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 » 

When Janet Echelman’s paints went missing, she didn’t let it stop her from making art for her upcoming show deadline. In this classic talk from TED2011, “Taking imagination seriously,” Echelman tells the story of her determination to use the materials surrounding her as inspiration. Despite numerous rejections from art school, she found that her constant creativity has helped her become an unorthodox public artist unbound by tradition.

Today’s TED Weekends on the Huffington Post highlights this talk, exploring the concept of Imagination Innovation. Below, find two essays that accompany this visionary talk on the site.

Janet Echelman: Imagination Becomes Reality

One of the most gratifying results of my TED Talk has been to see volunteers translate it into 33 languages — from Armenian and Arabic to Turkish and Vietnamese — and receive comments from people around the world about how my story is affecting their lives.

I heard from Pedro Perea in Madrid, a volunteer at a juvenile prison who brings translated TED Talks to teenage inmates:

“They usually give up when confronting difficulties. But when your talk ended, they applauded, which means more than they just liked it: you can see a new energy in their faces, the energy of ‘I can also do difficult things’. Their usual excuses for not trying to change themselves started to disappear … they saw that persevering brings results.”

I was stunned. I could never have imagined my story traveling across oceans and languages to reach this audience, translating to different circumstances, my story of being rejected by art schools yet going on to become an artist on my own.

Read the full essay » 

Thomas Fisher: The Rigor of Creativity

We have so mystified, romanticized, and idealized creativity, so convinced ourselves that it remains primarily the purview of artists or “geniuses,” that far too many people believe that they are not creative. In fact, they have not been allowed, or allowed themselves, to use the creativity that they and just about everyone else is born with. All human beings have a capacity for creativity because of how our brain works.

When we learn about some object, for instance, we store that knowledge in different parts of our brain. Its name goes one place, its shape and color in another, its weight and feel in yet another, and contextual information about it — its purpose, where it came from, how it is made — in yet another still. When we next encounter that object, our brain almost instantaneously recombines that information, enabling us to identify it, to use it, and to think or talk about it.

Our educational system largely tests this recombinant ability. Pupils get graded upon how well they retrieve the information that they have learned and they get marked down if they get some aspect it wrong: misspelling the word, misidentifying something, or misunderstanding some other aspect of it. Education has so focused on the correctness of our knowledge and the accuracy of our memory that it has almost completely repressed the complementary skill of creativity.

Read the full essay »

It was one of the original six talks posted on TED.com and it has, over the years, become our most-watched video with 13.5 million views. Sir Ken Robinson’s talk from TED2006, “Ken Robinson says schools kill creativity,” is truly a juggernaut.

But the real genius is Matt. He has so much creative intelligence, that we’re going to do some serious banking. Right, Matt?

This is the talk examined in today’s TED Weekends on the Huffington Post, exploring the idea of Creative IQ. Below, some of the TED Weekends essays that riff on this paradigm-shifting talk.

Sir Ken Robinson: Do Schools Kill Creativity?

I’ve spoken twice at TED. The first time was in 2006. TED was a very different event then. It was a private conference for about 1,200 people. After the event, the talks were packaged in a box set of DVDs and sent just to the attendees. I gave a talk called “Do Schools Kill Creativity?” A few months later, Chris Anderson, the curator of TED, called to say they were planning to put a few talks on their website as an experiment and asked if they could include mine. The timing was perfect. Social media was beginning to take shape and the insatiable appetite for YouTube and short videos was about to emerge. The experiment was an instant success and has turned TED into a global cultural phenomenon. There are now several hundred talks on the website and the number of downloads has passed one billion.

I’m surprised and delighted to say that my first talk remains the most viewed of all TEDTalks so far. It’s been downloaded well over 20 million times from all platforms in over 150 countries and continues to be downloaded about 10,000 times a day from the TED site alone. Admittedly that doesn’t compare with “Gangnam Style” with its 800 million downloads but it’s still a lot for a 20 minute talk on education …

In the past six years, I’ve had countless emails and tweets from young people who’ve shown it to their parents and teachers; from teachers, who’ve shown it to their students and their principals; from parents who’ve shared it with their kids, and from leaders who’ve shown it to their whole organizations. Why is this talk so popular and what’s the significance of its popularity?

Read the full essay >>

John Seed: Art Making in the Age of Mouse-Clicking

There is so much to like about Sir Ken Robinson’s TED Talk that I hardly know where to start. That said, here is a single sentence from his talk that deserves affirmation and discussion:

“We think visually, we think in sound, we think kinesthetically,” Sir Ken points out while discussing different types of intelligence.

I give a particularly high value to kinesthetic thinking. As I have come to understand after teaching studio art for over 25 years, the connections between our minds, our senses and our physical bodies need to be constantly tested, developed and refreshed to help us reach our intellectual and creative potential.

As a painter and a painting teacher I am constantly impressed with the power of the kinesthetic learning that goes with art making. I also worry that this type of learning is being undermined by our increasing embrace of technology and electronic devices.

Read the full essay >>

Brian Rosenberg: Society Is Killing Schools’ Ability to Encourage Creativity

Sir Ken Robinson’s TED Talk on “Schools Killing Creativity” is enormously entertaining and so rousing that one feels sheepish about questioning any of its parts. Of course, he begins with the dual advantage of being very funny and very British, a combination that audiences in America, at least, tend to find irresistible.

He also operates on a level of generality that brooks almost no opposition. Who, after all, is against creativity? (Well, perhaps certain members of the United States Congress, but we will leave that for another column.) Who does not wish to see our children flourish? Who can resist a good joke at the expense of college professors, who make such delicious targets? His line about faculty members treating their bodies as vehicles to carry their heads from meeting to meeting is one that I can assure you I will steal.

Read the full essay >>

On January 17, 2009, at 3:24pm, Flight 1549 took off from New York’s LaGuardia Airport as normal. Five minutes later, it had crash-landed in the Hudson River. While the heroic landing of Captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger has become the stuff of aviation legend, during the white-knuckle landing his passengers had no idea whether they would survive or die on impact. Ric Elias was sitting in the first row of the plane, and at TED2011 he shared for the first time the thoughts that went through his mind in those minutes — both the terrifying and mundane — and how the event changed his life forever.

The latest TED Weekends feature on the Huffington Post examines the lessons learned in near-death experiences. Below, some of the TED Weekends essays on this theme.

June Cohen: What we can learn from near-death experiences

TED’s own June Cohen shares a playlist of talks that explore big questions that, perhaps, we can only face when up against a non-negotiable deadline:

“Ric’s TED Talk has proven so compelling, because he answers the question so many of us have: When my life draws to a close, will I look back with regret? Or satisfaction? What will I wish I had done? What will matter most? It’s a gift, in some ways, to come so close to death, because it teaches us something essential about how to live. And this is a theme that many TED speakers have explored…”

Browse her playlist >>

Ben Thomas: Be proud to be wrong

Ben Thomas explores one memorable sentence in Ric’s talk. Post-crash, Ric tells us, “I haven’t had a fight with my wife in over two years, [because] I’m no longer trying to be right.” Ben asks us, what would we do if we let go of being right all the time?

“But isn’t learning an actual truth more important than defending an ego? Can’t it be just as thrilling to learn we’ve been wrong — to become, as Jonathan Swift once said, ‘wiser today than yesterday?’”

Read Ben’s essay >>

A great comment on Ben’s piece:

“To answer the question, I want to be wiser. That’s why, I want to thank you for that great article which reminds us [of] that simple idea, we should not be scared of being wrong! But of course, we need to learn from the mistakes. — Brygida Biedro”

You and other change agents have been commenting in full force in response to TED and The Huffington Post’s year-end collaboration to bring you 18 ideas that will shape 2012.

The ideas are in, and the conversation is hot. Since last Thursday’s launch viewers have been sharing ideas of every variety, from the practical repercussions of Sebastian Thrun’s driverless car from Google to how Deb Roy might expand his project on the birth of the word to study deaf children.

In response to Kathryn Schulz on why we should embrace, rather than reject, regret, stephCarlisi writes, “Kathryn’s talk took me on a journey through every layer of emotion involved in the stages of regret, landing me on the quite refreshing stage of: resolve. I hope this sticks with me–at least throughout the day.” Another commenter asks how shame might complicate our desire to live with our regrets, and Y Woodman Brown adds a personal touch, saying that we might also look for the so-called silver lining in our mistakes: “Without my mistake, I wouldn’t have my two wonderful daughters.”

On Naomi Klein’s talk on our addiction to risk, Raymond Fernandez comments: “We need to start here with our narratives and see them for what they are–justifications for horrible choices–and shift them to an honest and harsh light of reality. If we cannot handle this, then we do not deserve the heritage that this planet should be for all of humanity.”

If you haven’t yet seen the engaging conversations occupying our friends over on The Huffington Post, head over and get involved. This platform allows you to engage in rigorous debate, share your personal experiences with other users and offer constructive criticism for the future of these ideas.

Add your voice by commenting on today’s idea, Graham Hill: Less Stuff, More Happiness >>