" lives its life in continuity.
He closes the experiments, one after another.
And if you ask what happens at those moments.
The answer is quite straightforward.
They're lost forever.
I mean, most of the moments of our lives -- and I've measured -- the psychological present is about three seconds.
Which means, in fact, that there are about 600 million in a lifetime.
In a month, it's about 600,000.
Most of them don't leave any trails.
Most of them are completely ignored by our memory.
But still, sometimes you realize that they should count, that what happens during those moments of experience is our life.
This is the limited resource that we use in our life on Earth.
And the way to use it seems appropriate, but it's not the story that our memory keeps.
In the end, we have our memory and our experience, and they're really quite different.
The biggest difference among them is the perception of time.
From your experience point of view, if you're on vacation, and the second week is as good as the first week, then those two weeks of vacation will be twice better than one week.
That's not the way it happens for our memory.
For him, a two-week vacation, it'll be just better than a week because no memory is added.
You didn't change history.
From this angle, time is actually the capital variable that distinguishes our "meer memory" from our experience.
Time has very little impact on this story.
And the "meer of memory" is much more than memorizing and telling stories.
In fact, he makes decisions because, if you have a patient who has been undergoing, let's say, two coloscopies with two different surgeons who have to decide which one to choose, and the one he chooses is the one whose memories are the least bad, is this surgeon who's going to pick up.
"My experience" doesn't have his word to say in that choice.
In fact, we don't choose between experiments.
We choose between memories of these experiments.
And even when we think about the future, we usually don't think about it in terms of experiments.
We think about our future by evoking memories.
You can think of it just as a tyranny of "meer of memory" and represent the "meer of memory" as forcing the "meer of experience" through experiences that the "meer of experience" doesn't ask.
I feel like when you're on holiday it's very common, that when you're on vacation, in a way, to the orders of our memory.
And I think it's pretty hard to justify.
Clearly, how much do we feed our memories?
This is one of the explanations that is advanced to the domination of our memory.
And it makes me think of vacations that we've been on in Antarctica a few years ago, which have been the best vacation I've ever had, and I think about it quite often, as compared to the number of times I think of.
On my other vacation. I've probably consumed my memory of this three-week stay, during, I would say, about 25 minutes for four years.
After, if I had opened up the album with 600 photos, I would have spent an extra hour.
It lasted three weeks, and in the end it's only one and a half hour at the most.
It sounds disproportionate.
It's possible that I'm not a representative of the average, in this I have little taste of the consumption of my memories, but even if you have more than me, a fundamental question arises.
Why do we give so much weight to our memories, as opposed to the one we give to our experiences?
I want you to think about a brain experience.
Imagine that at your next holiday, at the end of this vacation, all your pictures are being destroyed, and you swallow a tablet that makes you amnesic so you don't remember anything.
By the time, would you choose the same kind of vacation?
And if you made another choice, there would be a conflict between your two entities, and you have to think about how to deal with that conflict, and it's really not obvious, because if you think about it in terms of time, you'll have an answer.
And if you think in terms of memories, you might have another answer.
Why do we choose the holidays that we're going to go, it's a problem that's going to face us with a choice between the two "me."
The two "me" give us two notions of happiness.
There are really two concepts of happiness that apply to each other.
So we wonder: how happy is the experience of me?
How happy are those moments in the life of the experience?
They're all; the happiness of the moment is a fairly complex process.
What are the emotions that you can quantify?
By that, now we have a clearer idea of what the happiness of the experience is in time.
If you think about the happiness of "My memories," that's a whole other story.
It has nothing to do with having a happy life.
But how we're satisfied, or happy, in thinking about our lives.
Let's not look very different.
What doesn't distinguish both of these notions is the point of grading the study of happiness, and I study the crowd of well-being students, who have failed the study of happiness for a long time, precisely in this way.
The distinction between the happiness of our experience and the satisfaction of our memory has only been realized very recently, and now there are projects to measure the two apart: the Gallup Organization did a survey with 500,000 people asking them what they thought about their lives and their experiences.
And there were other things in that sense.
In the last few years, we started learning about the happiness of the two "me."
To me, the main lesson we learned is that these two entities are very different.
You can see that a person is happy with their life, but it doesn't tell you much about the degree of happiness that she lives with, and vice versa.
Just to give you a sense of the correlation, the correlation is about five.
It's as if you met someone who tells you his father is two meters. What can you say about the size of this person?
Well, you have an indication, but there's a high degree of uncertainty.
You have so much uncertainty.
If I tell you that a person who's given his life eight out of 10, you'll have a lot of uncertainty to estimate the level of happiness of the experience.
So the correlation is weak.
We know a little bit about what controls happiness satisfaction.
We know that money has an important place, the goals also.
We know happiness is mostly about the people we enjoy, the time we spend with it.
There are other pleasures, but that domine thing.
So if you want to maximize the happiness of both of me, you're going to end up doing very different things.
The point of my talk is that we really shouldn't think about happiness as a substitute for well-being.
It's two very different notions.
To make a long story short, another reason that prevents us from having the clear ideas about happiness is that we don't care about the same things when we think about life or when we live it.
If you ask the simple question of how happy the people in California are, you're not going to have a correct answer.
When you ask that question, you think people have to be happier in California than, say, Ohio.
And the thing is, when you think about life in California, you think of the contrast between California and other places, and the contrast, let's say, is in the climate.
Well, it turns out the climate isn't very important for the experience "meaning" anymore than for the thought "meaning" and that decides whether people are happy.
But, you know, since it's the word that I'm thinking about, you might decide -- in order to get some moving to California.
It would be interesting to follow those who move to California, hoping to be happier.
In fact, their experience "don't be happier."
We're all aware of it.
But one thing will happen: they will be convinced that they will be happier, because when they rethink it, they will turn the wrong time in Ohio.
And they'd think they'd made the right decision.
It's very hard to assess the well-being. I hope I've shown you how difficult this is.
Thank you.
Thank you. I have a question for you.
Thank you very much.
A few weeks ago, we spoke to the phone, and they told me that the Gallup poll provided some pretty interesting results.
Can you tell us more now that you have a little bit of time left?
Of course.
The most significant outcome, I think, given this poll, is a number, which we didn't expect to find.
We found that about the happiness of the experience.
When we looked at how happiness varies based on income.
And it turns out that below 60,000 dollars a year, for Americans, and it was a very important sample, around 600,000, it's a very representative sample, below 2,000 dollars a year.
60,000.
60,000.
60,000 dollars a year, people are unhappy, and less they make more miserable.
On top, the happiness line is absolutely flat.
Honestly, I've never seen a line that's so flat.
You can clearly see that money doesn't buy you happy experiences, but you'll definitely buy the misery, and you can quantify the misery of a very specific college.
For the other entity, the "me of memory," it's a whole other story.
The more money you make, the more content you are.
It doesn't work for emotions.
Danny, the U.S. official is entirely based on life, freedom and pursuit of happiness.
If we give credit to this research, they look like they're going to counter-cour whatever we believe, for example, tax and so on.
Is there any chance that the leaders, that the country, together, take such a discovery seriously and implement policy based on it?
I think the role of research on happiness is recognized in public policy.
This recognition is slow in the United States, it's certain, but it's happening in England, and it's happening in other countries.
People recognize that they have to take into account happiness when they build public policy.
It's going to take a long time, we're going to argue, if we want to do experiments to study happiness, or whether we want studies of life evaluation, we need to start this debate rapidly, how to improve happiness can come from different ways in which we can think, and if you think about the "make of me" or the "make of experience."
It's going to influence policy decisions, I believe, in the years that come.
In the U.S., effort is being committed to measuring people's experience happiness.
This will be, I think, in 10 or 20 years, includes national statistics.
Well, it taught me that this problem will be, or should be at least, the most interesting political debate to follow in the next few years.
Thank you very much for the invention of behavioral economics.
Thank you, Daniel Kahneman.
Aimee Mullins: The chance of adversity.
The dictionary can be called "handicap" to word "free" and "free," but the writhing waiter Aimee Mullins has decided to redefine the term, by challenging these associations, it shows how adversity -- in his case, being born without a studia -- actually opens the door to the human potential.
I'd like to share with you a discovery that I made a few months ago while I was writing an article for Wired Italy.
I always have my hand-written word dictionaries when I write, but I'd already done reviewing the article and realized that I'd never, in my life, looked at the word "handicap" to see what I would find.
Let me read you the foyer.
"Handicament," adjectif: "infirme, impotent, useless, accidental, broken, mutilated, injured, broken, caffeled, caffeled, caffeled, exhausted, effaibli, powerless, casted, paralyzed, senilated, decreed, on the flanc, repressed, fisssured, eliminated; too hurt, useless and weak.
healthy, strong, capable."
I read this high voice to a friend and at the beginning I was laughing, it was so grotesque, but I just, I had just passed away, and my voice broke, and I had to stop to hold myself back to the emotional shock and the impact that those words were triggering.
You know, of course, that's my old dictionary in law.
I'm thinking it must be an old printing date, OK.
But in fact, the printing date was in the early '80s, as I had to start primary school and form an understanding of myself out of family cell and related to other children and the world around me.
And needless to say, thank God I didn't use that dictionary at the time.
I mean, after that entry, it appears that I was born in a world that perceved people like me absolutely nothing for them, while actually, today, I'm celebrated for the opportunities and adventures that my life has brought to me.
So I went right away to look in the 2009 edition and expect me to find a notable revision.
This is the actual version of that entry.
Unfortunately, it's not much better.
I find the last two words in "Antonymous near" particularly disturbing, "ether" and "sain."
So it's not just a story of words.
That's what we think about people when we name them with these words.
These are the values behind the words, and how we build these values.
Our language influences our thinking and how we see the world and how we see others.
In fact, many of the ancient societies, including the Greeks and the Romans, believed that speaking of oralement was very powerful, because saying the thing loudly made it exist.
So what reality do we want to make up, a limited person, or a person who has capabilities?
By making something as simple as nommer a person, a child, we could choking and numb their power.
Doesn't we want to open doors anymore?
One of those people who opened my doorbells was my pediatrician at Wilmington Institute in Delaware.
His name is Dr. Pizzutillo.
An Italo-American, whose name, apparently, was too difficult to say for most Americans, so he became a Dr. P.
And Dr. P always wore very colorful butterflies knots and had the most perfect temperament to work with children.
I loved it almost all the time that I spent in that hospital, except for my pediatric sessions.
I had to do what seemed to be an interminable repetition of exercise with these big rubber bands -- different colors -- you know, to help build my legs' muscles.
And I hated these rubber bands more than anything.
I hated them, I insulted them. I hated them.
And you know, I was already negotiating five years with Dr. P to try not to do these exercises, obviously not successfully.
And one day he came to my session -- exhaustive, unsurprising sessions -- and he said, "Wow. Aimee, you're really a strong, powerful little girl, I think you're going to break one of these rubber bands.
When you break it, I'll give you a hundred dollars."
Of course, it was just a stratagème of Dr. Pumpty to do these exercises that I didn't want to do in the perspective of becoming the five-year-old girl on the floor, but what he really did for me was to transform a terrible, everyday event into a new and promising experience.
And I wonder today, how much his vision, and the fact that he told me a strong, powerful little girl, have drawn my own vision of myself far into the future, as a strong, powerful and athletic person.
This is an example of how adults, in a position of power, can lift the power of a child.
But in the precedent examples of these synonymous dictionaries, our language doesn't allow us to evolve in the reality that we all want, the possibility for an individual to consider themselves capable.
Our language has not followed the changes in our society, many of which have been brought by technology.
Certainly, from a medical perspective, my legs, laser surgery for visual impairment, titanium's knee and hip replacement for aging bodies that allow people to fully grow their potential, and move beyond the bounds that nature has imposed them without talking about social networking platforms, allow people to identify themselves, to claim their own description of themselves, so that they can join the world's groups of choice.
So, maybe technology reveals us more clearly now what's always been: that everybody has something that is rare and powerful to offer to our society, and that human adaptation is our greatest asset.
Human ability to adapt, it's interesting, because people have always wanted to talk to me about defeating adversity, and I'm going to make a confession.
This sentence has never appealed to me, and I'm always embarrassed when I get asked questions about this topic, and I think I'm beginning to understand why.
What underlies this sentence about defeating adversity is the idea that success, or happiness, consists of emerging from the other side of a stimulating experience by letting and without trace of experience, as though my success in life had come from an ability to avoid and to move to the wider set of presumed squirrels of a life with prosthetics, or what other people perceive as my disability.
But in fact, we're changed. We're marked, of course, by a challenge, whether it's physically, emotionally, or both.
And I want to say that's a good thing.
Adversity is not an obstacle that we have to get around to take the course of our lives.
It's part of our life.
And I tend to think of it as my shadow.
Sometimes I see it big, sometimes small, but it's still with me.
And of course, I'm not trying here to reduce the impact, the weight, the test of a person.
There's adversity and challenge in life, and it's all very real and connected to every person, but the question isn't whether you're going to or not meet adversity, but how you're going to meet it.
So our responsibility is not just to protect the adversity that we love, but to prepare for them to be high.
And we don't make our kids service when we make them feel they're not equipped to fit in.
There's a big difference and difference between the objective medical fact that I'm amputated and the subjective social opinion of whether or not I'm disabled.
And really, the only real and repeated disability that I had to deal with is that the world always thinks that I can match those definitions.
In our desire to protect the ones we like by giving them the cold, cold truth about their medical pronostics, or, in fact, a pronostic about the quality of life they can wait for, we have to make sure we don't put the first brick of a wall that's really going to handicap a person.
Maybe the existing model, to just look at what's broken inside of you and how we're going to fix it, turns out to be more disabled for the individual than the pathology itself.
If we don't take the person all of them, we don't grateful for their potential, we create another disease in addition to any natural test that they already have.
We really value people for our community.
So we need to see beyond the pathology and the range of human abilities.
And, more importantly, there's a partnership between these perceived challenges and the best of our creative ability.
It's not about minimize, or nier, these painful times like something to avoid or to defuse, but rather find the hidden opportunities in adversity.
So maybe the idea that I want to spread is, not so much to defeat the adversity, that to open up to her, to surround her, to fight with her, to use a term of wound, maybe even dance with her.
And, perhaps, if we see adversity as a natural, regular and useful thing, its presence is less a burden on us.
This year was celebrated on the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin, and it was 150 years ago, when he was writing about evolution, that Darwin illustrated, I think, a truth about human character.
To paraphrase, it's not the strongest species that survives, not the smartest species, it's the most capable of adapting to change.
The conflict is the genesis of creation.
From the work of Darwin, among others, we can recognize that the human ability to survive and thrive is driven by the struggle of the human spirit, through conflict, towards transformation.
So, again, transformation, adaptation, are the greatest human gift.
And, maybe, as long as we haven't tested, we don't know what we're made of.
Maybe that's what adversity offers us, a sense of ourselves, a sense of our own power.
So we can make a gift.
We can think of adversity as something more than just difficult times.
Maybe we can see it as a change.
Adversity is just a change that we haven't yet adapted to.
I think the biggest adversity we've created for ourselves is the idea of normality.
So, who's normal?
There's no normal.
There's the common. There's the typical. There's no normal.
And you would like to meet this poor man if she existed?
I don't think so.
If we can change this paradigm, from the idea of successing normality, the possibility, or the power, to be even a little bit more dangerous, we can unleash the power of so many other children, and invite them to exploit their rare and precious talents in the community.
Anthropologists tell us that the only thing we have, as humans, is always asking the members of our communities, is to be useful, to be able to contribute.
We have proof that Neanderthals, 60,000 years ago, were wearing their elders and those who were severely wounded, and perhaps, because the experience of a life to survive, in those people, was promoting the value for the community: they didn't see these people as broken and useless: they saw them as rare and valuable.
A few years ago, I was in a market in the town where I grew up in this red region in the northern part of Eastern Pennsylvania, and I stood over a tomato wood.
It was summer. I was wearing a short one.
I hear this guy, his voice behind me says, "Tiens, if it's not Aimee Mullins."
And I go back, and there's this older gentleman. I have no idea who he is.
And I said, "Pardon, sir, we know? I don't remember you."
He said, "Well, you can't remember having met me.
I mean, when we met, I'd take you out of your mother's belly."
Oh, that guy.
And, of course, I tilted.
This gentleman was Dr. Kean, a man I had only known through my mother's stories on that day, because, of course, I had two weeks behind my birth day.
And so my mother's prenatal physician was on holiday, and the man who introduced me to the world was a total stranger for my parents.
And, like I was born without a sku, and I had my feet turned inside, and a few toes on that foot, and a few toes on that foot, he had to be the wearer, that foreigner had to be the wearer of the bad news.
He said, "I had to give this pronostic to your parents that you would never walk, and you would never have this kind of mobility that other kids have or any kind of independence in life, and you've made a liar from me that day."
What's amazing is he said that he's put aside all the press shoots throughout my childhood, whether it's when I won the spelling competition in CE1, worked with the scout girls, you know, the Helloween parade won my scholarship to the faculty, or any athletic victory, and he's using that, and he's teaching the internal students, high school medical students at Hahnemann and Hershey.
And he called this part of the course, the X factor, the potential of the human will.
No pronostic can represent how powerful it can be in someone's quality of life.
And Dr. Kean kept telling me, he said, "Before my experience, less than repeating the opposite, and having the minimum amount of support, if you let that happen, a successful child."
You see, Dr. Kean has changed his way of thinking.
He realized that there is a difference between the medical condition and what a person can do with it.
And my thinking has changed over time, in the sense that, if you asked me about 15 years ago, whether I would have traded my prosthetics against flesh and bone legs, I wouldn't have hesitated for a second.
At that time I was looking at this kind of normality.
If you ask me today, I'm not sure anymore.
And it was through the experiments I had with them, not through the experience that I had with them.
And maybe that change in me has happened because I've been exposed to more people who have opened up gates to me than people who have laid me on a lid and hugged me.
See, all you need is a person showing you the epiphany of your own power, and you're gone.
If you can give someone the key to their own power, the human mind is so receptive, if you can do that and open someone's door in a critical moment, you can educate them in the best sense.
You teach them to open doors.
In fact, the exact meaning of the word education comes from the root "educe."
It means producing what's inside of it, revealing the potential.
So what potential do we want to reveal?
One study was done in the 1960s in Britain when they went from primary school to secondary school.
It's called stream trials. It's called "pistage" here in the United States.
It's about separating students from note A, B, C, D, etc.
And the A students have the most difficult program, the best teachers, etc.
So, they took, over a three-month period, A students, gave them A, told them they were A, they were smart.
And at the end of the three months, they had A.D. results.
And, of course, the naive side, the flip side of this study, is that they took the A students and told them they were level A.
And that's what happened at the end of those three months.
Those who were in the corner, in school, in addition to those who gave up.
One key thing about this case study is that teachers were also bad.
Teachers didn't know we had an exchange.
They were just told these are the A students, these are the D students.
And that's how they started teaching them and treating them.
So, I think the only real infirmity is a mind that's crushed, a mind that's crushed doesn't have hope.
He doesn't see beauty.
It's no longer natural curiosity, childy and our innate ability to imagine.
If instead, you can support a human mind to hold hope, to see beauty in itself and in others, whether it's curious and imaginative, then we use our power to do good.
When a mind has these qualities, we are able to create new realities and new ways of being.
I'd like to leave you with a poem by a Persian poet of the last century called Hafiz who told me my friend Jacques Dembois.
And the poem is called "The God who only knows four words."
"Every child has known God, not the God of the name, not the God of the 'don't do it, but the God who only knows four words and repeats them over and over again, who says, 'Come to dance with me.
Thank you.
Eric Mead: The Placebo magic.
Switting pills, injections of nothing: studies show, more often than you might think, that placebos really work. At TEDMED, the magician Eric Mead does a trick to prove that even when you know something's not real, your reaction can be as powerful as it was. Now, this conference is not recommended for those who don't support blood vision or needles.
For a while, I've been interested in the placebo effect, which may sound weird to a magician as a subject of predilection, unless you look at the thing like me, either "What a wrong thing can be so credible that it becomes something true."
In other words, sugar pills have measurable effects in some types of studies, the placebo effect, just because the person thinks what happens to them is a pharmaceutical effect.
For pain management, for example, if they believe it hard enough, there is a measurable effect in their bodies called the placebo effect.
Something actually becomes something real through somebody's perception.
So, to understand this, I'm going to show you something basic, a very simple magic trick.
I'm going to show you how this works. This is a trick that has been in all the magic books for children in the '50s.
I learned it from the Cub Scout Magic in the '70s.
I'm going to do it to you and then explain it to you.
I'll explain why I explained it to you.
This is what happens.
The knife, which you can examine; my hand, which you can examine.
I'm just going to hold the knife in my fist like this.
I retrouse my sleeve.
To make sure there's nothing in my sleeves, I'm just going to shake my wrist here.
As you can see, no time anything can happen, as long as I shake nothing can come out of my sleeve.
The object of this tower is quite simple.
I'm going to open my hand, hoping, if all goes well, that my purely animal magnetism will stick the knife in place.
It actually holds so well that I can shake it and the knife doesn't fall.
Nothing comes back or comes out of my sleeve, no stuff. You can look at everything.
Ta-da!
Now, this is a trick that I often teach young kids who are interested in magic, because you can learn a lot about the illusion of the student in methodological ways -- even though it's a very simple trick.
There's probably a lot of people in the room who know this tower.
This is what happens.
I'm holding the knife in my hand.
I say I'm going to hold my wrist to be sure that nothing comes in and comes out of my sleeve. It's a lie.
The reason I hold my wrist is because it's actually the secret of the illusion.
At the moment my hand is moving away from you to move away, this finger right here, my index, is moving from where it's at a pointing position like this.
Not bad.
There's somebody who hasn't had a childhood here.
So that's how, from here, here it is.
When I move, my finger changes.
You could talk about why it's an illusion, why you don't notice there's only three fingers here, because the mind, in the way it deals with information, doesn't count one, two, three. It aggregates.
It's not really the subject. Here I open my hand.
Apparently it does, not by animal magnétism, but by deception, my index being here.
After I close my finger, the same way, I step back: that movement sort of covers the finger in a certain way.
I'll take that hand. I'll give you the knife.
This is a trick you can do to your friends and neighbors. Thank you.
Now, what does it have to do with the placebo effect?
I read a study about a year ago that really opened my mind.
I'm not a doctor or a researcher, so this, to me, was an amazing thing.
It turns out that if you run a placebo in the form of a white table, it's like the shape of an aspirine, it's just a white, round table, it has a measurable effect.
If you change the shape of the placebo, like a smaller tablet, and blue color, with a letter in a hollow, it's actually more effective in a measurable way.
Although not one of the two products is a drug -- they're sugar pills.
But a white table is not as good as a blue table.
What? It killed me.
It turns out it doesn't stop there.
If you have fruit flies, they're more effective than hideaways in any shape.
A colored herd, which is yellow on one side and red on the other, is better than a white herd.
The dosage has something to do with this.
A pill once a day is not as good as three pills -- I don't remember the statistics anymore -- sorry.
What I mean.
It's that the showers have something to do with it.
The shape is also for something.
If you want the ultimate placebo, you have the needle.
A syringe with something that's ringing, a few cubic centimeters of something that you inject into the patient.
It's such a powerful picture in his mind, it's so much stronger than the white tablet.
The graph, I'm going to show it to you at some point when we're going to have slides.
I mean, the white table is not as good as the blue table, which is not as good as the bell, which is not as good as the needle.
There's no real pharmaceutical quality at all.
It's just your belief that makes it real in your body and makes it stronger.
I wanted to see if I could take this idea and apply it to a magic trick.
Take something that seems like a whirlwind tour and gives it the appearance of reality.
We know from this study that, when you want the reality, you take the needle.
This is a 18-inch pin. It's very sharp.
I'm just going to stylize it a little bit.
It's really my flesh. It's not the flesh of growing Damian.
It's my skin right there. It's not a special effect of Hollywood.
I'm going to drill my skin and paste that needle across to the other side.
If you don't support the blood view, if you fall into the easy apples -- I was doing this trick for friends in my hotel room last night to some people I didn't know, and a lady nearly took the eye.
If you're sensitive, look somewhere in the next 30 seconds. In fact, you know what, I'm going to do the hard part behind it.
You can see, but you can also look away.
So, here's what happens, right here, the beginning of my flesh in the lower part of the arm, I'm just going to drill a little bit.
I'm sorry, man. I'm scared to you?
And then just a little bit through my skin, it comes out the other side like this.
We're basically in the same situation as with the knife trick.
It's kind of like that.
You can't count my fingers here?
Let me show you. Here's one, two three, four, five.
Yes, good ...
I know what people are saying when they see this.
They're like, "It's not silly enough to plant things through the skin for a few minutes."
Let me give you a taste.
What does it look like here? Not bad.
Yeah, I know.
The people in the back say, "Well, I didn't really see that."
People in the adjacent room are starting to enter ours.
Let me show you a little bit.
It's really my skin. It's not a special effect of Hollywood.
This is my flesh and I can turn.
I'm sorry. If you feel bad, look away, don't look at that.
The people in the back, or the people who will watch the video later will say, "Yeah, that's the kind of effect there, but if that were true, see, there's a hole over here and, if that were true, it would bleed."
Well let me give you a little bit of blood.
Yes, there it is.
I should normally remove the needle now.
I would clean my arm, and I would show you that there are no wounds, but I think in that context and in the idea of taking something that's Fakten and making it real, I'm just going to let it go like that and leave the scene.
We'll see multiple times these next few days.
I hope you will. Thank you very much.
Jane McGonigal: Play can make the world a better place.
Games like World of Warcraft are giving players the means to save worlds and motivations to learn the habits of heroes, what if we could use game power to solve problems in the real world? Jane Mc Gonigal thinks it's possible and explains how to do that.
My name is Jane McGonigal. I'm a game designer.
I've been creating online games for the last 10 years now.
My goal for the next 10 years is to make it as easy to save the world in the reality that it is in online games.
For that, I have a plan that involves convincing more people, including you, spending more time playing bigger and better games.
Today we spend three billion hours a week playing online.
Some of you might think, "This is a lot of time on games."
Perhaps too much, especially looking at the number of urgent problems in the real world.
But in fact, according to my research at the Institute for Futur, reality is exactly the opposite.
Three billion hours a week are not enough to solve the world's most urgent problems.
On the contrary, I believe that if we want to survive even 100 years on Earth, we need to increase that number considerably.
I calculated that the total need is 21 billion hours of play a week.
Maybe it's a counter-intuitive idea, so I'm going to argue, let's look at it a little bit closer.
If we want to solve problems like famine, poverty, climate change, conflicts, obesity, I think we need to aim online at least 21 billion hours a week, within 10 years.
If so. I'm serious. Really.
Here's why. It's pretty much why I think that games are as essential for human survival. Really.
This is a portrait taken by the Phil Toledano photographer.
He wanted to capture the emotion of the player.
He put a camera in front of the players while they were playing.
This is a classic player emotion.
If you're not a player, you could get away with some nuances.
You may see the sense of urgency, a little bit of fear, but especially intense concentration, very, very intense to solve a really difficult problem.
If you're a player, you'll notice a few nuances, the fold around the eyes, and around the mouth that's a sign of optimism.
The eyebrows express surprise.
Here's a player about to live what's called a heroic win.
You've heard about it. OK.
So we have players among us.
A heroic victory is such an extraordinarily positive result that you didn't even know it was possible before you got there.
It's way beyond the limits of imagination.
When you've reached that, you're shocked to discover what you really are capable of. It's a heroic victory.
Here's a player about to win an heroic victory.
This is the face that we need to see on millions of people all over the world as we confront the problems of the century to come.
The face of someone who, against all odds, is about to win an heroic victory.
Unfortunately, we see more this face every day when we face urgent problems.
This is what I call the face "I don't like life."
This is me imitating. Compris. Okay. All right.
It's still me having that face.
This is a graffiti in my former neighborhood in Berkeley, California, where I did my Ph.D., why are we better at play than we are in life?
This is a problem that many players have.
We think we're not as good at life as we are in games.
It's not just synonymous with successful success, but it's part of it.
We take this stage out in games, but -- but anyway, motivated in the sense of doing something that makes sense, ready to collaborate and cooperate.
When we're in play, I think many of us become the best version of ourselves, ready to help with a blink of eye, ready to tackle a problem as long as it takes to overcome failure and start again.
In real life, in front of failure, facing obstacles, we are not often in this state of mind.
We feel overwhelmed.
We feel overwhelmed.
You feel anxious, maybe depressed, frustrated or cynic.
We never have those feelings when we play, they just don't exist.
This is what I wanted to study when I was a graduate student.
What's in games that we think can do anything?
How can we transcend these feelings of play in our daily work?
I've looked at games like World of Warcraft, which is the archetype of the common problem-solving environment.
I started noticing the details that make heroic wins possible in games.
The first idea: as you walk into one of these online games, especially in World of Warcraft, there are a lot of different characters who want to trust you, right now, to achieve incredible mission.
Not anybody, but the one that corresponds perfectly to your level in the game. Okay?
You can do it.
They don't give you a challenge that you can't face.
But one is at the limit of your ability. So you have to work hard.
But there is no unemployment in World of Warcraft.
No one turns the thumbs off.
There's always something very specific and important to do.
And also hundreds of collaborators.
Where you go, hundreds of thousands of people willing to work with you to achieve your heroic mission.
It's not something that's common in real life, that feeling that, in a blink of fingers, hundreds of collaborators appear.
And there's also this heroic story, the exhilarating history of our lives, and what we do.
We all get this positive feedback.
You've heard the phrase "Nivell Next" and "Force +1," "Intelligence +1."
We don't have that kind of information in life.
When I come out of the stage, I won't have "Discours +1," or "Stamy +1," "Stam +20."
I don't have that return in life.
In contrast, the problem with virtual collaborative environments like World of Warcraft is that it's so empowering to win a heroic victory, that we decide to spend all our time in these virtual worlds.
It's just better than reality.
On that day, World of Warcraft players have collectively passed 5.93 million years to solve the virtual problems of ANC.
It's not necessarily a bad thing.
It may seem the opposite.
But let's move this back to the context: 5.93 million years ago, our earliest ancestor of primates set up.
He was the first primate standing.
When we talk about the time that we invest in games right now, the only way to address it, or even think about it, is to talk about the time at the scale of human evolution, which is an extraordinary thing.
But it's also fair. It sounds like, by the way, all the time we play, we change our capabilities of human beings.
We become a more collaborative and honest species.
It's true. I believe it.
Please consider this interesting statistic.
A researcher at Carnegie Mellon University recently published this.
A young way of today in a high-income country will have spent over ten thousand hours playing online, at the age of 21.
Ten thousand hours is an interesting number to two titles.
First of all, for kids in the United States, 10 to 080 hours is the exact number of hours in fourth grade school in baccalaureat if you go to all courses.
So there's a parallel curriculum in which the young people learn the brides to become a good player in the same way that they learn everything else in school.
Some of you may have read the last book by Malcolm Gladwell called "Otliers."
You've probably heard about his theory of success, his theory of 10 thousand hours.
It's based on cognitive science, if you spend a thousand hours studying seriously anything before 21 years, you'll be a virtuoso.
You'll be as good as any of the best in the world.
So what we're seeing is a whole generation of young people who are game virtuosa.
So the big question is, "What can the game be used for?"
If we knew how to answer that, we would have virtually self-helped human resources.
This is how many people in the world have spent at least one hour a day playing online.
These are the virtuoses of play.
500 million people extraordinarily good at something.
In the next 10 years, we'll have a billion new players who are going to be extraordinarily good at something.
If you didn't know it, it's going to happen.
The game industry develops low-power consoles and operates through GSM networks instead of ADSL, allowing the players all over the world, and especially in India, China, Brazil, to play online.
We expect a new billion players in another decade.
That will carry the number at 1.5 billion.
So I started thinking about how these games made us go crazy.
Here's my four conclusions. The first one is hopeful optimism.
OK. Imagine that as an extreme self-persuasion.
The tremendous optimism is the willingness to act immediately to overcome an obstacle, along with the certainty of a reasonable hope to succeed.
The players always believe that a heroic victory is possible, and it's worth trying, and trying now.
The players don't sit and don't do anything.
They're very strong at cutting a very dense social tissue.
A lot of interesting research shows that we like more people after playing with them, even though they beat us badly.
Why? Because it takes a lot of confidence to play with somebody.
They're going to spend time with us, they're going to play with the same rules, with the same goals, they're going to play until the game's over.
So playing together actually build links and trust and collaboration.
The result is that we create stronger social ties.
Wonderful productivity. I like this idea.
You know, there's a reason why the World of Warcraft average player spends 22 hours a week, sort of a middle-time job.
It's because we know, when we're playing, that we're actually happier at working hard, whether we're resting or running out of it.
We know that the human being is at its optimum when it makes a difficult but useful job.
Players are willing to work hard, all the time, if you give them the right mission.
And finally, a heroic sense.
The players love to come up with motivating missions, missions on the scale of the planet.
A little quiz to put that in perspective.
You all know Wikipedia, the world's largest wiki.
The second, in the world, with about 80,000 articles is the World of Warcraft.
Five million people use it every month.
They raised more information about World of Warcraft on the Internet than any other subject a wiki is devoted to.
They're building a heroic story.
They're building a principle of heroic knowledge on the World of Warcraft.
Okay, so here's the four superpowers that go into a single goal.
The players are full of hope and overpowerful individuals.
These are people who believe that they can change the world dramatically.
The only problem is they believe that they are able to change virtual worlds and not the real world.
Here's the problem I'm trying to solve.
Edward Castronova is an economist.
His work is impressive. He's interested in why people are pushing so much time, energy and money into online games.
He said, "We're witnessing an event that is a mass exodation towards virtual worlds and online game environments."
It's an economist. And so it's a rational one.
And he says ...
Not like me -- I'm a designer of games, exaggerating.
So he says it's perfectly logical, because players can achieve more in games than in the real world.
They can have stronger social relationships in games than in the real world.
They have better feedback and they feel more rewarded in games than they do in real life.
That's why it estimates that it's currently logical that players spend more time online than in the real world.
I find that quite as rational as I am right now.
But it's not, in any case, an optimal situation.
We need to begin to make the real world closer to play.
I was inspired by a survenu event 2,500 years ago.
These are old-fashioned, made out of sheep's waters. OK?
Before these wonderful game chains, sheep's bones existed.
They represent the first accessory of play invented by human beings.
If you're familiar with the work of the Greek historian, Herodote, you may know this story.
The story of who invented play and why.
Herodote said that games, especially despair, were invented in the realm of Lydie for a famine.
Apparently, the starvation was so severe that the king of Lydie decided that they had to do something that was insensible.
People would suffer. They would fight.
The situation was desperate. They needed a desperate solution.
According to Herodote, they invented the disgrace and they created a law in the whole kingdom.
The first day, everyone could eat.
The next day, everyone had to play.
They'd be so focused on their deficiency play -- games are so immersive and put us into such wonderful, fulfilling productivity -- that they would forget they had nothing to eat.
And so, the next day, they played.
And the next day they would eat.
According to Herodote, 18 years went by, and they survived the hunger, and they ate one day, and they played the next day.
I think that's exactly what we do today.
We are playing to get out of the suffering of the world.
We play to move away from everything that's not going on in real life, everything that's not satisfying, and we get the game that we need.
But we don't have to stop there.
It's really interesting.
According to Herodote, after 18 years, the famine was still present, so the king decided that they would play one last time with the dissidents.
They divided the realm into two.
They would both play the disgrunt, and the winners would have allowed their heroic adventure.
They would leave Lydie, and they would look for a new place to live, leaving the exact number of people could live on the resources available, and hopefully move their civilization to a place where it could thrive.
It sounds incredible, right?
But recently, DNA evidence showed that the Etrusques, which led to the Roman Empire, actually share the same DNA as the former Lydians.
Recently scientists have suggested that the incredible story of Herodote is actually true.
Geologists have found evidence for global cooling that lasted about 20 years that could explain famine.
So this amazing story could be true.
They could have actually saved their culture by playing, traveling in the game for 18 years, and then being so inspired, and knowing so well how to be solidized by the game that they were using civilization like this.
We too can do it.
We've been playing with Warcraft since 1994.
It was the first real-time strategy game of the World Serie of Warcraft. It was 16 years back.
They played the disinfranchis for 18 years, we've been playing with Warcraft for 16 years.
I think we're ready for our hero game.
They divided their civilization into two to look for a new world.
This is how I get to my 21 billion hours of play a week.
We need half of us to spend an hour a day playing, until we solve real problems.
I know you're thinking, "How are we going to solve real problems by playing?" Well, that's what I've been doing for my work over the last few years at the Institute for Futur.
We have this banner in our offices in Palo Alto, and it expresses our way of addressing the future.
We don't want to try to predict the future.
What we want is to invent the future.
We want to imagine the best possible outcome, and we want to get everybody to make this real result.
We want to illustrate heroic victories, and give people the means to achieve them.
I'm going to show you quickly three games that I invented as an attempt to give people the ways to create this victory in their own future.
This is the world without food.
It was invented in 2007.
It's an online game where you're trying to survive an gasoline shortage.
The gas shortage is fictive, but we've embedded enough content so you believe that it's true and that it's lived as if there's no more gas. When you start the game, you sign up, you say where you live.
Then you get real-time news, little bits of information that show you how much gasoline is costing, what's indisponible, how food production is affected, how transport is, if the schools are fermented, if there are riots.
You have to figure out how to live your real life as if that's true, and we're asking you to tell it, send video, photographs.
We tested this game with 1700 players in 2007.
We've been following them for three years.
I can guarantee you this is an experiment that transforms you.
Nobody wants to change their lifestyle to improve the world, or because we should.
But if you ever get into a heroic journey and hear, "We don't have gas anymore."
It becomes an extraordinary story and an adventure to live.
Make sure you see how you would survive.
Most players have kept the habits that have learned in this game.
So for the next game in which we save the world, we decided to aim for a higher, higher problem than the lack of gas.
We created the Superstruct game at the Institute for Futur.
The point was, a supercomputer calculated that humans had only 23 years to live on Earth.
This computer is called the Total Extinction Operation System, of course.
We asked people to come like a Jerry Bruckheimer movie.
You know his films, you're a dream team.
There's the astronaut, the scientist, the former prisoner, each has his mission to save the world.
But in our game, instead of just having five people in the team, we say that everybody is involved in it, your mission is to invent the energy of the future, the food of the future, the health of the future, the security of the future and the social security of the future.
There are 8,000 people who have played it for eight weeks.
They've imagined 500 crazyly creative solutions that you can find on the Internet by typing "Superstruct" in Google.
Finally, the last game. We're launching the three-quarters. This is a collaboration game with the World Bank Institute.
If you finish the game, you'll be certified by the World Bank Institute as Social Innovator, 2010.
We're working with the University of Sub-Saharan Africa, and we're helping them gain social innovation skills.
There's a comic book, different levels in local, knowledge network, sustainability, vision and resource.
I'd like to ask you to share this game with young people all over the world, especially in the developing world, who could benefit from this collaboration to start thinking about their own social enterprises to save the world.
I'm going to sum it up.
I have a question.
What do you think it's going to happen?
There are all these amazing players, there are these games that are using pilots of what we could do, but none of them have saved the world yet.
Well, I hope you'll agree with me to say that players are a resource that is usable to do tasks in the real world, that games are a powerful way for change.
We all have these amazing superpowers, this wonderful productivity, the ability to make a strong social connection, this sense of urgent optimism, and the desire of a heroic sense of our lives.
I really hope that we will come together to play useful games, to survive another 100 years on this planet.
My wish is that you would join me in creating such games and play with it.
When I look at the next 10 years, I'm sure two things: we can create any future we dream about, and we can play games that we want.
What games that will change the world will start!
Thank you.
Bill Gates is about energy: transition to zero carbon.
At TED2010, Bill Gates unveiled his view of the future energy future in the world, and he said we need "miracles" to avoid a planetary catastrophe, and why is he in favor of a radically different kind of nuclear reactor, the goal of getting at any price? A zero carbon emission world by 2050.
I'm going to talk today about energy and climate.
And that may seem a little surprising, because my full-time job at the foundation is more about vaccines and seeds, things that we have to invent and distribute to help the two billion of the poorest people to live better.
But energy and climate are extremely important for these people, in fact, more important than anyone on the planet.
The climate is deteriorating, which means there will be many years where their cultures won't grow.
There will be too much rain, or not enough rain.
Things will evolve in directions that their fragile environment simply cannot support.
And that leads to starvation. It leads to uncertainty. It leads to disorders.
Climate change is going to be terrible for them.
The price of energy, also, is very important for them.
In fact, if you could only lower the price of one thing, to reduce poverty, it would be, by far, energy.
Now, energy prices have come down over time.
Really, the advances of civilization are based on energy advances.
The coal revolution has fueled the industrial revolution, and even in the 1900s, we've witnessed a very rapid decrease in electricity prices, and that's because we have refrigerators, air conditioning, which we can make modern materials and do so many things.
In the rich world, everything's fine with electricity.
But at the same time that we've been looking at its price -- and it's gone down to divided it by two -- we've got to answer a new set of constraints, and that constraint is about CO2.
CO2 heats the planet, and CO2 equation is actually very simple.
If you take the overall rejected CO2, it leads to a temperature rise, and that temperature rise leads to very negative effects.
The effects on weather and, perhaps worse, indirect effects, because natural ecosystems can't adapt to these rapid changes, and then you see the collapse of these ecosystems.
It's true that if you look at the exact numbers, what temperature you're going to get, how much CO2 you're going to get, and how much positive side effects you're going to get, there's a certain uncertainty, but not a lot.
And if you don't know exactly the degree of gravity of those effects, you know they're going to be extremely severe.
Many times, I asked high-level scientists if you really needed to go down to close to zero?
Can't we just lower half or quarter?
And the answer is, until we reach zero, the temperature will continue to increase.
And so that's a great challenge.
It's very different than saying you're a three-and-a-half meter high truck trying to get under a three-meter bridge, and you're going to find the way to slide into it.
This is something that has to happen at zero.
Every year we release a vast amount of CO2, over 26 billion tons.
For every American, it's about 20 tons.
For a poor country, it's less than a ton.
The average is about five tons per person on the planet.
And we have to figure out how to bring the changes down to zero.
The increase was constant.
It's only because of various economic changes that it's slowing down, so we have to go from rapid rise to a decline, down to zero.
This equation has four factors.
Let's do a little bit of multiplication.
Now, we have something on the left, CO2, which we want to reduce to zero, and it's going to be based on the number of people, the services that each person uses, on average, the energy used on average for each service, and the CO2 being rejected by an energy unit.
So let's look at each of these members, and let's see how we can reduce the result to zero.
It's probably going to take one of those numbers close to zero.
This is the level of algebra of the secondary, but let's take a look.
First we have the population.
The world today is 6.8 billion people.
We should get to the nine billion.
With very good results on new vaccines, health care, birth control, we could reduce it, maybe, 10 or 15 percent, but we'll keep a factor of increase by about 1.3.
The second factor is about the services that we use.
It engulfs everything, the food we eat, the clothing, the television, the heat.
These are very good things, and getting rid of poverty means that you can provide services to almost everybody on the planet.
And that's a good thing that that number is increasing.
In the rich world, maybe the billion at the top, we could probably reduce it, by using less, but every year, that number, on average, will go up, and will end up more than double the amount of services that people have.
Here we have a very basic service example.
You have at home enough lighting to read and to do school homework, not these kids, so they go out and do their homework on the streetlight.
Now, efficiency, E, the amount of energy for each service, and here we have good news.
We have something that doesn't climb.
Through various inventions and new ways of making light, through new types of cars, different ways of building buildings.
There's a lot of services that we can reduce the energy in a substantial way, and for certain specific services, reduce that by 90 percent.
There are other services like how you make fertilizers, or you can make aerial transport, where the margins of improvement are much lower.
So basically, if you're optimistic, you could get a factor of three down, maybe even, a factor of six.
For all these three first factors, we're at the top of 26 billion, maybe 13 billion tons, and that's not enough.
So, let's see this fourth factor -- which is going to be a key factor -- and that's the amount of CO2 being consumed by an energy unit.
And so the question is, "Can we shrink it down to zero?"
By burning coal, the answer is no.
If you burn natural gas, not natural gas.
Almost all the techniques for producing electricity today, out of renewables and nuclear, are dumping carbon dioxide.
And so, what we're going to have to do on a global scale is create a new system.
So we need miracles in the field of energy.
But when I use the word miracle, I don't mean something that's impossible.
The microprocessor is a miracle. The personal computer is a miracle.
The Internet and the Web services are a miracle.
In that sense, people in this room were involved in creating a lot of miracles.
We don't usually have a date, where you have to make the miracle for a given date.
We usually just get ready, and then some get done, some don't.
In this case, you have to go all the speed and get a miracle with a relatively small calendar.
I wondered how I could sum up this visually.
Would there be a kind of illustration coming from nature, a demonstration that would capture the imagination of people here?
I came back in the last year when I brought some mosquitos, people had loved it.
It really allowed them to embrace the idea that there are people living with mosquitos.
So, with energy, all I could do is this.
I decided that free of fireflies would be my environmental contribution here this year.
So here are natural lucioles.
I was told that they wouldn't bite, in fact, they wouldn't leave this pot.
There are all kinds of clever solutions like this, but they don't actually bring much.
We need one or many solutions, which work on a huge scale, with tremendous reliability, and, although we're looking in many directions, I really only see five of them holding the road.
I've left the energy, the geothermal energy, the fusion, the biofuels.
They will bring their contribution, and if it's more than I think, much better, but my idea is that on these five, there's still work to do, and we can't let any of them fall, even though it's difficult, even though the challenges to rise are important.
Let's first look at burning fossil fuels, whether it's coal or natural gas.
What you have to do is look simple, but it's not, is take all the CO2, and take it out of the circuit, put it under pressure, make it liquid, put it somewhere, and hope there's more.
There are advanced projects that allow this to happen at 60 to 80 percent, but by 100 percent, it will be very delicate, and it will be difficult to get back to where all this carbon should be put, but the hardest thing here is the long-term question.
Who can have that certainty?
Who can guarantee something that is billions of times more voluminous than any other kind of waste that you can think of, nuclear or whatever?
That's a lot of volume.
So it's going to be difficult for this solution.
Then there's nuclear.
Which also presents three big problems.
The cost, especially in highly regulated countries, is high.
The question of security, to be really sure that there will be no problem, that even if you have human operators, the fuel will not be used for weapons.
And then, what about the waste?
And, although the volume isn't very impotant, there are many problems.
People need to feel good about it.
So, three very difficult problems that could be solved, and so, which one would have to work on.
The last three of the five, I put them together.
These are the people who often refer to as renewable energy.
But actually -- even though it's great that they don't require any fuel -- they present some disadvantages.
The first is that the density of energy produced by these technologies is substantially lower than the power plant.
It's about energy farms, it's about many square kilometers, thousands of times more space than it is for a normal power station.
Moreover, they're working sources by intermittence.
The sun doesn't burn all day, it doesn't burn every day, and, like that, the wind doesn't blow all the time.
And so, if you depend on these sources, you have to have a way to get energy during those periods of time that it's not available.
We have big, big, cost-effective problems here.
We have transmission problems.
For example, let's say that this energy source is out of your country, so not only do you need the technology, but you have to deal with the risk of an energy that's coming in by the way.
And finally, there's this storage problem.
So, to measure this, I've looked at all the kinds of batteries that we make, for cars, for computers, for telephones, for flashlights, for everything, and compared that to the amount of power that's used in the world, and what I've found is that all the batteries that we make today could store less than 10 minutes of all energy.
So, in fact, we need a major breakthrough here, something that can improve a factor of 100 of the approaches that we currently have.
It's not impossible, but it's not a very easy thing.
This is what we see when we try to get an intermittent source, say, 20 to 30 percent of what we use.
If you look at this source to provide 100 percent, you need an incredible miracle battery.
Well, let's try to push the question of the right approach to embrace.
Is it a new "Project Manhattan"? What ways to get there?
Well, we need a lot of companies to work on this, hundreds.
In each one of these five ways, we need at least a hundred people.
And for many of them, you'll think they're crazy. It's perfect.
And I think here, in the TED group, a lot of people are already pursuing these channels.
Bill Gros owns several societies, one called eSolar, who knows some of the important solar heat technologies.
Vinod Khosla invests in dozens of companies that do big things and have interesting possibilities, and I'm trying to help financially support these projects.
In fact, Nathan Myhrvold and I, we financially support a company that, maybe it'll surprise you, picked the nuclear approach.
There are some innovations in nuclear: modular, liquid.
And the innovation had really stopped in this industry for a while, so the idea that there are some good ideas that are hanging out is not surprising.
The idea of Terrapower is, instead of burning part of uranium, one percent, which is the U235, we decided to burn the other 99 percent, the U238.
It's a bit of a crazy idea.
In fact, it's been a long time that people talked about it, but they've never come to simulate it properly if it's going to work or not, so it's because of the advent of modern supercomputers that we've been able to do the simulation, and see that, yes, with the right approach to materials, it looks like it can work.
And because you're burning those 99 percent, you've improved costs tremendously.
What you're burning is the waste, and you can use fuel as all the waste surplus produced by today's reactors.
So instead of worrying about them, we use them. That's something.
It aspires to this uranium by working. It's kind of like a candle.
You can see this as a log, and we've often talked about it as the wave actor.
In terms of fuel, it really solves the problem.
I have a picture here of a place in Kentucky.
They're the best ones, the 99 percent, that we've taken away all the stuff we're burning right now, so we call it "supauvried uranium."
This would enable the United States for hundreds of years.
And, by an inexpensive process, simply filtering seawater, we would have enough fuel for all the life of the rest of the planet.
Okay, there's still a lot of road to do, but that's an example of the hundreds and the hundreds of ideas that we need to move forward.
So let's think about, how are we going to build our scale of notation?
What should we look like on our roadside?
Let's start with the goal that we have to reach, and then look at the middle stages.
By 2050, you've heard a lot of people talk about this 80 percent reduction.
It's really, really important that we could get there.
And that 20 percent comes from what's happening in poor countries, or a little bit of agriculture.
Hopefully, from here we'll have a sylviculture and an industry of clean ciment.
So to get to those 80 percent, the developed world, including countries like China, will have had to completely transform their electricity production methods.
The next level, it's going to be to implement this zero-emission technology, to implement it in every developed country and to be able to do it in other countries.
That's very important.
It's an essential component for holding the roadside.
So going back, going back, what does the 2020 road sheet look like?
Well, again, we should have the two elements.
We have to go through efficiency measures to start getting reductions.
Moins emit, much less is the amount of CO2, and therefore, less hot will be the temperature.
But in some ways, the level that we're facing here, doing things that don't lead immediately to major reductions, is no longer important, and perhaps even less, than this other, which is the innovation that these breakthroughs leave.
We need to be able to make them all the time, and we can quantify that in terms of societies, of pilot projects, of changes in the settings.
A lot of big books have been written about this.
Al Gore's book, "Our Choix" and David McKay's book, "Reservative energy without hot air."
They're really illuminating the topic, and creating a framework that opens up largely to the discussion, because we need large support for this.
A lot of things have to happen at the same time.
So this is a wish.
It's a very real wish that we're inventing this technology.
If I were given a single wish to do for the next 50 years, if I could choose the next President, or pick a vaccine, which is something I like, or pick that thing up, a cost divided by two without any CO2 show, that's the last one I would choose.
That's the one that would have the biggest impact.
If that wish doesn't realize, the division between people who think in the short term and the long term is going to be terrible, between the U.S. and China, between poor countries and rich countries, and life is going to be far worse for most of those two billion people.
So what do we have to do?
What do I call to you in order to go forward?
We need more funding for research.
When countries come together, like Copenhagen, they shouldn't just talk about CO2.
They should be discussing this innovation program, and you'd be surprised by the level of ridiculously low cost of these innovative approaches.
We need incentives for the market, a CO2 tax, with pluffle and trade, something that activates a price signal.
We have to get the message out.
We need this dialogue to be more rational, more understandable, including the steps, the measurements the government takes.
It's an important wish, but I think we can do it.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you. Thank you.
Thank you. Just to better understand, I mean, first of all, can you give an idea of the scale of investments that this represents?
So to finalize the software with the supercalculater, hire the best scientists, what we've done is just in tens of millions, and even testing our materials in a Russian reactor to make sure they work properly, we're only getting there in hundreds of millions.
The hardest part is the construction of the pilot, finding the few billion, finding the regulator, the location is how we'll build the first one.
Once the first one is built, if everything works like announced, then it will become obvious, with economic data and energy density, so many different from the nuclear that we know of.
So to understand, it involves building, deep down in the ground, something like a sort of a vertical column of nuclear fuel, made out of this appauvri uranium, and then the process starts up and continues down?
That's it. Today, we have to constantly wrap up the fuel reactor, so it requires a lot of people and a lot of controls can go wrong, like you have to open it up and get stuff out of it.
That's not good.
But if you have a very cheap fuel that you can put for 60 years -- just think of it as a log -- put it there without having all these same complex problems.
He's there, he's going to burn for 60 years and then it's over.
This is a nuclear power plant that's its own way of eliminating waste.
Yeah. Well, what happens with the waste is you can leave it in place -- there's a lot less waste in that approach -- and then you can get it out, put it in another reactor and burn it all.
In fact, you start with the waste that's out there today, which is in these cooling pools in the dry barrels near the reactor.
That's the fuel you start with.
What's been a problem with the old reactors is what feeds ours, and we dramatically reduce the waste volume with this process.
But when you talk to people around you, around the world, about the possibilities that we have here, where do we really want to make something about it?
Well, we didn't choose a particular place, and there are all these rules of divulgation about anything that relates to nuclear, so we create a lot of interest, and the company sent people to Russia, India, China.
I went back to the Secretary of Energy here to talk about how this fits into energy agenda.
I'm optimistic. You know the French and the Japanese have done a good job.
This is a variant of something that has already been done.
This is an important move, but it's like a quick reactor, and many countries have already built it, so each of these is expected to be the first country we will build.
What are, according to you, the efficiency and the probability of doing this in real life?
Well, for one of these large-scale electric production units, and that's just one approximation, we have to count 20 years to invent, and 20 years to implement.
That's the kind of efficiency that environmental models have shown us we have to wait.
And, you know, Terrapower, if things go well, which is a lot of hope, could easily hold those deadlines.
And there's fortunately, today, tens of companies, and there have to be hundreds, which can, if the scientific side is going well, and if the funding for their pilot factories is going well, also get into the competition.
And it's going to be better if we're going to see multiple hits, because then we can use a mixture of this stuff.
We absolutely need one of these successful projects.
In terms of changing the rules of the game at large scale, is it the most important one you've ever heard of?
One breakthrough in energy is the most important thing.
It would have been, even without the environmental constraints, but the environmental constraints simply make it so much more important.
In the nuclear world, there are other innovators.
You know, we don't know their work as well as this, but there are those who study the module approach, it's a different approach.
There's the liquid type reactor, which seems a little bit difficult, but maybe that's what they also thought about us.
So, there's different pathways, but the beauty of all of this is that a molecule of uranium sequesters a million times more energy than a molecule of, say, coal, and that is, if we know how to deal with negative aspects, it's basically radiation, then footprint and cost, potential, in terms of effects on the earth and on the rest, almost in a category aside.
What if it doesn't work, then what do you do?
Do we begin to take emergency measures to try and maintain the temperature of the Earth?
If you were to come to this situation, it would be like you had too much eaten, and you were prepared to have an infarctus.
So where do you go? You need a heart surgery or something like that.
There's a research line on what's called geoengineering, which is based on various techniques, which will delay warming, for the next 20 or 30 years to take care of us.
It's nothing more than an insurance policy.
We hope we don't need it.
Some people say it shouldn't even work in this direction, because it might make us lazy, as if you kept eating because you know that heart surgery will be there to save you.
I'm not sure that's the problem, given the scale of the problem, but, well, there's this geoengineering story, keeping in the back of the pocket, in case things happen faster than expected, or that innovation is much slower.
Climate-sceptics: if you had one or two sentences to say to them, how could you persuade them that they're wrong?
Well, unfortunately, skeptics are in different camps.
Those whose arguments are scientific are very few.
Do they say that there are negative feedback effects that have to do with clouds that have compensed things?
There's very, very few things they can even say, a million chance for this.
The main issue we have here is a little bit like AIDS.
You make a mistake now, and you pay the price a lot later.
When you have any kind of urgent problem, this idea of suffering now, with a profit later -- versus pain that you're not sure of.
In fact, the ratio of the Intergovernmental Group on the Climat Evolution, it's not necessarily the worst case, and there are people in the rich countries watching the GIEC and saying, "Okay, it's not that big."
The point is that it's this part of uncertainty that should push us in this direction.
But my dream is, if you can do anything economic, and answer CO2 constraints, then skeptics will say, "OK, I don't care if it doesn't reject carbon, I'd like it to emit CO2, but I think I'll accept it because it's better than the ones before.
And so, that would be your answer to the Bjorn Lomborg argument, that if we spend all this energy trying to solve the carbon problem, it's going to take all the other goals, like trying to get rid of the world of poverty and malaria, etc., that's a stupid waste of resources than spending money on that, then there's much better to do.
Well, the actual spending on research and development -- let's say, if the United States spent 10 billion more a year than actually -- it wouldn't be that dramatic.
That wouldn't challenge the other business as a business venture.
Where reasonable people can't agree, and we're talking about big numbers here, that's when you have something that's not economic, and you're trying to finance it.
It's mostly that, to me, is waste.
Except, if you're very close to the solution, and what you're doing is you're funding the progress of knowledge, and it's going to be very cheap.
I think we should try more things that could potentially cost a lot less expensive.
If the complaint that you are listening to is "Let's make super expensive energy," then only the rich can afford it.
What I mean is that all of us here, we could afford our energy five times more expensive without changing our lifestyle.
The catastrophe would be for these two billion people.
And even Lomborg has changed.
His thing, now, is to say, "why don't we talk about R&D anymore."
It's still because of the former, always associated with the climate-sceptic camp, but he realized it's a pretty lonely position, so he brings his R&D thing back.
But in there is something that doesn't seem to me wrong.
It's crazy to see how unfunded R&D is.
Well Bill, I think I'm speaking to the name of most people here by saying I really hope your wish will come true. Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Dan Barber: How did I fall in love with a fish?
Dan Barber's chief is faced with a dilemma, as many leaders today: How do you keep fish at the menu, have a work of impectable research and glautic humor, and he closes his quest to a respectable fish of the environment that he can fall in love with, and the honeymoe that he's been living since he's found in incredibly delicious fish raised in Spain by revolutionary methods.
I've known many fishes in my life.
There are only two that I loved.
The first one was kind of a passionate relationship.
It was a beautiful fish, savory, texting, charnu, a best-seller on the menu.
What fish!
Even worse, it was supposed to be raised by the highest standards of sustainability.
What made it feel good about the vendor.
I've been in relation to that beauty for several months.
One day, the company's boss called me and asked me if I wanted to speak at a conference about how sustainable it is for her to grow up.
"Absolutely," I said.
There was a company there that was trying to solve what became an unimaginable problem for our leaders.
How do we keep fish on our menus?
Over the last 50 years, we've fished in the seas as we've deforested the forests.
It's hard to excise destruction.
90 percent of the big fish, the ones we like, the tunas, the flakes, the salmon, the pads, saw their stocks collapse.
There's almost nothing left.
So for the better or for the worse, the aquaculture, the fish farm, is going to be part of our future.
There are many arguments against this practice.
Aquaculture farms, at least most of them, and they're inefficient, take for example the tuna.
A major failure.
It has a ratio of 15 to one food conversion.
That means it's going to take 15 pounds of wild fish to get a kilo of livestock tuna.
Not very sustainable.
Not very good taste either.
So this is, finally, a company trying to do the right thing.
I wanted to support them.
The night before the event, I called the director of the public relations of the company.
Let's call it Don.
"Don't," I told her, "Just to understand well, you're defied to raise your fish so far away in the sea, you don't pollute."
"That's true," he said, "We're installed so far, that the waste of our fish is scattered, not concentrated."
And then he said, "We're basically an autonomous world.
The food conversion rate? 2.5 to one," he said.
"The best in business."
2.5 to one, not bad ...
"Atch for one thing? Do you feed them with anything?"
"Free protein." he told me.
"Great," I said. I scraped the phone.
And that night, I was in bed, and I thought, "But what can that be, a sustainable protein?"
So the next day, just before the event, I called Don.
I said, "So, can you give me some examples of sustainable protein?"
He said he didn't know. He would have to ask around him.
So I had a few people from the company on the phone.
No one could give me a clear answer.
Until finally, I have the phone the chief biologist.
Let's call it Don too.
"Don't," I said, "Can you give me some examples of sustainable proteins?"
Well, he mentioned some algae and some food for fish, and then he said, "Build chicken."
I said, "Brought chickens?"
He said, "Yeah, the feathers, the skin, the flour of bone, the remains, dried and turned into food for animals."
I said, "What percentage of chicken is in food?"
I thought, you know, something like two percent.
"Well, about 30 percent," he said.
I asked her, "So what's sustainable about feeding fish with chicken?"
There was a long silence online, and he said, "It's just that there are too many chickens in the world."
My love for this fish went extinct.
No, it's not because I'm an intransigent and rigorous food fana.
What I am, actually.
No, my love for this fish turned off because, I swear to God, after this conversation, the fish tasted like chicken.
The second fish is another kind of love story.
It's the romantic sort of thing, the more you learn to know your fish, the more you love the fish.
I first ate it in a restaurant in southern Spain.
A friend reporter told me about this fish for a long time.
She sort of arranged us with a booking.
It happened on the table with a bright white color, almost kittyling.
The leader had too much cuit.
Something like twice for a long time.
Amazingly, he was always delicious.
Who can make a fish taste good after they've been too cooked?
Not me, but this guy was coming.
Let's call it Miguel.
It's actually called Miguel.
No, he didn't cook the fish, and he wasn't a chef.
At least not in the sense that you and I hear it.
This is a biologist in Veta La Palma.
This is a fish farm in the southwest of Spain.
It's up to the mouth of the Guadalquivir river.
Up until the 1980s, the farm was in the hands of Argentina.
They raised mouths on what was essentially marecages.
They did it by draining land.
They built this complex set of canals, they drained the water from the land and sent it into the river.
Finally, it didn't work, economically.
And ecologically, it was a disaster.
It killed nearly 90 percent of the birds, which, in the area, represents a lot of birds.
And in 1982, a Spanish company with an environmental awareness called the field.
What did they do?
They reversed the flow of water.
They literally shot the switch.
Instead of extracting water, they used canals to bring water back.
They flood the canals.
They created a 40-mile-long piscicole farm, mulet, shrimp, anguilles, and in this process, Miguel and this company completely reversed the ecological destruction.
The farm is incredible.
I mean, you've never seen anything like this.
You look at it on a horizon that's millions of miles away, and all you see is flooding channels and this thick, rich soil of swamps.
I was there a little while with Mriguel.
This is an amazing guy, three-quarters of Charles Darwin and a quarter of Crocodile Dundee.
Okay? Here we're walking hardly in wetlands, and I'm haunting and sweating from mud to knees, and Miguel is still a biology lesson.
It shows a rare white Elanion.
And then it talks about the mineral needs of phytoplankton.
And here he sees a pattern of grouping that reminds him of Tanzania's giraffe.
It turns out that Miguel has spent most of his career in the National Mikumi Park in Africa.
I asked him how he became such a fish expert.
He said, "A fish? I didn't know about fish.
I'm an expert on relationships."
And then he goes back into his conversation about rare birds and algae and strange aquatic plants.
And don't get me wrong, it was really fascinating, you know, something like the live biotic community.
It was great, but I was in love.
And I kept remembering that cooked piece of delicious fish that I had the night before.
So I interrupted. I said, "Miguel, what makes your fish taste so good?
He showed me the algae.
"I know, man, algae, phytoplankton, relationships, that's great ...
But what do you eat your fish?
What's the ratio of food conversion?
Now, he keeps explaining to me this is such a rich system that fish eat what they're going to eat in nature.
The biomass of the plants, the phytoplankton, the zooplankton, that is what feeds the fish.
The system is so healthy, it's totally self-interesting.
We don't feed them.
Have you ever heard of a farm that doesn't feed his animals?
Later that day, I was doing a tour on property with Miguel, and I asked her, "For a place that looks so natural, unlike every piscicole farm I've ever seen, how do you measure success?"
At that point, it was as if a director suddenly had changed the background.
We took a turning point, and here we saw an absolutely amazing show, thousands and thousands of pink flams, a real pink carpet, as it were as far as we could see it.
"That's success," he said.
"Look at their stomachs, [unclear] pink.
They're standing up."
Deterous? I was completely lost.
I said, "Miguel, wouldn't they be regaling with your fish?"
"Yes," he said.
"We lose 20 percent of our fish and fish eggs because of the birds.
Well, last year, on this property there were 600,000 birds, over 250 different species.
It became, today, the largest and one of the most important private bird sanctuarys in all of Europe."
I said, "Miguel, is a population of birds in the middle of it not the last thing you want on a fish farm?"
He shook his head, "No."
He said, "We have extensive breeding, not intensive.
It's an ecological network.
The flams eat the shrimp.
The shrimp eat the phytoplankton.
So the more pink the stomach is, the better the system is."
OK, now let's resum.
A farm that doesn't feed its animals, is a farm that measures its success to the health of its predators.
A piscicole farm, but also a bird sanctuary.
Oh, and by the way, those flamings, first of all, they shouldn't even be there.
They're entering a city that's 250 kilometers away, where the soil is more likely to build their nests.
Every morning they fly 300 miles to get to the farm.
And every night, they come back 250 miles to return.
They're doing this because they're getting to the white line from the A92.
Not a joke.
I was imagining something like the penguin walk, so I looked at Mriguel.
I said, "Miguel, they're really making 250 miles to get to the farm, and at night, they're reflecting 250 miles in the other direction?
Do they do that for little people?"
He looked at me like I had just quoted a Whitney Houston song.
He said, "No, they do it because food is better."
I didn't talk about the skin of my beloved fish, which was delicious, and I don't like the fish skin.
I don't like to grille it. I don't like it croustillating.
It's so bearing, it's got the tar ooze.
I almost never hold her in the kitchen.
Yet, when I tasted it in this southern restaurant in Spain, it didn't taste fish skin at all.
It tasted clean and sweet like you'd taste a bite of ocean.
I said this to Miguel, and he was working.
He said, "The skin acts like a sponge.
This is the last resort of defense before something enters the organism.
It's evolved to absorb the branches."
And then he said, "But our water doesn't have any equipment."
OK. A farm that doesn't feed its fish.
A farm that measures its success in its predators.
And then I understood that when he said, "A farm that doesn't have an underdog," it was a hell of a beddog, because the water that flows into that exploitation comes from the Guadalquivir river.
This is the river that carries with it all the things that the rivers tend to carry today, chemical contaminants, pesticide rake.
And when she walks through the system and goes back, the water's cleaner than when she gets in.
The system is so healthy that it purifies water.
So, not only a farm that doesn't feed its animals, not just a farm that measures its success to the health of its predators, but a farm that's literally a water purification factory, not just for these fish, but for you and I as well.
Because when the water comes out, it spills into the Atlantic.
One drop in the ocean, I know, but I'm going to take it, and you should do the same thing, because this love story, even though it's romantic, is also educational.
You might say it's a recipe for the future of good food, whether you're talking about bars, or mouth beef.
What we need now is a radically new idea of agriculture, in which food really tastes good.
But for many people it's a little bit too radical.
We're not realistic, we're not realistic, we're fans of gastronomie.
We're amateurs.
We love the farmers' markets.
We like small family farms.
We're talking about local food.
We eat organic food.
And when we suggest that this is all that will ensure the future of good food, someone somewhere stands up and says, "Hey, mec, I love the pink flams, but how are you going to do to feed the world?
How are you going to do that to feed the world?"
Can I be honest?
I don't like that question.
No, it's not because we are producing enough calories to feed the world.
A billion people are hungry today.
A billion -- more than ever before -- because of the overwhelming inequalities in the distribution, not the tonnage.
I don't like that question because it has determined the logic of our food system in the last 50 years.
Fourrager grain for the herbivores, pesticides for monocultures, chemicals for the soil, chicken for fish, and all the time, the agro industry just said, "If you feed more people for cheaper, is it so serious?"
It was our motivation. It was justification. It was the forecasting plan for American agriculture.
You have to look at things in front of it. It's an area of back-up activity, an activity that quickly marks the ecological capital that makes its own production possible.
It's not a company, it's not agriculture.
Our breadbasket is threatened today, not because of the decline of the supply, but because of the repulsion of the resources.
Not by the latest inventions for harvesty and tractors, but because of fertile land, not by pumps, but because of fresh water, not by merchants, but because of forests, not by fishing boats and net boats, but by fish in the sea.
You want to feed the world?
Let's start by asking: How are we going to feed ourselves?
Or better, how can we create the conditions that allow every community to feed itself?
To do that, don't take the model of abuse for your future.
It's really old, and it's wired.
It costs money in capital, in chemistry and in machines, and it never produced anything really good to eat.
On the contrary, let's take inspiration from the ecological model.
This is the one that's based on two billion years of experience on the pile.
Look at Miguel, farmers like Miguel.
Agribusiness that isn't confined to themselves, farmlands that are restoring instead of housing, farm-based farms that work extensively, and not just intensively, farmers who are not just farmers, but also experts in relationships.
Because it's also the ones that are tasted as experts.
And, to be completely honest, they make a better boss than I will ever be.
You know, it doesn't bother me, because if that's it, the future of good food, it's going to be delicious.
Thank you.
James Cameron: Before Avatar -- curious boy.
James Cameron: His big, big-budget films, and even bigger success, they create unresolved worlds that are clean, and in this very personal talk, it reveals its fascination with childhood for fantastic -- whether it's the reading of science fiction or diving -- and how it's led to the success of his movie "Aliens," "Terminator," "Titanic" and "Avatar."
I grew up feeding science fiction.
In high school, I was taking the bus to go to school every day, an hour commute in every direction.
And I was always in a book, a science fiction book, which brought my mind to other worlds, and satisfying, in its narrative form, my insatiable curiosity from then.
And that curiosity was also manifested by the fact that every time I wasn't in school, I'd be in the woods, and I would walk around and pick up samples, frogs, snakes, insects and water from the mares, and I'd come back and look at them in the microscope.
You know, I was a real nerd of science.
But it was to try to understand the world, understand the limitations of the possible.
And my love of science fiction seemed to be reflected in the world around me, because of everything that was going on, we were in the late '60s, going to the moon, exploring the depths of the ocean.
Jacques Cousteau came into our living rooms with incredible emissions that showed us animals and places, and a wonderful world, which we could never really imagine before.
So we would have said that this would accord with all the science fiction side of the day.
And I was an artist.
I could draw. I could paint.
And I realized that, because there were no video games and the saturation of computer graphics and all this imagery in the media landscape, so I had to create these images in my head.
You know, as all of you have done, like kids reading a book and, through the description of the author, project something on the screen of the film in their head.
Well, my answer to that was to paint, to draw alien creatures, exotic worlds, robots, space vessels, all these things.
In math I used to do all the time to hack into my classroom.
It was -- it was creativity that had to find its exutory, somehow.
And then an interesting thing happened, a Jacques Cousteau show got me really excited by understanding that there was an alien world here on Earth.
There was no chance that I could actually go one day to a foreign planet in a spacecraft.
It seemed really unlikely.
But there was a world where I could really go, here, on Earth, and it was as rich and exotic as anything I could imagine reading these books.
So I decided to become a diver in the age of 15.
And the only problem was I was living in a small village in Canada, about 1,000 kilometers away from the nearest ocean.
But I didn't let myself down.
I hanted my father until he found a dive class in Buffalo, New York, just across the border.
And in fact, I graduated in the swimming pool of a YMCA, at the heart of the winter, in Buffalo, New York.
And I didn't see the ocean, an ocean that was true for two years, until we landed in California.
Since then, for the last 40 years, I've spent about 3,000 hours underwater, 500 hours on underwater.
And one thing I've learned is that this middle of the deep ocean, and even the shallow oceans, are so rich in an amazing life that is really beyond our imagination.
Nature's imagination is bound by our own poor human imagination.
So today I'm absolutely admired by what I see when I do these dives.
And my love story with the ocean is still continuing, and as strong as it has ever been.
But as an adult, I chose a job, it was the achievement of films.
And it seemed to be the best way to reconcile this need I had to tell stories, with my irrepressible desire to create images.
When I was a kid, I kept drawing comic books, things like that.
So, cinema was the way to put together pictures and stories And that made sense.
And of course, the stories I chose to tell were stories of science fiction: "Terminator," "Aliens," and "Abyss."
And with "Abyss," I used to love the underwater world and diving world with filmmaking.
I have, you know, merged the two passions.
Something interesting came out of "Abyss," which was that to solve a specific problem of storytelling in this film, which was to create a kind of liquid creature, made out of water, we actually chose computer-generated animation, synthetic image.
And that gave the first computer-generated character that we've ever seen in a film.
And even though the film hasn't delivered money, we've barely reached the balance, I would say, I've seen something amazing: the audience, the audience of the whole world, has been hypnotized by this apparent magic.
You know, it's Arthur Clarke's Law, which says that all advanced technology is indistinguable from the magic.
People were watching something magical.
And I was very excited about this.
And I thought, "Wow, this is something that has to be adopted by film art."
So, with "Terminator 2," which was my next film, we pushed this a lot further.
Working with ILM, we created the liquid metal floor of the film, and the success was that this effect works or not.
And it worked. And again we created the magic.
And we had the same thing with the audience.
Even though we made a little bit more money on that.
So, by shooting a trait between these two points of experience, what we had come to, that it was going to be a whole new world, it was a whole new world of creativity for movie artists.
So I set up a company with Stan Winston, my dear friend, Stan Winston, who was the best makeup designer and creatures at the time, and it was called "Digital Domain."
And the concept of society was to move directly through the analog process of the optical benches and go directly to digital production.
What we did, which gave us a competitor advantage for a while.
But we've been late in the mid-'90s in the design of the characters and creatures that we've created this society for.
So, I wrote this scenario that I called "Avatar," which had to basically push back the frontiers of visual effects, digital effects, with realistic human figures, capable of emotions, generated in computer images, and the main characters would all be in computer graphics, and the world would be in computer graphics, and we would push back the frontiers.
And here, my company's guys told me that we weren't going to be able to do this for a while.
So, I put it aside, and I made this other film about a big ship that flows.
You know, I went into the studio like "Romeo and Juliet on a boat."
It was going to be an epic and romantic movie, a passionate movie.
In secret, what I wanted to do was to dive into the actual wreckage of "Titanic."
And that's why I made the film.
And that's the truth. Okay, the studio didn't know.
But I convinced them. I said, "We're going to dive into the wreck. We're going to film it for real.
It will be used for the opening of the film.
It's going to be really important. It's going to be a great marketing hook."
And I told them to fund an expedition.
It sounds crazy. But we come back to this idea of your imagination that creates a reality.
Because we actually created a reality where six months later I found myself in a Russian submersible, three miles deep in the North Atlantic, looking at the real Titanic through a window, not a film, not HD, but for real.
Seriously, I was in shock.
It took a lot of preparation, we had to build cameras and lights and all kinds of things.
But it struck me how much this dive, these deep dives, looked like a space mission.
You know, this very technical side, and it requires an awful lot of planning.
You go up into this capsule, you go down into this dark, hostile environment where there's no hope for rescue if you can't get out of yourself.
And then I thought, "Wow. It's like I'm living in a science fiction movie.
It's really cool."
And yes, I've been really disturbed by the virus of ocean exploration.
Of course, curiosity and scientific side.
It was all of that. It was adventure, it was curiosity. It was imagination.
And it was an experiment that Hollywood couldn't give me.
Because, you know, I could imagine a creature, and you could create a visual effect for it, but I couldn't imagine what I was seeing with this window.
And in some of our later expeditions, I saw creatures near hydrothermal vents and sometimes things that I'd never seen before, sometimes things that no one had ever seen before, that had never been described by science at the time we saw them and filmed them.
So, I got really crazy out of all this, and it took me more.
And so I made a rather curious decision.
After the success of "Titanic," I thought to myself, "OK, I'm going to put aside my filmmaking work in Hollywood, and I'm going to be a full-time explorer for a while."
And we started planning these expeditions.
And we found ourselves going out and exploring the bismark, and exploring it with robotic vehicles.
We went back to the blow of the Titanic.
We took the little robots that we created, the ones that dug out of the optical fiber.
The idea was to go in and do a study of the inside of this ship, which had never been done.
No one had ever looked inside the wreck. They didn't have the means to do it, but we created the technology to do it.
So, here I am now, on the bridge of the Titanic, sitting in a submersible, looking at floors that look a lot like this, where I knew the orchestra had played.
And I'm in charge of a little robotic vehicle crossing the ship's edge.
In fact, I control it at a distance, but my mind is in the vehicle.
I felt like I was physically present inside the wreckage of the Titanic.
And it was the most surreal experience ever since I was, because before I took a turn, I already knew what was going to be there, even before the lights of the vehicle reveal it, because I had cornered the shooting scene for months when we were making the film.
And the stage was built as an accurate replica based on the ship's plane.
Yes, it was an absolutely remarkable experience.
And it really made me understand something, the experience of telepresence, that you can actually experience with these robotic avatars, that your consciousness is injected into the vehicle, into this other form of existence.
It was really, really deep.
And perhaps a small glimpse of what can happen in a few decades when we start having cyborg bodies for exploration or other goals in many future post-human futures, as I can imagine, as a fan of science fiction.
So after doing these expeditions, and really started to appreciate what was there, down there, like these vents in the deep ocean where we had these fascinating animals.
These are foreigners in the real sense of the word here on Earth.
They live in a chemosynthesis environment.
They don't survive in a system based on the light of the Sun, as we do.
And then you can see animals that live next to warm water geysers, at over 500 degrees C.
We wouldn't think they could exist.
At the same time, I began to be also very interested in spatial science, again, the influence of science fiction, as when I was a kid.
And I ended up being involved in the space community, really involved with NASA, looking at NASA's consulting, planning real missions in space, going to Russia, tracking the biomedical protocols of cosmonauts, and all these kinds of things, in order to help me get good at the international space station with our 3D cameras.
And it was fascinating.
But what I ended up doing is bringing scientists from space to depth with us.
And take them to the bottom, that they have access, astrobiologists, scientific specialists, people interested in these extreme environments, going down them to the vents, and let them see, sample them, take their test instruments, and so on.
Well, here we were filmmaking, but we were actually doing science and even spatial science.
I had slashed the loop between the science fiction fan, you know, the kid, and do this kind of thing for real.
And you know, along this journey of discovery, I've learned a lot.
I learned a lot about science, but I also learned a lot about leadership.
You're saying that a director in the scene must be a leader, a leader, a captain of the ship, and all that sort of thing.
I didn't really learn much about leadership until I did these expeditions.
Because I had to, at some point, say to myself, "What am I doing here?
Why am I doing it? What should I draw from it?"
We don't make money with those sacred emissions.
They're just out of place. It doesn't bring glory.
People had to think that I was gone, between "Titanic" and "Avatar," and I had to be polishing my nails somewhere, sitting on a beach.
You made all these films, these documentary films, for a very limited audience.
No glory, no fame, no money. But what are you making?
It's done for the thing itself, for the challenge -- and the ocean is the environment with the greatest challenge that is -- for the pleasure of discovery, and for that strange connection that creates when a small group of people form a very loved team.
Because these are things we do with 1012 people working together for years.
Sometimes they went to sea for two to three months.
And in that connection, you realize that the most important thing is the respect that you have with them and that they have for you, that you've done a task that you can't explain to somebody else.
When you go back to shore and you say, "We had to do this, and fiber optics, and the attraction, and this and this, all technology, and the difficulty, the human performance of working in the sea, you can't explain it to people. This is the thing that the cops may have, or the people in the fight who have gone through something together and know that they can never explain it.
It creates a connection, it creates an obligation to respect.
So when I came back to make my next film, which was "Avatar," I tried to apply that same principle of leadership that is you respect your team, and you gain respect in return.
And it really changed the dynamic.
So, I found myself again with a small team in unknown territory, doing "Avatar," with a new technology that didn't exist before.
Terriblely exciting.
It's extremely difficult.
And we became a family, over a period of four and a half years.
And that completely changed the way I make films.
So people made observations about how I brought back ocean organisms to put them on the planet of Pandore.
For me, it was more about how do you do business, the process itself, that changed the following.
So what is the synthesis that we can get from all of this?
You know, what are the lessons we learned?
Well, I think number one has: curiosity.
It's the most powerful thing you have.
Imagination is a force that can really make a reality happen.
And the respect of your team is more important than everyone in the world.
There are young filmmakers who come to me and say, "Don't give me advice to do this."
And I say, "Don't put any limits on you.
Other people will do it for you, don't do it for yourself, don't play for yourself.
And take risks."
At NASA, they have this line that they like, "Reax is not an option."
But failure must be an option in art and exploration, because it's an act of faith.
And no big effort that has exuded innovations has been done without risk.
You have to be willing to take these risks.
So, it's with this thought that I'll leave you with, that in everything you do, failure is an option, but not fear. Thank you.
Gary Flake: Is he a turning point for web exploration?
Gary Flake presents Pivot, a new way of traveling and manipulating vast amounts of images and data online, based on disruptive Seadragon technology, Pivot allows spectacularly to zoom in on the databases online, and to find patterns and relationships that are invisible in standard navigation.
If I can give you a big idea today, it's that all of the data that we consume is larger than the sum of the parts, and, rather than thinking about information saturation, what I'd like to show you is how we can use information so that the structures emerge and we can see patterns that without that would be invisible.
So what we have here is a classic age mortality painting.
The tool I use here is a small experiment.
It's called Pivot, and with Pivot I can choose to focus on a particular cause of death, let's say accidents.
And, immediately, I see a different trend that emerges.
It's because, in the middle area, people are the most active, and here they are the most fragile.
We can move away again and re-engineering the data on the causes of death, and we see that cardiovascular disease and cancer are the usual suspects, but not for everyone.
If we continue and age filter, let's say 40 or less, we see that accidents are actually the biggest cause that people should care about.
And if we go a little deeper, that's especially true for men.
Anyway, you get the idea that seeing information, seeing the data in this way, looks a lot like swimming in a living bath of graph data.
And if we can do that with raw data, why not do it with content as well?
So what we have here is the cover of every single sports number ever illustrated.
It's all there. It's all online.
You can go home and try after my talk.
With Pivot, you can zoom in on a decade.
You can zoom in on a particular year.
You can go directly to a specific number.
So I look at this; I see the athletes that have emerged in this number, the sports.
I'm a Lance Armstrong fan, so I'm going to click on this, which reveals all the numbers that Lance Armstrong is mentioned in.
Now, if I just want to take a look at it, I might say, "Well, what if we looked at all the bike stuff?"
So I can take a little step back and explore this idea.
And I see Greg Lemond now.
And you begin to understand the idea that when you navigate through information in this way, as you open, as you move forward, as you move away, you don't search, you don't navigate.
You do something that's actually a little different.
It's between the two, and we think it changes the way information can be used.
And I want to extrapolate on this idea a little bit with something that's a little bit crazy.
What we did here is we took every page of Wikipedia and reduced it to a small summary.
So the summary is just made up of little synopsis and an icon to tell the subject it came out.
I'm just showing you the first 500 pages of Wikipedia's most popular pages.
But even in this limited view, you can do a lot of things.
Immediately, we have an idea of the topics that are most popular on Wikipedia.
I'm going to go ahead and choose government.
Now, having elected government, I can now see that the Wikipedian categories that correspond to this are the characters of the Year of Time magazine.
And it's important because it's an infromation that hasn't been contained in any of the pages of Wikipedia.
It's not possible to do this by taking a step back and looking at it all.
So when I look at one of these particular summaries, I can now dig in the concept of singleness of the Year of Time magazine, and I can fill them all up.
Looking at these people, I see most of them come from the government.
Some come from natural science.
Others, less many more, come from the business world.
That's my boss.
And one comes from the music world.
And interestingly, Bono is also a TED Prize winner.
So we can continue to go ahead and look at all the TED Prize winners.
And you see, we're going through the network for the first time as if it's actually a network, not page-to-page, but at a higher degree of abstraction.
And I'd also like to show you another thing that might take you a little bit of surprise.
I'm just showing you the New York Times website there.
So Pivot, this application -- I don't want to call it a browser; it's really not a browser, but you can visit web pages with -- and we introduce this zoom-in technology to every web page like this.
So I can move away, go right back to a particular section.
And the reason it's important is because, being able to look at web pages in this way, I can look at the entire history of my navigation in exactly the same way.
So I can dig into what I've done in some of the time periods.
The, in fact, is the state of the entire demo that I just gave.
And I can play back some of the stuff that I consulted earlier today.
And, if I want to get away and look at it all, I can decorate my historical record, maybe my research history.
I was doing some research here, doing Bing's research here for Live Labs Pivot.
And from that, I can dive into the webpage and just throw them back.
It's a multiple-use metaphor, and every time it makes it much bigger than the sum of the parts with the data.
And at that moment, in this world, we believe that data is this curse.
We're talking about the information overload problem.
We're talking about being drowning under the data.
What if we could actually flip the situation and flip the web, so that instead of one thing to the other, we would typically go from one set of things to another set of things, and be able to discern the trends without that would have been hidden?
If we can do that, then, rather than being stuck with the data, we could actually extract information.
And, instead of just dealing with information, we can extract knowledge from it.
And if we have knowledge, then maybe there's even wisdom to get away from it.
And with that, thank you.
Michael Specter: The dangers of rejecting science.
The treaties of the autistics of vaccination, the interdictions of OGM, the basic plant-based healthcare system: all of this sends back to the growing fear -- often the a priori -- of science and reason, says Michael Specter, and he challenges us against this trend that could lead to a disaster for humanity's progress.
Suppose we have a machine here, a big machine, at TED mode, a time machine.
Each of us here must be up there.
You can go back or forth; you can't stay where you are.
I wonder what you would pick because I asked my friends, they wanted to go back.
They wanted to go back before the automobiles or Twitters or New Stars.
I don't know.
There's a kind of nostalgia towards pieux.
I understand that.
I have to say I'm not a part of it.
I don't want to step back from a lack of adventurous mind, but for the possibilities of this planet, they don't step back, they move forward.
So I want to get on this machine and move on.
It's the biggest moment that there's ever been on this planet, regardless of the measurement unit: health, wealth, mobility, opportunities, rates of disease.
There's never been that many times.
My great grandparents all died before they turned 60.
My grandparents moved to 70.
My parents approach 80.
So I would love to have a nine at the beginning of my death age.
But it's not just about people like us because it's more general than that.
A child born in New Delhi today can hope to live as long as the richest man in the world 100 years ago.
Think about it. It's an amazing fact.
Why is that true?
Smallpox: It killed billions of people on this planet.
She turned demographics on the globe like no war ever did.
It's done. It's disappeared.
We defeated it.
In the rich world, diseases that cause millions of us to have a generation are almost no longer there.
Diphetry, rubole, polio ...
Does anybody know what this is about?
The vaccines, modern medicine, our ability to feed billions of people, are the triumphs of the scientific method.
In my mind, the scientific method, trying things, seeing if they work, change them otherwise, is one of the great advances in humanity.
That's the good news.
Unfortunately, it's the only good news, because there are other problems, many of them mentioned, and one of them, despite all of our successes, is that a billion people are layering the hollowness in the world every day.
That number goes up, very quickly, and it's indigned.
Pire, we used our imagination to deeply pollute this planet.
The safe drinking water, the arable land, the rainforest, the oil, the gas -- they disappear quickly and less innovating to get out of that mess, we're also going to disappear.
The question is, can we do it? I think so.
It's clear that you can make food for billions of people without violating the land that they live on.
I think we can produce enough energy without having to destroy the world.
I really believe it. It's not a utopian.
This is what wakes me up at night, one of the things that keeps me from sleep.
We've never had as much science as we can now. We've never been able to use it just as we can today.
We're in an amazing set of events in many areas.
Yet, I think we have to go back 300 years before the Enlightenment, to find a period where we're fighting progress, when we're fighting these things harder and on more fronts than we are now.
People are so upset about their beliefs that you can't release them.
Even the truth doesn't release them.
Each one is free of its opinions, each one can think about what it wants to be progress, but you know what you can't do?
You can't deny the facts. Sorry, you can't.
It took me a while to understand it.
Ten years ago, I wrote a story about vaccines for the New Yorker.
I was surprised to meet with opposition to what was, after all, the most effective health measures in all human history.
I didn't know what to do. I just wrote a story and then went on to something else.
A little bit later, I wrote a story about a genetically modified food.
Same thing, worse.
People were getting crazy.
So, I wrote a story about this, and I couldn't understand why people thought about "Franken Food" -- why moving molecules organized rather than randomness -- was breaking the laws of nature out?
You know, I do my job: I write the article and there it is.
I mean, I'm a journalist: we wear, we send, we go for dinner, it's okay.
But these stories freaked me out. I ended up understanding why.
Well, because those fanatics that kept me crazy were not fanatics at all.
It was about meaningful, educated people, as needed.
It's just like the people in this room.
It disturbed me so much ...
And then I thought, let's be honest: we're at a point in this world where we don't have the same amount of progress as we used to.
We talk about it in ambivalent ways.
It's ironic to talk about guillemets: "The Progrès."
There are reasons for that, and I think we know them.
We've lost faith in institutions, in authority and sometimes in science itself. There are no reasons not to have it lost.
Just mention a few names and people understand.
Tchernobyl, Bhopal, Challenger, Vioxxx, weapons of mass destruction, inherited votes.
You can make your list.
There are questions and problems about people that we thought were always right.
Be skeptical.
Ask questions, demand evidence.
Take nothing for money counting.
But here's the thing: When you're proof, you have to accept the evidence. We're not good at that.
The reason is that we're in an epidemic of fear like I've never seen and hope to never see it again.
Twelve years ago was published an awful story that linked the autism epidemic to the vaccine against the redole, the spokes and the rubole.
Amazing.
There are tons of studies that have been conducted to see if that's true.
They must have been done, it's a very serious issue.
The results came back.
United States, England, Sweden, Canada, all the same: no correlation, no link, nothing at all.
It doesn't matter because we believe the anecdotes, we believe what we see, what we believe we see, what makes us feel real.
We don't think of a bunch of documents being produced by a government official and I understand that. We all understand that.
You know what?
The result has been disastrous because this is one fact: the United States is one of the only countries in the world where the vaccine rate against the redole goes down.
It's indigned. We should be ashamed.
It's horrible.
What could happen to this?
I really understand it.
Anybody here has the redole?
Did anybody here see somebody die from the redole?
Not very common ...
It never happens in this country, but it happened 160,000 times in the world last year.
It's a lot of redwood deaths. 20 every hour.
As it doesn't happen here, it's evacued of our minds and people like Jenny McCarthy can deliver books of fear and ignorance of tribunes like Oprah Winfrey or Larry King.
They can because they don't differentiate causality and correlation.
They don't understand that these notions look the same, but they're almost never the same.
It's something we have to learn faster.
This guy was a hero: Jonas Salk.
He lost us from the worst flake of humanity.
Without fear and pain, polio has disappeared.
This guy in the middle. Almost the same.
His name is Paul Offit.
He just developed with others a vaccine against the redavirus.
It saves the lives of 400 to 500,000 children in the developing world every year.
Pretty good, right?
It's good except that Paul is traveling to talk about vaccines and saying their value: that people are stopping their juries.
He actually says it that way.
In fact, Paul is a terrorist.
When Paul gives a talk, he can't tempt with no armed guards.
He gets calls at night because people like to tell him they know where his kids go to school.
Why? Because Paul made a vaccine.
I don't need to say that, but vaccines are essential.
You take them off, you get disease back, you get horrible diseases; that's what happens. We have redole in this country now.
It's worse. Of course, children will die because it's just a matter of statistics.
They're not going to die just redole.
What about polio? Let's take that. Why not?
A graduate student wrote me a few weeks ago to tell me she thought I was a bit crazy.
No one told me that before.
She wouldn't vaccinate her child against polio.
No question.
Okay.
Why? Because we don't have polio. You know what?
We didn't have polio in this country yesterday.
I don't know. Maybe a guy took a plane in Lagos this morning and he flew over to Los Angeles. He's flying over Ohio.
He's going to land in a few hours, rent a car and get to Long Beach, and he's going to be part of one of the wonderful TED dinners tonight.
He doesn't know who's infected with a paralyzing disease and us either because the world works like this.
This is the planet we live on. Don't say the opposite.
We love to see each other in the lie. We love that.
Everybody took their vitamins this morning?
Echinages: a little antioxidant to make you move forward.
I know you're doing it because half the Americans are doing it every day.
They take it, as well as alternative drugs, and no matter how often you find that they're useless.
Data is formal.
They blow your urine away. They rarely do more than that.
It's good if you want to pay 28 billion dollars for dark urine. I'm with you.
Dark ancient ones.
Why do we do that?
To me, we already hate Big Pharma.
We hate government. We don't trust.
We shouldn't. Our health care system is bad.
It's cruel to millions of people.
It's incredibly cold and unbearable for those of us who can afford it.
So we're off. Where do we go?
We're in the Big Placebo arm!
It's fantastic. I love Big Placebo.
You know, it's really serious because this thing is crap. We put billions of dollars on it.
I have lots of little examples here.
Fatty. Echinate: Fatty. Acai: I don't even know what it is, but it costs us billions of dollars: fraud.
You know what? When I say this, people scream at me. They say, "What are you involved with? People are going to do what they want.
They feel good."
You know what? You're wrong.
I don't care if the health minister says.
"Hmm, I'm not going to accept the evidence of my experts on mammography," or if a carpenter wants to treat her cancer patients with lavages in coffee.
When you take the path where belief and magic replaces evidence and science, you get to a place where you don't want to be.
You get to Thabo Mbeki, South Africa.
He killed 400,000 of his citizens by pretending that the beave, the ail and the olive oil were much more effective than the antiretrovirals we know to slow down the development of AIDS.
Hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths in a country that suffered more than any other disease.
Please don't tell me that these things are irrelevant.
There are always.
The most wasteful epidemic in which we are now finding is this absurd battle between the U.G.M.'s proprietors and the elites of the bio.
It's an idiotic argument that has to stop.
It's a debate about words, about metaphors.
It's ideology, not science.
All we eat, every grain of rice, every single strand of persil, every chou of Bruxelles has been modified by man.
There were no Mandarins in the Garden of Eden.
There was no cantaloup.
There were no Christmas sapins. We created everything.
We've done it in the last 11,000 years.
Once it's successful, sometimes it's not.
We got rid of what didn't work.
Now we can be more accurate.
There are risks. Absolutely.
You can put a kind of vitamin A in rice, and this thing can help millions of people extend their lives.
You don't want to do that?
I have to say, I don't understand.
We're taking care of genetically modified foods.
Why do we do that?
What I often hear is too many chemicals, pesticides, hormones, monocultures. We don't want giant exploitation of the same thing. It's bad.
We don't want companies that patent life.
We don't want companies with seeds.
You know my answer to all this?
You're right. Let's solve the problem.
It's true that we have a huge problem of food, but it's not science.
It has nothing to do with science.
It's legal, morality, intellectual property.
Science is not a business.
It's not a country.
It's not even a concept; it's a process.
Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. The idea that we shouldn't let science work because we're scared is really very restrictive. It prevents millions of people from flourishing.
In the next 50 years, we're going to have to produce 70 percent more food than it is now. 70 percent.
This is investment in Africa for 30 years.
Scandinavia.
They need it and we don't give it to them.
Why? genetically modified foods.
We don't want to encourage people to eat these exquisite things like manioc, for example.
Manioc is eaten by half a billion people.
It's like a potato.
It's just a bunch of calories. It sucks.
It has no nutrients, it has no protein. Scientists are injecting all this into it now.
People could eat it and not become blind.
They wouldn't be hungry and you know what?
That would be good. That wouldn't be Chez Panisse, but that would be good.
All I can say about this is, why do we struggle against this?
Let's see: why are we opposed to this?
Because we don't want to move genes?
It's about moving genes, not chemicals.
It's not about our ridiculous passion for hormones, our insistence to have bigger, better, more singular foods.
It's not about Rice Krispies, it's about keeping people alive, and it's time to understand what that means.
Because, you know what?
If we continue to act like we do, we will be guilty of something we don't want: high-tech colonization.
We can't describe otherwise what's going on.
It's selfish, it's ugly, it's ugly to us and we have to stop that.
So after this crazy, fun conversation, you might say, "So, do you ever want to move on this ridiculous machine to travel in time?"
Absolutely. I want to.
It's stuck in the present there, but we have an amazing opportunity.
We can fix this machine on what we want.
You can move it where you want to. You're going to move it where you want to.
We have to have these conversations and we have to think, but when we get in the machine and we move forward, we're going to be happy to do it.
I know we can. For me, it's something the world needs now.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Robert Gupta: Music is medicine, Music is mental health.
Robert Gupta, the violinist at Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra, tells us about the lesson that he gave to a brilliant schizophrenic musician -- and what he learned from that, called up later on stage, Gupta interprets his own transcript of the Suite Forer N°1 of Bach.
One day, the Los Angeles Times column, Steve Lopez walked into the streets of downtown Los Angeles when he heard a beautiful music.
She came from a man, an African-American, charming, shaming, homeless man, who played on a violin that had no two strings.
This story, many of you know it, because Steve's columns inspired a book, which was adapted on the screen, with Robert Downey Jr in the role of Steve Lopez, and Jamie Fox in the role of Nathaniel Ayers Anthony, the bassist at the Juilliard School whose promising career was rescued by a tragic paranoid schizophrenia.
Nathaniel gave up Julliard, had a total rupture, and 30 years later, he was homeless on the streets of Skid Row, downtown Los Angeles.
I encourage you all to read Steve's book, or to watch the film, to understand not only the wonderful connection that created between these two men, but also how music helped shape that connection, and was ultimately the instrument, if you pass me that calemb, which helped Nathaniel out of the street.
I met Mr. Ayers in 2008, two years ago at the Walt Disney Concert Hall.
He had just heard a concert from the first and fourth symphony of Beethoven, and he came backstage and presented himself.
He was speaking in a very innovative and social way by Yo-Yo Ma and Hillary Clinton, the reasons why the Dodgers would never win the World Heritages, because of the plotting of the first violin in the last motion of Beethoven's Fourth Symphony.
And we talked about music. And I got an email from Steve a few days later saying that Nathaniel would like me to give her a violin class.
Now, I should point out that Nathaniel refuses to get treated because when he was treated it was with electrochemicals and Thorazine and menottes and that, all his life, he suffered from that trauma.
But now it turns out it's inclined to these schizophrenic episodes.
In the worst of their manifestations, he explodes, and then disappears for days, errant on the streets of Skid Row, exposed to his horrors, the ridings of his evil spirit on him.
And Nathanial was in such a state of agitation when we started our first lesson at Walt Disney Concert Hall that there was a kind of a maniac reflection in his eyes, it looked like it was lost.
And he was talking about the invisible and smoke devils, and how someone would put it in his sleep.
And I was scared, not for me, but I was afraid to lose it, that he's going to fall asleep in one of his crises, and I'm ruining his relationship with the violin if I started talking about reaches and arches and other interesting forms of the didactic pedagogy of the violin.
So I just started playing.
I played the first musical motion for Beethoven's violin.
And as I played, I saw that a profound change was happening in Nathaniel's eyes.
It was as though it was under the impression of an invisible pharmaceutical product, a chemical reaction, whose music I played was the catalyst.
And Nathaniel's maniaque rage turned into understanding, quiet curiosity, and grace.
And as a miracle, he raised his own violin, and he started playing the ear, clips of violins that he then asked me to fill in, Mendelsohn, Tchaikovski, Sibelius.
And we started talking about music, from Bach to Beethoven, from Brahms, Bruckner, all B, from Bartók, all the way to Esa-Pekka Salonen.
And I realized that not only did he have an encyclopedic knowledge of music, but he had a connection to that music at a personal level.
He talked about the kind of passion and understanding that I share with my colleagues at Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra.
Playing music, and talking about music, this man was transformed, byanoïaque, by the streets of downtown Los Angeles, in this lovely, erudit, brilliant musician from Juilliard.
Music is medicine. Music changes us.
And for Nathaniel, music is mental health.
Because music lets him take his thoughts and his delights and bring them back through his imagination and his creativity, in reality.
And it's an escape from its dysfunctional state.
And I realized it was the essence of art.
That's why we've created music, to take something that exists within each of us, at the most fundamental level of our being, our emotions, and through our artistic take, through our creativity, we're able to shape those emotions in reality.
And the reality of this expression reaches each and every one of us, and educates us, inspire us and unite us.
And in terms of Nathaniel, the music brought him back to his friends.
The responsive power of music brought it back to the musicians' family who understood it, recognized his talent and respected it.
And I will always keep making music with Nathaniel, whether we're at the Disney Concert Hall Walt, or Skid Row, because he reminds me why I became a musician.
Thank you.
Thank you. Thank you.
Robert Gupta.
I want to play something that I shamefully stole from the fiddlers.
So please forgive me.
Tom Wujec: Move a tower, build a team.
Tom Wujec presents the surprising results of his extensive research on the Marshmallows -- a simple, team-building exercise, which involves dry spaghettis, a meter of sticky tape and a marshmallow, which builds the highest tower, with these ingredients? And why does an unexpected group always do better than average?
Many years ago, here in Ted, Peter Skillman presented a design test called the marshmallow test.
And the idea is quite simple.
Four people's teams have to build the highest-scale structure standing with 20 spaghettis, a meter of glue, a meter of wire, and a marshmallow.
The marshmallow must be placed at the top.
Although it seems really simple, it's actually rather difficult, because it forces people to collaborate quickly.
I thought this was an interesting idea, so I put it in a design workshop.
And it was a great success.
Since then, I've run about 70 design workshops around the world, with students, designers and architects, and even the Fortune 50 CEOs, and there's something in this exercise that reveals deep teachings about the nature of collaboration, and I'd like to share some with you.
Now, normally most people start taking their brands relative to the task.
They talk about it, they look for what it's going to look like, they work for power, and then they spend a little bit of time planning, organizing.
They make sketches, and they have spaghetti. They spend most of their time assembling the more and more large structures of sticks, and then, at the end, just as the deadline gets closer, somebody takes the marshmallow, and they're right at the top, and then they come back, and -- Ta-daaa!
They admire their work.
But in fact, what happens, most of the time, is that the "ta-daa" ends up in "oh" because the weight of the marshmallow is that the whole structure breaks down and collapses.
There are a number of participants who have far more than "oh" than others, and, among the worst, young graduates from trade schools.
They lie, they cheat, they're distracted, and the structures they produce are really boxes.
And of course, there are teams that produce far more of theta-daa structures, and, among the best, young college graduates in kindergarten.
And it's really amazing.
As Peter says, not only do they produce the highest structures, but they're also the most interesting structures.
So, the question we're asking is, how does this happen? Why? What are they special?
Peter likes to say this: "No one of the kids has spent just a minute trying to become the Directeur Technic of spaghetti Inc." That's true.
They don't spend their time managing for power.
But there's another reason as well.
It's that business school students are trained to find the only one plan that will work.
And then put it into work.
And then what happens, when they put the marshmallow up at the top, they don't have time left, so what?
That's the crisis.
Does that remind you something? Perfect.
What the kindergarten teams do differently is they start with the marshmallow, and they build prototypes, successive prototypes, always keep the marshmallow at the top, and have so many opportunities to repair the prototypes in difficulty.
Designers will recognize this kind of cooperation as the core basis of the iterative process.
With every version, children have instant information about what works or not.
So the ability to work with prototypes is essential, but let's see what the results of different teams are.
The average for most people is 50 centimeters, for business school students, about half, lawyers, a little bit better, but not very much, and for kindergarten, better than most adults.
Who are really the best?
Architects and engineers, fortunately!
A meter is the highest structure I've seen.
So why? Because they understand that the triangles and the self-portrait geometric patterns are the key to build stable structures.
So technical directors do a little bit better than average.
But this is where it gets interesting.
If you add a management executive to the team, the results go up significantly.
It's amazing. You know, you look around, and you say, "Oh, it's CETE team that's going to win."
It can be said in advance. And why?
Because they have these special skills of facilitation.
They run the process, they understand the process.
And any team that manages and tracks with a lot of attention improves the unfolding of the work significantly improves its performance.
special skills and skills of facilitation, their combination leads to success.
If you have 10 teams running around, about six, maybe, will make a structure that stands up.
And I tried something interesting.
I thought, "This time, let's look at the stakes."
So I offered a cost of $10,000 in software to the winning team.
And what do you think happened to those design students?
What was the result?
This is what happened.
Not a single team had no structure standing.
If one had built, say, a three-inch structure, they would have brought the price home.
So, isn't it interesting, that high stakes have a strong impact?
We did the exercise again with the same students.
What do you think happened then?
Here they understood the importance of prototypage.
And the same team went from the worst group to the best.
They made the highest structure in the shortest time.
There are great lessons for us, about the nature of motivation and success.
So, you might ask yourself, "Why is it that somebody spends time organizing a Marshamallow experience?"
The reason is I'm helping to create digital tools and processes that help teams make automobiles and video games and special effects.
And what Marshamallow is it's helping them to identify hidden biases.
Because, frankly, every project has its own marshmallow, right?
The competition provides a shared experience, a common language, a common attitude to build the "good" prototype.
And that is the value of that experience, of that simple exercise.
And those of you who are interested in can go to marshmallows.com.
It's a blog that you can look at how to drive the Marshamallows.
There are no instructions.
There are some crazy examples from around the world, about how people twist and adjust the system.
There are also records of the world.
And the fundamental lesson, I think, is that design is really a sport of contact.
It requires that we all make sense of the task, and that we apply the best of our thinking, of our feeling and our application to the challenge that we have in front of us.
And sometimes a small prototype of this experiment will be the only thing that will allow us to make an "oh" a "ta-daa."
And it can make a big difference.
Thank you very much.
Daniel Tammet: The different ways of knowing.
Daniel Tammet has language synesthesia, digital and visual synesthesia, which means that his perception of words, numbers and colors are intertwined in a new way of perceiving and understanding the world. Tammet, author of "I am born a blue day," shares his art and his passion for languages in this beautiful view of his mind.
I'm an autistic savant, or more exactly, an autistic savant with high work.
It's a rare condition.
And even more rare if she comes with me as in my case, a self-awareness and a mastery of language.
Very often when I meet someone and they discover that I'm like this, there's a certain mischief.
I see it in their eyes.
They want to ask me something.
And in the end, very often, the yearning is stronger than they are and they can't help but say, "If I give you my birth date, can you tell me what day of the week I was born?"
Or they talk about Cuban roots, or they ask me to recite a large number or a long text.
I hope you'll forgive me if I don't do that kind of thing for you today.
I'm going to talk about something much more interesting than the dates of birth or the Cuban roots -- a little bit deeper and a little bit closer, I think, than work.
I want to talk to you briefly about perception.
When he was writing theater pieces and the news that had to make him famous, Anton Tchekhov was holding a notebook in which he was writing his observations about the world around him -- little details that other people didn't seem to see.
Every time I read Tchekhov and his unique vision of human life, it reminds me of why I became a writer as well.
In my books, I explore the nature of perception and how different kinds of perceptions create different kinds of knowledge and understanding.
Here are three questions from my work.
Rather than trying to figure them out, I'm going to ask you to consider for a moment the intuitions and the visceral instincts that go through your head and your heart as you look at them.
For example, computation.
Can you feel how much place on the line of numbers the solution is likely to fall?
Or look at the foreign word and the sounds.
Do you think of the reaches of the senses that they're pointing to you?
And in terms of poetry, why does the poet use the word leg instead of the word rabbit?
I'm asking you to do that because I believe our personal perceptions, you know, are at the heart of how we acquire knowledge.
aesthetic judgments, rather than abstract reasoning, guide and shape the process by which we've come to know what we know.
I'm an extreme example of this.
My worlds of words and numbers relate to color, emotion and personality.
As Juan said, it's the condition that scientists call synesthesia, unusual interference between meaning.
These are the numbers from one to 12 as I see them -- each number with its own shape and character.
One is a flash of white light.
Six is a very sad black hole.
The sketches are in black and white here, but in my mind they're in color.
Three is green.
Four is blue.
Five is yellow.
I also paint.
And this is one of my paintings.
This is a multi-pication of two first numbers.
Three-dimensional shapes and space that they create in the middle creates a new shape, the response of the operation.
And the big numbers?
Well, you can't wait to get bigger than pi, the mathematical constant.
It's an infinite number -- it literally never ends.
In this painting I made of Pi's first 20 declars, I take the colors and the emotions and the textures and put them together in a kind of vallonated digital landscape.
But it's not just the numbers that I see in color.
Words too, for me, have colors and emotions and textures.
This is an opening sentence from the novel "Lolita."
Nabokov was himself synesthetic.
You can see here how my sense of sound L contributes to highlight the totality.
Another example: a little bit more mathematical.
I wonder if any of you will notice the building of the sentence from "Great Gatsby."
There's a syllabes procession -- wheat, one; prairies, two; lost Swede towns, three; one, two, three.
And that effect is very pleasant to the mind, and it helps to enjoy that sentence.
Let's go back to the questions I asked you a while ago.
64 millimeters per 75.
If any of you play chess, you'll know that 64 is a square number, and that's why the Egyptians, eight times eight, have 64 cases.
It gives us a form that we can represent, that we can perceive.
And 75?
Well if 100, and if we think 100 like a 75 square would look like this.
So what we need to do now is we need to assemble these two images in our mind -- something like this.
64 is 6400.
And in the right corner, you have nothing to calculate.
Four horizontal, four up and down -- that's 16.
So what the operation is actually asking you to do is 16, 16.16.
It's much easier than the way in which school taught you to do math, I'm sure.
It's 16, 16, 16, 48, 4,800 -- 4,000, the response to the operation.
Facile when you know how to do it.
The second question was an Icelandic word.
I guess there aren't a lot of people out there talking about Iceland.
So let me just give you a couple of choices.
Is it a happy word, or a sad word?
What do you say?
Okay.
Some people say he's happy.
Most people, a majority of people say it's sad.
And he actually means sad.
Why, statistically, a majority of people say a word is sad, in this case, heavy in other cases?
In theory, language evolves in a way that sound is associated, corresponds to the subjective, personal, intuitive experience of listening.
Let's look at the third question.
This is a verse of a poem by John Keats.
Words, like numbers, express fundamental relationships between objects, events and forces that make up our world.
It's going to be self, that as we exist in this world, we should, in our lifetimes, intuitively absorb those relationships.
poets, like other artists, play with their intuitive understandings.
In the case of 'hare', the lèvre' is a rich English ring.
It can also mean the fibers that grow on the head.
And if we think about it -- let me highlight the image -- the fibers represent vulnerability.
They take it to the smallest movement or the slightest emotion.
So what you have is an atmosphere of vulnerability and tension.
The luver himself, the animal -- not a cat, not a dog, a lip -- why a lip?
Because, think about the image, not the word, the image.
Too long ears, too long legs, help us to imagine, to feel intuitively, what it means to box and to shake.
So I hope in the course of these few minutes I've been able to share with you a little bit of my vision of things, and show you that words can have colors and emotions, numbers, shapes and personalities.
The world is richer, larger than it is too often the air.
I hope I've given you a chance to learn to see the world with fresh eyes.
Thank you.
Shea Hembrey: How I became 100 artists.
How do you set up an international art salon with work of 100 different artists? If you're Shea Hembrey, you're inventing all the artists and all the works yourself -- from out-of-the-art facilities to very large-scale, to tiny paintings made with one paintbrush at one hair. Look at this funny and hallucinating talk to see the explosion of creativity and the diversity of the talents that one artist is capable of.
I'm a contemporary artist and I come from an unexpected background.
I was 20 years old when I first went to an art museum.
I grew up in the middle of nowhere on a dirt road in Arkansas, at the nearest film hour.
And I think it was a great place to grow up as an artist, because I grew up surrounded by excentric figures in colors who knew how to make wonders with their hands.
And I could never tell you how much I had a plouc childhood and as much intellectual as you would expect.
For example, my sister and I, when we were little, we made a competition to see who could eat the most squirrel brains.
But on the other hand, we read a lot about ourselves.
And if the TV was on, we looked at a documentary.
And my father is the most voracious reader I know.
It can read a novel or two a day.
But when I was a kid, I remember, he was killing the flies in our house with my compressed air gun.
And the most amazing thing for me was that he was in his chair yelled at me to go get the compressed air gun, and I was going to look for him.
And what was amazing to me -- well, he was pretty awesome, he was killing a fly in the house with a gun -- but what was so amazing to me was that he knew just enough to arm him.
And he could shoot from a distance of two pieces and not damage what she was asking about, because he knew just enough to arm the gun and to kill the fly without damageing what she was asking.
So, I should talk about art.
Or we're going to spend all day with my childhood stories.
I love contemporary art, but I'm often really frustrated by the world of contemporary art and the contemporary art scene.
A few years ago, I spent months in Europe looking at the great exhibitions of international art that take the pulse of what's supposed to happen in the art world.
And I was struck by going to so many, one after the other, with a certain clarity of what I desired.
And I desired several things that I wouldn't get, or that I wouldn't get enough.
But two of the main things: one of them, I also wanted more work that attracted a large audience that was accessible.
And the second thing that I also wanted was a more craft and a more exquisite technique.
So I started thinking and listing everything that I thought would make a perfect fit.
So I decided to start my own biennial.
I'm going to organize it and lead it and open it up to the world.
So I thought, okay, I've got to have some criteria about how to choose works.
So amongst all the criteria I have, there are two main things.
One of them, I call it my Mimaw test.
And I imagine explaining art to my grandmother in five minutes.
And if I can explain it in five minutes, then it's too obtuse or esoteric and it hasn't been quite refined yet.
She needs to be retravailed until she can speak beautifully.
And then my second set of rules -- I hate to say "rucks" because it's art -- my criteria would be the three Hs, which is head, heart and hands.
And the great art would have its head: it would have interesting intellectual ideas and concepts.
He would have the heart in that sense that he would have the passion and the heart and the soul.
And he would have his hand in what he would be greatly designed.
So I started thinking about how am I going to make this Biennial, how am I going to go around the world and find these artists?
And then I realized one day, there's a easier solution.
I'm just going to do everything myself.
And so that's what I did.
So I thought, a Biennale needs artists.
I'm going to do an international biennial, I need artists from around the world.
So what I did was I invented a hundred artists from around the world.
I came up with their biographys, their passions and their art styles, and I started doing their work.
I thought, oh, I could spend my life doing such a project.
So I decided to do a real good thing.
She's going to take two years of work in the studio.
And I'm going to create that in two years.
And I did.
So, I should start talking about these guys.
Well the range is very large.
And I'm like a technician, so I loved it, learning how to play with all the techniques.
So, for example, in realistic paintings, we're going to go from this that's in the old master's style, to really realistic dead things, to this kind of painting that I paint with one hair.
And then at the other end, there's performance and short films and interior installations like this interior installation and this one, and open-air installations like this one and this one.
I know I have to mention that I do all these things.
It's not a retouch.
I'm underwater in the bush with these fish.
So now let me introduce you to some of my fictional artists.
This is Nell Remmel.
Nell is interested in the process of agriculture, and its work is based on these practices.
This work, which is called "Terreturn" -- she wanted to take the sky and use it to clean a sorry land.
And taking giant mirrors -- and this is she taking giant mirrors and trains them in dust.
And it's 30 feet long.
And what I loved about his work is, when I can walk around and look down in the sky, look down at the sky, and it reveals itself in a new way.
And the best part of this work is probably the crepuscule and dawn when the corner of the crepuscule fell and the Earth is in the shadow, but there's still light above, it's light above.
And you're there and everything else is dark, but there's this portal that you want to jump in.
This work was great. It's in my parents' backyard in Arkansas.
And I like to dig a hole.
So, this open one was very fun to do, because it had to dig up the earth for two days.
The next artist is Kay Overstry, and she's interested in ephemeral.
And in his most recent project, it's called "The weather I made."
And she's making weather times the scale of her body.
And this piece is "Givre."
And what she did was she came out of a cold, dry night and breathed back on the lawn to let -- to let the mark of her life, the brand of her life.
And so it's 1.65 meters of string that she left behind.
The sun rises, and it fades.
And this is my mother who played the role.
So, the next artist, this is a group of Japanese artists, a group of Japanese artists -- in Tokyo.
And they wanted to develop a new alternative art space.
And they needed funding, so they decided to invent some interesting funding projects.
One of them is these masterpieces to scratch.
And so what they do -- each of these artists on a 23 centimeter card in 18, which they sell for 10 dollars, drew original art works.
And you buy one of these, and maybe you get a real work, and maybe not.
Well, this caused a real estate in Japan, because everyone wanted to have a masterpiece.
And the ones that are most searching are the ones that are barely colored.
And all of these works, in a way, speak about luck or fate or chance.
Those first two are portraits of winners of the mega-jackpot years before and after winning.
And this one is called "Tirr the short straw."
I love these works because I have a little cousin at home who introduced me -- who, I think, is such a great presentation -- to a friend one day saying, "Here's my cousin, Shea.
It's hard to get straws."
And this is one of the best compliments we can do.
This artist is Gus Weinmueller, and he's doing a project, a great project, called "Art for the Peoples."
And within this project, he's doing a smaller project called "Assanning Artists."
And what he does -- he spends a week doing this with a family.
And it shows up on their porch, in front of their door, with a toothbrush and a pajama, and it's ready to spend the week with them.
And what it finds in place, it enters and does its little studio that serves as a base of work.
And it spends this week talking to the family about what they think is great art.
He has all these discussions with his family.
And he digs everything they have, and he finds materials to work.
And he's doing a work that answers what they think is great art.
For this family, he made this dead nature.
And all he's doing is sort of reference to nesting and space and personal goods.
The next project is Jaochim Parisvega, and he's interested in -- He believes art is everywhere waiting -- that he just needs a thumb turn to happen.
And he gives this push by harnessing natural forces, like in his series where he used rain to make paintings.
It's called "love of love."
He made wild birds create his art for him.
So he put the materials in places where the birds were going to get it, and they came up with his nests for him.
And this one is called, "Take my love."
This is called "Nid remixing love songs."
And this one is called "Love Neid."
Insure, this is Sylvia Slater.
Sylvia is interested in art training.
This is a very serious Swiss artist.
And she thought about her friends and family who work in places where chaos reigns and developing countries, and she thought, what can I do that would have value for them, in the case that something's going wrong and that they have to buy their way from the border or pay a killer.
And she came up with the idea of creating these works in pocket formats that are portraits of the person carrying them.
And you always have that on you, and if everything went into your house, you could make payments and buy your life.
So this cost of life is for a leader of a nonprofit irrigation.
So, I hope what happens is you never have to use it, and it's a legacy you transmit.
And she does it like you can break them into payments, or they might be like these, which are leaves that can be payments.
So they're valuable. They're valuable metals and stones.
And this one had to be fragmented.
He had to break a piece out of Egypt recently.
This is the open of a duo, Michael Abernathy and Bud Holland.
And they're interested in creating culture, pure tradition.
So what they're doing is they're moving into an area and trying to create a new tradition in a small geographic area.
So, this is in Eastern Tennessee, they decided that we need a positive tradition that goes with death.
So they invented tombstones.
And a tombstone jolt -- a tombstone jolt is when, for an important birthday or a birthday, you get all your friends and family and you go to the place where you're going to be buried.
And we got a lot of attention when we did.
I persuaded my family to do that, and they didn't know what I was doing.
And I said, "Habill you for a funeral. We're going to do a work."
And so we went to the grave and did this, which was hilarant -- the attention we had.
So what happens is you dance to the grave.
And once you finish your dance, everyone's wearing a toast and tells you how great you are.
And you actually have a funeral that you're in.
This is my dad and my mom.
This is a work by Jason Birdsong.
It's interested in the way that we think of as an animal, how much we're interested in biomimicry and camouflage.
You know, we're looking in a dark rake or a smell in the jungle, trying to distinguish a face or a creature.
We just have this natural way of seeing.
And he plays with this idea.
And this work: it's not real leaves.
These are specimens of butterflies who have natural camouflage.
So they associate them.
Here's another pile of leaves.
These are actually all real specimens of butterflies.
And he associates them with paintings.
Like this painting of a snake in a box.
So you open the box and you think, "Oh, there's a snake in there."
But it's actually a painting.
So it creates interesting conversations about realism and biomimicry and our propension to be overwhelmed by camouflage.
The next artist is Hazel Clausen.
Hazel Clausen is an anthropologist who took a year off and decided, "You know, I would learn a lot about culture if I created from scratch a culture that doesn't exist."
So that's what she did.
She created the Swiss people named Uvulites, and they have this typical tyrolian style song that they produce using the light.
And also how they reference the light -- all they say has fallen because of the forbidden fruit.
And this is the symbol of their culture.
And this is from a documentary called sexual and control of populations in the Uvulites.
This is a typical angora bush for them.
This is one of their founders, Gert Schaeffer.
And this is actually my aunt Irène.
It was so funny to have a false character who did false things.
And I crack in front of this work, because when I see it, I know it's French aquora and all the old German ribbons and laines that I found in a parrot cord from Nebraska and bathed everywhere for 10 years and then old Chinese jups.
The following is a collective of artists called the Argent Dobermans.
And their motto is to spread pragmatism one person at a time.
And they're really interested in how we've become too damned.
So that's one of their comments about how we got too much messed up.
And what they did was they put a stop sign on every beard on that fence.
And that's what we call "blong Horse Sense."
The next artist is KM Yoon, a really interesting South Korean artist.
And he went back to a tradition of the conquered art of rock.
Then comes Maynard Sipes.
And I like Maynard Sipes, but he's in his own world, and, God bless him, he's so paranoid.
Next is Roy Penig, a really interesting artist from Kentucky, and this is the coolest guy I know.
Once he even traded an art piece for a piece of government cheese because the person wanted it so much.
Then it's an Australian artist, Janeen Jackson, and it's from one of his projects called "What makes art work when you don't look at."
The next piece is a hallmark of a good literary adventure, Jurgi Petrauskas.
And then this is Ginger Cheshire.
This is from a short film called "The Last No One."
And this is my cousin and my sister's dog, Gabby.
Then it's a work by Sam Sandy.
He's an ancient Australian Aborigène, and he's also an artist.
And this is from a great sculpture project that he started.
This is a work by Eastelle Willoughsby.
She's suffering from color.
And this is one of the most prolific artists of all these hundred artists, even though she goes to her 90s.
This is a work by Z. Zhou, and he's interested in stasis.
Then comes Hilda Singh, and she does a whole project called "Tenue Social."
Then comes Vera Sokolova.
And I have to say, Vera scares me a little bit.
You can't look it directly in the eyes, because it's a little scary.
And it's nice that it's not true; it would be scary that I said that.
And she's optometrist in St. Petersburg, and she plays with optics.
Then it's from Thomas Swifton.
This is from a short film, "The Skinny Aventures."
And this is by Cicily Bennett, and it's from a series of film courts.
And after that, there are 77 other artists.
And all together with those 77 other ones that you don't see, that's my sweetheart.
Thank you.
Joshua Walters: Be just crazy.
At the TED Full Spectrum audition, Joshua Walters' bipolary comedy follows the line that separates mental illness from intellectual ability, and in this funny speech and gives it a question of, what is the right balance between treating madness and acceptance of the maniaque side of creativity?
My name is Joshua Walters.
I'm an actor.
But in addition to being an actor, I was also diagnosed bipolar.
What I consider to be positive, because the more mad I am on stage, the more entertaining I am.
At the age of 16, in San Francisco, I did a sharp maniac episode in which I was taking for Jesus Christ.
You may think it was frightening, but actually no drugs can take you as far as the thought of being Jesus Christ.
I was sent to a place, a psychiatric facility, and over there, everyone is doing their own one-man show.
There's no public like this to justify their rehearsals.
They're just practicing.
One day they will be there.
When I came out, I was diagnosed and received medication from a psychiatrist.
"Okay, Josh, why don't you give you the -- why don't you give you the Zyprexa.
Okay? Mmmm?
At least, that's what it says about my pen."
Some of you are in the middle of what I see.
I can feel your noise.
The first half of high school was the fight against the maniac episode, and the second half was the shortest of these drugs, which made me sleep throughout high school.
The second half was just a big herd in class.
When I walked out, I had a choice.
I could either deny my mental illness or accept my mental skill.
There's a current at the moment to make mental illness -- at least the hypomaniac side.
If you don't know what hypothermia is like a control machine, maybe like a freerrari machine.
Many of the speakers here, and some of you in the audience, have this idea of creativity, if you see what I'm talking about.
You're driven to do something that everyone has judged impossible.
There's a book -- by John Gartner.
John Gartner wrote this book called "The Hypomanic Edge" in which Christophe Colomb, Ted Turner, and Steve Jobs, and all these entrepreneurial minds compete with this key to creativity.
Another book was written not long ago in the mid-1990s, called "Touched With Fire," by Kay Redfield Jamison, in which we looked at the creative side of Mozart, Beethoven, and Van Gogh would all suffer from maniac depression.
Some of them got sued up.
So there was not just a good side of the disease.
Recently, there has been an evolution in this field.
One article was written in The New York Times, September 2010, saying, "Just enough maniac."
Be smart enough that investors who are looking for entrepreneurs who have this kind of spectrum -- you know what I'm talking about -- maybe not completely bipolar, but they're in the spectrum of bipolar -- where on the one hand, you might think you're Jesus, and on the other hand, maybe they just make you a lot of money.
To see you.
Everyone's somewhere in between.
Everyone's in between.
So maybe, you know, madness doesn't exist, and diagnosing a mental illness doesn't mean you're crazy.
But maybe that just means you're more sensitive to what most people can't see or feel.
Maybe nobody's really crazy.
Everyone's just a little bit crazy.
The intensity depends on what part of the spectrum you fall into.
The intensity depends on how lucky you are.
Thank you.
Dave deBronkart: This is Dave, e-patient.
When Dave deBronkart has learned that he's been achieved with rare terminal cancer, he turned to a group of patients on the web with the same pathologie -- and found a medical treatment that even his own doctors didn't know what it was. It saved his life. He now calls it to all the patients that they communicate with each other, that they use their medical records, and that they improve their decision-making, an e-Patient at a time.
We're here to talk about an amazing thing, the year of patients' events.
You've heard stories today about patients taking control of their cases, patients saying, "I know what my chances are, but I'm going to look for more information.
I'm going to define myself the conditions of my success."
I'm going to tell you how I'm going to die four years ago -- when I discovered I was actually almost dead.
And what I then discovered about the e-Patient movement -- I'm going to explain what the term means.
I blogged under the pseudonyme of Patient Dave, and when I discovered this, I changed for e-Patient Dave.
In terms of the word "patient," when I started a few years ago getting involved in medical care and meeting as a simple observer, I noticed that people were talking about patients as if they weren't in the room, as if they weren't.
In some of the talks today, we're still doing it.
But I'm here to tell you, "patient" is not a word to the third person.
You're going to find yourself in a hospital bed -- or your mother, or your child -- I see people stick up their heads, and say, "I'm very good at what you're talking about."
So when you're going to hear what I'm going to talk about here today, first of all, I mean I'm here on behalf of all the patients I've met, and of everyone I haven't met.
It's about letting patients play a more active role in improving health care.
One of the doctors at my hospital, Charlie Safran, and his colleague, Warner Slack, has been saying for decades that the most under-employed resource in all of the healthcare system is the patient.
They've been saying it since the 1970s.
Let's go back a few years.
This was in July 1969.
I was in the first year of college, and this was the year or we ate out on the moon for the first time.
This was the first time we saw from another surface -- this is where we are right now, where we live.
The world was changing.
He was going to change in many ways that no one could predict.
A few weeks later, it was Woodstock.
Three days of fun and music.
This is, just to prove historical authenticity, a picture of me this year.
Yes, the rolling hair, the blue eyes -- that was really something.
In the fall of 1969, the Whole Earth Catalog looked.
This was a hippie newspaper about self-sufficiency.
We think hippies were just hedonists, but there was a strong component -- I was part of the movement -- a very strong component of self-responsiveness.
The subtitle of this book is, "to access to tools."
It was about how to build your own home, how to grow your own food.
In the 1980s, this doctor, Tom Ferguson, was the medical editor of the Whole Earth catalog.
And he saw that most of what we do in medicine and health care is take care of ourselves.
In fact, he said it was about 70 to 80 percent of the way that we really took care of our bodies.
He also saw that when the healthcare system becomes a medical system because of a more severe disease, what gives us the most is access to information.
And when the web came, it changed everything, because not only could we find information, we could find other people like us who could gather, who could bring us information.
And he coined the term e-Patients -- equippled, engaged, that can act, that is capable.
Of course, at this stage of life it was in a more dignified form than it was at the time.
I was an engaged patient long before I heard the term.
In 2006, I went to my doctor for a routine exam, and I said, "I have shoulder pain."
I've gone through a radio, and the next morning -- you may have noticed, those of you who have gone through a medical crisis will understand this.
This morning, some of the speakers mentioned the date they learned about their illness.
For me, it was 9 a.m. on January 3, 2007.
I was at work; my office was net; I had the blue carpet of separation from the walls.
The phone rang and it was my doctor.
He said, "Dave, I've posted the radio on the screen of my computer at home."
He said, "Votre shoulder, it's going to go, but you have something in the lung."
And if you look in that red oval, that shadow was not supposed to be there.
In short, I said, "So do I have to go back?"
He said, "Yes, we're going to have to scan your chest."
And before I got caught, I said, "Would I do something?"
He said -- think about that.
This is the advice your doctor gives you.
"Come home and take a drink of wine with your wife."
I went to the CAT scan, and it turns out there were five of these things in each of my lungs.
So at this point, we knew it was cancer.
We knew it wasn't a lung cancer.
It meant that it was metastases from somewhere.
The question was, where?
So I had an ultrasound.
I had to do what many women have to do -- gel on the belly and bzzzz.
My wife accompanied me.
She's a veterinarian, so she saw a lot of echographies.
I mean, she knows I'm not a dog.
But what we saw -- this is an MRI.
It's much more net than ultrasound.
What we've seen in this kidney is that big blob there.
And in fact, there were two of them.
One girl was on the front and she'd already burst and she'd climb into the baby.
The other one would pull back, and she would join the soleary muscle, which is a big muscle in the back that I'd never heard of, but all of a sudden I was interested in it.
I went home.
And I Googled -- I've been connected since 1989 to Compuserv.
I know you can't read the details here; it's not important.
I went to a respected medical website, WebMD, because I know how to filter waste.
I also found my wife online.
Before I met her, I looked at suboptimal research results.
So I looked for quality information.
Trust is so important -- what sources of information can we trust?
Where does my body end and where does the invader begin?
And a tumor is something that grows out of your own tissue.
How is that possible?
Where does it start and end the medical skill?
This is what I read on WebMD: "The pronostic is weak for advanced kidney cancer.
Almost all patients are incurable."
It's been long enough that I'm on the net to know that if I don't like the first results that I get, I'm still looking for it.
And what I found was on other websites, even on the third page of Google results, "There's little hope," "Prinstic is bad."
And I think, "How is that?"
I didn't feel sick at all.
I was tired at night, but I was 56.
I was slowly losing weight, but that's what the doctor told me to do.
It was really something.
And this is the diagram of stage four of the kidney cancer of the drug that I ended up having.
From a pure coincidence, there's this thing in my lung.
In the left femur, the bone of the left thigh, there's another one.
I had one. My leg ended up dead.
I fainted and fell over, and she broke.
There's one in the skull, and then to make good sense, I had these other tumors -- including, as the treatment started, there was one that was growing on my language.
I had kidney cancer growing on my tongue.
And what I read was that my average life expectancy was 24 weeks.
It was bad.
I had a foot in the grave.
I thought, "What's my mother's face going to look like on my funeral day?"
I had to speak to my daughter. I said, "Go for what's going on."
Her boyfriend was with her.
I said, "I don't want you to get married prematurely just so you can do it while Dad is still alive."
It's really serious.
Because if you ask yourself what motivates patients, think about that.
My doctor advised me a community of patients, Acor.org, a network of patients with cancer, among other amazing things.
Very quickly, they told me, "The kidney cancer is not a rare disease.
Find a special center.
There's no cure, but there's something that sometimes works -- usually it doesn't work -- it's called high- dose interleukine.
Most hospitals don't talk about it, they won't even tell you it exists.
Don't let them give you something else first.
And by the way, here are four doctors around you who are proposing it and their phone numbers.
Amazing, right?
So there it is.
Here we are, four years later, you don't find a website that gives patients this information.
Approuved by the government, the American Society for cancer, but patients know what patients want to know.
This is the power of patient networks.
This amazing substance -- again, I said, where does my body end?
My oncologist and I talk a lot about this time, I want my talks to be technically accurate.
And he said, "You know, the immune system is good at detecting invaders -- bacteria from the outside -- but when it's your own tissue you've developed, it's a whole other story."
And I went through a mental exercise, because I started my own community of support for patients on a website, and one of my friends, one of my parents actually, said, "So, Dave, who grew this thing?
Are you going to mind yourself?
So I started.
And this whole story is in this book.
That's how the numbers appeared.
I used to place the web numbers from my hospital the size of my tumors in a painting.
Don't worry about numbers.
You see, this is the immune system.
One amazing thing, these two yellow lines are where I got the two doses of interleukine at two months away.
And let's see how the size of the tumors has dramatically lowered between the two.
It's just amazing.
Who knows what we can do when we learn to serve more.
The conclusion is that a year and a half later, I was there when this beautiful young woman, my daughter, married.
And when she went down those stairs, and at that point she was just her and I, I was so happy she didn't have to tell her mother, "I wish Dad was there."
This is what we do when we improve health care.
And I want to talk briefly about two other patients who do everything they can to improve the health care system.
This is Regina Holliday, painted in Washington D.C., whose husband died of kidney cancer a year after my disease.
Here she is painting a mural fresque of her horrible weeks in the hospital.
One of the things she discovered is that her husband's medical record in this paper shirt was disorganized.
She said, "If I have a label with the nutritional data on the side of a pack of grain, why can't there be something as simple that tells every new nurse who takes her service, every new doctor, the basic elements of my husband's pathologist?"
So she painted this medical data set with a nutrition label, something like this, in a diagram of her husband.
And then last year, she painted this diagram.
She looked at the health system like me.
It turned out there were a lot of people who had written advice books to patients who you don't hear about in medical lectures.
Patients are such a under-employed resource.
As I said in my introduction, I came up with a certain mastery to say that patients had to have access to their data.
In fact, I told a talk a couple of years ago, "Don't give me my damn data, because you can't trust how to hold it."
And she's got our damn data here -- it's a pun -- that's starting to come out, starting to convince -- water symbolizes our data.
And in fact, I want to improvise a little bit for you here.
There's a guy I know on Twitter, a guy from the health care software in Boston, and he wrote the rap of the e-Patient.
And it does that.
Give me my damn data set, I want to be an e-Patient just like Dave to give me my damn data, because that's my life to save, I'll stop there.
Thank you. I shuffled the timing.
Think about the possibilities, why are iPhones and iPads growing much faster than the health tools that are available to help you take care of your family?
This is a website, VisibleBody.com that I stumbled across.
I said, "You know, I'm asking myself what my soletic muscle is?"
You can click on things and take it off.
I saw, "Aha, this is the kidney and the sole muscle."
I rotated it in 3D, and I thought, "I understand now."
So I realized it reminded me of Google Earth, where you can fly to any address.
I thought, "Why don't we take this and connect it to the data from my digital scanner and have Google Earth for my body?"
And what did Google come out this year?
Google Body browser.
But it remains general.
This is not my data.
But if we can pull this data out from behind the dam so that software designers can throw themselves in the way that they usually do, who knows what to create.
Last sontore: This is Kelly Young, a patient with rhumatoid arthritis living in Florida.
It's a live story that's happened in the last few weeks.
The RA patients, as they call themselves -- his blog is called RA Warrior -- have a big problem because 40 percent of them don't have visible symptoms.
And that makes the evolution of disease difficult to evaluate.
Some doctors think, "Yeah, well, you're really bad."
Well, she found, looking around the web, a nuclear bone scanner that's used to use for cancer, but can also reveal the inflammation.
And she saw that if there's no inflammation, then the scanner is uniformly gray.
So she passed it.
And the radiologist report said, "No cancer."
And that's not what he was supposed to do with it.
So she wanted to reinterpret it, and her doctor fired it.
She pulled the CD out.
He said, "If you don't want to follow my instructions, go ahead."
So she took the CD out of the images of the scanner, and looked at all these hot spots.
And now she's actively engaged in her blog looking for help to get better health care.
You see, this is a patient who took things by hand -- no medical training.
We are, you are, the most under-employed resource in the healthcare system.
What she was able to do was because she had access to raw data.
What was this important?
Well, in the TED 2009, Tim Berners-Lee himself, the inventor of the Web, gave this talk in which he said that the next revolution would not be that your browser would find the articles of other people on the data, but the raw data.
And he went back to the end of his talk, "Don't give us the raw data.
Give us the raw data."
And I ask you, these words, please, to improve the health care system: let patients participate.
Let patients participate.
Let patients participate.
Let patients participate.
Thank you.
Every patient in the world watching this webcast, God bless you all -- let patients participate.
[Unclear] And he bless you. Thank you very much.
Bill Ford: A future beyond the big traffic jam.
Bill Ford is a man of the automobile. His grandfather was Henri Ford, and he grew up at the heart of the giant Ford Motor Co, so when he's concerned about the environmental impact of cars and the growing problem of the global traffic, it's worth listening to him, and his vision of the future of mobility includes smart roads, more smart public transopters, more green than before.
From my birth and choice, I've been involved in the auto industry my entire life, and over the last 30 years, I've traveled to Ford Motor Company.
And for most of those years, I was worried about how I was going to sell more cars and trucks.
But today I worry about whether all we do is sell cars and contaminate it.
What happens when the number of vehicles on the roads are pumped by two, by three, or even by four?
Two great passions guide my life, and the first is automobiles.
I literally grew up with Ford Motor Company.
I thought it was so cool when I was a little boy when my father came home the last Ford or the last Lincoln and left it in the aisle.
And that's when I decided, at the age of 10, that would be really cool if I was the test driver.
So my parents went out to dinner.
They would sit down, I'd walk out of the house.
I would jump to the wheel and go around the street to the new model, and it was huge.
And it lasted about two years, until -- I think I was about 12 years old -- my father comes home with a Lincoln Mark III.
And he was snowing that day.
So Mom and he went to dinner.
And I came out in fresh, and I thought it would be really cool to make rounds or even eight in the snow.
My father finished his meal early that evening.
And he ran to the front, and he opened the door at the same time, or I slipped over the glass and found it in front of the front door with the car -- and I almost ended up in the front hall.
The driving testing was pretty cool for a while.
But I really started to love cars then.
And my first car was a 1975 green-electric Mustang.
And even though the color was kind of ugly, I loved this car, and she really shook my love story with the cars that are lost today.
But cars are really more than a passion for me; I literally have them in the blood.
My great-grandfather was Henry Ford, and on the side of my mother, my great-grandfather was Harvey Firestone.
So when I was born, I guess you can say that I was expecting a lot of myself.
But my great grandfather, Henry Ford, really believed that the mission of the Ford Motor Company was to improve people's lives and produce cars at the fingertips of everyone.
Because he believed that, with mobility, freedom and progress had come.
And I share that belief.
My other great passion is the environment.
And when I was young, I would go all the way north of Michigan and paint in the rivers where Hemingway was painting, and then he wrote about it.
And it really struck me over the years, in a very negative way, when I was going to a river that I loved, and I was going through this field that was once filled with fireflies, and now had a trade street or a residential building.
And so even though it was young, it was really in me.
And this whole notion of environmental conservation, at a very basic level, I understood it well.
When I was a high school kid, I started reading authors like Thoreau and Aldo Leopold and Edward Abbey.
And I really started to develop a deeper appreciation of the natural world.
But he had never come to the idea that my love of cars and trucks would be one day in conflict with nature.
And that was true until I went to college.
And when I got to college, you can imagine my surprise when I was going to school and some of my professors were saying that Ford Motor Company and my family were all wrong with this country.
They thought we were more interested, as a industry, by the profits than by the progress, and we filled the cloud of smoke -- and frankly, we were the enemy.
I walked into Ford after college after a time of introspection to see if it was the right thing to do or not do.
But I decided I wanted to go see if I could make a change.
And if I look back 30 years, it was kind of naive to think about this age that I asked to do it, but that's what I wanted to do.
And I really found out that my teachers weren't completely wrong.
In fact, when I came back to Detroit, my commuters for the environment weren't really tasted from the people of my own company, and certainly not from the industry.
I had very interesting conversations, as you can imagine.
There were people at Ford who believed that all these ecological absurdities were just going to disappear and that I had to stop training with green people.
I was considered a radical.
And I'll never forget the day when a member of the general direction called me to stop incurringled environmentalists or suspected of being.
Of course, I didn't intend to do that.
And I kept expressing myself on the environment.
And that was really the subject that we now call sustainability.
And over time, my opinions then controversial have become more or less consensive today.
I mean, I think most people in the industry understand that we have to get there.
And the good news is that today we're attacking the big problems of cars and the environment -- not just in Ford, but really in industry.
We're pushing the efficiency of the fuel up into new peaks.
And with new technologies, we're reducing -- and I think one day we'll eliminate -- CO2 emissions.
We start selling electric cars and it's great.
We're developing alternative transmissions that will make cars affordable in every sense of the term -- economically, socially and ecologically.
And in fact, although we have a long way to go and a lot of work to do, I see the day that my two great passions -- cars and the environment -- are actually in harmony.
But unfortunately, as we're on the road to solve a monstrous problem -- and as I said, we're not there yet, we have a lot of work to do, but I see we're going to do it, but even as we're setting this up, another huge problem comes up and people don't realize it.
And it's the freedom of mobility that my great-grandfather has brought to people who are now threatened, just like the environment.
The problem, in the simplest terms, is mathematical.
Today, there are about 6.8 billion people in the world.
And in our lifetime, that figure is going to grow to about nine billion.
And at this population level, our planet is going to face the limits of growth.
And with that growth comes from severe practical problems, one of which is that our transportation system simply can't face it.
When we look at population growth in terms of cars, it becomes even clearer.
Today there's about 800 million cars on the roads around the world.
But with more people and greater prosperity in the world, that number is going to go up to between two and four billion cars by half the century.
And this is going to create the kind of global traffic that the world has never seen before.
Now think about the impact that this will have on our daily lives.
Today, the average American spends about a week a year stuck in traffic jams.
And it's a huge waste of time and resources.
But it's nothing compared to what happens in nations that have the fastest growth.
Today, the average driver in Beijing is spending five hours a day in his car.
And last summer -- many of you have probably seen this -- there was a 160-mile traffic jam that took 11 days to resorbate in China.
In recent years, 75 percent of the world's population will live in cities, and 50 of those cities will have 10 million people or more.
So you see the size of the problem that we face.
When we look at population growth, it's clear that the mobility model we have today won't work tomorrow.
Frankly, four billion clean cars on the road remain four billion cars.
And a wireless traffic jam is still a traffic jam.
So if we don't change anything today, what does tomorrow look like?
I think you probably already have the picture.
The traffic jams are just a symptom of this challenge, and they're really, really embarrassing, but they're just that.
But the biggest problem is that this global congestion is going to stifle economic growth and our ability to deliver food and care, especially people who live in cities.
And our quality of life is going to be severely compromised.
So what will the solution be?
Well the answer is going to be innovative.
My great grandfather once said to invent the Modèle T, "If I had asked people back then what they wanted, they would say, "We want faster horses." So the answer to more cars is simply not to have more roads.
When America started to expand to the West, we didn't add any more chariot convois, we built railroads.
And to connect our country after World War II, we didn't build any two-way highways, we built the interstate highway system.
Today we need a leap forward in thinking so that we can create a viable future.
We're going to build smart cars, but we also need to build smart roads, smart parking, smart public transport systems and so on.
We don't want to lose our time in traffic, in the toll booths or in search of parking spaces.
We need an integrated system that uses real-time data to optimize personal mobility at large scales without constraints or compromise for the moving ones.
And frankly, it's the kind of system that will sustain the future of personal mobility.
And the good news is that some of this work has already begun in different parts of the world.
The city of Masdar in Abu Dhabi employs self-driving electric vehicles that can communicate with each other, and they travel underneath the streets of the city.
And on top of that, you have a series of pedestrian lanes.
In New York, on the 34th Street, traffic jams will soon be replaced with a connected system of corridors dedicated to specific vehicles.
Screwing areas and reserved transportways are going to be created, and the whole thing will reduce the average hour-by-moment shift to move across New York from about an hour to about 20 minutes today.
And if you look at Hong Kong, they have a very interesting system called the Pieuvre.
It's a system that brings together all the transportation assets into one payment system.
So parking, buses, trains, all operate in the same system.
Car-sharing services also go around the world.
And these efforts, I think, are great.
They get rid of the congestion, and they start to, frankly, save fuel.
Those are all good ideas that will make us move forward.
But what really inspires me is what will be possible when our cars are going to start talking.
Very soon, the same systems that we're using today to bring music, entertainment and GPS information to our vehicles are going to be used to create a network of smart vehicles.
Every morning I travel about 45 miles from home to Ann Harbor to my office in Dearborn, Michigan.
And every night I go home, my journey is really crap.
And I often have to go out of the express path and look for different iterations to try and get to my home.
But very soon the day will come where cars will communicate with each other.
So if the car in front of me on 94 falls on a traffic jam, she'll immediately alert my car and tell her to recalibrate her body back to me on the best possible path.
And these systems are currently under test, and frankly they're going to be ready to market very soon.
But the potential of a connected car network is almost limitless.
One day, very soon, you'll be able to plan a ride to go to town and your car will be connected to a smart parking system.
So you go up into your car, and at that point, your car holds you a parking lot before you get there -- you don't have to turn to look for one, which, frankly, is one of the biggest fuel consumption for cars today in urban areas: looking for parking space.
Or imagine yourself in New York and you follow a smart taxi on your smartphone, and so you don't have to wait in the cold to find one and make a sign of it.
Or you're at a TED conference and your car is talking to everybody's calendars and telling you the best itinérarian about going from home and when you need to leave, so that you're all coming to your next destination in time.
This is the kind of technology that will bring together millions of individual vehicles into a single system.
So I think it's clear that we have the premises of a solution to this huge problem.
But as we've discovered by attacking the problem of CO2 emissions and also fossil fuels, there is no single miracle solution.
The solution is not going to be more cars, more roads, not a single ferroviary system; you can only find it, I believe, in a global network of interconnected solutions.
I know we can develop the technology that will make it work, but we have to accept where we are to go and look for solutions -- that it means sharing vehicles or public transport or some other way of doing that we haven't found yet, our transportation and infrastructure mix has to support all future options.
We need the best and the smartest of us to begin to think about this problem.
Companies, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, they all have to understand that this is a huge business opportunity as well as a huge social problem.
And as these groups embrace the challenge of clean energy -- and to me it's really amazing to see all the gray matter, all the money and all the profound thinking that have, in the past three years, been invested in the field of clean energy.
We need that same passion and that same energy to tackle the global gridlock.
But we need people like all of you in this room, eminent thinkers.
I mean, frankly, I need all of you to think about how to contribute to this enormous problem.
And we need people from all walks of life; not just inventors, we need government designers and government officials to think about the attitudes they're going to embrace in this challenge.
This problem isn't going to be solved by one person or one group.
It's really going to be a national energy policy, frankly for every country, because the solutions in each country will be different from the income levels, the congestion and also the current level of systems.
But we have to get there, and we have to get there today.
And we need to have an infrastructure to support this flexible future.
You know, we've come a long way.
Since the Modèle T, most people have not walked away from more than 40 kilometers away from home in their entire lives.
And since then, the automobile has given us the freedom to choose where to live, where to work, where to play and frankly when we go out and want to circulate.
We don't want to go back and lose that freedom.
We're in a process of solving -- and as I said earlier, I know that we have a long way to go -- the big problem that holds all of our attention and passion, and that's the environmental problem, but I think we all have to navigate all of our efforts and all of our ingenuity and determination to help solve this notion of global gridlock.
Because in doing so, we're going to preserve what we've ended up taking for granted, and that is the freedom to move around and move without effort around the world.
And that will really improve our quality of life if we do it.
Because if you can imagine, like me, a zero-emission future and freedom to move around the country and around the world as we take for granted today, it's worth all the hard work today to keep it for tomorrow.
I think we're the best at all when we're faced with big problems.
It's one, and it can't wait.
So let's get this right now.
Thank you.
Robert Hammond: Build a park in the sky.
The city of New York was trying to destroy the High Line, a abandoned airway in Manhattan, when Robert Hammond and a few friends suggested, why don't we make a park? He tells us how that happened in a narrative of local cultural activism.
Highline is an ancient aerial ferroviary line running across Manhattan for two miles.
It was originally a fret line coming down the 10th Avenue.
It was called "The Death Avenue" because there were so many people crushed by the trains, that the railroads hired a kind of horseback to be known as the West Side Cowboy.
But even with a cowboy, about a person a month would die.
So it was raised.
It was built at nine meters in the air, right in the middle of the city.
But with the emergence of interstate highways, it was less and less used.
And in 1980, a train just passed it for the last time.
It was a burnt-up train -- for Thanksgiving, that's what we're talking about -- from the meat packaging industry.
And then we gave it up.
And I live in the neighborhood and got wind for the first time in the New York Times, in an article that said we were going to demolish it.
And I suspect someone worked for conservation or saving and volunteering, but I realized nobody was doing anything.
I went to my first neighborhood meeting -- I had never seen anyone before -- and I sat next to a guy named Joshua David, who's a travel writer.
At the end of the meeting, we realized that we were both a little bit interested in the project; most people wanted to demolish it.
So we traded our business cards, and we didn't stop calling ourselves and decided to start this organization, the Amis of the High Line.
And the original goal was to just save it from demolishing, but then we also wanted to find out what we could do with it.
And what got me excited first, or interested, was this view from the street -- this sort of steel structure, a little bit rusty, this industrial relique.
But when I got up, it was two and a half kilometers of wild flowers crossing the center of Manhattan with views of the State Empire building the Statue of Liberty and the Hudson River.
And that's really where we started, that the idea formed, to make it a park, and it was inspired by this wild landscape.
At the time, there was a lot of opposition.
The Mayre Giuliani wanted to demolish it.
I'm going to pass you through a lot of legal gaits and a lot of community engagement.
Mayor Bloomberg came along, and he supported us well, but we still had an economic record.
It was after 9/11; the city lived in difficult times.
So we commissioned an economic feasibility study to try to get the case up.
And it turns out we were wrong in numbers.
We thought the building would cost 100 million dollars.
So far it's fed 150 milions.
And the main point was, it had meaning for the city, economic perspective.
So we said that, within a 20-year period, the value for the city in terms of the increase in wage value, and increased taxes would be about 250 million.
It was enough. It really brought the support of the city.
Turns out we were wrong about that.
Now, it's estimated that it's created about half a billion dollars, or it's created about half a billion dollars, in taxes for the city.
We started a design competition, selected a design team.
We worked with them to create a design that was inspired by this wild landscape.
There are three sections.
We opened the first section in 2009.
Success has surpassed all our expectations.
Last year we had about two million visitors, and that's 10 times what we estimated it.
This is one of my favorite places in the first section.
This is amphitre just above 10th Avenue.
And the first section ends up on the 20th street now.
The other thing is that it generated, obviously, a lot of ecological value; it also inspired, I think, a lot of great architecture.
There's a view, where you can see Frank Gehry's buildings, new, Shigeru ban, Neil Denari.
And the Whitney is going to move into the center of the city -- "Whitney Museum of American Art" and they're building their new museum just at the foot of the Highline.
This was designed by Renzo Piano.
And they're going to do the work in May.
And we've already started building section 2.
This is one of my favorite places, this bridge where you're two feet above the surface of the High Line, and you go through a canopy of trees.
The Highline was covered with billboards in time, and so we had a lot of fun and instead of enclosing people from view of the city.
It was installed last month.
And then the last section had to go around the rail exchangers, which is the largest undeveloped site in Manhattan.
And the city has planned -- for the better or for the worse -- three and a half million square feet of development than the High Line will encerclera.
But to me, what makes the special Highline really is people.
And frankly, even though I love the designs that we built, I've always been afraid not to really love it, because I've fallen in love with this wild landscape -- and how can I recreate this magic?
But what I've found is that it's in people and in the way that they use it that, to me, makes it so special.
A quick example is that I realized after we opened up that there were all these people holding their hand on the High Line.
And I realized New Yorkers don't hold their hand; we don't do that outside.
But you see it on the Highline, and I think it's the power that public space can have to transform the way people live their city and interact with each other.
Thank you.
Matt Cutts: Try something new for 30 days.
Is there something you've always had the intention of doing, wanting to do, but what -- you didn't do it? Matt Cutts propose: try and do it for 30 days, this brief, light talk offers us a clever way of thinking about planning and making goals.
A few years ago, I felt stuck in the routine, so I decided to follow the tracks of a great American philosopher, Morgan Spurlock, and try something new for 30 days.
The idea is actually quite simple.
Think about something you've always wanted to add to your life and try to do it for the next 30 days.
It turns out that 30 days is just the right amount of time to install a new habit or remove an old one -- like looking at information -- in your life.
I learned about this challenge in 30 days.
The first one was more than leaving the months, and to stop them, that time was much more memorable.
This was part of a challenge that I started taking pictures every day for a month.
And I remember exactly where I was and what I was doing that day.
I also noticed that starting to face challenges of 30 days more and more difficult, I had more confidence in myself.
I've gone from computer nerd to his office to the kind of guy who's going to bike work -- just for fun.
Last year I've even completed the rise of the Kilimandjaro, the highest in Africa.
I would never have been so adventurous before I started my 30-day challenges.
I also found out that if you really want something strong enough, you can do anything for 30 days.
Have you ever wanted to write a novel?
Every year in November, tens of thousands of people try to write their own 50,000-word novel from zero to 30 days.
And in fact, all you have to do is write a 667 words a day for a month.
That's what I did.
By the way, the secret is not going to sleep before you've written your words of the day.
You may miss sleep, but you'll finish your novel.
Now, is my book the next great American novel?
No. I wrote it in a month.
It's horrible.
But for the rest of my life, if I meet John Hodgman at a TED party, I wouldn't have to say, "I'm a computer scientist."
No, no, if I want to say, "I'm a writer."
So, I want to say one last thing.
I learned that when I was making little sustainable changes, things that I could keep doing, there was more chance that they persisted.
There's nothing wrong about big challenges, crazy challenges.
In fact, they're very fun.
But there's less chance they muster.
When I stopped sugar for 30 days, the 31th day looked like this.
So I have a question for you: What do you expect?
I guarantee you the next 30 days will go through whether you want it or not, why not think of something you've always wanted to try and do it for the next 30 days?
Thank you.
Nina Tandon: Be careful with tissue engineering.
Nina Tandon is a "TED Fellow" engineer tissues that develop hearts and artificial bone, and for that, it needs new ways of treating artificially engineered cells -- techniques that she's developed using simple but powerful method to reproduce their natural environment.
Good morning everybody.
I work with tiny, really incredible creatures called cells.
Let me tell you what it's like to grow these cells in a lab.
I work in a lab where we extract cells from their original environment.
We put them in boxes that we sometimes call Petri boxes.
We feed them -- sterilely of course -- with what we call the culture center -- their food -- and we grow them in incubators.
Why do I do that?
We look at cells on a blade, and they're only on the surface.
But what we're really trying to do in my lab is make tissue from them.
What does that mean?
That means growing a real heart, let's say, or growing a piece of bone that can be placed into the body.
Not only that, but they can also be used for models of disease.
For that, traditional cell culture techniques are really not enough.
The cells have a kind of sickness of the country; the box doesn't look like their home.
So we have to do better to recreate their natural environment to thrive.
We call this the biomedical paradigm -- copying nature in the lab.
Let's take the example of the heart, the subject of a lot of my research.
What makes the heart unique?
Well, the heart bat, periodically, inlassible, and faithful.
We imitate this in the lab by extracting the cellular culture systems of electrons.
These electrodes act like little pacemakers to contract cells in the lab.
What do we know about the heart?
The heart cells are pretty ubiquitous.
Nature feeds the heart cells of your body with a very, very dense blood supply.
In the lab, we model micro-channels in biological matter where we grow cells.
This allows us to migrate into the middle of culture, the food of the cell, through scaffolds where we grow the cells -- sort of like what's going on with a capillary bed in the heart.
So this brings me to the first lesson: life can do a lot with very little.
Let's take the example of electrical stimulation.
Let's see how powerful one of those vital elements can be.
On the left, we see a little piece of heart tissue beating that I made from rat cells in the lab.
That's about the size of a little guimauve.
After a week, he beats.
You can see it in the upper left corner.
But don't worry if you don't see it well.
It's fantastic that these cells can beat.
But what's really amazing is that these cells, when we electrically stimulate them, like with a pacemaker, they beat a lot more.
This brings me to the second lesson: cells do all the work.
In a sense, tissue engineers have a little identity crisis here, because structures engineers build bridges and big things, computer scientists, computers, but we, in fact, build innovative technologies for cells themselves.
What does that mean for us?
Let's do something very simple.
So let's call it that cells are not an abstract concept.
Let's call our cells keeping us alive in a very real way.
"We are what we eat." It's like, "We are what our cells eat."
In the case of our intestinal flora, these cells may not even be human.
But it's also good to note that cells are also the mediators of our experience of life.
Behind each sound, every vision, every touch, every flavor, and every smell, there's a corresponding set of cells that receive that information and interpret it for us.
The question is, should we extend our sense of environmentalism to include the ecosystem of our own bodies?
I invite you to speak more with me, and at the same time, I wish you luck.
No cancer cells become a endangered species.
Thank you.
Jack Choi: The virtual dissection table.
On stage at TED2012, Jack Choi shows a powerful tool for training students in medicine: a human body on the touch screen of the length of a poncard that allows you to explore and dissect and understand the systems and the parts of the human body.
You know that cadaver dissection is the traditional way of learning human anatomy.
For students it's a pretty experience, but for a school it can be very difficult or expensive.
And we know that most anatomy classes don't have cadaver dissection laboratory.
Perhaps for those reasons, where you are, it can be difficult to get cadavers out of them.
To find a solution, we developed with Dr. Brown at Stanford the virtual dissection table.
We called it Anatomage Table.
With this Anatomage Table, students can learn how to dissect without a human cadaver.
And the shape of the table is important, and since it's touchable, just like we're talking in a lab, and even just like surgeons are operating a patient, you can literally interact with the table.
Our digital body is nature-sized, so that's exactly how students will see the real anatomy.
I'm going to show you.
You see, I use my finger to interact with the digital body.
I'm going to cut out.
I can cut like I want, so I'm cutting out here.
Then it shows the inside.
And I can change my cut to see different parts.
I can eventually cut through here, see the brain, and I can change the incision.
You see internal organs.
We call this the slicer mode.
Okay, I'm going to do another incision.
Here.
This shows a lot of internal structures.
If I want to see the back, I rotate it and I see it behind.
Like that.
If these images make you uncomfortable or uncomfortable, that means we've done a good job.
Doctors say it's a pleasure for the eyes.
Instead of massing a body, I'd rather do more useful clinical dissections.
What I'm going to do is remove the skin, the muscles and the bones, to see the internal organs.
Here.
Let's say I'm going to cut the liver out here.
Okay.
Let's say I want to see the heart.
I'm going to do a little bit of surgery.
I'm going to cut some veins, arteries, orps!..
You don't want to hear "ps" in a real operation.
But fortunately, in our digital man, we can ring.
Okay.
All right.
Zoom in a little bit.
I'm going to cut through here.
And you can see inside the heart.
You can see the eardrum and the ventricles, how the blood is flowing through our arteries and into our veins.
Like this, students can isolate anything and dissect anything.
It's not always a dissection.
Since it's digital, we can do a reverse dissection.
I'm going to show you, I'm going to start with the skeleton, and I can add some internal organs.
And yeah.
Maybe I can just quickly add them up like this.
And I can build gradually muscles like this.
We can see the tendons and the muscles.
If only I could muscle myself so quickly.
And this is another way of learning anatomy.
Another thing I can show you, which often happens is that doctors are discovering their patients through X-rays.
So the Anatomage Table shows exactly how anatomy arises on X-rays.
You can also interact with X-rays, and if you like, you can also compare with the anatomy that it's appearing on X-rays.
When you're done, you reintroduce the body and it's ready for another session.
It seems that our table can even change gender.
This is a woman now.
So this is Anatomage Table. Thank you.
Frank Warren: half a million secrets.
"The secrets can be of a very different nature: they can be shocking, stupid, emotional." Frank Warren, founder of PostSecret.com, shares some of the 500,000 secrets that he's sent to strangers through postcards.
Hello, I'm Frank, and I collect secrets.
It all began with a crazy idea, November 2004.
I printed 3,000 postcards to myself, like this one.
One side was virgin, and the other side was a few simple instructions.
I asked people to share, anonymously, a little secret that they had never told anyone before.
I randomly distributed these postcards in the streets of Washington, D.C., not really knowing what to expect.
The idea quickly won the scale of the viral.
People started buying their own postcards or making them themselves.
I started getting secrets in my mailbox, not just from Washington, D.C., but also from Texas, California, Vancouver, New Zealand and Iraq.
And soon my crazy idea gets so crazy that it is.
PostSecret.com is the world's most untited blog.
This is my collection of postcards today.
You can see my wife trying hard to put a bunch of postcards at the top of a pyramid of over 500,000 secrets.
What I'd like to do now is share with you a handful of these special secrets in this collection, starting with this one.
"When I was a kid, I found these stamps and I waited for my entire life to have someone to send them.
And I've never had anybody. "The secrets can take in very different forms.
They can be shocking, silly or emotional.
They connect us with our deepest humanity or with people we will never meet.
Maybe that's one of you who sent this one.
I don't know.
This one very well demonstrates the creativity that people can demonstrate when they make and send me a postal card.
Clearly, this one was made from a Starbucks cup, and he wears a stamp and my too address.
"A biological mother, my parents are terrific.
I met love. I'm happy: "The secrets can remind us of the countless human dramas, the frailty and heroism that, in silence, transcend into the lives of the people around us even now.
"All those of you who have known me before 9/11 think I'm dead." "There was a time when I was working with a bunch of cul-bate, so sometimes I didn't wear culottes, and I made a big smile in my own backyard:" Before I show you the next secret, I have to give you a few explanations.
I love making interventions in high school students to share secrets and stories with students.
Sometimes I have a moment after I talk, I get books out and I take pictures with students.
The next poster card was made from one of these photographs.
I also have to add that, just like today, in this event dedicated to PostSecret, I was wearing a wireless mic.
"You micro wasn't extinct in sound tests.
We've all heard you snipt." It was really embarrassing when it happened, until I realized it could have been much worse.
Perfect. You know what I'm talking about.
"This envelope contains the bits of a suicide letter that I didn't use for.
I'm the happiest person, "As one of these guys is my son's father.
He gives me a lot of money to keep the secret, "This Saturday, while you were wondering where I was going, I was actually buying you a bag.
She's in my pocket right now, "I put this poster card on the PostSecret blog two years ago, on the Day of Saint-Valentin.
This was the last, last secret of a long list.
It was less than two hours when she was online when I got an e-mail excited about the guy who sent me this postal card.
He said, " Frank, I have to share with you this story that's just happened to me." He said, "My knees are still shaking.
It's three years since my girlfriend and I did this ritual on Sunday morning, which is to go and visit the post-Secret blog and read the secrets in high voice.
I read a few of them and then it's on his way.
It really brought us closer over the years.
So when I discovered that you'd pasted my surprise marriage on the bottom of the list, I was mad with joy.
I tried to stay quiet, show nothing.
And, like every Sunday, we started reading the secret to each other around us.
But this time I felt like she would take hours to read each of these maps, "But she eventually did it.
She came to the last secret, which was my marriage proposal.
And he said, "She reads it once, then a second."
She turned to him and said, "It wouldn't be our cat?" And when she looked at him, he had put a knee on the floor and he had a ring.
He asked her, and she said yes. A happy ending.
I said to him by asking him to share a photograph, something that I could share with the PostSecret community so everybody knew how this fairy tale ended.
He sent me this picture.
"I found your camera this summer in Lollapalooza.
I ended up developing the photographs, and I'd like to give you the picture: "This photo has never been sent back to people who have lost it, but this secret had an impact on a lot of lives, starting with a student in Canada called Matty.
This secret gave him the idea of starting his own website, which he called IFound YourCamera Matty, and he offers people to send him the digital cameras that they find, the lost memory cards, with an orphan photograph.
Matty pulls out the photographs of these devices and puts them on his site every week.
People come to see if they recognize a photo they've lost or help other people find the pictures they desperately seek.
This one is my favorite.
Matty has found this ingenious way of using the kindness of strangers.
It seems simple, and it is, but the impact it can have on people's lives is enormous.
Matty shared an email with me that he received from the mother who's on this photograph.
"I am, my husband and son.
The other pictures show my grandmother, very sick.
Thank you for your website.
These pictures matter enormously to me.
This camera contains the images of my son's birth.
It's going to be four years tomorrow." Every picture that you see there and thousands of others have been sent back to people who have lost them -- sometimes out of the oceans, sometimes by having the barriers that are imposed by language.
This is the last postal map I'd like to share with you today.
"When the people I love leaving telephone messages, I always save them in case they're going to die tomorrow and there's no other way to hear their voices again, "When I put this secret on the site, dozens of people sent me phone messages from their phone, sometimes for years, family messages or friends who had died.
They said that in keeping these voices and sharing, it allowed them to maintain the mind of these expensive beings.
A little girl sent the last message that her grandmother had spoken to her.
Secrets can take many forms.
They can be shocking, silly or spiritual.
They can allow us to connect with our deepest humanity or with people we will never see again.
First saving message.
Today we have a birthday party, where we have a birthday party, the candles are on the cake, and we're all invited to celebrate this event You're 20 and a year today.
I wish you a very happy birthday, I love you.
Now, I say goodbye.
Thank you.
Lucy McRae: How does technology transform the human body?
Lucy McRae, TED Fellow, is an architect in the body -- they imagine ways to fuse biology and technology in our own bodies, and in this visually amazing talk, she shows us her work, from clothes that recreate the inside of the body for the clip of a pop star, Robyn, at a pill that, when you swallow it, you sweat from perfume.
I say I'm a body architect.
I have a classic dance training and worked in architecture and fashion.
As an architect in the body, I fascinate with the human body and explore how I can transform it.
I worked at Philips Electronics in the future design research lab, working for 20 years in the future.
I've explored human skin and how technology can transform the body.
I've been working on concepts like electronic tattoo, which is augmented by touch, or dresses that were burning and shaking with light.
I started my own experiences.
These are the low-tech approaches to high-tech conversations that I had.
This is choking cotton glued on a colocataire with pearl glue.
I started a collaboration with a friend of mine, Bart Hess -- in normal times, he doesn't look like this -- and we used ourselves as role models.
We transformed our apartments into labs and worked in a very spontaneous and immediate way.
We were creating images that cause human evolution.
While I was at Philips, we talked about this idea of maybe a technology, something that wasn't on and on and off, but between them.
One thing that could perhaps take the form of a gas or a liquid.
And I became obsessed with trying to blur the body's perimeter so that you can't see where the skin ends and where the environment begins.
I set up my studio in the prostitutes' quarter and wrapped myself in some obsessively ambitious plumbing pipes, and I found a way to redefine skin and create this textile dynamic.
I was introduced to Robyn, the Swedish pop star, and she was also exploring how technology coexist with raw human emotion.
And she talked about how technology with these new feathers, this new face painting, this punk, the way we identify with the world, and we made this clip.
I'm fascinated by the idea of what happens when we merge biology with technology, and I remember reading this idea of being able to reprogram biology in the future, far from disease and aging.
And I thought about this concept.
Imagine if we could reprogram our own body odor, modify it and improve it on the biological level and how that would change the way we communicate with each other?
Or the way we teach sex partners?
And could we come back to being more like animals, to more basic modes of communication?
I worked with a synthetic biologist, and I created a fragrance that you can swallow, which is a cosmetic pill that you eat and the fragrance comes out of the skin when you sweat.
It completely sums up what the fragrance is, and it provides a whole new format.
This is the fragrance that goes from the inside out.
It redefines the role of skin, and our bodies become an atomist.
I learned that there are no limits, and if I look at the evolution of my work I see threads and connections that make sense.
But when I look into the future, the next project is completely unknown and wide open.
I feel like all of these ideas are embedded inside of me and these are the experiments and the conversations that connect these ideas, and they come out instinctively.
As a body architect, I've created this platform with no boundaries and no nées to allow me to discover everything I want.
And I feel like I've barely started.
So this is a typical day in the office.
Drew Curtis: How did I beat a patent hunter?
Drew Curtis, the founder of Fark.com, tells the story of his fight during a trial against a company that had a patent for creating and distribution of news stories through email, "In his presentation, he shares some surprising statistics about the growing legal problem of military patents.
Last January, my company, Fark.com, was prosecuted with Yahoo, MSN, Reddit, AOL, TechCrunch and others by a company called Gooseberry Natural Resources.
Gooseberry has a patent for creating and distribution of news through email.
It may sound a little strange that such a thing can be patented, but it happens all the time.
Take something that already exists and patent it as if it's a new technology -- like phone calls on the Internet or TV programs or radio programs for mobile phones and so on.
The problem with these patents is that the mechanisms are obscure and the patent system presents dysfunction, and as a result, most of these lawsuits end up in rules.
And because these regulations are subject to a set of non-divulgation, nobody knows what the terms were.
And therefore, patent hunting can claim that it won the case.
In the case of Gooseberry Natural Resources, this patent on sending news messages had a kind of fatal flaw that I was very concerned about, which is that usually in the media world there's one definition for news, and it turns out it's press releases -- like in C.P.
My company, Fark, is dealing with information, officially, and as a result, we were not in interference with this patent.
The discussion is loud, right?
No.
One of the major problems with patent law is that, in the case you're sued by a patent hunter, the burden of proof that you didn't transgress the patent is actually the charges of the accuse, which means you have to prove that you don't transgress the patent that they're pursuing you.
And it can take a little bit of time.
You have to know that a patent protection costs, on average, two million dollars and takes 18 months when you win.
This is the best possible issue for you when you're sued by a patent hunter.
I had hoped that I could partner with some of these big companies to defend myself from this trial, but they negotiated one by one to fix the case, even though -- and this is important -- none of these companies have transgressed this patent -- none of them.
And they started negotiating.
The reason they've negotiated is because it's cheaper to negotiate than to cope with the lawsuit -- clearly, sometimes, two million dollars cheaper, and much more if you actually lose the lawsuit.
This would also be an important distraction for corporate management, especially for a small company of eight people like mine.
Six months after the trial began we ended up in the phase of discovery.
And during the discovery phase, we asked the patent hunter to give us screen captures of Fark showing where the patent violations were actually visible.
Maybe because there were no such screenshots, but suddenly Gooseberry wanted to negotiate.
Their representatives: "Ah, yes. My company is re-crafting on our side."
It doesn't matter whether the address goes to a mall in northern Los Angeles that has no employees.
"And you would like to go forward and close that lawsuit.
Would you like to propose to your best and final offer? "My answer: "And what about nothing? We didn't have a lot of hope for this solution.
But they agreed.
No opposition.
Now, as I reported before, one of the reasons I can tell you about this is because there's no trustworthiness about this issue.
How is that possible?
Well, during the negotiation phase, when we got our copy, I deleted it.
My lawyer said, "Well, no way it works."
This is the signed income.
Why? You can call them.
They're not subject to either clause of privacy.
What did I learn from this business? Three things.
The first of all, if you can, don't fight the patent, fight the infraction.
Patents are very difficult to get around.
Infraction is much easier to argue.
Secondly, understand from the beginning that either you have no money at all, whether you like to spend your money paying a patent attorney rather than giving them that money.
The reason it works is because patent hunters get a percentage of what they get out of the negotiations.
And if it becomes clear to them that they can't get money, they're getting less interested in continuing the process.
I'm sure you tell them that you'll make this procedure as disturbing, painful and as difficult as possible for them.
This is a tactic that patent hunters are supposed to use on people to get what they want.
It turns out, as they're paid by honoraries, that it actually works, really well in reverse.
Don't forget that.
What does all this mean?
So to sum up, that's one thing: don't negotiate with terrorists.
Patent hunters have done more damage to the U.S. economy than any local or foreign policy organization in history every year.
And what are they doing with this money?
They're directly investing it by engaging more lawsuits.
This is the moment of the Conférence where I'm supposed to give some kind of solution to the patent system.
And the problem is there are two large types of industry that have different goals in mind for the patent system.
Health industry would like stronger protections for inventors.
The new technologies industry would like stronger protections for manufacturers.
These goals aren't necessarily diamed opposites, but they don't disagree.
And as a result, patent hunters can kind of live in the space between the two.
So unfortunately I'm not smart enough to have a solution to the problem of patent hunters.
However, I had this idea, and it was pretty good.
And I thought, "I should patent it."
So, infraction to the patent by a mobile device -- defined as a computer that's not fixed.
My solution: Give me this patent and I will destroy it all.
Thank you.
Frans de Waal: The moral behavior of animals.
So empathy, collaboration, fairness and reciprocity -- caring for other people's well seems to be a very human trait, but Frans de Waal shows surprising videos of behavioral testing, about primates and other mammals that show how many of these moral traits we have in common.
I was born in Den Bosch, where the Hieronymous Bosch painter named after him.
I always loved this painter who lived and worked in the 15th century.
And what's interesting about morality is that he lived in a time when the influence of religion was falling, and he wondered, I think, what would happen to society if there was no religion or there was less religion.
So he painted this famous painting, "The Garden of Earthly Delights," which some people have interpreted as being humanity before the fall, or being humanity without falling at all.
So you wonder, what would happen if we didn't taste the fruit of knowledge, so to speak, and what kind of morality would we have?
Later, as a student, I went to a very different garden, a zoological garden in Arnhem where we have chimpanzees.
This is me young with a baby chimpanzee.
And I found out there that chimpanzees are very hungry for power, and I wrote a book about it.
At the time, the search for animals was focused on aggression and competition.
I painted a general framework of the animal kingdom, including humanity, that at the bottom of ourselves we're competitive, we're all aggressive, we're all looking for our personal profit.
This is the launch of my book.
I'm not sure the chimps used to read it, but that's sure they seemed interested.
While I was doing this work on power and dominance and so forth, I discovered that chimpanzees reconcile after the rings.
What you see here are two males who fought.
They ended up on a tree, and one of them reaches the other.
A second after I took the picture, they came together at the base of the tree and they hugged each other.
It's very interesting because at the time we were just talking about competition and aggression, and so it didn't make any sense.
The only thing that matters is win or lose.
But why do you reconcile after a ring?
It doesn't make any sense.
This is what Bonobos do. Bonobos do everything with sex.
So they reconcile with sex.
But the principle is the same.
The principle is that you have a valuable relationship that is degraded by conflict, so you have to do something.
My whole framework on the animal kingdom, including human beings, began to change at that time.
We have this image, by the way, in political science, in economics, in letters, in philosophy, that the man is a wolf for the man.
And so at the very bottom, our nature is actually bad.
I think it's an unfair image for the wolf.
After all, a very cooperative animal.
That's why many of you have a dog at home, who also has all these characteristics.
And it's very unfair for humanity, because humanity is actually much more cooperative and empathic than we believe.
So I started getting interested in this problem by studying other animals.
So these are the pillars of morality.
If you ask anybody, "What is morality based on?" These are the two things that always happen.
The first is reciprocity, and it's associated with a sense of justice and a sense of fairness.
And the other is empathy and compassion.
And human morality is more than that, but if you take these two pillars, there's not much left, I think.
So they're absolutely essential.
I'm going to give you a few examples.
This is an old video from the Yerkes Primate Center where we train chimpanzees to cooperate.
And it's already a hundred years that we're doing experiments on cooperation.
Here you have two young chimpanzees who have a box, and the box is too heavy for a chimpanzee to attract him.
And of course, there's food in the box.
Otherwise they wouldn't be shooting it with as much force.
So they bring the box.
And you can see they're synchronized.
You see they work together, they pull at the same time.
It's already a big deal of progress compared to a lot of other animals that wouldn't be able to do that.
And now you're going to see an even more interesting picture, because now one of the two chimps has been fed.
So one of the two is not really interested in the task anymore.
Look now at what's going on at the end.
He basically takes everything.
There's two interesting things there.
One is that the chimpanzee on the right actually understands what his partner needs -- so he completely understands the need for cooperation.
The second is that the partner is willing to work even if food doesn't care.
Why is that? It probably has to do with reciprocity.
There's a lot of evidence in primates and in other animals that they make for themselves.
So he will one day or the other will have a return favor.
So this is how it works.
We do the same with elephants.
It's very dangerous to work with elephants.
Another problem with elephants is you can't use a box that's too heavy for an elephant.
Maybe you can do one of these, but I think it's going to be too fragile.
So what we did in this particular case -- we do these studies in Thailand for Josh Plotnik -- we have this instrument, we use this rope.
If you pull this side of the rope, the rope disappears on the other side.
So two elephants have to pull this at the same time.
Otherwise nothing happens and the rope disappears.
And the first recording you're going to see is two elephants released at the same time that come into the equipment.
The equipment is on the left with food on it.
So they come together, they take it together and they pull together.
It's actually pretty simple for them.
There they are.
And this is how they do it.
We're going to make the task more difficult now.
Because the purpose of this experiment is to see how they understand cooperation.
Do they understand it as chimpanzees, for example?
The next step we're doing is we're releasing an elephant before the other, and this elephant has to be smart enough to stay there, wait and not pull the rope out -- because if it pulls the rope out, everything disappears and the test is done.
This elephant is doing something illegal that we haven't learned it.
But it shows how much it understands, because it puts its leg on the rope, it sits on the rope and waits for the other to arrive, and then the other will do all the work for it.
That's what we call the benefit of others.
But it shows the intelligence of elephants.
They develop many of these alternative techniques that we don't necessarily learn.
The other elephant comes in and he's going to shoot.
Now look at the other one. The other one doesn't forget to eat, of course.
This was the part of cooperation, reciprocity.
Let's talk about empathy.
Empathy is the main topic of my research.
And empathy has two qualities.
One is understanding. One ordinary definition: understanding and sharing other people's feelings.
And the emotional part.
Empathy travels on two paths.
One is the body's path.
If you talk to a sad person, you're going to adopt a sad expression and a sad posture, even before you know if you feel sad.
And it's sort of the path of the body or emotional empathy, which have a lot of animals.
Your dog also has it.
That's why people have mammals at home and not turtles or snakes or other animals that don't have that kind of empathy.
Then there's the cognitive pathway, which is more like putting into somebody else's perspective.
And it's more limited.
There are few animals -- I think elephants and primates can do this kind of thing -- but there are very few animals that can do it.
synchronization, which is part of this empathy mechanism is very ancient in the animal kingdom.
And in humans, of course, we can study it on the contagion of the bells.
Human beings bathe when others bathe.
And it has to do with empathy.
It activates the same regions of the brain.
We also know that those who are more about the contagion of the bâle are very empathetic.
Those of you who have problems with empathy, like autistic children, don't work with contagion.
So it's linked.
So we're looking at this in chimpanzees by presenting them with an animated head.
This is what you see on the upper left, an animated head bailing.
And there's a chimp watching, a real chimp watching a computer screen that we're doing on these animations.
The contagion of the bâle that you're probably familiar with -- and you might start bailling very quickly -- is something we share with other animals.
And it's linked to the body's path that is sync that's based on empathy, and in fact it's universal in mammals.
We're also looking at more complex expressions. This is consolation.
Here's a male chimp that's lost in a sling and he's screaming, and a young boy comes in and puts his arm around and quiet.
It's consolation. It's similar to human consolation.
And consolation behavior is determined by empathy.
In order to study empathy in kids, you have to ask the family to pretend to be upset, to see what kids do.
So it's related to empathy, and it's the kind of expression that we're looking for.
Recently we published an experiment that you may have heard of.
It's about altruism and chimpanzees where the question is, do chimpanzees care about somebody else's well-being?
And for decades, it's been assumed that only human beings can do it, that just human beings care about somebody else's well-being.
We did a very simple experiment.
We do it on chimpanzees living in Lawrenceville, in the Yerkes research station.
And this is how they live.
We call them in a room and we experience them.
In this case, we're putting two chimpanzees next to each other.
And one of them has a full of tokens, and the tokens mean different things.
A type of jeton feeds only the chimpanzee who chooses it, the other feeds both.
This is a study we did with Vicky Horner.
And there you have two hints of color.
They have a full bucket of water.
And they have to choose one of the two colors.
You're going to see how this happens.
If this chimp makes the most selfish choice, which is the red jeton in this case, it has to give us.
We take it, we put it on a table with two food rewards, but in this case only one on the right will get food right.
The one on the left is going because he already knows it's not a good test for him.
The next one is the pro-social token.
The one who makes the choice -- this is the interesting part -- for the one who makes the choice, it doesn't really matter.
He's now giving us a pro-social jeton and they're both getting food.
The one who makes the choice always gets a reward.
So it doesn't matter.
He should actually choose without looking at it.
But what we've discovered is that they prefer the pro-social token.
So this is the 50 percent line, which is random choice.
And especially if the partner draws attention, he picks more times.
And if the partner puts the pressure on him -- if the partner starts to spit and intimidate him -- the choice goes down.
It's as if they said, "If you don't do well, I wouldn't be pro-social today." And here's what happens without a partner, when there's no partner.
So we found chimps care about someone else's welfare -- especially if they're members of their group.
The last experience I want to tell you about is our study of fairness.
This study became famous.
And now there are many others, because after doing it 10 years ago, it became very famous.
And at first we did this with capucins.
I'm going to show you the first experiment we did.
Now it was done with dogs and birds and chimpanzees.
But with Sarah Brosnan we started with capucins.
What we did was we put two capuchinions next to each other.
Again, these animals live in groups, they know each other.
We take them out of the group, we put them into a test room.
And they have to do a very simple task.
And if you give them both of thecombres as reward, the two monkeys are next to each other, they're perfectly capable of doing it 25 times in a row.
So concombre, even if I think it's just water, but concombre is perfect for them.
If you give the grape partner -- the preferences of my capucins for food are exactly at the price of the supermarket -- if you give them raisins -- a much better food -- you create inquity among them.
So this is the experiment we did.
Recently we recorded it with new monkeys who'd never done the task, thinking they might have had a stronger reaction, which turns out to be true.
The monkey on the left is the one who gets concombre.
The one on the right is the one who gets grapes.
The one who gets concombre, please notice that the first piece of concombre is perfect.
The first piece he eats.
Then he sees the other one that gets grapes, and you'll see what's going to happen.
He gives us a rock. That's the task.
And we give him a piece of cucumber and he eats it.
The other one has to give us a rock.
And that's what he's doing.
He gets grapes and he eats it.
The other one sees this.
He's now giving us a rock, and he's getting concombre again.
He's trying a rock against the wall.
He has to give it to us.
He gets concombre again.
In fact, what you're seeing is basically the manifestation of Wall Street.
I have to tell you -- I have two more minutes, I'm going to tell you a funny story.
This study became famous and we got a lot of comments, especially anthropologists, economists, philosophers.
They didn't like it at all.
Because they decided in their heads, I think, that fairness is a very complex problem and animals can't have it.
A philosopher even wrote us that it was impossible for the monkeys to make sense of fairness because fairness was invented during the French Revolution.
Another one wrote a whole chapter that said it felt like it's related to fairness if the one who receives grapes refuses grapes.
What's funny about this is that Sarah Brosnan, who does this with chimpanzees, had two or three combinations of chimpanzees where, indeed, the one who got the grapes turned it down until the other person turned it into obtienne.
So we're getting a lot closer to human fairness.
And I think philosophers should rethink their philosophy a little bit.
So recapitulate.
I think there's an evolved morality.
I think morality is much more than what we're talking about, but it would be impossible without those ingredients that we find in other primates, which is empathy and consolation, pro-social trends, reciprocity and a sense of fairness.
So we're working on these issues to see if we can create a morality from the bottom up, so to speak, without God or religion being involved, and to see how we can come to an evolved morality.
Thank you for attention.
Tal Golesworthy: How did I repair my own heart?
Tal Golesworthy is a warm-up engineer -- he's known in pipes and plumbing, and when he took an operation to fix a vital problem with his aort, he took his engineering skills to know his doctors to design a better repair.
I'm an engineer.
I know all the hots and the incinérators and tissue filters and cyclones and things like that, but I also have Marfan syndrome.
This is a heréditary disease.
And in 1992 I participated in a genetic study and discovered in my great horror, as you can see from the slide, that my bottom row was not in the normal fork, the green line at the bottom.
Everyone here will be in the fork between 3.2 and 3.6 centimeters.
I was already 4.4.
And as you can see, my aort was incremental, and gradually I came to the point where surgery was going to be necessary.
The surgery that was available was quite horrible -- you were anesthesed, you were a chest open, you were plugged into a heart-poumon machine, you were down your body temperature at about 18 degrees C, you were stopped your heart, you were cut off the aorta, you were riding it with a plastic valve and a plastic aorta, and, most importantly, you were condemning yourself to a lifetime of anticoagulant therapy, normally warfarine.
The idea of surgery was not very attractive.
The idea of warfarine was really scary.
So, I thought, I'm an engineer, I'm in research and development, it's just a plumbing problem.
I can do that. I can change that.
So I started modifying the whole treatment of the aortic dilatation.
The goal of the project is really, really simple.
The only real problem with the ascending aorta in people with Marfan syndrome is that it lacks traction resistance.
So, the possibility exists to simply wrap the pipe up from the outside.
And she would remain stable and work quite well.
If your high-pressure hose pipe, or your high-pressure hydraulic drive goes up a little bit, you just put a little bit of duct tape around it.
It's as simple as this in the concept, but not in execution.
The great benefit of external support for me was to be able to preserve all of my own pieces, all of my own helium and valves, without needing anticoagulating treatment.
So where do we start?
Well, it's a cross-section through me.
You could see in the middle this device, this little structure, pumping.
This is a left ventricle pushing the blood through the aortic valve -- you can see two of the aortic valve leaflets working there -- up into the ascending aortic aortic aortic aortic valve.
And that's that part, the ascending aor that expands and, ultimately, bursts, which, of course, is fatal.
We started by organizing the acquisition of images from MRI machines and scanners from which we could make a model of the patient's location.
This is a model of my aort.
I have one real thing in my pocket, if someone wants to see it and play with it.
You can see, it's a very complex structure.
It's got a funny, gyptuous shape at the bottom, which contains the aortic valve.
Then it comes back into a round shape and then it shrinks and curves.
So this is a fairly difficult structure to produce.
This, as I said, is a CAO model of me, and it's one of the last models of CAO.
We've gone through a process of iteration of making better and better models.
Once the model is produced, we turn it into a solid plastic model, as you can see.
Using a rapid prototyping technique, another engineering technique.
We then use this first model to make it into a poreal maille, perfectly custom, that takes the shape of the first one and fits perfectly into the aorta.
So this is really personalized medicine at best.
Every single patient that we've intervened has a perfectly well-adapted implant.
Once you make it, the installation is very easy.
John Pepper, he's blessed, a cardiothoracic surgery professor -- had never done this before in his life -- he asked the first one, didn't like it, took it off and asked the second one.
I am thankful again.
Four and a half hours on the table and everything was finished.
So, surgical implantation was actually the easiest part.
If you compare our new treatment to the existing alternative, which we call the composite transplant of the root aorta, there's one or two surprising comparisons, which I'm sure will be clear to all of you.
Two hours to install one of our six-hour devices for the existing treatment.
The current treatment requires, as I said, the heart-poumon machine and it requires total body cooling.
We don't need all of that, we're working on a beating heart.
He opens you up, he reaches to the point where your heart is beating, right at the right temperature.
No break in your circulatory system.
So, that's really cool.
But to me, the best thing is there doesn't need to be anti-coagulant.
I don't take any substance except for the ones I choose to take for pleasure sometimes.
And in fact, if you're talking to people who are in long-term dresses, it's pretty much at your quality of life.
And worst of all, it inevitably shortens your life.
Similarly, in the artificial valve option, you have to take antibiotic therapy every time you have any invading medical treatment.
Even the visits at the dentist asks you to take antibiotics, in case you develop an internal infection on the valve.
Again, I don't have all that, so I'm totally free.
My aort is fixed, I don't have to worry about it, which is a renaissance for me.
So let's go back to the theme of the presentation: In multidisciplinary research, how on Earth is an engineer that's used to work with hot spots to come up with a medical device that transforms his own life?
Well the answer to this question is a multidisciplinary team.
This is a basic team list.
And as you can see, there are not just two main disciplines, medicine and genius, but there are also various specialists within these two disciplines.
John Pepper here, he was the cardiac surgeon who did the work on my own, but everybody had to contribute in one way or another.
Raad Mohiaddin, radiologist: We had to get good quality images from which to make the CAO model.
Warren Thornton, who always does our CAO models, had to write a CAO code to produce this model from this really rather complicated data set.
There are some barriers, though. There are some problems.
The jargon is a big one.
I don't think anyone in this room understands these first four jargon points.
The engineers of you will recognize the rapid prototyping and the CAO.
The physicians of you, if there are, will recognize the first two.
But there won't be anybody else in this room who understands all of these four words.
Eliminer the jargon was very important to make sure that everyone in the team understands exactly what they meant when they used a particular expression.
Our disciplinary conventions were funny too.
We took a lot of horizontal images from me, produced these slices and then used them to build a CAO model.
And the very first CAO model we did, surgeons were playing with the plastic model, they didn't quite understand it.
And then we realized that this was actually a mirror image of the actual aortic aortic.
And it was a mirror image because in the real world we're always looking at the top plans, the houses or the streets or the maps.
In the medical world they look up for plans.
So the horizontal images were just an inversion.
So, you have to be careful with the disciplinary conventions.
Everybody needs to understand what's supposed and what's not.
Institutional barriers were another serious headache in the project.
The Brompton Hospital was taken back by the Imperial College medical school, and there are serious relationship issues between the two organizations.
I was working with the Imperial and the Brompton, and it generated serious problems with the project, really, problems that shouldn't exist.
Research and ethics committee: If you want to do something new in surgery, you have to get a license from your local research and policy department.
I'm sure it's the same in Poland.
There will be something equivalent, which allows new kinds of surgery.
We didn't just have the bureaucratic problems associated with this, we also had professional jealousies.
There were people at the research board and ethics who really didn't want to see John Pepper succeed again, because he's so successful.
And they've done some extra challenges.
bureaucratic issues: ultimately, when you have a new treatment, you have to send an orientation note to all the hospitals in the country.
In the U.K., we have the National Institute of clinical excellence, NICE.
You'll get equivalent in Poland, no doubt.
We had to go beyond the NICE problem.
We now have a great clinical orientation on the Web.
So any interested hospital can come in, read the report from NICE to come in contact with us and then come in and do it themselves.
The funding obstacles: another big area to be concerned about: a big problem to understand one of these perspectives: When we first approached one of the great U.K. intelligence agencies who finances these kinds of things, what they saw was essentially an engineering proposal.
They didn't understand, they were doctors, they came right after God.
It had to be naked. They put it in the bin.
So at the end I went to private investors and I let go.
But most of the research and development is going to be funded by institutions, by the Polish Academy of Sciences or the research Council in Physic Science and engineering or something, and you have to get through those people.
jargon is a huge problem when you try to work in many disciplines, because in a world of engineering, we all understand CAO and RP -- not in the medical world.
I guess eventually the funding bureaucrats really have to come back.
They really have to start talking to each other, and they have to have a little bit of imagination, if not too much to ask -- probably it is.
I coined a phrase called "obstructive conservatism."
So many people in the medical world don't want to change, especially when any engineer comes to the answer.
They don't want to change.
They just want to do what they did before.
And in fact, there are many surgeons in the U.K. who are still waiting for one of our patients to have a problem, so they can say, "Ah, I told you it's not good." We actually have 30 patients.
I'm seven and a half years old.
For all of us, we're cumulating 90 years of post office workers, and we haven't had one problem.
And yet, there are people in the U.K. who say, "Yes, that external aortic root, yes, it will never work, you know. It's really a problem. It's really a problem.
I'm sure everyone in this room has been dealing with arrogance of the medical body, doctors, surgeons at some point.
Usually it's just the way doctors protect themselves.
"Yes, of course, I'm dealing with my patient."
I think it's not good, but here I am.
Egos, of course, again, a huge problem If you work in a multidisciplinary team, you have to give your guys the benefit of doubt.
You have to express your support.
Tom Treasure, professor of cardiothoracic surgery: incredible guy.
It's very easy to respect it.
Does he respect me? Kindly different.
It was bad news.
The good news is that the benefits are absolutely enormous.
Let's translate that. I bet they can't.
When you have a group of people who have had a different professional background, a different professional experience, they not only have a set of different knowledge, but they have a different perspective on everything.
And if you can bring these guys together and talk to them and understand each other, the results can be spectacular.
You can find new solutions, really new solutions, which have never been looked at before very, very quickly and easily.
You can save huge amounts of work just using the foundation of broad knowledge that you have.
And therefore, it's a whole other use of technology and knowledge around you.
The result of all this is that you can get incredibly quick progress with extremely low budgets.
I'm so embarrassed that it cost so little to get my idea to be implanted that I'm not prepared to tell you what it cost.
Because I suspect there are absolutely classic surgical treatments probably in the United States that cost more for a single patient than the cost for us to turn my dream into my reality.
That's all I mean, and I have three minutes left.
So Heather's going to love me.
If you have any questions, please come and talk to me later.
It would be a pleasure to talk to you. Thank you very much.
Sherry Turkle: Connected, but alone?
So, as we expect more technology, erwarten wir, from each other? Sherry Turkle Studien darüber, how our devices and online selves are redefining human connection and communication -- and asks us to think deeply about the new kinds of connections that we want.
One moment ago, my daughter Rebecca sent me a text message to wish me good luck.
Her texto said, "Mom, you're going to pick it up." I love that.
Receive this text was like receiving a câlin.
I embody the central paradox.
I'm a woman who likes to receive texts who's going to tell you that too many texts can be a problem.
In fact, that reminder of my daughter brings me back to the beginning of my story.
In 1996, when I gave my first TEDTalk, Rebecca was five years old and she was sitting right there in the front row.
I had just written a book that celebrated our life on the Internet and was about to cover The Wired magazine.
In these gray days, we were experimenting with chat rooms online and virtual communities.
We were exploring the different aspects of ourselves.
And then we broke down.
I was thrilled.
And as a psychologist, what got me excited about this was the idea that we were going to use what we had learned in the virtual world about ourselves, about our identity, to live a better life in the real world.
Now fast forward to 2012.
I'm here again on the TED stage.
My daughter's 20. She's a student.
She's there with her cell phone, too.
And I just wrote a new book, but this time it's not one that will send me the cover of Wired magazine.
So what happened?
I'm always excited about technology, but I think, and I'm here to demonstrate, that we let it take us where we don't want to go.
Over the past 15 years, I've been studying mobile communication technologies, and I've interviewed hundreds and hundreds of people, young and old, about their lives being plugged in.
And what I've found is that our little devices, these little devices in our pockets, are so powerful psychologically that they don't just change what we do, they change who we are.
Some of the things we're doing now with our devices are things that, just a few years ago, we would have found weird or disturbing, but they've quickly become familiar, and that's what we're doing.
So just to take a few quick examples: people send texts or emails during corporate board meetings.
They send texts, go shopping and go on Facebook during the course, during the presentations, actually during all meetings.
People talk to me about the new and important skill of making visual contact while you're texting.
People tell me it's hard, but it's possible.
Parents send texts and emails to breakfast and dinner while their kids complain about not having all their parents' attention.
But then those same kids refuse each other's attention.
It's a recent picture of my daughter and her friends together while they don't get together.
And we even text at funerals.
I study this subject.
We numb ourselves to our grief or to our dreamer and we dive into our phones.
But what's important about this?
It's important for me because I think we're going into trouble -- trouble is certainly in our relationships with each other, but also trouble in our relationship with each other and our capacity for self-reflection.
We're living in a new way of being alone together.
People want to be with each other, but also elsewhere -- connected to all the different places that they want to be.
People want to personalize their lives.
They want to go in and out of every place they're in because the thing that matters most to them is to control where they pay attention.
So, you want to go to this board meeting, but you just want to pay attention to the moments you care about.
And some people think that's a good thing.
But you can find yourself hiding from each other, even though we're all constantly connected to each other.
A 50-year-old business guy gave me that he felt like he didn't have colleagues at work anymore.
When he's going to work, he doesn't stop talking to anybody, he doesn't call.
And he says he doesn't want to interrupt his colleagues because, he says, "They're too busy with email." But then he stops and he says, "You know, I don't tell you the truth.
I'm the one who doesn't want to be interrupted.
I think I should want that, but actually I prefer to just do things about my Blackberry, "In every generation, I see that people never have enough of each other, if and only if they can have each other at a distance, in quantities that they can control.
This is what I call the Golden Boucle effect: not too close, not too far, just as you need.
But what could be perfectly suited to a typical age can be a problem for a teenager who needs to develop face-to-face relationships.
A 18-year-old boy who uses texting for almost everything says to me with nostalgia, "A day, a day, but certainly not now, I'd like to learn to have a conversation." When I ask people, "What's wrong with having a conversation?'" People say, "I'm going to tell you what's wrong with having a conversation.
It's happening in real time, and you can't control what you're going to say. So that's the real problem.
Sending SMS, email, blog posts, all these things allow us to present ourselves as we want to be.
We can change, and that means we can delete, and that means we can retouch, face, voice, flesh, body -- not too little, not too much, just what we need.
Human relationships are rich and they're complicated and they're demanding.
And we clean them up with technology.
And when we do, one of the things that can happen is we sacrifice the conversation for a simple connection.
We stand.
And over time, we seem to forget this, or we seem to stop worrying.
I was taken when Stephen Colbert asked me a profound question, a profound question.
He said, "Do all these little tweets, do all these little online communication kittens come together to make a big deal of real conversation?" My answer was no, they don't add up.
Connecting to little kids can work to collect discret bits of information, and it can work to say, "I think about you," or even to say, "I love you," -- I mean, look how I felt when I got my daughter's text -- but it doesn't really work to learn from each other, to really get to know each other and to understand each other.
And we use conversations with each other to learn how to have conversations with ourselves.
So, fleeing the conversation can really matter because it can compromise our capacity for self-reflection.
For kids who grow up, that skill is the basis of development.
Every few times I hear, "I prefer to send texting as to speak, " And what I see is that people are so used to having much less than real conversation, so used to doing less, that they've become almost ready to go all over people.
So, for example, many people share this hope with me, that one day a more advanced version of Siri, the digital assistant on the Apple iPhone, will be more like a better friend, somebody who will be listening when others won't.
I think that hope reflects a painful truth that I've learned over the past 15 years.
This sense that no one's listening to me is very important in our relationships with technology.
That's why it's so attractive to have a Facebook page or a Twitter feed -- so many automatic publishers and the feeling that no one's listening to us is willing to spend time with machines that seem to care about us.
We put in robots, we call them social robots, which are specifically designed to be companions -- for older people, for our children, for us.
So are we losing our confidence that we will be there for the other?
In my research I worked in nursing homes, and I brought these social robots that were designed to give older people the sense that they were understood.
And one day I came and a woman who had lost a child was talking to a robot that had the shape of a baby seal.
It seemed to look it in the eyes.
It seemed to be following the conversation.
He comforted her.
And a lot of people found this amazing.
But this woman was trying to make sense of her life with a machine that had no experience of the arc of human life.
This robot was playing its role well.
And we are vulnerable.
People experience a simulcast of empathy as if it's true.
So, in the moment that this woman was exhiting this false empathy, I thought, "This robot can't be compassionate.
He doesn't face death.
He doesn't know life. " And since this woman was so comforting in her robot-compagnon, I didn't find this amazing; I found it was one of the most heartbreaking moments of my 15 years of work.
But when I stepped back, I felt in the cold, hard center of a perfect storm.
We expect more technology and less technology.
And I'm like, "Why did we get here?" And I think that's because technology takes us basically where we are the most vulnerable.
And we are vulnerable.
We are alone, but we are afraid of intimacy.
And so social networks to social robots, we design technologies that will give us the illusion of the company without the demands of friendship.
We turn to technology to help us feel connected so that we can control comfortably.
But we're not so comfortable.
We're not so much in control.
These days, these phones in our pockets change our minds and hearts because they offer us three gratifying fantasmes.
One, we can put our attention wherever we want it to be; two, we will always be heard; and three, we will never have to be alone.
And that third idea, which we will never have to be alone, is at the heart of the evolution of our psyche.
Because when people are alone, even for a few seconds, they become anxious, they panic, they act, they know a device.
Just think of the people who line up the box or a red light.
Being alone is like a problem that has to be solved.
And so people are trying to solve it by connecting.
But here, connection is more a symptom than a cure.
It expresses, but it doesn't solve, a underlying problem.
But more than a symptom, the constant connection transforms the way people think about themselves.
It shapes a new way of being.
The best way to describe it is, so I share.
We use technology to define ourselves by sharing our thoughts and feelings even as we think and feel them.
So before it was: I feel something, I want to make a call.
Now, it's: I want to feel something, I need to send a texto.
The problem with this new regime of "I share therefore I am" is that, if we don't have connection, we don't feel like we are ourselves We almost don't feel like we are ourselves So what do we do? We connect more and more.
But in the process, we are condemned to be isolated.
How do we move from connection to isolation?
You find yourself isolated if you don't cultivate the ability to be alone, the ability to be separated, to gather you.
So solitude is the place where you find yourself in order to reach to other people and form real attachments.
When we don't have the capacity for solitude, we turn to other people to feel less anxious or to feel alive.
When that happens, we're not able to appreciate who they are.
It's like using them as spare parts to support our fragile sense of self.
We're going to let ourselves think that being connected all the time is going to make us feel less alone.
But we run a risk, because it's actually the opposite that's true.
If we're not able to be alone, we'll be more lonely.
And if we don't teach our kids to be alone, they'll just be when I talked to TED in 1996, and I did a county of my studies on the first virtual community, I said, "Those who make the greatest benefit of their lives on the screen come to them in a self-reflection mind." And that's what I call here and now: reflection, and, more and more, a conversation about where our current use of technology can take us, what that might cost us.
We are subjuted by technology.
And we're afraid, like young lovers, that too much talking can ruin the romance.
But it's time to talk.
We grew up with digital technology, and so we see it as aboutie.
But that's not the case, it's just the beginning.
We have a lot of time to rebuild the way we use it, the way we build it.
I'm not suggesting that we surrounded ourselves from our devices, just that we developed a more conscious relationship with them, with each other and with ourselves.
I see the first ones.
Start thinking about solitude as a good thing.
Make room for that.
Find ways to demonstrate this as a value to your children.
Create sacred spaces at home -- the kitchen, the dining room -- and speak for the conversation.
Do the same thing at work.
At work, we're so busy communicating that we often don't have time to think, we don't have time to talk, things that really matter.
Let's change that.
More importantly, we all really need to listen to each other, including when we're boring.
Because it's when we curl up or we heal or don't find our words that we tell each other.
Technology takes the bet to redefine human connection -- how we care about each other, how we care about ourselves -- but it also gives us an opportunity to say our values and our direction.
I'm optimistic.
We have everything we need to start.
We have them and others.
And we have the greatest chance of success if we admit our vulnerability.
That we're listening when technology says it's going to take something complicated and promise something simpler.
So in my work, I hear that life is hard, relationships are full of risk.
And then there's technology -- simple, hopeful, optimistic, always young.
It's like calling for cavalry.
An ad campaign promises that, online and with avatars you can say, "Well, love your friends like your body, love your life, online and avatars." We're attracted to virtual romance, computer games that look like worlds, by the idea that robots, robots, will one day be our real companions.
We spend a night on the social network instead of going to the pub with friends.
But our substitution fantasms cost us.
Now we all need to focus on the many ways that technology can bring us back to our real lives, to our own bodies, to our own communities, to our own policies, to our own planet.
They need us.
Let's talk about how we can use digital technology, the technology of our dreams, to make life the life that we can love.
Thank you.
Atul Gawande: How do we cure medicine?
Our medical systems don't work anymore. Doctors are capable of extraordinary treatments, but they're losing their main goal: to cure people, and the doctor and the author Atul Gawande proposes that we take a step back and look at new ways to practice medicine -- with less cowboys and more specialists.
I started in writing and research as an internal surgery student, as someone who was very far from becoming any expert in anything.
So, naturally, the question that's being asked at this point is, how am I getting good at what I'm trying to do?
And it became a question of, how do we become all good at what we're trying to do?
It's already difficult to acquire all the techniques, to try to learn all the knowledge that you have to do for all the tasks that you take in charge.
I had to think about how I sew and I cut, but how I choose the right person who comes into the operating room.
And in the middle of all this has come this new context to think about what being good meant.
In the last few years we've realized that we're going through the most severe crisis in medicine because of something you don't normally think about when you're a doctor concerned about how to do good for people, and that's the cost of medical care.
There's not a country in the world that's not asking now if we can allow what doctors do.
The political fight we've developed now is whether the nature of the problem is government or insurance companies.
And the answer is yes and no; it's more complicated than that.
The source of our problems is actually the complexity that science has given us.
And to understand that, I'm going to take you back a few generations.
I want to take you back to a time when Lewis Thomas was writing his book, "Any Graduate Science."
Lewis Thomas was a writer doctor, one of my favorite authors.
And he wrote this book to explain, among other things, what it was like to be an intern in medicine at the Boston City Hospital in 1937 prior to the creation of penicillin.
It was a time when medicine was cheap and very inefficient.
If you were in a hospital, he would say, it was good for you because you'd get a little bit of heat, food, shelter, and maybe care and care from a nurse.
Doctors and medicine did absolutely no difference.
It didn't seem to prevent doctors from being completely overloaded at the time, as he explained.
What they were trying to do was find if you had one of the diagnostics that they could do something about.
And there were a few of them.
If you had acute pneumonia, for example, they could get you through a serotarapy, which is the injection of the anticorpus of the rage in the streptococ bacterium, if the tract had it properly underclassed.
If you had a heart failure, they could empty you by a half-liter blood by opening an arm veins, which would give you a large preparation of digital sheets and then placing you in an oxygen tent.
If you had the first signs of paralysis and you were very good at asking personal questions, you could make sure that paralysis was caused by syphilis, in which case you could give this nice concoction of mercury and anarsenic -- as long as you didn't get overdose and kill the patient.
Out of all this, a doctor couldn't do much more.
It was at that time that the main structure of medicine was created -- which meant being good at what we were doing and how we wanted medicine to develop.
It was at a time when you could know what was known, you could hold it all up, and you could do everything.
If you had a prescription pad, if you had a nurse, if you had a hospital that would give you a recovery place, maybe some basic tools, you could actually do everything.
We had fractures, we had saignes, we had the blood, we had the microscope, we put the cells into the culture, we injected the serotarapy.
This was the life of an artisan.
So we built modern medicine around a culture and a value system that said your qualities were bold, courageous, independent and autonomous.
Autonomy was our greatest quality.
Let's look at a few generations later, in our time, and it looks like a completely different world.
We've now found treatments for almost every thousand diseases a human being can have.
You can't cure everything.
You can't guarantee that everyone will live a long, healthy life.
But you can make it possible for most of them.
But what does it cost in exchange?
Well, now we've discovered 4,000 medical procedures and surgical procedures.
We found 6,000 drugs that I have now prescribed.
And we're trying to deploy this capacity, city by city, to all the living people -- in our own country, not to mention the whole world.
And we've reached the point where we've realized, as doctors, we can't know everything.
You can't do it alone.
One study was done where they looked at how many clinicians it took to take care of you if you went to a hospital at different times.
And in 1970, you just had to have two full-time clinicians.
You basically needed a nurse's care and just a few visits from a doctor who was examining you more or less once a day.
By the end of the 20th century, the number had gone up to over 15 clinicians for the same typical hospital patient -- specialists, family therapists, nurses.
We're all specialists now, even the first responders' doctors.
Everybody gets some of the care.
But to hang on this structure that we built around the audacity, independence, each of these people has become a disaster.
We trained, engaged and rewarded people for acting like cowboys.
But it's a team of experts that we need, like in stage one, but for patients.
There's evidence all around us: 40 percent of the coronary artery disease patients in our communities are getting incompelets or inappropriate care.
60 percent of our asthmatic patients, or brain damage, are getting incomplets or incomplets.
Two million people coming into our hospitals contracting an infection they didn't have because somebody couldn't follow basic hygiene.
Our experience as people who get sick, and need help with other people, is that we have wonderful clinicians where we can go -- incredibly well-trained and very smart workers -- that we have access to amazing technologies that give us great hopes, but not really the impression that everything is happening on a regular basis for you from the very beginning to the end to achieve a successful outcome.
There's another sign that shows us that we need teams of specialists, and that's the cost of care.
I think now in medicine we're overwhelmed by this question of cost.
We mean, things are like this.
It's just the cost of medicine. "When you come from a world where you treated arthritis with aspirin, which most of the time didn't work, at a place where, if things get worse, you can put a hip or knee prosthesis that give you years, or decades, without disabilities, dramatic change, and is it amazing that a $40,000 hip replacement replacing a 10-cent aspirin?
So things are like this.
But I think we don't know some facts that tell us something about what we can do.
We looked at the data on the results that happened as complexity increased, we found that expensive care isn't necessarily the best.
And vice versa, the best care often turns out to be the cheapest -- have fewer complications, people become more effective at what they do.
And that means there is hope.
Because if to get the best results, we really needed the most expensive care in the country, or in the world, then we would seriously talk about rationing, which we're going to pray for disease.
It would really be our only choice.
But when you look at the positive deviations -- the people who get the best results at the lower costs -- what you find is that the ones that look most like systems are more effective.
Which means they've found ways to bring all the different parts together, all the different components into one thing.
Having great components is not enough, and yet, in medicine, we've been obsessed with the components.
We want the best drugs, the best technologies, the best specialists, but we don't think enough about how this all comes together.
It's actually a horrible design method.
There's a famous experiment that talks specifically about this, which says, what if you built a car with the best parts removed?
Well, that would make you install Porsche brakes, a Ferrari engine, a Volvo carrosserie, a BMW chassis.
And you put it all together and what do you get?
A bunch of un-in-a-brac brics that doesn't go anywhere.
And sometimes it's the feeling that we have with medicine.
It's not a system.
We realize that a system, in contrast, where things are starting to come together, has certain qualities to look like a system and operate like that.
The number one quality is the ability to recognize success and the ability to recognize failure.
When you're a specialist, you can't see the end result very well.
You really need to start looking at data, as little as sexy as it sounds.
One of my colleagues is a surgeon in Cedar Rapids in Iowa and he was interested in this question: How many scanners did they do for their community in Cedar Rapids?
He got interested in this because there were government reports, news reports, journal articles saying we'd done too much scanners.
He didn't see it with his own patients.
And then he wondered, "How many did we do?" and he wanted to get the data.
It took him three months.
Nobody had asked the question in their community before.
And what he found was that for the 300,000 people in their community, last year they had done 52,000 scanners.
They had a problem.
Which brings us to the second quality that a system has.
First quality, find where you failed.
The second quality is design solutions.
I got interested in this when the World Health Organization came to my team and asked if we could help them with a project to reduce deaths in surgery.
The number of surgery has increased worldwide, but not the safety of surgery.
Our usual tactics for tackleing this kind of problem is to make more training, to give people more specialization or to bring more technology.
Well, in surgery, you couldn't have specialized people and you couldn't have better trained people.
And yet, we see impensable levels of death, manual forms that might be avoided.
So we looked at what other high-risk industries do.
We looked at skyscrapers, looked at the world of aviation, and we found that they have technologies, training, and they have another thing: they have checklists.
I didn't expect to spend a significant part of my time as a Harvard surgeon worrying about checklists.
And yet, what we discovered is that these tools help experts improve.
We appealed to Boeing's chief security engineer to help us.
Could we create a checklist for surgery?
Not for the people at the bottom of theorgangram, but for the people who are right down the chain, the whole team including the surgeons.
And what they've taught us is that creating a checklist to help people deal with complexity actually involves more difficulty than I've ever thought.
You have to think about things like pauses.
You have to identify the moments in a process where you can catch a problem before it becomes a danger and act.
You have to figure out that this is a pre-frontal checklist.
And then you have to focus on the raw elements.
A checklist like this for a mono-moteur airplane is not a recipe for flying an airplane, it's a reminder of the key elements that are forgotten or missed if they're not checked.
So we did that.
We've created a 19-piece checklist that takes two minutes.
It's for surgical teams.
We had the moments of pause just before anesthesia happens, just before the scalp hits the skin, just before the patient leaves the operating room.
And we had a mixture of silly things on this list -- make sure that an antibiotic is given at the right time because it reduces the rate of infection by half -- and then interesting things, because you can't concoct a recipe for something as complicated as surgery.
Instead, you can create a recipe for preparing a team at the unexpected.
And we had points like making sure everyone in the room was introduced by his name at the beginning of the day, because you have half a dozen people or more who sometimes form a team for the first time you get there.
We implemented this checklist in eight hospitals around the world deliberately in different places in rural Tanzania at the University of Washington in Seattle.
What we found is that, according to the miscarriage, the complications rate has dropped to 35 percent.
He fell into all the hospitals where the list was impeded.
The death rate fell to 47 percent.
It was more important than a drug.
And that brings us to quality number three, the ability to implement this, to make sure that the colleagues throughout the chain actually apply this.
And it was a long time to develop.
It's not our norm in surgery yet -- let's not talk about making checklists for childbirth and other areas.
There's a profound resilience because using these tools is forcing us to confront the fact that we're not a system, we're forcing ourselves to act with a different system of values.
Just using a checklist requires that you adopt different values than you have, like humility, discipline, teamwork.
It's the opposite of how we've been trained: independence, self-sufficiency, autonomy.
I actually met a real cowboy.
I asked her what it was like to put together a herd of a thousand bestials for real in hundreds of miles?
How do you do that?
And he said, "We've got cowboys stationed around different locations," and they communicate electronically all the time, and they have checks and checks and balances on how to deal with everything -- from bad weather to emergency rooms or vaccinations to livestock.
Even cowboys are teams of specialists now.
And it looks like it's time we're having it too.
Making systems work is the great task of my generation of physicians and scientists.
But I would go further and I would say that having systems work, whether it's health care, education, climate change, creating a path to get out of poverty, is the great task of our whole generation.
In every field, knowledge exploded, but it brought complexity, it brought specialization.
And we've come to a point where we have no choice but to recognize, that as individualistic as we wish to be, complexity requires the success of the group.
We all need to train teams now.
Thank you.
Laura Carstensen: older people are happier.
In the 20th century, we added an unprecedented number of years to our lifespan, but is life quality as good? It's surprising, but yes! At TEDxWomen, the psychologist Laura Carstensen tells us about the research that people get happier and happier and have a more positive view of the world as they get older.
People live longer and gray societies.
We hear about it all the time.
We read it in the newspapers.
We hear it on television.
Sometimes I worry that hearing so much about it has led us to accept longer lives with a kind of complacency, even ease.
But don't get it wrong, longer lives can, and I think, will, improve quality of life every time.
To put that in perspective, let me see the whole plan for a minute.
Over years have been added to life expectancy in the 20th century that if we've been added all the years since millennia of human evolution into an eye blink, we've almost doubled our lifespan.
So if it ever comes to you to find that you don't apprehend that story of aging, that's not serious.
It's brand new.
And because the fertility rate has fallen down over that same period where life expectancy has increased, that pyramid that has always represented the distribution of ages in the population, with many young people at the bottom has shrunk to a tiny, tiny peak of older people who are able to survive until old age is being reapted in the form of a rectangle.
And now, if you're the kind of person who can be anxious about population statistics, these are the ones that you should be talking about.
Because what that means is that for the first time in the history of our species, the majority of babies born in the developed world have the opportunity to age.
How did this happen?
Well we're no longer genetically hardier than our ancestors were 10,000 years ago.
This whole range of life expectancy is the remarkable product of culture -- the hollow that contains science and technology and large-scale behavioral change that improves health and well-being.
Through cultural changes, our ancestors have largely eliminated early death so that people can now live their full lives.
There are problems associated with aging -- diseases, poverty, loss of social status.
It's too early to rest on our laurets.
But the more we learn about aging, the more it becomes clear that a steep decline is grossly inexact.
The old comes with remarkable improvements -- increased knowledge, expertise -- and emotional aspects of life improve.
It's true, the older people are happy.
They're happier than average people, and certainly young people.
One study after another comes to the same conclusion.
The Ministry of Health recently conducted a study where they simply asked people to tell them if they had felt an important psychological stress last week.
And less than older people answered that question than average people, and young people as well.
And a recent Gallup poll asked participants how much stress, worry and anger they had experienced the previous day.
And stress, concern and anger all decrease with age.
So social scientists call this the paradox of aging.
After all, aging is not pie.
So we asked all sorts of questions to see if we could counteract this finding.
We asked if perhaps the current generations of older people are and have always been the best generations.
That is, maybe the young people today won't live up to these improvements when they get old.
We asked, maybe older people are simply trying to put a little bit of optimism into something that is otherwise depressing.
But the more we tried to disappoint this discovery, the more evidence we found in favor.
Years ago, my colleagues and I embarked on a study in which we follow the same group of people over a period of 10 years.
originally the sample went from 18 to 94 years.
And we studied whether and how emotions changed as they got older.
Our participants were wearing electronic beeps for a week at a time, and we'd beep them over the course of the day and the evening randomly.
And every time we would pick them up, we would ask them to answer several questions -- on a one- to seven-scale scale, how happy are you now?
How sad are you now?
How frustrated are you now? -- to have an idea of the kinds of emotions they had in their daily lives.
And using this intense study of individuals, we find that it's not a particular generation that's better than others, but the same individuals over time come to a relatively positive experience.
You can see this decline in very advanced ages.
And there's a mild decline.
But at no point the curve is back to the levels that we see at the beginning of the adult age.
It's really too simplistic to say that older people are "happy."
In our study, they're more positive, but they're also more likely than the youngest people to experience emotions -- sadness at the same time as happiness; you know, that smell of eye when you smile at a friend.
And other research has shown that older people seem to engage more comfortably with sadness.
They take more sadness than younger people do.
And we suspect that this can contribute to explain why older people are better than younger people when it comes to solving emotional conflict and higher charge debates.
Older people can see injustice with compassion, but not despair.
And all things are equal, the older people run their cognitive resources, like attention and memory, towards positive information rather than negative.
If you show pictures to young people, middle-aged people and older people like the ones you see on the screen, and then they're asked to remember all the images they can, old people, but not young people, remember more positive images than negative ones.
We asked the old and young people to look at faces in lab studies, some frowning, some frowning, some frowning, some frowning, older people look at faces that smile and look at angry faces that frowned.
In everyday life, it translates to greater appreciation and greater satisfaction.
But as a sociologist, we continue to wonder about possible alternatives.
We said maybe older people are more positive because their cognitive abilities are degraded.
We said, would it be possible that positive emotions are just easier to handle than negatives, and therefore to flip on positive emotions?
Our neural centers in our brain may be degraded so that we are unable to now manage negative emotions.
But that's not the case.
The most vivid intellectual adults are the ones that show the most positive effect.
And in conditions where it really matters, older people manage negative information just as well as positive information.
So how is that possible?
In our research, we've found that these changes are basically from the uniquely human ability to see time -- not just clock time and time of calendars, but time of life.
And if there is a paradox of aging, recognizing that we will not live forever changing our perspective of life in a positive way.
When the horizons of time are long and nebulous, as it typically happens when you're young, people are constantly preparing, they're trying to infuse all of the information they can, they take risks, they're exploring.
We can spend time with people we don't even like because it's an interesting thing.
We could learn something unexpected.
We're going to meet you with strangers.
You know, after all, if it doesn't work, tomorrow is another day.
People over 50 are not going to date with strangers.
As we get older, our time horizons shrink and our goals change.
When we recognize that we don't have all the time in the world, we see our priorities more clearly.
We do less of the side questions.
We enjoy life.
We're getting better, we're more open to reconciliation.
We invest in more important emotional parts of life and life improves, so we're happier on the day.
But that same change in perspective leads us to have less tolerance towards injustice.
By 2015, there will be more than 60 years in the United States than under 15 years.
What will happen to societies that have too many older people?
The numbers won't determine the outcome.
Culture will.
If we invest in science and technology and find solutions to the real problems that older people face and capitalize on the real strengths of old people, then extra years of life can dramatically improve the quality of life at any age.
Companies with millions of stable, talented citizens who are healthier and better educated than any generation before them, armed with knowledge about the practical issues of life and motivated to solve big problems can be better societies than we've ever experienced.
My dad, who's 92, likes to say, "Let's just think about how to save the old people and start talking about how to make them save us all."
Thank you.
Michael Norton: How do you buy happiness?
At TEDxCambridge, Michael Norton is sharing some fascinating research on how money can actually buy happiness: when you're not spending it on yourself, look at the surprising data on many ways in which spending pro-social dollars can be a profit for you, your work and good for others.
I want to talk about money and happiness, which are two things that many of us spend a lot of our time thinking or trying to make it or trying to make it bigger.
And many of us are echoing this expression.
We see it in the religions and the self-help books, that money can't buy happiness.
And I want to suggest to you today that, in fact, it's wrong.
I'm in a business school, that's what we do.
It's wrong and, in fact, if you think about it, you're not actually spending it well.
So instead of spending it the way you usually spend it, maybe if you spent it differently, it might work a little bit better.
And before I tell you the ways in which you can spend it that makes you happier, think about the ways in which we usually spend it that actually won't make us happier.
We did a little natural experiment.
CNN, a few years ago, wrote this interesting article about what happens to people when they win lottery.
It turns out that people think that when they make lottery their lives is going to be amazing.
This article describes how their lives are frozen.
What happens when people make lottery money is they spend all the money and all the money and all the friends and all the ones they've ever met.
And it actually ruins their social relationships.
So they have more debt and fewer pies than they had before they won the lottery.
What was interesting about the article is that people started making comments about the article, the readers.
And instead of talking about how it made them realize that money doesn't lead to happiness, everyone immediately started saying, "You know what I would do if I won the lottery ... " and fantasizing what they would do.
And these are two of the ones that we've seen that it's really interesting to think about.
One person wrote, "When I win, I'll buy my own little mountain and I'll put a little house on it." And another person wrote, "I'll fill a big bathtub with money and I'll go into the bathtub just by smoking a big, big cegar and throwing a champagne glass." It's even worse after, "So I'll take a picture and print dozens of them.
Everyone who's going to ask me for money or try to take care of me is going to get a copy of the picture and nothing else. " And so many comments were exactly of this guy, where people got money and, in fact, it made them antisocial.
I told you it ruins people's lives and their friends are bringing them.
Also, money often makes us feel very selfish and we do things just for ourselves.
Perhaps the reason that money doesn't make us happy is because we're always spending it on bad things, especially that we're still spending it on ourselves.
And we thought, I wonder what would happen if we made people spend more money on other people.
Instead of being antisocial with your money, what if you were a little more prosocial with your money?
And we thought, let's do that to people and see what happens.
Let's make people do what they usually do and spend money on themselves, make money on people, and measure their happiness and see if, in fact, they become happier.
The first way we did it.
One morning in Vancouver, we went to the campus at the University of British Columbia, and we approached people and said, "Do you want to participate in an experiment?" They said, "Yes. We asked them how happy they were, and then we gave them an envelope.
And one of the envelopes contained things that said, "In 17 hours today, spend that money on yourself." So we gave some examples of what you could spend on it.
Other people, in the morning, had a piece of paper that said, "In 17 hours today, spend that money for someone else." There was also money in the envelope.
And we manipulated how much money they were given.
Some of them received this sheet of paper and five dollars.
Some of them received this sheet of paper and 20 dollars.
We let them do their day. They did what they wanted to do.
We found that they spent it the way we asked them.
We called them bedtime and asked them, "What did you spend it on and how happy do you feel now?" "What did they spend it on?
They're licensed students, so they've spent a lot of it on themselves with things like earrings and makeup.
One woman said she bought a teddy bear for her niece.
People gave money to homeless people.
Huge effect here of Starbucks.
So if you give undergraduates five dollars, it looks like coffee for them and they run at Starbucks and spend it as fast as possible.
Some people pay a coffee as they usually would, but others said they bought a coffee for somebody else.
So the same purchase, just targeted to you or targeted to somebody else.
What did we find when we called them at the end of the day?
The people who spent money on others were happier.
For those who spent money on themselves, nothing happened.
It didn't make them happy; it just didn't do much for them.
And the other thing that we've seen is that the sum of money doesn't matter very much.
People thought 20 dollars would be much better than five dollars.
In fact, no matter how much money you spent.
What really matters is you spent it on somebody else rather than on yourself.
We see it over and over again when we give people money to spend on other people rather than on themselves.
Of course, these are undergraduate students in Canada -- not the most representative of the world.
They're also rich and educated, and all these other kinds of things.
We wanted to see if this is true everywhere in the world or only in the rich countries.
We actually went to Uganda and did a very similar experiment.
So imagine, instead of just people in Canada, we said, "Go for the last time you spent money on yourself or other people.
Do you write it. How happy did you get?" Or in Uganda, "Tell the last time you spent money on yourself or other people and describe it." And then we asked them again how happy they were.
And what we see is quite amazing because there are universal human characteristics in what you do with your money and then real cultural differences in what you also do.
So, for example, a guy from Uganda said this.
He said, "I called a girl that I wanted to love." And basically they came out together, and he said at the end that he didn't reach his goal "to with her so far.
This is a guy from Canada.
Very similar to this.
"I took my girlfriend out for dinner.
We went to the movies, we left early, and then we went back to his room for -- "The cake -- just a piece of cake.
Constante human universal -- so you're spending money on other people, you're nice to them.
Maybe you have something in your mind, maybe not.
But then we see the extraordinary differences.
So look at these two.
This is a woman from Canada.
We say, "Tell one time you spent money on somebody else. She says, "I bought a gift for my mom.
I went to the mall in my car, bought a gift, gave it to my mother, "A beautiful thing to do.
It's good to give gifts to people you know.
Compare that to this woman in Uganda.
"I walked and I met a long-time friend whose son had malaria.
They didn't have money; they went to a clinic and I gave him this money; "It's not 10,000 dollars; it's local currency.
So it's a very small amount of money, actually.
But extremely different motivations here.
This is a real medical need, literally a donation to save life.
At the top, it's just, I bought a gift for my mother.
What we see again, though, is that the specific way that you spend on other people is not as important as the fact that you spend on other people to make you happy, which is really, really important.
You don't have to do amazing things with your money to make you happy.
You can do small, trivial things and still get those benefits by doing that.
This is just two countries.
We also wanted to expand the experience and look at every country in the world, if we could, to see what the relationship is between money and happiness.
We've obtained data from the Gallup Organization, which you know for all the political polls that have been done in the last few days.
They ask people, "Have you given money to a charity recently?" and they ask them, "How happy are you in general your life?" And we can see the relationship between these two things.
Are they positively correlated? Give money makes it happy.
Or are they negatively correlated?
On this map, green means they're positively correlated and red means they're negatively correlated.
And you can see, the world is madly green.
In almost every country in the world where we have data, the people who give money to charity are happier people than people who don't give money to charity.
I know you're all looking at this red country in the middle.
I would be a critter if I didn't tell you what it is, but in fact, it's the Centrafricine Republic.
You can make stories. Maybe it's different for some reason or another.
Right below on the right is Rwanda, amazingly green.
So almost everywhere we look at we see that giving money makes you happier than keeping it for yourself.
What about your professional life, which is where we spend the rest of our time when we're not with the people we know.
We decided to infiltrate ourselves in companies and do something very similar.
These are sales teams in Belgium.
They work in teams; they're going to sell to doctors and try to get them to buy drugs.
We can look and see how they sell things in their role as a member of a team.
Some teams, we give people the team a sum of money for themselves, and we say, "Just do it the way you want it to yourself" as we did with students in Canada.
But the other teams say, "Here's 15 euros.
Get them out for one of your fellow employees this week.
Buy him a gift and give him a gift.
And then we can see, and now we have teams that spend on themselves and we have these prosocial teams that give money to make the team a little bit better.
The reason I've got a ridiculous pinata is because one of the teams put his money together and bought a pinata, and they all got around and broke the pinata and all the candy fell down and things like that.
A very silly, banal thing to do, but think of the difference in a team that didn't really have that, that got 15 euros, put them in, got a coffee, or teams that have this prosocial experience where they all relate to buying something and making a group activity.
What we see is that, in fact, teams that are prosocial sell more things than teams that have just gotten money for themselves.
And one way to think about that is, for every 15 Euro you give people for themselves, they put it in their pocket, they don't do anything different than what they did before.
You don't win anything.
You actually lose money because it doesn't motivate them to do better.
But when you give them 15 euros to spend on their teammates, they do so much better in their teams that you actually get an enormous amount of money investing in those kinds of money.
And I realize that you probably think of yourself, it's beautiful, but there's a context that's extremely important for public policy, and I can only imagine it would work in that.
And basically, if it doesn't show me it works here, I don't believe anything he said.
And I know what you're all thinking about are the hunting balloon teams.
We got a huge criticism, if you can't show it with teams of press balloons, that's stupid.
So we went out and we found these track teams and we infiltrated them.
And we did exactly the same thing before.
For some teams, we give people the money team, they spend it on themselves.
Other teams, we give them money to spend on their hunting balloon rides.
The teams who spend money on themselves win even as they did before.
The teams that we give money to spend on the other become different teams and, in fact, they dominate the league as they spent everything.
In all these different contexts -- your personal life, your professional life, even stupid things like intramural sports -- we see spending on others is more than spending on yourself.
And so I'm just going to say, I think if you think money can't buy happiness you don't spend it well.
The implication is not that you have to buy this product instead of this product and it's the way to make you happier.
In fact, you have to stop thinking about what product you buy for yourself and you have to try to give more people.
And it turns out we have an opportunity for you.
DonorsChoose.org is a nonprofit, mainly for public school teachers in low-income schools.
They put together projects, so they say, "I want to teach Huckleberry Finn in my class and we don't have the books," or "I want a microscope to teach science to my students and we don't have a microscope.
You and I can go and buy for them.
The teacher writes you a thank you. Children write you a thank you.
Sometimes they send you the photographs of them using the microscope.
It's an extraordinary thing.
Go to the site and go out into the process of thinking, even less, "How can I spend money on myself?" and more to "If I have five or 15 dollars, what can I do to benefit other people?" Because ultimately, when you do, you find that you're benefiting a lot more from yourself.
Thank you.
Christina Warinner: On the run of ancient diseases -- because of the dental plaque.
Imagine what we could learn about diseases by studying the history of human disease, from the ancient hominids to date. But how? Chritina Warinner, TED Fellows, archaeologist geneticists, and she found a spectacular new tool -- of microbien DNA in the fossilized area.
Have you ever wondered what's inside your dental plaque?
Probably not, but people like me, yes.
I'm an archaeologist at the Center for evolutionary medicine at Zurich University, and I study the origins and evolution of human health and diseases by conducting genetic research on the skeletal remains and maternalized amongst ancient men.
And through this work, I hope to better understand the evolutionary vulnerability of our bodies, so that we can improve and better manage our health in the future.
There are different ways of approaching evolutionary medicine and one of those ways is to extract human DNA from ancient bone.
And from these extracts, we can reconstruct the human genome at different points in time and look for changes that could be associated with adaptations, risk factors and heréditary diseases.
But it's only half the story.
The most important health problems today are not caused by simple mutations in our genome, but rather the result of a complex and dynamic interaction between genetic variation, diet, microbes and parasites and our immune response.
All of these diseases have a strong evolutionary component that is directly linked to the fact that we live in today in a very different environment than the ones in which our bodies evolved.
And in order to understand these diseases, we need to move past studies of the single human genome to a more global approach of human health in the past.
But that presents a lot of problems.
And first of all, what do we actually study?
The skeletons are ubiquitous; they're found everywhere.
But of course, all of the soft tissue came down, and the skeleton itself has limited health information.
Mumies are a great source of information, except they're really geographically limited and limited in time.
Coprolithes are fossilized human feces, and they're actually very interesting.
You can learn a lot about ancient diet and intestinal disease, but they're very rare.
To solve this problem, I set up a team of international researchers in Switzerland, Denmark and the U.K.
To study a very badly studied material, not known about people all over the world.
This is a kind of fossilized dentary plaque that's officially called dentary computation.
Many of you may know it as the tartre.
This is what the dentist removes your teeth every time you go to see it for a control.
And in a typical dentary control, you can take about 15 to 30 milligrams off of it.
But in ancient times, before the teeth brossing, up to 600 milligrams could accumulate on the teeth during an entire life.
And what's really important about the dental calculus is that it fossilizes just like the rest of the skeleton, and it's found in large numbers before today and it's ubiquitous worldwide.
We find it in every population of the world at every time, going back tens of thousands of years.
And we find them even in animals and in neandertals.
And the previous studies had carried only on microscopy.
They had looked at the dental calculus under the microscope, and they had found things like pollen and plant frienddons, and they had found animal meat muscle cells and bacteria.
So what my team of researchers, what we wanted to do is, can we apply proteomic genetics and technology to look for DNA and protein, and can we get a better taxonomic resolution to really understand what's going on?
And what we found is that we can find a lot of bacteria likensal and pathogenics that log into the nasalway and the mouth.
We also found immune proteins related to infection and inflammation and DNA and protein related to diet.
But what was surprising to us, which was also quite exciting, is that we also found bacteria that normally log into higher respiratory systems.
So this gives us virtual access to the lungs, where there are many important diseases.
And we also found bacteria that are normally trapped in the digestive tube.
And so we can now virtually access this system of organs even farther away that from the skeleton alone has been decompose for a long time.
And so by applying the sequencing of ancient DNA and mass spectrometry technologies of protein to old dental calculus, we can generate immense amounts of data that then we can use to begin to reconstruct a detailed picture of the dynamic interaction between food, infection and immunity thousands of years ago.
So what started out as an idea is now implemented to produce millions of sequences that we can use to investigate the long-term evolution of human health and disease, to the genetic code of individual pathogens.
And from that information we can learn how pathogens evolve and also why they keep getting sick.
And I hope I've convinced you of the value of the curriculum.
And the last thought I want to leave you with, in the name of the future archaeologists, I want to ask you to think twice before you go home and brush your teeth.