Rebecca Saxe speaks at TEDGlobal 2009. Photo: James Duncan Davidson

Above and slightly behind your right ear, exists a part of your brain many scientists believe is specifically dedicated to thinking about other people’s thoughts – to predicting them, reading them, and empathizing with them. It’s called the temporoparietal junction, and this is the area cognitive neuroscientist Rebecca Saxe focuses on in her research.

Rebecca Saxe: How we read each other's mindsAt TEDGlobal 2009, Saxe delves into our amazing capacity to identify and predict others’ emotions and actions, and how this ability is learned throughout childhood. This skill serves an important function in human relationships – we learn how to fill in the unspoken blanks between what someone is thinking and how they are presenting themselves. This is what allows us to glance at a photo of someone and be able to know what she is feeling.

Saxe’s talk is this week’s featured idea for TED Weekends on the Huffington Post. Below, find essays all about our ability to, in a sense, read minds.

Rebecca Saxe: Learning to Read Someone Else’s Mind

My TED Talk, above, is about the process by which we learn to read each other. Here are five reasons that I study how human brains think about other minds.

(1) It is a hard, and awesome, problem. To me, the most breathtaking idea I’ve ever heard is that each thought a person ever has, every moment of experience, of insight, of reflection, of aspiration, is equivalent to a pattern of brain cells firing in space and time. How does a pattern of brain activity constitute a moral judgment? A moment of empathy for a fictional character? The idea for a sentence you’re about to write? Someday, scientists will be able to imagine, simultaneously, these abstract thoughts and how each corresponds to a specific pattern of brain activity. I don’t expect this understanding to arrive in my lifetime. But it’s thrilling to imagine that future, and to feel that my research might be a small step on the route that gets us there. Read the full essay »

Phillip M. Miner: The Neurology of Disgust

Growing up believing you are an abomination is strange. But, if you are gay and grew up in Kansas (or many other parts of the world) — like I did — it’s not all that uncommon. We’re told from a very young age that being gay is wrong and gross. The lesson that men who have sex with men are disgusting is repeated so frequently, your average kid quickly gets the message.

Sometimes the moral judgment is delivered directly — often times through someone with religious moral authority or family. Other times it comes more subtly through language cues. In my experience, the euphemisms for men who have sex with men seem to bleed together to form a powerful and often false identity, saying all men who have sex with men are feminine (“pansy”, “fairy”, “poof”), perverts (“pillow biter,” “corn holer,” “sword swallower”), and abominations (“queer,” “bent”).

There’s disagreement on the physical mechanisms for creating moral beliefs in the brain. Read the full essay»

Barbara Ficarra: Equipped for Empathy

“The great gift of human beings is that we have the power of empathy.” These are heartfelt words by award-winning actress Meryl Streep.

Do we all have the power of empathy? Are we hardwired to know what other people want? Is it easy to think about other people’s thoughts?

Rebecca Saxe’s enlightening TEDTalk ”How To Read Each Other’s Minds” asks: “Why is it so hard to know what somebody else wants or believes?” “Why is it so hard to change what somebody else wants or believes?” And “How is it so easy to know other minds?” Read the full essay »

The TEDxBahrialUKarachi show went on, despite a bombing in the city the day of the event. Why? To give hope. Photo: TEDxBahrialUKarachi

The city of Karachi, Pakistan, was on lockdown after bomb blasts claimed 57 lives in the midst of a tumultuous election. And on the day of TEDxBahriaUKarachi, yet another bomb shocked the area. Still, organizers Furqan Hussein and Sana Nasir boldly tread onward toward putting on a memorable event. “‘Ideas for Survival,’ our theme, sowed the idea of surviving in situations when there’s [little] or no hope,” Nasir tells the TEDx Blog in an interview. “The one thing we wanted our audience to take back [with them] was hope.”

These are the lengths some TEDx organizers go to in order to put on great events — dozens of which are held across the world every week. From these events, the TEDx team chooses four favorite talks each week, highlighting just a few of the enlightening speakers from the TEDx community and its diverse constellation of ideas. Below, listen to this week’s talks – on topics ranging from the data revolution to how we perceive pain.

Democracy’s data revolution: Simon Jackman at TEDxSydney
At TEDxSydney, Stanford researcher Simon Jackman demonstrates some of the ways in which an increased availability of data gives us a more accurate picture of electoral trends, the political zeitgeist, and the serious implications this has on the shape of public conversation. (Filmed at TEDxSydney.)

Pain is all about perception: Silje Endersen Reme at TEDxNHH
Nearly everyone will suffer from some form of back pain during their lifetime, often without a specific cause. At TEDxNHH, Silje Endersen Reme explains how our mental state can affect the way we perceive chronic and acute forms of back pain. (Filmed at TEDxNHH.)

Detecting cancer before it spreads: Raj Krishnan at TEDxSanDiego 2012
Curing cancer isn’t just about better treatment, says Raj Krishnan. If we can improve detection, patients will enjoy much better odds of survival and recovery. Krishnan demonstrates how doctors can use existing technology to scan for DNA markers of cancer cells — even before the patient is showing symptoms. (Filmed at TEDxSanDiego.)

African thumb piano jam: Hiroyuki at TEDxTokyo
At TEDxTokyo, Japanese artist Hiroyuki plays a remarkable musical performance on the kalimba — also known as the thumb piano. A handheld plucking instrument still relatively obscure in Western music, the kalimba is an ancient part of the heritage of several cultures in sub-Saharan Africa. (Filmed at TEDxTokyo.)

And here, some of the week’s highlights from the TEDx blog:

• Portrait of a TEDx’er: Austin Kleon
• Instagrammed: Completing the sentence “Before I die, I want to…” at TEDxRiyadh
• Quoted: Jackson Katz viral TEDx talk, “There are no women’s issues.”

Volunteer firefighter Mark Bezos kicks off the hour with a story of a small, seemingly insignificant act of heroism. Through a tiny act of kindness, he realizes the dozens of possibilities we have in a day to be heroes in our own humble ways. Next, self-named “renegade ecolutionary” Ron Finley describes the garden that he began on the sidewalk in front of his house in South Central Los Angeles, meant for anyone to eat from. Finley expresses the importance of the yin and yang of giving and receiving — one cannot simply take, but must create a cycle of giving.

The second half of the show continues with Dan Pallotta, who wonders why we are so much more willing to invest in a private company’s enterprises than we are to donate to a non-profit. Pallotta stresses the paradigm shift that we need to enact — away from viewing non-profits as things that must produce results in the here-and-now to seeing them as organizations that can grow and thrive on long-term investments. Amanda Palmer closes the show, sharing her experience as a musician in a budding economy built on trust. As she talks, she emphasizes the importance of the simple act of asking when you need something — and the joy that comes from the connection found through mutual support.

To hear TED Radio Hour’s “Giving It Away,” check your local NPR schedule to find out when the show airs today. Or listen to it via NPR’s website »

Head to iTunes, where the podcast is available now »

Chris Hadfield, the Canadian astronaut who’s become a YouTube sensation aboard the International Space Station, has showed us why tears won’t fall in space and the dangers of clipping one’s fingernails in zero gravity. But he has truly outdone himself with his latest video. Scheduled to leave the space station tonight at 7pm – and to touch down in Kazakhstan hours later — Hadfield has remade David Bowie’s “Space Oddity.” (For those not up on their Bowie song titles, this is the song that starts: “Ground control to Major Tom.”) Watch it — it’s truly awe-inspiring.

At TED, we’ve had talks from explorers of the mind, charterers of the polar regions and investigators of insects. Today, we’re taking a look at talks from those who’ve seen the earth from outside its atmosphere. All of these TED, TEDx, and TED-Ed speakers are astronauts, yes, but they also have something else in common: a desire to never stop exploring. We’ll start, of course, with Hadfield welcoming TED to Canada, upon hearing that TED2014 would be held in Vancouver.

1. Commander Hadfield welcomes TED to Canada
2. Mae Jemison: On teaching arts and sciences together
3. Cady Coleman greets TED2011 from the International Space Station
4. Roberta Bondar: The challenge of change
5. Lodewijk van den Berg: How a crystal growth scientist became an astronaut
6. Joseph Allen: A sense of place in space
7. Yvonne Cagle: The human microscopic
8. Jerry Carr: Life of an astronaut
9. Ed Lu: The biggest conversation project imaginable (See also: Changing the course of the solar system and Oceans of robots)
10. Michael Massimino: Spaceflight
11. Nicole Stott: The glass floor: Reaching for the stars
12. Stephanie D. Wilson: My journey to space
13. Michael E. Lopez-Alegria: Human exploration of space
14. Ron Garan: The orbital perspective of our fragile oasis (See also: Connecting humanity’s changemakers and his greeting to TED2011 from ISS)

Cameron Russell: Looks aren't everything. Believe me, I'm a model. Cameron Russell wants to have a discussion about the way that we, as a society, perceive beauty. Media representations of women, she says, are replete with racist and sexist representations, encouraging women to live up to a standard that is both oppressive and unattainable. Russell’s profession offers an insider’s perspective on the topic – after all, she has been modeling for over a decade.

Her candid talk from TEDxMidAtlantic led to this edition of TED Weekends on the Huffington Post. Below, find essays to start the discussion on our perceptions of beauty.

Cameron Russell: Beauty Is in the Lies of the Beholder

Women are not crazy for wanting to have a discussion about body image. And the conversation isn’t as superficial as the one Dove keeps encouraging us to have. It is a conversation about sexism and racism. It is a conversation about the real reason we try to shrink our waists and whiten our teeth (and sometimes even our skin). Most of the time we don’t do those things to make ourselves happy, we do them for someone else. I think we should start talking about that.

The easiest place to see discrimination is our incomes. Modeling is one of the few professions where women actually out-earn men. And across all jobs, studies have found that more attractive women earn more. A woman’s value is too often skin-deep. In 2004 a study found that resumes with very African-American-sounding names were 50 percent less likely to get called for an initial interview. And racial bias in salaries is overwhelming. While white women make an average of 78 cents for every man’s dollar, for African-American women that number drops to 62 cents, and for Hispanic women to 54 cents. Read the full essay

Donna Highfill: Beauty and Biblical Plagues

There is nothing like a biblical plague landing on your face to make you question the importance of physical appearance. I was 24 years old when I noticed a massive knot on my face that caused my left eye to close slightly. I was sure that something horrible had bitten me and was equally sure that some topical cream and an antibiotic would cure it. But when my normally personality-less dermatologist sat down beside me, put his hand on my arm and said, “You are so young and pretty. I am so sorry,” I knew I was wrong on both counts.

At the time the plague descended, I was a trainer for a mid-sized bank, which called for me to present in front of people on a regular basis. I was also getting married soon… that special time in a girl’s life when you prepare for that walk down the runway that church folks call an aisle.

Sparing the more vivid details of cystic acne, I will tell you that it is a cruel skin disease that can ravage the skin with huge, painful cysts. See? Biblical plague stuff. Fortunately, mine hit only one place on my body. Unfortunately, that place was my face. Read the full essay

On Tuesday night, PBS and TED joined forces to air TED Talks Education, a one-hour televised special, featuring passionate teachers, students and researchers from the field who shared their ideas about transforming the US education system. We were so inspired by these spirited speakers that we asked them to curate playlists of their favorite TED Talks for you to enjoy.

Sir Ken Robinson chose his favorite talks, spanning creative methods of learning and powerful spoken word. Watch his favorite talks »

Educator Angela Duckworth selected inquisitive talks about human behavior and psychology. Watch her talk picks »

Bill Gates’ extensive playlist includes a variety of eye-opening selections on medicine, robots and violence. Watch the talks that inspire him »

Teacher and activist Geoffrey Canada’s playlist reflects his passion for advocacy through an exploration of violence, slums and environmental activism. Watch his favorite talks on social justice »

Poet Malcolm London picked talks from speakers with candor – poets and educators alike. Watch this poet’s selections »

High school teacher Pearl Arrendondo chose motivating talks that reflect her own drive. Watch her inspiring picks »

Ramsey Musallam, chemistry teacher, selected talks on imaginative ways of repurposing education and learning. Watch his inventive collection of talks »

A view of the stage before TEDxDelft. Photo: Roy Borghouts

From dancing math to teaching in languages other than English – this week’s X marks the spot is a selection of TEDx Talks about rethinking education. Each week, TEDx chooses four of our favorite talks, highlighting just a few of the enlightening speakers from the TEDx community, and its diverse constellation of ideas worth spreading. Below, find this week’s edition on education.

Teaching math through movement: Erik Stern and Karl Schaffer at TEDxManhattanBeach
Erik Stern and Karl Schaffer took their love of dance into the classroom. Now, they promote the teaching of complicated mathematics concepts to kids using the power of movement, as they demonstrate. (Filmed at TEDxManhattanBeach.)

Teach for tomorrow’s world: David Garner at TEDxIndianapolis
With new technology, rapid changes in the global economy, and an evolving workforce, we have an urgent need to improve the way we teach, says David Garner. He explains why we should leave behind outdated models like specialization and standardization and move to a more multidisciplinary approach. (Filmed at TEDxIndianapolis.)

Language and the wealth gap: Phiwayinkosi Mbuyazi at TEDxSoweto
In a passionate talk, Phiwayinkosi Mbuyazi takes issue with the convention of teaching international students in English, suggesting that this practice often hurts much more than it helps. (Filmed at TEDxSoweto.)

Teach both 007 and MacGyver: Marc Chun at TEDxDenverTeachers
“Why am I learning this?” It’s a question familiar to parents and teachers alike. Marc Chun and other researchers set out to discover how students actually use general knowledge — and he now recommends curriculums that focus on creativity in solving problems. (TEDxDenverTeachers.)

Below, find some highlights from the TEDx blog this week:

• 5 TEDx Talks in honor of teacher appreciation week
• Bosons, bicycles and big data: 7 things we learned from TEDxCERN
• Is it better or worse to drink while exercising? Evidence from Dr. Timothy Noakes at TEDxCapetown
• 5 TEDx Talks on DNA
• The first TEDx playlist featuring TEDx Talks entirely in Spanish

To that end, we invited Market Road Films, the production company of two-time Emmy-winning filmmaker Tony Gerber and Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright/MacArthur Genius Award-recipient Lynn Nottage, to create short documentaries about high schoolers in New York City with incredible stories. Several of these docs appeared in last night’s show, but several went unsurfaced … until now. Watch all five below.

Shahruz Ghaemi is lucky enough to attend one of the most competitive schools in the nation — but he feels that some of his best learning happens outside the classroom. While studying with his jazz piano teacher, Ghaemi is dropped into an environment where he is forced to think differently. While standardized testing can be confining, this creative outlet helps him understand concepts in new ways. “[Education] ought to be able to provide everyone in America with opportunity,” he says. “But an administrative culture that focuses on standardized testing does us no good at all.”

Two years ago, Melissa Perez didn’t have graduation on the brain at all. In fact, she barely attended classes. Then she got pregnant — and becoming a parent changed everything. Melissa wanted to be able to provide for her daughter, and with the help of her math teacher — who recognized her talent — she quickly improved her grades. Thanks to that push from her teacher, she rose to the challenge and became the first in her family to graduate high school. “She always said that she saw something in me,” Melissa says. “She was like, ‘I know there’s something inside you that wants to fight for it.’”

You can tell Julia Delmedico is sharp from the way she observes her school environment in the Bronx. But as a hands-on learner, she struggles during exam time. In this documentary, Julia is the voice of students who feel the weighty pressure of tests as something that keeps them from learning as much as they could. “I think the best kind of education is one that teaches you to speak and think for yourself,” she says. “That’s much more valuable than passing your exams.”

Shayna Cody’s work ethic is unmistakable as she competes with her twin sister to finish homework. Full of energy, she takes it upon herself to channel it towards her education by participating in a program for teenagers who hope to become doctors. For Shayna, learning isn’t about being a receptacle of knowledge, but about pursuing more. She says, “I think a fully rounded education is not just sitting there doing the work that’s required of you but actually taking the time to learn what you can’t out of your classes.”

Being young sounds carefree, but Grier Montgomery reminds us that it can be filled with anxiety. He speaks to the hard parts of being a high-schooler: the harsh bullying, the pressure to achieve and the assignments that pile up. Grier finds some relief among all of this, though, in the arts. “The arts is what I live for,” he says. “If it wasn’t for theater, I think I definitely would have dropped out of school.”

TEDx as seen from space, with help from Google Earth (Image: DigitalGlobe and Google).

It’s TEDx … from space. This unique vantage point of TEDxSanaa’s amazing mountainside signage is brought to you with some help from Google Earth. Take a look for yourself on Google Maps. We take this image as proof that TEDx has become a global enterprise.

This week, from events held across the world, we’ve handpicked four TEDx Talks that encapsulate this diverse venture. Ranging from how racecar driving can save infants’ lives to why video games belong in museums — all of these talks are brought to you by our vast TEDx community. Below, find this week’s talks.

Can music really make you smarter? Jessica Grahn at TEDxWesternU
New parents are awash in products claiming the power to turn their kids into geniuses with just a little bit of Mozart. Could any of these claims be true? At TEDxWesternU, Jessica Grahn examines the effects of music on the human brain, debunks common myths and highlights some of music’s real medical uses. (Filmed at TEDxWesternU.)

Are video games art? Maria Lujan Oulton at TEDxRiodelaPlata
More and more, video games are being accepted and enjoyed as works of art in galleries around the globe. At TEDxRiodelaPlata, Maria Lujan Oulton takes a look at six designers who are using gaming to create powerful forms of interactive art. (Filmed at TEDxRiodelaPlata.)

How F1 racing saves babies: Peter van Manen at TEDxNijmegen 2013
We can use the same technology that evaluates faults in Formula 1 racecars to solve problems off the racetrack, says data analyst Peter van Manen — from detecting warning signs of heart failure in infants to designing ambulances that monitor patients on the way to the hospital. (Filmed at TEDxNijmegen.)

Nanoscale fruit juice and other small things: Stefan Bon at TEDxWarwick
From flame-retardant plastic to healthier chocolate, Stefan Bon shows us the extraordinary promise of the budding field of nanotechnology. (Filmed at TEDxWarwick.)

And, some of this week’s highlights from the TEDx blog:

• 5 big TEDx Talks about little things
• Newest form of public transportation from TEDxAustin: Suspended gondolas
• Quoted: TED Talks embraced as a learning platform in China
• 5 great photos from TEDx Talks across the world
• TEDxSKE presents an animation of what it’s like to attend a TEDxSalon