A letter — be it handwritten or typed — feels like an unpremeditated revelation, a glimpse into the writer’s subconscious. Letters are, also, often rooted to the place where they were written: a cozy armchair, a backyard hammock, the corner desk of a classroom, a train. It’s this physical and temporal presence that enables a special kind of opening-up, even when the recipient is a stranger.

Hannah Brencher knows the letter’s power. Her organization, The World Needs More Love Letters, facilitates letter-writing between strangers. In today’s heartfelt talk, given during the New York leg of the TED Talent Search, Brencher explains how she found this unique calling. Because her family has always communicated by letter, when she found herself depressed after college, she did the only thing she could think of — she penned pages and left them in libraries and cafes where strangers could chance upon them. The idea snowballed into a global exchange.

“Most of these letters have been written by people who have never known themselves loved on a piece of paper,” says Brencher in her talk. “They’re the ones from my generation. We have grown up in a world that is paperless, and where some of our best conversations have happened upon a screen. We have learned to diary our pain onto Facebook and we speak swiftly in 140 characters or less. But what if it’s not about efficiency?”

Brencher’s talk deeply resonated when we posted it on the TED Talent Search website. One commenter declared, “Hannah is an anachronism, a much-needed reminder of our need to slow down and pay attention. Outstanding! I wonder if she needs a Nana…”

Before Twitter, before Facebook, before Gmail and AIM, there were ink and paper. There were people who dedicated time to writing correspondences, and then waited for a reply. After the jump, excerpts from five of the most delightful, beautiful or simply intimate letters we’ve come across.

1. William James, a psychologist and philosopher (and brother to the writer Henry James), penned a letter to his wife, Alice James, from Vienna on September 24, 1882:

Dear, perhaps the deepest impression I’ve got since I’ve been in Germany is that made on me by the indefatigable beavers of old wrinkled peasant women, striding like men through the streets, dragging their carts or lugging their baskets, minding their business, seeming to notice nothing, in the stream of luxury and vice, but belonging far away, to something better and purer. Their poor, old, ravaged and stiffened faces, their poor old bodies dried up with ceaseless toil, their patient souls make me weep.[…]All the mystery of womanhood seems incarnated in their ugly being—the Mothers! the Mothers! Ye are all one! Yes, Alice dear, what I love in you is only what these blessed old creatures have.

2. In 2009, after Barack Obama was elected for the first time, Bill Adler published a book of kids’ letters to their president. So much of the writing in this book is moving (or hilarious); one example comes from Kiana, a 12-year-old from Anderson, South Carolina.

As a Black female, I’m going to try to be the first woman president, and the first Black woman president at that—that is, if no one beats me to it.

3. In an 1897 editorial in New York’s Sun, journalist Francis Pharcellus Church (anonymously) replied to a concerned eight-year-old, who had written to ask whether Santa Claus exists. This letter has rightly become famous—and inescapable during the holidays, when it’s printed and posted every year.

Yes, VIRGINIA, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy. Alas! How dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus. It would be as dreary as if there were no VIRGINIAS. There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence. We should have no enjoyment, except in sense and sight. The eternal light with which childhood fills the world would be extinguished. […]The most real things in the world are those that neither children nor men can see. […]Only faith, fancy, poetry, love, romance, can push aside that curtain and view and picture the supernal beauty and glory beyond. Is it all real? Ah, VIRGINIA, in all this world there is nothing else real and abiding.

4. In 1882, several years before they married, the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud wrote to his fiancée, Martha Bernays, from Vienna:

If only I knew what you are doing now. Standing in the garden and gazing out into the deserted street? Ah, I am no longer passing by to press your hand, the magic carpet that carried me to you is town, the winged horses which gracious fairies used to send, even the fairies themselves, no longer arrive, magic hoods are no longer obtainable, the whole world is so prosaic, all it asks is: “What is it you want, my child? You shall have it in time.” “Patience” is its only magic word. And in saying so forgets how things get lost when we cannot have them then and there, when we have to pay for them with our own youth.

5. On a book tour in 1942, the writer Vladimir Nabokov wrote letters to his wife, Vera Nabokov. In November, on a stop in St. Paul, Minnesota, he wrote:

Yesterday after the trip into the country I went, having got awfully bored, to the cinema and came back on foot—I walked for more than an hour and went to bed around eight. On the way a lightning bolt of undefined inspiration ran right through me—a passionate desire to write, and to write in Russian. And yet I can’t. I don’t think anyone who hasn’t experienced this feeling can really understand its torment, its tragedy. English in this sense is an illusion and an ersatz. In my usual condition, i.e. busy with butterflies, translations, or academic writing, I myself don’t fully register the whole grief and bitterness of my situation.

I am healthy, eating plenty, taking my vitamins, and read the newspapers more than usual now that the news is getting rosier. St. Paul is a stupefyingly boring city, only owls at the hotel, a bar girl who looks like Dasha; but my apartment is charming.

What can you learn from your muscles? A lot, according to Alexander Grey, the chief technology officer of Somaxis, who has created sensors that measure muscle workload. In a talk given at TED@New York – one of 14 events that was part of the 2013 Talent Search — Grey demonstrates how people can use these sensors to stave off the onset of fatigue while running, recognize stress injuries before they happen, and even play the guitar — without ever picking one up.

In your bio, it says that you’ve created these muscle sensors to be used “personally and interpersonally.” What are some future uses for the muscle sensors?

One of the things I’m looking at is this idea of live, non-local racing. With athletes, you could stream your fatigue data and heart rate data and go for a run with someone in Tokyo for example. So, then that [data] would go to your iPhone, and they’ve got one too, so you’re all in the network. You can literally connect people globally to have them share their own biometrics with each other.

So that would be one application, but there’s a lot of others. One of the features is the midi controller. You can actually make it so that by moving your body, the sensor creates music or controls lights. So, you could have a new type of performance art that integrates body movement with sounds.

One of the things I’m trying to coordinate right now is making a platform for group experimentation. So, the idea would be that anyone could create an experiment like: what works better for me before a run — bananas or pasta? People could sign up for that, and they could go on a pre-set distance run with whatever it is they’re eating beforehand, and then all the data aggregates. Then someone could say: how about barefoot running versus regular running with shoes, what’s going to make a bigger difference in my calf fatigue over time? Someone creates an experiment, a bunch of people join, so all of a sudden with all these kinds of sensors in different places, people can discover other things on their own — it’s like a platform for discovery.

Do you have background in medicine — either Eastern or Western?

I studied electrical engineering and computer science for two years, and then I changed majors and got my degree in molecular biology. Then I started working and abandoned biology, and went back to tech. I was doing failure analysis for microchips, and then I started this thing up, which is a mixture of bio and tech. I also have a degree in acupressure, and actually it was very useful to understand the body, the different types of bodies, and the different types of muscles. It’s a lot of hands on stuff, a lot of massage is integrated there, so you just get a sense of the different kinds of tissues, the way that people work, and the dimensions that people have.

We heard you say something about robots earlier. Tell us more!

If you perhaps have a prosthetic limb right now, they have a lot of systems for translating the data. They have muscle-driven prosthetics, but there are tons of wires and they’ve got to go inside and all this stuff — it’s pretty invasive. So, if you have some kind of thing you could just put on, and it allows you to control your prosthetic, I think that would be a great improvement to what we’ve already seen.

How can these sensors help the everyday person feel better — let’s say, someone who is not particularly active, but feels body pain and fatigue often?

Repetitive strain is something that’s a big problem in the workplace. I came up with a way to do predictive screening, so that if you run people through a 2-minute test, typing and mousing, there’s an algorithm which crunches their numbers and looks at how you’re using those muscles while you do it. Therefore, it determines the risk factor for developing a repetitive strain injury in the future even if you have no symptoms right now. That was actually my original business plan, but I was told the market wasn’t big enough, so I had to start in sports and fitness first.

What’s next?

It’s a hardware platform, there are some great ideas that people have run by me that I’m really excited about, but our eventual role will be to provide the platform. We’ll release an API, and let people do whatever they want: make that workplace monitor, make the yoga monitor, make the meditation aid.

This is why the big trend is self-monitoring, you know, what can I do on my own? Even if you have healthcare, the irony is that the doctor sees you for such a short period of time, that if you could bring them all this other data and say, “Hey, look at all the stuff I’ve collected — look at the trends,” it’d be a way to expand the doctor’s insight. It may not be the same grade as medical equipment, but the information it gives is very good, and I think that at that price point the value to people is pretty solid.

Watch out for more Q&As from the TED@NY event throughout this week. Head to TalentSearch.TED.com to watch and rate these talks, as well as those from the 13 other stops along the TED2013 Talent Search tour.

In an interview you should ask a movie star about her movies, an author about his books, a musician about her latest album. But Randy Cohen, the original New York Times Ethicist, hopes to bypass all those boring questions on his radio show “Person Place Thing” and find out what weird passions people of note are really harboring. In a talk at TED@New York — one of the 293 talks given as part of the 2013 Talent Search — Cohen explains why the structure works so well.

If you knew nothing about a person and you were told to interview them, what’s the one question you would ask?

What kind of toothpaste do you use? Or why are you wearing that shoe? If the interview is about the person’s work, you can always go to that. But what we’re doing on our show bypasses all of that. It turns out people have stories that they’re carrying around in their heads that no one ever asks them to tell.

What made you come to this idea?

I have no idea. I never know. Do you know? Where ideas come from? I was thinking about this years and years ago and pitched it around as a TV project and no one was interested in it at all. Then when I lost my job, I went, “Oh wait, you know what would be fun to work on?” I recognize a precursor to it in Desert Island Discs. It’s been on British radio for like 50 years. You come with seven pieces of music that you would take to a desert island. People are boring when they talk about themselves. If you want a biologist to talk about what she’s doing with monkeys, this won’t get you there. But if you want to know what she’s like as a person, I think this is pretty good.

What is your Person Place Thing?

It would vary day-to-day, I hope — so I’m not just a completely dull predictable old blowhard, because I fear that. Because I probably am. But today I think Samuel Johnson would be my Person, because I revere him and he’s the greatest. Place: Do you know River Road? It’s fantastic! Cross the George Washington Bridge and go south half a mile and cut back toward the river and there’s seven miles of two-lane blacktop. This is State Park, and that’s where cyclists go. You’re two minutes from Manhattan and it’s like you’re in the country. You see eagles there! It’s spectacularly beautiful, it’s right along the river. You’re up and down and the cliffs protect you from any noise or traffic, so once I’m there I guess the Thing would be my bicycle.

This brilliant invention hasn’t changed that much except maybe mine’s carbon fiber. In the 1890s there was this huge vogue for cycling in Manhattan, especially amongst Manhattan women. It became associated with feminism, because it was kind of an independence of motion that became associated with motion in the larger sense. Those people I think would recognize what we ride as bicycles. They would think we’re pretty cool, with our carbon fiber and our 20 gears, but it’s the same object essentially, and there’s so much joy packed into it. And when you cross the bridge and ride like that you see thousands of your fellow New Yorkers enjoying the day. So I think I would go with Dr. Johnson, River Road, bicycle. But ask me next week and I hope I have three different things.

Watch out for more Q&As from the TED@NY event throughout this week. Head to TalentSearch.TED.com to watch and rate these talks, as well as those from the 13 other stops along the TED2013 Talent Search tour.

Cognitive neuroscientist John Kounios was curious: what happens in the brain when someone has a great idea? And so the Drexel University psychology professor designed an experiment to measure subjects’ brain activity as they solved problems. In a talk given at TED@New York — one of 14 events that was part of the 2013 Talent Search – Kounios outlines what is required for lightbulb-over-the-head moments.

You just talked about this wonderful story of a fireman and the neuroscience of the a-ha moment. What is it about this idea that makes you want to spread it to the world?

The world faces a lot of problems. Certain kinds of problems can be solved in a linear, step-by-step, incremental way. We can solve those kinds of problems using procedures that we already know. But when you’re encountering a novel problem — a very complex problem — you need to make a leap. You need to have a sudden insight, an a-ha moment. You need to look at it from a different perspective.

In the story that I told, Wag Dodge was looking at a fire, and he had the make the mental leap to thinking of the fire as the solution. Now, there is no step by step, logical procedure for doing that.

You have to completely restructure your way of thinking about things in order to do that. The problems that the world faces now are enormously complex, and are not like problems that civilization has faced in the past. We need that kind of breakthrough thinking, creative insight, whatever you want to call it. And that’s why we need to reform educational systems, reform our procedures for solving problems in order to take account of this other way of thinking, and to find ways to promote this other way of thinking if we’re ever going to survive as a species.

Presumably, after the fact, we can imagine a series of thoughts that can get us to the creative solution. You can imagine Wag saying, “I need to survive. How do I create a safe space? I know I can set it on fire.” Is that common problem where people will have strokes of insight and imagine that they used an analytical process to get there after the fact?

Yes. I remember reading an interview with a scientist — whose name I can’t remember — who had won an award. They asked him, “Did you have some breakthrough?” And he said, “No, no, no. I just worked on the problem increment by increment.” And then at the end of the interview he’s describing this moment where he was in the bathroom and he had this idea.

What happens often, especially if you look at interviews of scientists, is they think back on their whole career. What comes to mind is the years and years and years of work they put into something. And there were insights here and there, these sudden insights, but often those shrink in one’s memory in comparison with the massive work over years that was toiled. But, we find, looking at scientific careers, that they are punctuated by these sudden insights.

Another thing is that often scientists have learned to suppress talking about these insights, because if you’re writing a grant proposal, you can’t say, “Here’s a completely different way of looking at the problem.” They’ll never fund you, not in a billion years. You have to describe this very conservative, step by step procedure, even if that’s not how you got to where you are. You might have an insight, you might have an idea, but then you have to go back and cover your tracks, and to describe how you arrived at this in a gradual way, otherwise the granting agencies will say, “This is too risky. You have no foundation for this idea.”

Can your neuroscience research can be used to talk people into looking for and using creative insights more?

I think what it does is that it demonstrates that there are two very different ways of thinking. It demonstrates that you cannot just assume this linear pathway to solutions and to knowledge. That there are ways to short-circuit the system. If you don’t take that into account and you put restrictions that force people into the incremental pathway, then you’re going to be stunting the advancement of knowledge, stunting the solution of problems which are critical to us all.

Watch out for more Q&As from the TED@NY event throughout this week. Head to TalentSearch.TED.com to watch and rate these talks, as well as those from the 13 other stops along the TED2013 Talent Search tour.

Daniel Ogilvie was shocked when his 4-year-old daughter ran out of her bedroom screaming, “I don’t want to be a thing that dies.” But every child goes through this moment of recognizing their mortality. A Rutgers University professor who has studied philosophy for the past 25 years, Ogilvie has become fascinated with our beliefs about death and afterlife. In a thought-provoking talk at TED@New York — one of the 293 talks given as part of the 2013 Talent Search — Ogilvie explains his impetus for teaching a course about “soul beliefs,” whether or not we think something of ourselves carries on after our physical body dies.

What is your drive to separate religion from the beliefs of the afterlife? Why do you feel that is important to do in your research and work?

Truth is, I don’t make the separation between religion and afterlife beliefs. Religions make use of afterlife beliefs. Now, each religion has a different message about what to do, and how you have to behave and who to believe in, in order to make it into this gated community called heaven. But each religion has a view on that — a message and the point that I make is that each religion has different prescriptions.

Now, I’m ambivalent again, but that’s what got me into this issue. I mean, what we’re concerned about now is competition between religions about how to get to heaven, and there have been lots of wars fought over this — well, part of the motivation for wars fought is this, and each of the warring tribes are about to have access to nuclear weapons — we’re going to blow ourselves up. I started reading about this, writing about it and doing research on it, but if I cut this out, I will end up with something about how my goal is to have people talk about their beliefs about the soul, about afterlife, and to question the assumptions that we have without really thinking about them. [These thoughts] have been ingrained in us, but my point is to bring them from a level of absolute certainty to “I’m not sure,” and that’s where I make my break. If we’re operating with “I’m not sure,” that may reduce the kind of tension that exists in the world.

Are you particularly a religious man yourself?

No. I give a whole course on this, and at the end of the course [students] still don’t know if I’m an atheist or something like that, and I’m fine with that. I just want them to think about their own beliefs, talk about it, argue about them — well not necessarily argue about them, but read about the history.

I’ve written this long thing about the history of afterlife beliefs, and I’ve written another thing on how we come to believe anything — it’s called, “Anatomy of Internalized Beliefs.” So I keep on, you know, pushing this thing, but I should probably be either retired or dead.

Actually I was to retire next year, but the university loves this course, so it’s the last year I’m teaching it. I co-teach it with somebody who’s really retiring. But, they’re going to videotape it in the fall with really good, professional videotaping to make it available. Maybe for free courses or maybe they’d sell it to universities, with Rutgers making the profit, as a hybrid course where you’d go through the lectures, have recitation, and I would work up a manual on what to do. The university said instead of retiring, let’s put you on a research professor line, so that’s what we’re working on now. It’s a very engaging topic that people are very interested in talking about, and before now this was sacred territory.

Watch out for more Q&As from the TED@NY event throughout this week. Head to TalentSearch.TED.com to watch and rate these talks, as well as those from the 13 other stops along the TED2013 Talent Search tour.

Pancreatic cancer is devastating. Only 5.5% of those diagnosed with the disease survive past five years, because — once it’s diagnosed — it generally has already spread around the body. And that’s where 15-year-old high school student Jack Andraka sees a major opportunity for change. In a spirited talk given at TED@New York — one of 14 events that was part of the 2013 Talent Search – Andraka walks viewers through his cheap and accurate test for the early detection of pancreatic cancer, which recently won the world’s largest high school science competition.

What is it about your idea that you want to spread to the world, and the TED audience?

How it will revolutionize the medical field and save thousands of lives in the early detection of cancer. And how it only costs three cents and takes five minutes.

Why do you think this discovery wasn’t made before?

Because a bunch of scientists are bound to one specific field. They’re not allowed to wander outside of it. But also, we’re just laying out these interdisciplinary approaches, and carbon nanotubes haven’t been out there for that long, maybe ten years. So these new revolutions are typical now of how carbon nanotubes are revolutionizing our everyday life.

What are the next steps for this test? How long until we would see it available for use?

The most important point to remember is that this is a very preliminary study on the development of this assay for the early detection of pancreatic cancer. We are still a long way from solving pancreatic cancer; there is still a lot of research to conduct not only on this assay but on a variety of factors from genetics to therapeutics. This assay will not solve all of the problems that we face with pancreatic cancer and the assay, while a huge leap in the field of early detection, is not quite ready to enter clinical trials. We are still several years from seeing this sensor come onto the commercial market for use in general checkups.

Future testing includes using the sensor on additional human samples, including chronic pancreatitis and stage I and pre cursor lesions, monitoring if the assay gives false-positives for chronic pancreatitis, and inter-institutional studies. The results so far look extremely promising for the sensor due to its observed sensitivity, how little it costs, and how fast it is, however we just
simply won’t know for sure until all of the testing is completed. This is a glimmer of hope in the fight against pancreatic cancer and I’m extremely excited about continuing my research on this.

What’s your plan? I assume you’ll finish high school. Are you going to take an accelerated route?

I like sticking with my age group, just because I don’t see how I could ever talk and relate to 21-year-olds — except if I’m talking about science of course. Then I’m going to go through high school, then probably college and grad school. Just the typical American student path.

Watch out for more Q&As from the TED@NY event throughout this week. Head to TalentSearch.TED.com to watch and rate these talks, as well as those from the 13 other stops along the TED2013 Talent Search tour.

Tania Luna, the CEO of SurpriseIndustries.com and a psychology instructor at Hunter College in New York, came to the United States as a 6-year-old immigrant from Ukraine. While she and her family thought that they were staying at a hotel when they first arrived in New York, upon returning years later, they discovered that it was actually a homeless shelter. In a moving talk at TED@New York — one of the 293 given as part of the TED2013 Talent Search — Luna describes her life as an immigrant and how thinking about how poor she was as a child makes her feel so exceptionally rich now.

Did your personal story directly, or indirectly, inspire your business?

I think it inspired my business indirectly, in several ways. The first is, because I grew up with a lot of things changing and very little stability — I mean, we never knew where we were going to live next — I became very surprise-averse and sort of a control freak. I wanted to control everything around me. But, on the other hand, through my upbringing, I really got a chance to explore and focus on the little, wonderful, magical surprises in life, like finding toys in the trash; like finding pennies.

I used to do this silly thing when I was a kid where I’d like bury treasure — little wrappers that I’d pick up — in the dirt and then I’d go looking for treasure. Growing up with so little allowed me the luxury of really letting my imagination run wild and I really was privileged in being able to appreciate these little things and surprises. Because I had such low expectations, pretty much anything nice that happened was a wonderful surprise.

And so, on the one hand, I think my upbringing inspired the business because I had an appreciation for experiences and surprises and, on the other hand, so many things had gone wrong in my life that I wanted to be in control of everything. I wanted to surprise others — I didn’t want things to surprise me.

Also, since we grew up with no money, I always wanted to own my own business so that I could be in charge of my finances, thinking that entrepreneurs make a lot of money, though this isn’t necessarily the case. I lost more money than I’ve made, I’m sure, on my business ventures.

My business and my clients have taught me a lot about life because I watch them go through these surprises, and it helps me reconnect with the real important reason I started the business with my sister, which was that it creates these little magical moments of surprise in your life.

Tell me about surprises you about your TED experience so far.

What surprised me is that I thought I was going to do a talk about surprise and not being attached to outcomes, and it was very ironic, but I found out yesterday morning that I wouldn’t be doing a talk about a surprise, but that I should tell my life story instead. So, the first surprise was that I would be giving a talk that I didn’t expect to give, but my old talk was about allowing surprise into your life and how to not be attached to outcomes — so I said, “Okay, the whole moral of my story was to let yourself be surprised, so I’ll do this and let myself be surprised.”

The other thing that’s surprising is that I’m talking about this here, in front of all these people, but my closest friend probably don’t even know a lot of these things about me. There are a lot of these stories that I haven’t thought about, so just when Kelly and Nick were like, “tell your story,” I started thinking, but there was so much that I didn’t remember — like the pizza thing I hadn’t thought about for 20 years! In a lot of ways I feel like it’s a story about things around me, not my story, and I think that’s one of my hesitations to share it, because I feel like I didn’t do anything to deserve the opportunity to share it.

There were times that I was really ashamed of us not having money. You know? Like I remember this one time, we found a bike in the trash and it was my first bike and it was obviously a used bike, and I started to learn to ride a bicycle. The girl who threw it out, her mother had thrown it out and had gotten her a new bike, but the girl lived in our neighborhood and she saw me riding her bike and she like chased me down and threatened me, saying that we had stolen her bike, and I do remember that feeling of shame — of realizing how something that I had become attached to was not my own. I had somebody else’s garbage. And also, being an immigrant — this is more for my sister — but when we moved here people weren’t so accepting of immigrants. In Ukraine, she was the popular girl. Here, people shoved her into the street and people tormented her, so there are those scars still in a lot of ways. So, I get the desire to not bring that up again.

Watch out for more Q&As from the TED@NY event throughout this week. Head to TalentSearch.TED.com to watch and rate these talks, as well as those from the 13 other stops along the TED2013 Talent Search tour.

Until he was 19, Joshua Prager wanted to play professional baseball or be a doctor. After 19, he was just glad he could walk. For eight years Prager was a senior editor at The Wall Street Journal, where he was a four-time Pulitzer Prize nominee for his long-form pieces investigating historical secrets. In his talk at TED@New York — one of the 293 given as part of our TED2013 Talent Search — Prager weaves a personal story around the event which shaped his entire adult life, a bus accident that left him a quadriplegic.

You seem to agree with comments that some of your stories have “the gestation of a llama.” Do you think the pace of your writing has been informed by your injury? How has your accident shaped your writing process?

A few key ways. The first is — it’s striking this didn’t occur to me beforehand — I had just spent a decade writing these long articles about people whose lives had changed in an instant, when someone said to me, “Well, obviously your life changed in an instant.” And I was like, “Oh my god!” This is not some tortured connection; it’s so obvious, and yet it truly was not apparent to me. I wrote an article about a person who swung a baseball bat and his life changed, who clicked a shutter of a camera and his life changed, a person who inherited something, a person who disappeared, and I hadn’t realized the obvious connection.

Another thing is — someone else pointed this out to me — that I have spent all these years writing about secrets and the corrosiveness of secrets. And here is why this is so important to me: I don’t have the luxury to tell someone on our third meeting, “Oh by the way, I have a cane, I’m disabled.” When you meet me, you know instantaneously that I have something wrong with me. And the key is: My openness works for me. I don’t have to bottle things up inside. I tell people what I’m thinking, because there it is. It’s right out in the open. And I have been sort of, one person at a time, helping other people live openly as well. When a person can be honest and open, they feel better.

One last point: Because I can’t run, I actually do stop and smell the roses, in a sense. I really pay attention along the way. I love detail. I really pay attention and look around, and that comes out in my work.

You were 19 when your accident happened. Before that did you have an interest in writing or journalism?

I had no interest in journalism, but I loved writing. I had wanted to be a doctor. Then four months after the accident I got out of the hospital, I had no idea how the fuck I could be a doctor because I didn’t feel anything, I couldn’t move my hands well, I just didn’t see it physically being possible. (Later I wrote about quadriplegic doctors and now I know anything is possible.) And because the real way I expressed myself before, baseball — I was a very good ball player — I couldn’t do that anymore. The thing that was left for me was writing.

And now do you play?

I do. I play softball with my friends every Sunday in the park. I’m the one who organizes the game. Someone runs to first base for me, and I pitch overhand, and I have a great time. And I’m still pretty good.

Watch out for more Q&As from the TED@NY event throughout this week. Head to TalentSearch.TED.com to watch and rate these talks, as well as those from the 13 other stops along the TED2013 Talent Search tour.

We know other primates are a lot like us. But how close are they, and what can we learn about ourselves from them? Lauren Brent is a primatologist and evolutionary biologist who has spent years studying social bonds — particularly friendship — with an eye to learning how and why those behaviors evolved. We talked to her just after she rehearsed for her TED@New York talk, one of the 13 events in our 2013 talent search.

Why do you want to spread your idea among a TED audience?

There are lots of levels to it. I love evolution and am passionate about the study of evolution. I think that any message that has an evolutionary basis to it, whether it’s explaining our lives or explaining other animal’s lives, is important to get out there. Ultimately understanding our lives from a biological basis can be, and is, really beautiful and powerful and I wish more people who would do it.

I think the idea of friendship and monkeys and people and other animals all being interconnected in a social way is interesting because it’s incredibly complex. I mean, I think we can intuit it now because we know about Facebook and social media sites — we can see all the indirect connections that we have, right? But maybe other primates have those indirect connections too. It’s not like it’s going to help a monkey get a job because he’s indirectly connected to so-and-so down the street, but at the same time maybe it — the ways that they’re connected in the same way that we’re connected — maybe that does something for their lives too.

How did you get the idea of studying friendship in other species?

I started off being interested in social behavior in humans. I thought, as an undergrad, “Humans are really weird. We’re so weird. I mean all these social interactions and behaviors we have. What’s up with that?” That’s how I started studying monkeys, because I wanted to understand biologically why it is we do some of the things that we do. If monkeys do those things too, then maybe we can use them as a model for understanding ourselves.

Is this something no one thought to look for before?

No, it’s been a growing field. Part of it is that to ask evolutionary questions we need to know about how it influences reproductive output. Just like people, monkeys don’t have that many babies in their lifetime — and they live a really long time. Often you have to wait for them to die before you can say, “This one did all of these behaviors and had ten babies, and this one did this set of behaviors and only had five.”

So, primatology was started up in the 1960s, we’ve been collecting data on primates for years and years and years. It’s just now that we’re getting to the point where these long-term field sites have started to come into fruition and produce results that we can link up, like lifetime reproductive success. Of course, those aren’t my results. In that respect, these sort of answers are relatively recent, they’ve all been published in the last nine years or so.

I was coming into the field right when all of this was coming to a head. So I was like, “Great, this is what interests me.” We’re getting all these amazing results out of the long-term field sites — these people who’ve been doing this much longer than me are producing all of this amazing data — that’s what I want to study. I happen to work at one of these long-term field sites where we can amazingly get all sorts of biological samples, so we can work out stress hormones. So actually, what my focus largely has been on the association between stress hormone levels and social relationships. So the monkeys who have more friends — less stress hormones.

Does that mean you take blood from the monkeys?

No, I do it with feces. Cortisol levels in the feces. I follow them around, I collect their poo, and, voila.

Watch out for more Q&As from the TED@NY event throughout this week. Head to TalentSearch.TED.com to watch and rate these talks, as well as those from the 13 other stops along the TED2013 Talent Search tour.

Kids these days are “speaking” a new language, right under our noses and literally right under the table. But is texting making us dumber? No, says John McWhorter, Associate Professor at Columbia University and Contributing Editor at The New Republic. In his talk from TED@New York — one of 293 talks given as part of the TED2013 Talent Search — McWhorter says texting is merely a new form of language. And that being afraid of it is something to lol about.

You argue that texting is a language in which we write like we speak; but what if we stop writing like we write?

That will never happen. There’s no reason to think that we will not be able to do two things at a time. Many people are bilingual, and most people in the world are at least bidialectal. In America we think of the black person who can speak standard English and then in homier situations speaks a very different kind of grammar (and it is a grammar). In the same way you can write in two dialects. You can very easily text in the language I just described, and yet be somebody who writes for The Economist. I know people like that. We don’t have to worry that one thing is going to extinguish the other. Generally there’s always been casual speech and formal speech, and people can keep the two in their heads.

But we had time in school before texting was popular to learn formal writing. What about “kids these days”?

I teach at Columbia where people are rather hyper-prepared, but these kids can write up a storm, a paper about Plato and Aristotle, and under the table when they think I don’t see, they’re texting! People will continue to learn certain ways of writing and reading in school, and then there will be this other thing. It’s just that now we don’t only talk with our mouths, we talk with our fingers.

Do you text fluently?

I’ve never thought about it that way. I don’t text fluently. I’m 46 and the language I’m talking about came about in 2004, so I think I’m a little bit past the generation that would do it fluently. I text, but I would never write “lol” or “haha.” I used to think that was a gender thing, but it’s not. It’s an age thing. … One “k” for “okay” is apparently abrupt. I’m told that if someone writes “k” it’s kind of like “whatever.” I didn’t know that! I just thought it was a quick way of writing “okay.”

So I’m learning this from my “peeps.” They don’t text me, but they write papers about it. That’s how I learned that there’s this thing going on with texting that I would never have known about, because no one would ever write to me this way.

How does one express laughter then? “lol” or “haha” don’t quite cut it.

Apparently the way you do it is with acronyms like, um, lsh … “laughing so hard I’m on the floor” … There are these longer ones that actually mean that you’re physically laughing. R –

Roflmao. Rolling on the floor laughing my ass off?

Yes, that one! So apparently that’s how you indicate that something funny was said.

What do you say when something is funny?

I don’t text in long enough sentences to get in whether I think something is funny. In email, which I’m beginning to think is old-fashioned, I don’t use the bouncing emoticon because I think that is girly, but I use the little smile signs, with a colon and parentheses :) — a more male emoticon, where you comprise it yourself, because men build things? I don’t know. No but I don’t laugh in texts, and I think that’s partly — and I’m not trying to be dismissive of youth — but I think it’s because I’m not 22.

Watch out for more Q&As from the TED@NY event throughout this week. Head to TalentSearch.TED.com to watch and rate these talks, as well as those from the 13 other stops along the TED2013 Talent Search tour.