Gaillard’s team flashed words in front of volunteers for just 29 milliseconds. The words were either threatening (kill, anger) or emotionally neutral (cousin, see).

The words were preceded and followed by visual “masks”, which block the words from being consciously processed, or the masks following the words weren’t used, meaning the words could be consciously processed. The volunteers had to press a button to indicate the nature of the word, allowing the researchers to confirm whether the volunteer was conscious of it or not.

Read the full article.

And watch Dan Dennett’s fun, intriguing 2003 TEDTalk on consciousness.

Watch Dan Dennett’s talk from TED U 2009 on TED.com, where you can download this TEDTalk, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances from our archive of 400+ TEDTalks — including more talks about evolution’s genius.

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During this holiday break, the conversation on TED.com has been as lively as ever. We talked about our resolutions:

Cynthia Ryan writes: my resolution for 2009 is to (continue to) challenge my assumptions. Dan Dennett helps me do this, if only on his intellectual coattails. More than that, he has a way of imparting complex information about the workings of the human brain that I can really get my mind (ha!) wrapped around.

We talked about fractal broccoli, inspired by Jennifer 8. Lee’s hunt for General Tso and his chicken:

Edward Carter writes: In Japan, I found Mandelbrot broccoli that looks like the coolest fractal I have seen botanically. It tasted pretty good too. Does anybody grow it in the US?

Adam Geber replies: Edward, you can absolutely find “Mandelbrot broccoli” in the United States! Usually, it’s referred to as either Romanesco broccoli or cauliflower, and occasionally called “broccoflower”. It’s a beautiful and delicious plant, and totally rewarding to grow, but if you’d like to purchase it, try your local farmers’ market or a larger store. Good luck!

And young violinist Sirena Huang checks in on the discussion around her TEDTalk, where she keeps her fans updated:

She writes: … It’s been a pretty busy season but I’ve had lots of fun. One of the highlights for me was the From the Top recording at the beautiful Northfield Mount Hermon School in MA, which was SO much fun because I got to meet lots and lots of incredible people and made some friends there too! The show airs on January 17th on the WQXR radio station. (And I will post the online info as it becomes available!)
Also, this summer I performed at the Aspen Music Festival Competition, and here is a clip that I hope you all will enjoy (here’s the link http://www.kajx.org/listen_archive.php?prog=fest and you can just look for the festival notes for JULY 23rd. A clip should pop up =)
Thanks everyone and all the best for the new year!!!!!

Follow these conversations and many more on TED.com.

A glorious slideshow from Discover discusses 8 zombie animals and the parasites that control their minds and/or bodies. Snails, spiders, crabs and people — we all are at risk of zombification from tiny forces that know how to make us do things.

Philosopher Dan Dennett suggests that — just as these parasites force their host to act in ways that benefit the parasite — so do certain ideas find a home inside our brains and make us act in ways that don’t directly benefit us. To hear more about this phenomenon, watch Dan Dennett’s TEDTalk about zombie ants and the dangerous power of memes.

Or just watch some zombies do yoga.

Image: Steve Yanoviak/University of Arkansas at Little Rock. From Discover.

Can you reverse her direction of rotation?

Cognitive Daily at ScienceBlogs took a reader poll and found that two-thirds saw the silhouetted woman rotating clockwise. About the same number were able to reverse her direction.

Those who initially saw the woman rotating counter-clockwise found it easier to reverse her direction — much as the Necker cube‘s orientation can be reversed at will. How did you fare? (Check out more illusions in TEDTalks by Al Seckel and Dan Dennett.)

He writes:

While working in 3D last year, I discovered this optical illusion: A large grid seen rotating at a certain speed will appear to group itself into smaller grids, spinning independently.

See O’Reilly’s website for more examples (and his theory on why this happens).

For more optical illusions, watch Al Seckel’s TEDTalk on how easily we are fooled; or Dan Dennett’s talk on our gullible minds. As Dennett says, we need to understand how easily we are fooled, in order to understand the nature of consciousness itself.

Illuminating Genius: Unlocking Creativity: Is creativity innate or learned? Does the innovative brain have distinct structural or chemical features? Can we enhance our creativity? Vilayanur Ramachandran will contribute to this session, along with Nancy Andreasen and David Eagleman.

Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives: Brian Cox will moderate a panel of physicists including Michio Kaku and Max Tegmark as they discuss the possibility of parallel worlds. The panel is to follow a screening of Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives, a film about Hugh Everett, father of the “many-worlds interpretation” of quantum physics and the film’s director, Mark Everett.

Science of Morality: Patricia Churchland, Antonio Damasio and Marc Houser join philosopher Dan Dennett in a discussion of the science of right and wrong: Why do we cooperate? Is altruism innate? How does morality arise from interactions among biological and social systems?

Looking for the Laws of Life: The forms that life could take seem endless — at least in theory. Some scientists are on the verge of creating it in a lab. But are there universal laws of life, much like the fundamental laws of physics? This event features a vibrant discussion with leading astrobiologists Paul Davies, Steven Benner and Maggie Turnbull.

Faith & Science: Many scientists have found a way to accommodate both scientific inquiry and religious teaching in their belief systems. Other scientists are bringing science to bear on religion and spiritual belief. Actress Julia Sweeney contributes to this intimate look at what scientists have to say about their spirituality.

For more information about event schedules and to purchase tickets, visit the World Science Festival’s website.

Although the men and women on this list are some of the world’s most sophisticated thinkers, the criteria to make the list could not be more simple. Candidates must be living and still active in public life. They must have shown distinction in their particular field as well as an ability to influence wider debate, often far beyond the borders of their own country.

TEDTalks speakers on this top 100 list include George Ayittey, Steven Pinker, Neil Gershenfeld, Malcolm Gladwell, Craig Venter, Al Gore, Richard Dawkins, Vilayanur Ramachandran, Larry Lessig, Steven Levitt, E.O. Wilson, Dan Dennett and Bjorn Lomborg — and look for upcoming TEDTalks from others on this list, including Paul Collier, who spoke at TED2008 about “the bottom billion.”

See the full list of 100 >>

Memeticist Susan Blackmore uses the hotel-bathroom toilet-paper fold as an example of a useless meme — a meme that has spread throughout the world, even though there is no human reason for it to exist. The persistence of this meme easily disproves the comfortable notion that we humans only spread ideas that are useful or interesting — it shows that, once a meme takes on life, it spreads itself.

Inspired by Blackmore’s research, origamist and TEDster Bruno Bowden created a combinatorial meme — linking Blackmore’s ideas with the sophisticated folding techniques discussed by origami master Robert J. Lang onstage at TED. See photo at left.

+ To learn more about dangerous memes, listen to
Dan Dennett’s awesome 2002 TEDTalk >>

+ To learn more about toilet-paper origami, check out this devoted student of the art >>

+ To see what happened when Ze Frank was attacked by this meme on Day 4 of TED@Aspen, visit our Flickr set >>

NEW: Read the transcript >>

Watch this talk on TED.com, where you can download it, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances.

How many creationists do we have in the room? Probably none. I think we’re all Darwinians. And yet, many Darwinians are anxious, a little uneasy, would like to see some limits on just how far the Darwinism goes.

It’s all right, you know. Spider webs? Sure, they are products of evolution. The World Wide Web? Not so sure. Beaver dams, yes; Hoover Dam, no.

What do they think it is that prevents the products of human ingenuity from being themselves fruits of the tree of life — and hence in some sense obeying evolutionary rules? And yet people are interestingly resistant to the idea of applying evolutionary thinking to thinking — to our thinking. And so I’m going to talk a little bit about that — keeping in mind that we have a lot on the program here.

So you’re out in the woods, or you’re out in the pasture, and you see this ant crawling up this blade of grass. It climbs to the top and it falls, and it climbs, and it falls, and it climbs — trying to stay at the very top of the blade of grass. What is this ant doing? What is this in aid of? What goals is this ant trying to achieve by climbing this blade of grass? What’s in it for the ant?

And the answer is, nothing. There’s nothing in it for the ant.

Well then, why is it doing this? Is it just a fluke?

Yeah, it’s just a fluke.

It’s a lancet fluke: it’s a little brain worm — a parasitic brain worm — that has to get into the stomach of a sheep or a cow in order to continue its life cycle. So, salmon swim upstream to get to their spawning grounds, and lancet flukes commandeer a passing ant, crawl into its brain, and drive it up a blade of grass like an all-terrain vehicle.

So there’s nothing in it for the ant. The ant’s brain has been hijacked by a parasite that infects the brain, inducing suicidal behavior. Pretty scary. Well, does anything like that happen with human beings? This is all on behalf of a cause other than one’s own genetic fitness, of course. Well, it may already have occurred to you that Islam means “surrender,” or “submission of self-interest to the will of Allah.” Well, it’s ideas — not worms — that hijack our brains. Now, am I saying that a sizable minority of the world’s population is having their brain hijacked by parasitic ideas? Oh, it’s worse than that. Most people have.

There are a lot of ideas to die for: Freedom, if you’re from New Hampshire. Justice. Truth. Communism. Many people have laid down their lives for Communism, and many have laid down their lives for Capitalism. And many for Catholicism. And many for Islam. These are just a few of the ideas that are to die for. They’re infectious.

Yesterday, Amory Lovins spoke about “infectious repetitis.” It was a term of abuse, in effect. This is unthinking engineering. Well, most of the cultural spread that goes on is not brilliant, new, out-of-the-box thinking; it’s infectious repetitis.
And we might as well try to have a theory of what’s going on when that happens, so that we can understand the conditions of infection.

Hosts work hard to spread these ideas to others. I myself am a philosopher, and one of our occupational hazards is that people ask us what the meaning of life is.
And you have to have a bumper sticker, you know, you have to have a statement. So, this is mine: The secret of happiness is to find something more important than you are and dedicate your life to it. Most of us — now that the Me Decade is well in the past — we actually do this. One set of ideas or another have simply replaced our biological imperatives in our own lives. This is what our summum bonum is. It’s not maximizing the number of grandchildren we have.

Now, this is a profound biological effect: the subordination of genetic interest to other interests. And no other species does anything at all like it.

Well, how are we going to think about this? It is, on the one hand, a biological effect, and a very large one. Unmistakable. Now, what theories do we want to use to look at this? Well, many theories. But how — what’s going to tie them together?
The idea of replicating ideas. Ideas that replicate by passing from brain to brain.
Richard Dawkins, whom you’ll be hearing later in the day, invented the term “memes,” and put forward the first really clear and vivid version of this idea in his book The Selfish Gene.

Now, here am I talking about his idea. Well, you see, it’s not his. Yes — he started it. But it’s everybody’s idea now. And he’s not responsible for what I say about memes. I’m responsible for what I say about memes. Actually, I think we’re all responsible for not just the intended effects of our ideas, but for their likely misuses. So it is important, I think, to Richard, and to me, that these ideas not be abused and misused. They’re very easy to misuse; that’s why they’re dangerous. And it’s just about a full-time job trying to prevent people who are scared of these ideas from caricaturing them and then running off to one dire purpose or another.
So we have to keep plugging away, trying to correct the misapprehensions so that only the benign and useful variants of our ideas continue to spread. But it is a problem.

We don’t have much time, and I’m going to go over just a little bit of this and cut out, because there’s a lot of other things that are going to be said.
So let me just point out: memes are like viruses. That’s what Richard said, back in ’93. And you might think, Well, how can that be? I mean, a virus is, well, you know, it’s stuff. What’s a meme made of? Yesterday, Negroponte was talking about viral telecommunications, but — what’s a virus? A virus is a string of nucleic acid with attitude.

That is, there is something about it that tends to make it replicate better than the competition does. And that’s what a meme is. An information packet with attitude.
What’s a meme made of? “What are bits made of, Mom?” Not silicon. They’re made of information. Can be carried in any physical medium. What’s a word made of? Sometimes when people say, “Do memes exist?” I say, “Well, do words exist?” Are they in your ontology? If they are… Words are memes that can be pronounced. Then there’s all the other memes that can’t be pronounced — different species of memes.

Remember the Shakers? “Gift to Be Simple?” Simple furniture? And of course they’re basically extinct now. And one of the reasons is that, among the creed of Shakerdom is that one should be celibate. Not just the priests — everybody.
Well, it’s not so surprising that they’ve gone extinct. But in fact that’s not why they went extinct. They survived as long as they did at a time when the social safety nets weren’t there and there were lots of widows and orphans, people like that, who needed a foster home. And so they had a ready supply of converts. And they could keep it going. And, in principle, it could’ve gone on forever. With perfect celibacy on the part of the hosts. The idea being passed on through proselytizing, instead of through the gene line.

So the ideas can live on in spite of the fact that they’re not being passed on genetically. A meme can flourish in spite of having a negative impact on genetic fitness. After all, the meme for Shakerdom was essentially a sterilizing parasite.
There are other parasites which do this — which render the host sterile. It’s part of their plan. They don’t have to have minds to have a plan.

I’m just going to draw your attention to just one of the many implications of the memetic perspective, which I recommend. I’ve not time to go into more of it.
In Jared Diamond’s wonderful book Guns, Germs and Steel, he talks about how it was germs more than guns and steel that conquered the new hemisphere — the Western hemisphere — that conquered the rest of the world. When European explorers or travelers spread out, they brought with them the germs that they had become essentially immune to, that they had learned how to tolerate over hundreds and hundreds of years, thousands of years, of living with domesticated animals, the sources of those pathogens.

And they just wiped out — these pathogens just wiped out the native people who had no immunity to them at all.

And we’re doing it again. We’re doing it this time with toxic ideas.

Yesterday, a number of people — Nicholas Negroponte and others — spoke about all the wonderful things that are happening when our ideas get spread out thanks to all the new technology all over the world. I agree. It is, largely, wonderful. Largely wonderful. But among all those ideas that inevitably flow out into the whole world thanks to our technology, are a lot of toxic ideas.

Now, this has been realized for some time. Sayyid Qutb is one of the founding fathers of fanatical Islam, one of the — one of the ideologues that inspired Osama Bin Laden. One has only to glance at its press films, fashion shows, beauty contests, ballrooms, wine bars and broadcasting stations — memes. These memes are spreading around the world and they are wiping out whole cultures. They are wiping out languages. They are wiping out traditions, practices. And it’s not our fault anymore than it’s our fault when our germs lay waste to people that haven’t developed the immunity. We have an immunity to all of the junk that lies at the edges of our culture. We — free society, so we let pornography, and all these things, you know, we shrug them off. They’re like a mild cold. They’re not a big deal for us. But we should realize that, for many people in the world, they are a big deal. And we should be very alert to this as we spread our education and our technology.

One of the things that we are doing is, we’re the vectors of memes that are correctly viewed by the hosts of many other memes as a dire threat to their favorite memes — the memes that they are prepared to die for. Well, now how are we going to tell the good memes from the bad memes? That is not the job of memetics, of the science of memetics. Memetics is morally neutral. And so it should be. This is not the place for hate and anger. It’s — if you’ve had a friend who’s died of AIDS, then you hate the HIV virus. But the way to deal with that is to do science, and understand how it spreads and why in a morally neutral perspective. Get the facts. Work out the implications. There’s plenty of room for moral passion once we’ve got the facts and can figure out the best thing to do.

And, as with germs, the trick is not to try to annihilate them. You will never annihilate the germs. What you can do, however, is foster public health measures, and the like, that will encourage the evolution of avirulence. That will encourage the spread of relatively benign mutations of the most toxic varieties.

That’s all the time I have, so thank you very much for your attention.