Charles Duhigg talks about the incredible staying power of habits at TED@250 “A Better You.” Photo: Ryan Lash

Last night in the TED office, we held a salon all about spring cleaning — for your life. Themed ”A Better You,” the event featured four speakers with ideas on how to make a better, happier, more productive self.

First to speak was The Power of Habit author Charles Duhigg, a reporter for The New York Times who won a Pulitzer Prize last week for his series The iEconomy. Duhigg began his talk describing a habit he just couldn’t kick: Every day at around 3 pm, he would leave his desk and go to the cafeteria for a chocolate chip cookie. As a result he gained 8 pounds, and his wife was starting to make pointed comments. As he looked more closely at this habit, he realized why it was so hard to break — because habits become part of tightly wound behavior loops. Habits are extremely powerful: Bad ones can be harmful, he said, while good ones can improve all aspects of your life. He capped his talk with an unexpected example — Starbucks, which endows its employees with good conflict resolution habits in order to provide the customer service they are known for.

Tech writer Jill Duffy shares tips for taming one’s email inbox. Photo: Ryan Lash

Tech reporter Jill Duffy spoke next, giving nine useful tips on how to conquer email before it conquers you. Among them: Keep your unread emails to about a page, save canned responses or email templates so you don’t always end up typing the same thing, and don’t be afraid to delete emails — and let go of the obligations that they represent.

Jay Silver shows how a cat can take photos of itself — using a bowl of water and the Photo Booth program on a computer. Photo: Ryan Lash

You see a banana for eating; Jay Silver sees a yellow edible space bar for his keyboard. Silver, an MIT Media Lab Maker, brought in a bag of tricks to demonstrate how to hack everyday objects. He connected his laptop to two slices of pizza to use as a clicker to advance his slides, and painted a streak of ketchup — then played it like a piano. See more uses from his invention kit, MaKey MaKey »

Amy Webb concluded the program, giving a hilarious and heartbreaking talk about how she gamed the online dating system. Photo: Ryan Lash

Finally, author Amy Webb closed the night with a lesson in love, explaining how she reverse engineered online dating sites to find her perfect mate. Webb drew from her new book, Data: A Love Story, to explain what she did when she found herself frustrated with her online dating prospects. Since she’s a digital strategist, she naturally turned to data analysis. She devised a point system by which to rate all her prospects, only to realize that she had left out one important element from the equation: the competition. In this incredibly honest talk, she explained why she created 10 fake male accounts to scrape data about successful female candidates and how they presented information about themselves. (Note: optimistic language and photos with just enough skin.) Webb’s story has a happy ending. She is now married to Brian Woolf, who she met as a result of her data gathering. Sitting next to me in the audience, last night was the first time he heard her tell the story.

“A Better You” was part of TED@250, a new series of salons held at our New York headquarters at 250 Hudson Street. Since our main conferences are only twice a year, TED@250 is an opportunity for talks that rethink headlines and respond to conversation happening in real time. It’s also a place for speakers with the kind of personal stories that simply work better on the small scale. Stay tuned. Some of these talks may be coming to TED.com.

Logic needs love: Jacob Berkson at TEDxSussexUniversity
Love does not exist outside of reason, says Jacob Berkson, but within it. Taking us on a historical tour of philosophers who believed that cold logic stood alone, Berkson shows how reason and emotion are forever intertwined. (Filmed at TEDxSussexUniversity)

The biology of love: Helen Fisher at TEDxEast
Can your choice of mate be predicted by science? Biologist Helen Fisher profiles the four chemicals that affect personality and suggests that data from online dating sites could unravel the mysteries of human attraction. (Filmed at TEDxEast)

In sickness and in health, men and women aren’t equal: David Page at TEDxBeaconStreet
As scientists are finding new ways to treat patients with advances in genetics, one critical area is being overlooked: the difference between men and women. As David Page suggests, genetically speaking, there is as large a gap between men and women as there is between humans and chimpanzees of the same gender — and understanding this gap could open up entirely new avenues for treating once-incurable illnesses. (Filmed at TEDxBeaconStreet)

Is technology destroying love? Yann Dall’Aglio at TEDxParis
How has the digital age changed love? Yann Dall’Aglio examines what it means to love in today’s society, if it’s in danger, and if it’s even worth saving. (French with English subtitles.) (Filmed at TEDxParis)

And here, some of the week’s highlights from the TEDx blog this week:

• A glimpse at the first TED in Iran
• A 6-year-old shares his plan to help the homeless
• The TEDx interns honor Leslie Snope’s Galentine’s Day

• Suleika Jaouad, who writes about being young with cancer, talks about the embarrassing but very real prospect of being a sexually active cancer patient. [The NYTimes Well Blog] For other unconventional responses to cancer, watch Ananda Shankar Jayant’s talk on fighting cancer with dance.
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• Data visualizationist and programmer Olivier H. Beauchesne maps Wikipedia geotags to uncover some unexpected connections across the tome. [Collaborative Cybernetics]

Leslie Morgan Steiner: Why domestic violence victims don't leave

• Read Leslie Morgan Steiner’s CNN article, “Why abused women stay in bad relationships,” in which she calls on lawyers to provide pro bono work to victims of domestic violence. [CNN] Make sure to watch her TED Talk on the same topic.
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• An 18-minute documentary on the future of interactive design, along with eight insights. [Co.DESIGN]
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• Soren Kierkegaard’s Valentine’s Day ode to his love — a pen. [The American Reader]
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• On Tuesday night, TED Fellow Jon Lowenstein‘s documentary about gun violence in Chicago aired on Channel 4 News in the UK, before the U.S. State of the Union address. [Channel 4] See our annotation of Obama’s speech, in TED Talks and playlists.
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• How moshing taught a physics grad student about the dynamic of human collective motion. [The Atlantic]
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• Here, 34 tips from the Vimeo Video School on shooting a video promo for a nonprofit. The featured lesson was created by the film production crew, What Took You So Long?  [Vimeo] They also happen to be behind this video chat with Hans Rosling from the TEDxSummit in 2012.
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• Simply sublime watercolors accompanying stories by beloved Italian author Italo Calvino. [Brain Pickings]
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• Don’t feel bad if you’ve failed the famous invisible gorilla test. Eighty-four percent of radiologists, who seem to have superhuman attention spans, fail, too. [NPR]
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• Is a wearable wrist computer on the horizon? Will we soon all be wearing iWatches? Perhaps so.  [NYTimes Bits blog]

Photo: Anne Francey

Esther Perel: The secret to desire in a long-term relationship

For a fascinating look at why we’re experiencing this “crisis of desire” (hint: it’s the first time in history when we’ve expected marriage to be about passion) and how we can boost out erotic intelligence within the space of a great relationship, watch this talk. And below, more great TED Talks in the areas of love, passion and sex.

• Helen Fisher: The brain in love
• Mary Roach: 10 things you didn’t know about orgasm
• Hannah Brencher: Love letters to strangers
• Helen Fisher: Why we love, why we cheat
• Jenna McCarthy: What you don’t know about marriage
• Thomas Dolby: “Love Is a Loaded Pistol”
• Isabel Allende: Tales of passion

1. Women are more likely to get responses than guys. For a guy who writes a woman on OKCupid without any previous flirtation, he has a 25% chance of getting a reply from her. But for women who are cold-writing a guy — there’s a 40% chance she will get a reply.
2. Women’s perception of men’s attractiveness may be more warped than men’s perception of women’s appearance. With the rise of pornography, plastic surgery and airbrushing, many people wonder — do guys know what real women look like anymore? The answer appears to be yes. When Rudder showed us a graph of the ratings men give to women on an attractiveness scale of 1 to 5 through OKCupid, there’s a normal distribution with fewer women falling at the 1 and 5 extremes and the grand majority getting ratings in the middle. However, when women rate men on a scale of 1 to 5 on attractiveness through the site, the graph skews sharply towards the lower end. Women overall rate many men as a 1, and shockingly few as a 4 or 5. Jokes Rudder, “A 3.8 for a guy is basically Hollywood material.”
3. Still, men tend to email the most attractive women. While guys can clearly appreciate women in the center of the attractiveness spectrum,  that doesn’t mean they don’t aim for the top. Men of all levels of attractiveness tend to send the most emails to the few women rated across the board as a 5.
4. Message length doesn’t appear to matter. Rudder was sure that longer messages would up a person’s chances of getting a response from the object of their affection. But it’s not true. Whether a message is the length of a tweet or the length of a novella doesn’t seem to matter in terms of chances for a reply. The numbers listed in item #1 hold tight — men have a 25% chance of getting a response and women have a 40% chance.
5. If you don’t hear back quickly, you probably won’t. Rudder took a look at the length of time elapsed before a person replies to a message and how it corresponds to the likelihood that they will respond. In a fascinating twist, half of all replies are sent by the seven-hour mark. There’s a big drop-off from there in the chances of a reply. “Seven hours is the half-life of your hopes and dreams,” joked Rudder.
6. Not all replies turn into dates. Getting a reply on OKCupid is half the battle — but it isn’t everything. There’s only about a 30% chance that a reply will turn into an actual conversation — a correspondence that lasts for three exchanges or longer.
7. Despite the startling statistics, people do fall in love through the site. Every day, about 500 people disable their OKCupid profiles for a very specific reason: they met someone through the site that they’re embarking on a relationship with.

What have your online dating experiences been like? Which of these facts surprises you the most?

Helen Fisher: The brain in love

Inspired by Helen Fisher’s classic TED Talk, “The brain in love,” we invited three speakers with big ideas on relationships, sex and family to our New York office for a TED@250 salon, part of a program to tackle timely topics. Love was certainly in the air.

After a screening of the incredibly sweet office-romance film “Post-It Love,” Christian Rudder stepped to the stage. The co-founder and editorial director of OKCupid, Rudder set out to parse some of the data pouring into the site at all times from its users. For example, Rudder shared that when a man on the site writes a woman without any previous interaction, he has a 25% chance of getting a response from her. Meanwhile, women cold-writing men through the site have a 40% chance of a reply. Rudder shared another interesting tidbit — that half of responses are sent to a message are sent with seven hours. As Rudder put it to a big laugh, “Seven hours is basically the half-life of your hopes and dreams.”

But Rudder shared an inspiring bit of news. Every day, 500 people deactivate their OKCupid profiles because they met someone through the site. “All it takes is one,” says Rudder. This sentiment was echoed in the ahhhh-worthy Google video, “Parisian Love,” which tells a moving love story via search.

Bruce Feiler, author of Walking the Bible and the new book The Secrets of Happy Families, stepped up next to share the surprising thing that has revolutionized his family life: agile programming. A method of software development, agile breaks down large projects into small, do-able bits — allowing people throughout the process to give feedback as they go. Agile was developed in opposition to the “waterfall method,” where people in charge determine the flow of the project and people inside the process have no input.

Applying this to a family means creating detailed daily checklists. “You can’t underestimate the power of making a checkmark,” says Feiler. “It works in offices and it works with kids.” Agile in the home also involves having weekly meetings to talk about what went well over the course of seven days and what needs improvement. And Feiler reveals a surprising fact about his twin 8-year-olds: that they’re able to pick their own punishments and they generally give themselves harsher ones than their parents would have picked.

Finally, we heard from Esther Perel, author of Mating in Captivity, who spoke about keeping passion in long-term relationships now that human beings “live twice as long” as we used to. Perel nailed the basic challenge of modern relationships — that, on the one hand, they must satisfy our deep-seated need for security, dependability and permanence while at the same time meeting our equally strong need for adventure, mystery and the unexpected.

“Can we want what we already have?” Perel asked. The answer is yes. But because Perel sees desire as the space between the self and the other, she reveals that this can be achieved in some counter-intuitive ways — in part by being more selfish and savoring moments of absence. Her thoughts were truly surprising and inspiring.

Stay tuned for these great talks on TED.com and the TED Blog in the upcoming weeks. And a special thanks to Built It Green, who donated the wood for the beautiful backdrop you see in these images.

Photos by Cloe Shasha