TED Weekends investigates why we judge othersAbove 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. At TEDGlobal […]
Thomas Insel’s insights on mental health: a tale of two TED playlistsIn the past 30 years, major advances have been made when it comes to treating several serious diseases. Today, there are 85% fewer deaths from leukemia and 63% fewer fatalities from heart disease than there were then. Meanwhile, while AIDS was once considered a death sentence, people with the disease can now live to old […]
TEDsters, get ready to play Brain GamesYour brain is three and a half pounds of tissue — and yet it’s the key to everything you experience. The National Geographic Channel show Brain Games seeks to give a better understanding of it – by looking at how the brain focuses, processes fears, makes decisions and much more. The show is hosted by […]
Your weekend reading: Simple secure passwords, an invisible brainSome staff picks of smart, funny, bizarre and cool stuff on the interwebs this week: Super-duper useful mandatory homework: Get a secure password now. As xkcd explains, most people’s approach to secure passwords (a word bastardized with “random” capital letters and punctuation that’s difficult to remember) is wrong. Now go get yourself a good password. […]
7 talks on mapping the human brainIn his State of the Union address, US President Barack Obama teased the importance of mapping the human brain, hinting that it could be a good investment in the future. According to The New York Times, the president will soon announce a decade-long plan to support the comprehensive rendering of the brain as part of […]
7 talks on monkeys, and 7 talks on mind controlMiguel Nicolelis begins today’s talk by showing you what a brainstorm looks and sounds like. “This is 100 brain cells firing,” says Nicolelis. “Everything that defines what human nature is comes from these storms that roll over the hills and valleys of our brains and define our memories, our beliefs, our feelings, our plans for […]
New playlists: “Our brains: predictably irrational” and “What’s wrong with what we eat?”TED playlists are collections of talks around a topic, built for you in a thoughtful sequence to illuminate ideas in context. This weekend, two new playlists are available: “What’s wrong with what we eat?” and “Our brains: predictably irrational” — and a bonus! A TED primer of 11 classic TED Talks. Think of it as […]
TED Weekends wonders: Can you reset your brain?One morning when she woke up, Jill Bolte Taylor felt pain behind her left eye similar to what she’d felt biting into an ice cream cone. Soon, her own appearance — from her hands to her reflection — felt utterly bizarre to her. Next she lost her balance and then her internal chatter simply stopped […]
Spotting neuro-fiction: A guide to dissecting overblown neuroscience headlinesNeuroscientist Molly Crockett has a secret to share: if you want to make better decisions, eat a grilled cheese sandwich. In today’s talk, filmed at the TEDSalon in London, Crockett shares how she accidentally had a part in circulating this message. Several years ago, Crockett and her fellow researchers set out to study how serotonin […]
Play with the brain: An online game that’s helping map the connections of the retinaSebastian Seung is one of the most influential explorers of our time — and his terrain is the human brain. You may remember Seung’s talk from TEDGlobal 2010, in which he uses the relatively new term “connectome,” to describe the connections between each of the hundreds of millions of neurons in our brains that make […]
While many wonder what the pervasive use of technology is doing to our overloaded mental circuits, the new TED Book Brain Power: From Neurons to Networks ponders that question in another way: can cutting-edge neurological research into child brain development teach us anything about how we shape the global “brain” of the Internet? As author Tiffany Shlain […]
12 talks on understanding the brainRead Montague is interested in the human dopamine system — or, as he puts it in this illuminating talk from TEDGlobal 2012, that which makes us “chase sex, food and salt” and therefore survive. Specifically, Montague and his team at the Roanoke Brain Study are interested in how dopamine and valuation systems work when two […]
A close-up look at the adolescent brain: Sarah-Jayne Blakemore at TEDGlobal2012“Fifteen years ago, it was widely assumed that the vast majority of brain development takes place in the first few years of life,” says professor Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, who heads up the Developmental Group at the UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience. “Back then we didn’t have the ability to look inside the living human brain and track development […]
Misbehaving beautifully: Meet TEDGlobal guest host Sarah Caddick in our Q&ASarah Caddick is a neuroscientist who’s obsessed with the way that science and, in particular, the brain, are understood by those who don’t spend most of their lives inside a lab. She is the Neuroscience Advisor to David Sainsbury and a senior advisor to the Gatsby Charitable Foundation — a big funder of scientific research, […]
Pawan Sinha details his groundbreaking research into how the brain’s visual system develops. Sinha and his team provide free vision-restoring treatment to children born blind, and then study how their brains learn to interpret visual data. The work offers insights into neuroscience, engineering and even autism. (Recorded at TEDIndia, November 2009, in Mysore, India. Duration: […]
