There’s a place in Switzerland where scientists travel on bicycles through tunnels filled with atom-smashing tubes, where the first webpage was born, and where a giant wooden globe watches over researchers replicating the very beginnings of our universe. That place is CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, and last Friday, it held its first TEDx event: TEDxCERN.

At the event, 23 speakers and performers — including a Nobel laureate, an Ig Nobel Prize founder, a Google Science Fair winner, and an opera singer — gathered together in CERN’s Globe of Science and Innovation to talk about the Higgs boson, science education, classifying galaxies, and — naturally — an analysis of the forces required to drag sheep.

So what did we at TED HQ learn at TEDxCERN? A lot. But to make things easy, here are seven takeaways from TEDxCERN:

1. In 2010, when prompted to draw a “scientist,” only 33% of schoolchildren asked drew a woman.
In 1980, the figure was 8%. At TEDxCERN, Londa Schiebinger, head of the Gendered Innovations project at Stanford University, talked about some of the issues women in the sciences face today, and the importance of recognizing gender bias in science and technology.

2. Animated elephants and double scoops of ice cream make pondering particle physics a lot more palatable.
Thanks to a collaboration between the whip-smart scientists at CERN and the talented animators at TED-Ed, four new TED-Ed lessons premiered at TEDxCERN — bringing mind-boggling concepts like antimatter, big data, the Higgs boson, and the origins of the universe to life in a way that even the most science-averse student could appreciate: with chocolate-almond ice cream, a lemon, and a giant pile of leaves.

3. Brian May from the band Queen is an astrophysicist.
Yeah, we didn’t know that either. But thanks to a talk from Zooniverse head Chris Lintott, we learned that not only is May a card-carrying astrophysicist (he earned a Ph.D. in astrophysics from Imperial College in 2007), he is a fan of Lintott’s Galaxy Zoo project — a herculean effort to gamify and crowdsource galaxy classification.

4. Science goes beyond geography.
People called SESAME (Synchrotron-light for Experimental Science and Applications in the Middle East) “an impossible project.” But this lab in Jordan, built around a giant synchrotron particle accelerator, has brought together Israeli, Jordanian, Palestinian, Turkish, Pakistani and Iranian scientists to study a universe bigger than us all. At TEDxCERN, SESAME scientists Eliezer Rabinovici and Zehra Sayers talked about the project’s groundbreaking work.

5. Cool teachers bring their students on field trips via Google Glass.
Physics class can be boring. But not so much if your teacher is Andrew Vanden Heuvel, the TEDxCERN presenter and online physics teacher who traveled to Switzerland to give his students a live tour of the world’s largest particle collider live through his eyes, using Google Glass. At TEDxCERN, we got to see a video diary of his trip, and it is mesmerizing:

6. Herrings communicate by farting. Really.
When you’re a scientist, what you think you’re looking for isn’t always what you find, and Marc Abrahams — organizer of the Ig Nobel Prize, the annual celebration of “improbable” science — thinks this is awesome. At TEDxCERN, he spoke on improbable findings, and shared some surprising discoveries by past Ig Noble winners, including one Robert Batty, who — with his team at the Scottish Association for Marine Science — discovered that strategically released gas allows herrings to communicate at night.

7. The Higgs field is a big deal. In fact, if its value changed too much, it’s quite possible “all atomic matter would collapse.”
Theoretical physicist Gian Giudice knows a lot about the Higgs boson, the Higgs field, and researchers’ attempts to understand it better. At TEDxCERN, he pondered the question, “What might the Higgs mean for the fate of the universe?” and got us all flustered when he said that new discoveries about the famed boson might mean that someday the value of the Higgs field could change and all would be doomed. But not to worry — whatever happens, we’ve got a lot of time before it does.

For more dispatches from TEDxCERN, including some killer photos, visit the website or check out their Facebook or Instagram.

Melinda French Gates (right) speaks to TED’s Chris Anderson. Photo courtesy of the Gates Foundation.

Can a person change a world rife with problems — villages without basic healthcare, girls turned away from schools, hospitals unable to get life-saving vaccines to the people who need them? For three years, TEDxChange, a partnership between the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the TEDx program, has said yes, by spotlighting people who are taking risks, thinking big and making change happen.

On Wednesday, April 3, the conversation continues at TEDxChange 2013: Positive Disruption. TEDxChange will begin at 9 am (PST), April 3, at the Gates Foundation Campus in Seattle and will stream live online at TED.com and TEDxChange.org. The program will run for 90 minutes.

Hosted by Melinda Gates, TEDxChange features seven speakers:

• Julie Dixon, director of Georgetown University’s Center for Social Impact Communication
• spoken-word poet David Fasanya
• Halimatu Hima, Niger’s first Youth Parliament president
• M. Cathleen Kaveny, a professor of law and of theology at the University of Notre Dame
• Salim Shekh and Sikha Patra, 15-year-olds working to eradicate polio from their communities
• Roger Thurow, an author of the book Enough: Why the World’s Poorest Starve in an Age of Plenty and a recipient of Action Against Hunger’s Humanitarian Award

Around the world, you can gather at an independently organized TEDx event to watch a live broadcast of TEDxChange. This year, at 200 events in 65 countries — including ones in Amsterdam, Kyoto, Delhi, Bogotá and New York — TEDxers will consider TEDxChange’s theme of how disruption can lead to good. Spaces are still available at many of these events; to join the positive disruption and find a TEDxChange livestreaming event near you to attend, click here.

Here, TEDxChange host Melinda Gates chats with TED Curator (and former TEDxChange host) Chris Anderson to talk about positive disruption. Below, their conversation:

Chris: Melinda, I’m really looking forward to TEDxChange and am excited to see you host this year. Tell me a bit about the speakers you’ve lined up…

Melinda: Thanks Chris! With only one week to go, I’m focused on preparations for my role as host. It’s quite different from the work I did leading up to my talk last year — and given the impressive job you’ve done as TEDxChange host until now, yours are big shoes to fill.

Luckily, I’ll be sharing the stage with some truly talented and inspiring people. I was really struck by Roger’s book, The Last Hunger Season. At TEDxChange, he’ll be telling the story of Ethiopia’s smallholder farmers and how their lives have been transformed with access to the technologies we take for granted in the U.S. and Europe. I have such admiration for Cathy Kaveny, who shares my belief in the power of faith communities to bring about positive change in the developing world. I’m excited, too, to see Halima again. We met in Niger — the country with the highest fertility rate in the world. The insights and stories she shared from her country contributed to my ongoing learning on the importance of advocating for access to contraceptives as a way to unlock the potential of entire communities.

Chris: And the theme, Positive Disruption, why did you choose it?

Melinda: Positive Disruption really comes down to courage. I’m very fortunate that my work at the foundation means I have the opportunity to travel. Wherever I go in the world, I meet so many amazing people with the courage to believe that, for the world’s poorest people, change is possible. And the commitment to make that dream a reality.

Chris: What are you hoping comes out of this event? Why does an event like this matter?

Melinda: At this year’s TED conference in Long Beach, Bono spoke about the progress that has been made in the fight against poverty. But too often these stories of progress remain untold. We started TEDxChange in 2010 to give voice to the issues that still affect so many around the world today – HIV/AIDS, nutrition, access to life-saving vaccines. My hope for this year’s event is that it will give more people the courage to be disruptive and in doing so, unlock the potential of many others all over the world.

Chris: Lastly, why TEDx?

Melinda: The TEDx community is such an awesome force for change. It’s incredible that 200 TEDx organizers, from Kabul to Amsterdam, are holding TEDxChange events this year. I’m reminded of the work of one of our speakers, Julie Dixon, who will talk about influence as a currency for change. The TEDx community has already shown that it has real influence on global conversations — but also the heart to use that influence to change lives for the better.

The answer may lie in sunlight—there’s more in the south than there is in the north, particularly in the winter. Talk about how sunlight affects health usually centers around Vitamin D, an essential vitamin that is, in part, produced in human skin during exposure to ultraviolet B rays. But in today’s talk, given at TEDxGlasgow, dermatologist Richard Weller describes new research that links sunlight to another compound — nitric oxide. This chemical messenger lowers blood pressure by dilating blood vessels. High blood pressure is, of course, a major risk factor for heart disease.

Weller says that stable versions of nitric oxide are stored in the skin and are activated by sunlight, after which the compound makes its way to the circulatory system. In other words, this sunlight-boosted nitric oxide might be lowering the blood pressure of people in sunnier locales, thus lowering their risk of heart disease.

There are many messages in Weller’s charming talk. But perhaps the strongest: that where you live affects your health. And this extends far beyond your distance from the equator or how much sun you get every day. Here are five other TED Talks about ties between health and geographical location.

Yesterday, two bomb blasts ripped through a snooker hall in the town of Quetta in Pakistan, killing 81 people.  We were very saddened to hear that TEDx speaker Irfan Ali, who spoke briefly at TEDxRawalLake just weeks ago, was among those killed.

The organizers of the event shared their sadness with us, through Facebook.

“Irfan Ali was a famous activist who, in his own words, was born to fight for human rights and peace. He said his religion is respect and love for all the religions,” they write. “At TEDxRawalLake, we gave our audience a chance to give their idea on the stage. People came up and gave their ideas, one by one. I saw Irfan Ali noting something, but he didn’t get up right away. We took a break and he came up to the curator and said, ‘I missed it. I would like three minutes.’ The curator said, ‘Okay.’ He spoke after the break and said something which we see daily but don’t notice — he pointed out the issue of taking things for granted in the name of ‘kun k yeh Pakistan hai.’ He ended his speech very passionately. There was something special in his talk — maybe it was honesty. The way he said everything it was just so nice.”

They continue, “No one had in mind that this man on stage will be no more in the next 20 days, He went quietly but left a silent message in his own words: ‘Mere shehr main meri nasal lootne walon, Pata hai beta kis trah jawan hota hai.’ We will miss you, Irfan Ali. God Bless you”

Read more about Irfan Ali on AlJazeera.com. And after the jump, watch his powerful comments from TEDxRawalLake. He will truly be missed.

At TED, we’re constantly impressed by the accomplishments of young innovators. With talks like Adora Svitak’s “What adults can learn from kids,” 12-year-old Amy O’Toole assisting Beau Lotto in “Science is for everyone: kids included,” and Thomas Suarez, who was developing apps before he could drive, we can’t help but be hopeful for the future. That is why we are thrilled to announce the third anniversary of TEDxYouthDay, a series of independently-organized TEDx events designed to empower and inspire teens and kids worldwide.

This Saturday and Sunday more than 100 TEDx events will participate in TEDxYouthDay, with youth conferences going down in 42 countries — including Egypt, Spain, India, Hong Kong, Brazil, Taiwan and the United States. A whopping 26 of these TEDxYouthDay events will be livestreamed through the TEDxYouthDay website. Additionally, more than 100 youth leaders — some as young as 11-years-old – have volunteered to report on these events, and will be writing, photographing and tweeting from events across the globe. You can follow their reporting on Twitter live on the 17th and 18th by following the hashtag #TEDxYouth.

TED will also be participating in the fun with TEDYouth in New York City, a free, day-long event for high school students. More than 20 scientists, designers, technologists, explorers, artists and performers will dazzle participants with mind-shifting stories as well as incredible lessons on what they do best. (While the in-person event is fully booked, TEDYouth will also be livestreamed for FREE on Nov. 17, from 1 to 6pm EST, and interpreted into Spanish and Arabic. Sign up for a livestream reminder notification here.)

This year’s TEDxYouthDay theme is “Dream Big…Then Do It!” For the past month, youth from around the world have been sharing their big ideas for a better world. Here, some selections from the TEDxYouthDay photo campaign, for which young people completed the sentence, “A dream that I commit to making real is…” The breadth, depth, and creativity of these answers have astonished us — like the answer above from Instagram user shenjustshen – and we can’t wait to see what these dreamers will accomplish.

Also from Instagram user shenjustshen, a TEDxYouthDay participant writes that her dream is “to show the world that there is no such thing as perfection in art.”

A participant from TEDxYouth@DiscoveryCollege says he hopes to be the first man on Mars and Pluto.

TEDxYouthDay reporter Serena Chao shares her dream, to stay true to herself.

A TEDxParkCityDaySchool team member shares his dream, “Finding a enjoyable and successful job.”

Instagram user sritahereje says she commits to the “spread of creative messages.”

A participant of TEDxYouth@DiscoveryCollege shares her dream: “To prove everyone wrong.”

TEDxYouthDay Reporter Jahbari Wallace aims high with his dream, filling in the sentence with the words “doing the right thing in every situation.”

A TEDxParkCityDaySchool team members share her dream “to help stop starvation.”

This weekend, join us as we celebrate the extraordinary accomplishments and drive of our youth to keep this world an ever-incredible place. Settle down, make yourself a sandwich, and stay glued to the TEDxYouthDay website, where TEDxYouthDay events will be livestreaming throughout Saturday and Sunday.

Most people rarely feel compelled to stare at grains of sand. But when those same grains are magnified hundreds of times and rendered in three dimensions, they appear like individual pieces of colored glass crafted by a skilled artist — no two pieces the same.

In today’s TEDTalk, photographer turned microbiologist turned inventor Gary Greenberg introduces us to the micro world, revealing the hidden wonder of everyday objects in nature as seen close-up using his high-definition, 3D microscopes.

“It’s a magical world beyond reality,” says Greenberg in this talk from TEDxMaui.

In the talk, Greenberg shows us what a bee’s eye look likes when magnified, how human nerve cells look as they fire, and what the stamens in flowers appear like to bugs.  But he spends the most time on his recent obsession — sand. For his book A Grain of Sand, Greenberg photographed samples around the globe, from Bermuda to Japan. (The image above is sand from Maui.) These photos make you realize that, when you take a long walk on the beach, you are walking over thousands of years of geological history. Greenberg even shows close-ups images of dust from the moon — which appear like woven crystals — procured by NASA’s Apollo 11 Mission.

In honor of Greenberg’s work, here are eight talks that give other unexpected views of nature.

Louie Schwartzberg: Nature. Beauty. Gratitude.
Louie Schwartzberg is not content to let us pass by the wonders of nature without taking a movement to be thankful. In this talk from TEDxSF, Schwartzberg shows his amazing time-lapse images of flowers blooming — which can take a month to film. “Theirs is a dance I will never tire of,” he says. “Their beauty immerses us with color, taste and touch.”

Frans Lanting: The story of life in photographs
“Nature is my muse,” says Frans Lanting as he describes his attempts to photograph the places where earth’s evolution began. In this talk from TED2005, he shares striking photographs of what our surroundings looked like before the oceans formed and before the exhale of oxygen.

Edward Burtynsky photographs the landscape of oil
If Frans Lanting photographs the “before,” Edward Burtynsky photographs the “after” — how humans have altered and ravaged the earth. He chalks up the majority of these modifications to nature to one thing: oil. At TEDGlobal 2009, he shares large format photographs of our drilling, production and automobile use, sounding a warning bell about peak oil.

Nick Veasey: Exposing the invisible
Nick Veasey captures images of ordinary sights — people, animals, familiar objects — but he does so in an extraordinary way: using X-ray photography. Most inspired by nature, Veasey shows us our surroundings from the inside out at TEDGlobal 2009.

Karen Bass: Unseen footage, untamed nature
Karen Bass records the previously inaccessible parts of nature. Traversing the remotest parts of the globe by helicopter for weeks at a time, Bass uses new technology to show the world recently discovered species while also solving the mysteries of nature. At TED2012, she shows the astonishing nature footage she’s shot for the BBC and National Geographic.

Reuben Margolin: Sculpting waves in wood and time
Mimicking the beauty of nature, Reuben Margolin sculpts massive structures — like one that imitates the landing of two raindrops next to one another and another that emulates the collision of waves. In this talk from TED2012, he describes the mechanisms and inspirations behind his art.

Camille Seaman: Haunting photos of polar ice
Who knew that icebergs and glaciers have personalities? In this talk from TED2011, TED Fellow Camille Seaman shows her stunning photographers, which somehow humanize massive bodies of ice. As they document the beauty of polar regions, they also highlight a tragedy — that glaciers and icebergs are melting, some giving up quickly and others fighting the good fight. (As a bonus, make sure to watch James Balog’s wonderful talk, “Time-lapse proof of extreme ice loss.”)

Louie Schwartzberg: The hidden beauty of pollination
Pollination is an intimate dance between honeybees and flowers. In this talk from TED2011, Louie Schwartzberg gives us an up-close look, showing high-speed footage from his film “Wings of Life.”

Below, find some of the powerful stories from this event about the importance of personal transformation and the strength that comes with community.

David Butler II: The boy next-door
In this talk, David Butler II shares a harrowing story of the path that led him to prison. A truly vulnerable talk, Butler expresses the importance of reaching out to one another — in a way that can prevent acts of abuse and violence.

Gary Mohr: Systematic sense of hope
1 out of 4 the world’s imprisoned population is incarcerated in the United States. This fact struck Ohio’s Director of Rehabilitation and Correction, Gary Mohr. In this talk, he expresses the dire need for reform. He has created a framework that addresses creating a safe space within prison, as well as improving integration into society after release.

Dawud Wilson: Sights and sounds of the ghetto
Using slam poetry, Dawud Wilson evokes haunting images of his neighborhood. This emotive and eye-opening piece addresses the many injustices he saw there — issues that may well ring true for other communities.

Watch many more talks from TEDxMarionCorrectional on YouTube.

“This is my brain cancer. It isn’t nice,” says Salvatore Iaconesi, the engineer, artist and TED Fellow who recently opened up his medical files to the world, crowdsourcing cures of the medical type as well as those for the soul. In this just-released talk from TEDxTransmedia, Iaconesi explains why he made the decision to release his records via his website — to maintain his sense of humanity.

“Your life really does change. It becomes a procedure,” says Iaconesi in this powerful talk. “You cease to exist because you become a patient. In more than one way, you’re not a human being any more. You’re replaced by your clinical records. Yes, those records are talking about you, but they’re really not talking about you. They talk about some of your body parameters, but their language is different than the language of human beings.”

In this talk, Iaconesi outlines the staggering results of reaching out to the world for cures: 600 poems, 35 videos, 15,000 email conversations and counting. The New Scientist recently created a gallery of some of the artistic “cures” that Iaconesi has received, including a sculpture of his brain tumor created in Second Life by artist Patrick Lichty and a performance piece created by Francesca Fini inspired by the magnets used in brain scanning.

Iaconesi tells The New Scientist that the response from medical professionals has been exciting, too. “I have been able to become an expert in neurosurgery and neurology. Through this kind of complete openness, I could access thousands of people who have provided me with their knowledge, their skills, their testimonies, their life experiences,” he tells the magazine. “Roughly 60 neurologists, neurosurgeons and radiologists contacted me suggesting techniques for surgery and for treatment. They are even talking to each other.”

One of the medical professionals who has been most helpful is TED Fellow Jimmy Lin of the Rare Genomics Institute. As it turns out, Lin is the geneticist who did the first genome sequencing for the very type of brain cancer that Salvatore has, glioblastoma.

Iaconesi recently reached out to Lin with good news — that the latest magnetic resonance imaging shows that the tumor is not growing and that he might be a good candidate for radical surgery. Lin offered to give a second opinion, and has also volunteered to help Iaconesi sequence the genome of his tumor after surgery, in an open source platform.

Overall, Iaconesi says that all the input — artistic, personal and medical — has helped him created his plan for treatment. “It’s a strategy that goes around the world and across thousands of years of culture,” says Iaconesi in his TEDx talk. “No one commiserates with me — no one is sad, and everyone is doing something. And most important of all, everyone involved is really feeling part of the human society. This is a good use for technology.”

For more reading about Iaconesi and the open-sourcing of his cure:

• My open source cure for brain cancer, CNN
• Crowd-sourcing a cure for cancer through the internet, BBC News
• Italian Internet Users Want to Help Heal Cancer, Brazil’s Folha de Sao Paolo
• Thousands of Opinions Can Also Have Risks, Folha de Sao Paolo
• The Story of Salvatore Iaconesi Could Become Law, Wired Italy
• The Cures, written by a friend of Salvatore’s for Huffington Post Healthy Living
• Geeks and Dreamers in Rome Believe in the Future, Italy’s la Reppublica

Team Rubicon’s latest mission is called Operation: Greased Lightning. What does that mean, you ask?

In today’s powerful talk, given at TEDxSanDiego in 2011, Jake Wood shares his experience co-founding Team Rubicon, a disaster relief organization that uses veterans to do the difficult work of search and rescue, supply disbursement and debris cleanup, helping those in devastated areas while simultaneously giving veterans a renewed sense of purpose. It’s a powerful solution to two problems.

“The first is that there’s inadequate disaster relief. It’s slow, it’s antiquated, it’s not using the best technology and it’s not using the best people,” says Wood in his talk. “The second problem … is very inadequate veteran reintegration. It’s a topic that’s front-page news right now. As veterans are coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan, they are struggling to reintegrate back into civilian life … We can use disaster response as an opportunity for service for veterans coming home. And we can use veterans to improve disaster response.”

Wood served for four years in the Marine Corps, doing tours of duty in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Upon returning, he and several friends founded Team Rubicon. Their first initiative sent them to Port-au-Prince, Haiti, where an earthquake had ripped the country apart and relief supplies were moving far too slowly. (Watch Jake’s 2010 TEDxSanDiego talk about Team Rubicon in Haiti.) From there, Team Rubicon sent volunteers to help after the tsunami in Chile and floods in Pakistan. In 2011, the organization set its sights on domestic disaster relief as well, sending volunteers to help after the tornados in Joplin, Missouri.

Which brings us back to Operation: Greased Lightning. Over the past week, Team Rubicon mobilized to provide disaster relief in areas affected by Hurricane Sandy. Wood tells the TED Blog that the operation name was given because Sandy is the main character in the movie Grease.

The TED Blog caught up with Wood this weekend, while he was organizing Team Rubicon’s Hurricane Sandy response. After watching his moving talk, read the short Q&A with him below.

What were your first thoughts hearing about Hurricane Sandy approaching?

What can we do — and how quickly can we do it.

What are some of the things Team Rubicon is doing to pitch in for Hurricane Sandy relief? 

We have been working around the clock since the Saturday before the storm. In the first week, we ran search-and-rescue operations, shelter management and debris clearing. As the efforts are transitioning to the recovery phase, we are mobilizing and deploying over 1,000 military veterans to move into a single community to lead recovery efforts and establish a battle plan to return to normalcy. Street by street, home by home. It will be Fallujah, but with chainsaws and shovels instead of tanks and rifles.

You gave talks about Team Rubicon at TEDxSanDiego in 2010 and 2011. How has Team Rubicon evolved since then?

Since then, we’ve expanded exponentially. In 2010 we saw ourselves primarily as an international disaster relief organization that used military veterans and focused on medical triage and training. However, in that first year we began to realize just how powerful the continued service was to the veterans who were involved, and we began to think about ways to expand programs to include more vets. The natural avenue was to drop the medical emphasis and expand into domestic disaster response. Since doing that, we’ve grown from 300 volunteers to 5,000 and our mission tempo has picked up dramatically.

In the past two years, what have been some of the Team Rubicon efforts have you been most proud of?

We’re most proud of recognizing and capturing the spirit of service that was inherent in the military veterans who were involved.  Our nation’s veterans are such an incredible resource, and I think we have a unique opportunity to prove it to our country.

What was your experience returning to everyday life after military service? Do you think the general public has a good understanding of what it’s like to return, or is there something it’s hard for us to get?

The general public will never understand what it’s like — it’s just not possible. It is very difficult, but fortunately for me, I founded Team Rubicon with William McNulty only a few months after I left the service, so there wasn’t a lot of time for me to get lost.

What skills do veterans have that make them a good fit for disaster relief?

First and foremost, it’s their ability to stay calm in incredibly stressful situations. I think this too often gets brushed aside. Disasters are incredibly fluid situations, and many people often go crazy with the uncertainty; however, this is exactly the situation that veterans have found themselves in for the last ten years in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In addition to that, veterans have great leadership skills, the ability to work in teams, and a unique knack for living in austere conditions.  Finally, they have a lot of the hard skills needed: emergency medicine, heavy equipment operation, and high-speed communications knowledge.

You say in your talk that the experience of volunteering for Team Rubicon has for some been as good, if not better, than therapy. Why do you think that is?

Veterans lose three things when they get out of the military: mission, community and a sense of self. Team Rubicon is able to provide these things to veterans in spades.  We have a clearly defined mission that our veterans buy into; they once again find themselves on the front lines, only this time in their communities after disasters rather than in the Middle East.

For more on Team Rubicon, head to their website or follow them on Twitter.

What makes us happy? It’s one of the most complicated puzzles of human existence — and one that, so far, 87 speakers have explored in TEDTalks.

In today’s talk, Matt Killingsworth (who studied under Dan Gilbert at Harvard) shares a novel approach to the study of happiness — an app, Track Your Happiness, which allows people to chart their feelings on a moment-by-moment basis. As they go about their day, app users get random pings, asking them to share their current activity and note their mood. When Killingsworth gave this talk at TEDxCambridge in 2011, the app had collected data from more than 15,000 people in 80 countries, representing a wide range of ages, education levels and occupations. In this talk, Killingsworth reveals a very surprising finding: that mind-wandering appears to factor heavily into this happiness equation.

“As human beings, we have this unique ability to have our minds stray,” says Killingsworth on the TEDx stage. “This ability to focus our attention on something other than the present is amazing — it allows us to learn and plan and reason.”

While most people think of mind-wandering as a lifting escape from daily drudgery, the Track Your Happiness data shows that this may not the case. In fact, mind-wandering appears to be correlated with unhappiness. When people were mind-wandering, they reported feeling happy only 56% of the time. Meanwhile, when they were focused on the present moment, they reported feeling happy 66% of the time. This effect was true regardless of the activity the person was doing — be it waiting in a traffic jam or eating a delicious dinner. (Read Killingsworth’s study, published in the journal Science in 2010, to see a breakdown of mind-wandering rates by activity.)

According to Killingsworth’s data, people mind-wander most when in the shower and least when they are having sex. But, still, mind-wandering is a constant. Overall, people mind-wander 47% of the time. Perhaps not such a good thing if it relates to unhappiness,

To hear more about mind-wandering — and about the importance of studying happiness in general — watch Killingsworth’s talk. And after the jump, read several more fascinating studies on the psychology of mind-wandering — some of which will make you feel better about your daydreaming.

A relationship to working memory
Mind-wandering might make us feel less content, but it could also have a functional purpose. A recent study published in the journal Psychological Science suggests that mind-wandering might be a sign of a high capacity working memory — in other words, the ability to think about multiple things at once. Researchers asked study participants to press a button and, as they went, checked in to see if their minds were wandering. After the task was complete, researchers gave participants a measure of their working memory. Interestingly, those who were found to be frequent mind-wanderers during the first task showed a greater capacity of working memory. Researcher Jonathan Smallwood of the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Science explains, “Our results suggest that the sorts of planning that people do quite often in daily life — when they’re on the bus, when they’re cycling to work, when they’re in the shower — are probably supported by working memory. Their brains are trying to allocate resources to the most pressing problems.”

A key to memory formation
Mind-wandering might also play a vital function in helping us form memories. New York University neuroscientist Arielle Tambini looked at memory consolidation in this study published in the journal Neuron in 2010. Participants in the study were asked to look at pairs of images and, in between, were instructed to take a break to think about anything they wanted. Using fMRI, the researchers looked at the activity in the hippocampus cortical regions while they did both. The study showed that these two areas of the brain appear to work together — and that the greater the levels of brain activity in both areas, the stronger the subjects’ recall of the image pairing was. Explains Lila Davichi, who oversaw the study, “Your brain is working for you when you’re resting, so rest is important for memory and cognitive function. This is something we don’t appreciate much, especially when today’s information technologies keep us working round-the-clock … Taking a coffee break after class can actually help you retain that information you just learned.”

A creative boost
As the cliché goes, the best ideas usually come when you are least expecting them. A recent study published in the journal Psychological Science gives a clue as to why. A research team led by Benjamin Baird and Jonathan Schooler of the University of California at Santa Barbara asked participants to take “unusual uses” tests — brainstorming alternate ways to use an everyday object like a toothpick for two minutes. Study participants did two of these sessions, and then were given a 12-minute break, during which they were asked to rest, perform a demanding memory exercise or do a reaction time activity designed to maximize their mind-wandering. After the break, they did four more unusual uses tests — two of them repeats. While all of the groups performed comparably on the two new unusual uses lists, the group that had performed the mind-wandering tasks performed 41% better then the other groups on the unusual uses lists they were repeating. “The implication is that mind-wandering was only helpful for problems that were already being mentally chewed on. It didn’t seem to lead to a general increase in creative problem-solving ability,” says Baird.