Deb Roy: The birth of a word

His team wondered: could this kind of analysis be applied to television or, say, Twitter to discover communication trends?

These are the kinds of questions that today’s TED Weekends on the Huffington Post explores. Here, three of the great essays that are available now for your reading pleasure. 

Deb Roy: The Birth of a Word

Three trajectories came together in 2005 and took me to new frontiers of cognitive science (and subsequently, it turns out, the media industry).

• The first trajectory: I began to see an unexpected connection between my research in robotics at MIT and theories of how children learn to talk, leading to studies of child language that I did with my wife and collaborator Rupal Patel over the past decade.
• Second: The era of Big Data was dawning, and the far-fetched idea of video-recording everything that happens in a home had become a practical reality.
• Third, Rupal and I learned that we were expecting our first child in July 2005.

This confluence of events sparked an unusual study of child language featured in the first half of my TEDTalk. Read the full essay »

Gayatri Devi: How Do I Improve My Memory? Forget More!

Do you know what is essential for a good memory? The ability to forget. To completely and thoroughly forget. Forgetting, like breathing or sleeping, is physiologically normal. This is at odds with our modern compulsion to record and remember everything and is a perfect recipe for anxiety.

Deb Roy, a cognitive science professor at MIT studying language, recorded 8-10 hours daily of the first three years of his son’s home life. He compiled a quarter million hours of audio and video, creating a 200,000 gigabyte “ultimate memory machine.” (Most computers store about one gigabyte.) Consider how much information each of us is exposed to in 24 hours, on streets, subways, screens and in sleep. Imagine recording and remembering all this. Thankfully, we were never meant to.

Fact: We are evolutionarily programmed to forget. Our brains evolved over millennia with built-in forgetfulness. Our brain is engineered to remember tastes, smells, voices, touch and visions, not names. Our brain is engineered to solve problems (How do we keep track of cattle? Mathematics; How do I communicate? Language), not remember disjointed facts. A fact not linked to a sense, an emotion, or a concept is quickly forgotten. Read the full essay »

Ben Hecht: Big Data Gets Personal in U.S. Cities

Much has already been said about how big data is dramatically changing the way that organizations make decisions. Today, more data is being created from more places than ever before. Blogs, Facebook, YouTube videos, retailer loyalty cards, mobile phones, and sensors on buildings are producing tons of data daily. Private sector companies, in their real-time data warehouses, are storing, analyzing, and harnessing it to help them to better understand their customers, dynamically alter pricing based on real-time demand, and even change their business models. And, increasingly government is putting the wealth of data that it generates to work to increase efficiency, save dollars, and create more proactive policy. But, as Deb Roy highlights in his TED Talk, the true promise is where the numbers and patterns from this data connect and become personal — enabling us to understand and to respond to humanity and the world in ways previously unimaginable. This type of analysis has infinite potential for improving the human condition on an ongoing basis; and strengthening people’s commitment to our democracy. Already, in U.S. cities, we are seeing many promising signs of the transformative personal application of Big Data:

Mass Personalizing of Government Data and Services: The movement towards open government data in the U.S. has already had huge implications for the relationship between citizen and government. Read the full essay »

Michael Shermer: The pattern behind self-deception

In his talk, “The pattern behind self-deception,” Shermer debunks superstitions and urban legends and shares why we are prone to believe in them — because of our brain’s hardwiring for survival. He explores what is behind our shared desire to believe, even when it means actively deceiving ourselves — and potentially others.

Today, TED Weekends on the Huffington Post features Shermer’s compelling talk. Below, find some of our favorite essays that accompany it, taking a look at deceptive tendencies.

Michael Shermer: Why We Deceive Ourselves (Sometimes)

As the publisher of Skeptic magazine I am often asked what I mean by skepticism, and if I’m skeptical of everything or if I actually believe anything. Skepticism is not a position that you stake out ahead of time and stick to no matter what.

Consider global warming: Are you a global warming skeptic? Or are you skeptical of the global warming skeptics? In this case, I used to be a global warming skeptic, but now I’m skeptical of the global warming skeptics, which makes me a global warming believer based on the facts as I understand them at the moment. The “at the moment” part is what makes conclusions in science and skepticism provisional.

Thus, science and skepticism are synonymous, and in both cases it’s okay to change your mind if the evidence changes. It all comes down to this question: What are the facts in support or against a particular claim? Read the full essay » 

Laura Cococcia: Santa, Self-Deception, and the Survival Instinct

It takes almost no effort to make a child believe in Santa Claus. Step one? Put some presents under a Christmas tree every year. Step two? Tell the child that Santa Claus put them there. Result? You’ve got a Santa-believer on your hands, and you have evolution to thank for it.

Belief is the topic of science writer and historian Michael Shermer’s TEDTalk on the patterns and Darwinian instincts behind self-deception. Even as a noted skeptic — in fact, as editor-in-chief of Skeptic magazine — Shermer asserts that belief is the natural human state, and that it is science and reason that seem unnatural to us. During his time on the stage, he pulls away the curtain that divides us from our understanding of why we are prone to believe ultimately illogical, at times fantastical, things.

Santa Claus and, as we’ll see, his mystical compatriots the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy, are cultural as well as psychological phenomena that serve as apt examples of our propensity for self-deception. However, they aren’t the examples Shermer employs in his explanation. After all, their creation is too recent to represent the development of belief. He must travel a long way back in time. Read the full essay » 

Laura Kray: What if…

“Jamal Malik is one question away from winning 20 million rupees. How did he do it? (A) He cheated, (B) He’s lucky, (C) He’s a genius, and (D) It is written.” — Slumdog Millionaire, 2008

In the opening scene of the critically acclaimed film, a title card appears on the screen to raise the possibility that fate has intervened to guarantee that an uneducated orphan from the slums of Mumbai will defy the odds and become a game show champion. Throughout the film the possibility that Jamalʼs quest would end in failure looms large. Ultimately, the sheer improbability of his success suggests the universe conspired to provide a set of questions that he was uniquely suited to answer. In so doing, Jamal was reunited with Latika, his first and only true love, and his romantic destiny was fulfilled. Viewers are left with the sense that something so improbable could not have happened by chance alone, and the underdogʼs fate must have been written in the stars. Indeed, the filmʼs immense popularity is most likely enhanced by its universally appealing storyline: seemingly random and disconnected events are, in some unfathomable sense, intertwined by fate.

As a researcher at UC Berkeleyʼs Haas School of Business, I study how people reflect on fateful experiences to construct the story of their lives. Let me ask you, have you ever considered how your life would be different if certain pivotal experiences, or turning points, hadnʼt occurred? The scientific term for reflecting about “what might have been” is counterfactual thinking. It turns out that, rather than immobilizing us with regret, actively “what iffing” can help us to see our destiny more clearly. Even painful experiences, like loss of loved ones, can come to be appreciated for the growth and learning that they brought about by imagining how your life would be different had these events not occurred. Read the full essay »