Most choirs require their members to have a great voice, enjoy wearing a robe and be available for rehearsals in the same location. This is not the case for composer Eric Whitacre. In his classic talk from TED2011, Whitacre explains how he came to lead a chorus of more than 2,000 singers located all around the globe, each singing for a camera on YouTube.

“Human beings will go to any lengths necessary to find and connect with each other,” says Whitacre, as he shares highly moving testimonials from the far-flung singers. “People seem to be experiencing an actual connection from a virtual choir.”

Today’s TED Weekends explores the theme: “A crowd-sourced future.” Featuring essays from Eric himself as well as TED Talks favorites Charlie Todd and Marcin Jakubowski, TED Weekends looks at the many different ways that disparate individuals can be brought together to pool their creativity. To get you in the spirit, here are 11 TED Talks on the power of crowds.

1. Jamie Drummond wants us to crowdsource the world’s goals
2. Katherine Fulton says crowdsourcing is the future of philanthropy
3. Jimmy Wales on the birth of Wikipedia
4. Damon Horowitz calls for a “moral operating system”
5. Lucien Engelen is telling you to crowdsource your health
6. Paul Lewis reveals the potential of crowdsourcing the news
7. Rachel Botsman says the currency of the new economy is trust
8. Massimo Banzi explains how Arduino is open-sourcing imagination
9. Luis von Ahn created massive-scale online collaboration
10. Avijit Michael speaks about the impact of social media on government
11. Alastair Parvin is crowdsourcing architecture for everyone, by anyone

Today’s TED Weekends on the Huffington Post further explores the way our minds connect the dots of reality — sometimes correctly and sometimes erroneously. Below, some of the TED Weekends essays that riff on this mind-bending theme.

Beau Lotto: Optical Illusions Show How We See

Imagine… as you wake later than usual rolling over towards the window, you notice that it’s a gorgeous day outside. Warm, yellow sunlight shines in through glass illuminating floating “dust angles.” On the other side of the glass, past the oak tree with yellowing leaves, you see a brilliant blue sky. For the first time it occurs to you that a blue sky is a contradiction: the sky at night is devoid of color, so why during the day does the world seem to be shrouded in a blanket of blue? Years previously as a child full of questions you asked your parents, but the answer they offered seemed somehow inadequate at the time… less than magical. And so the question remains… as it does the most of us.

The answer is this: The sky isn’t actually colored at all (not blue or yellow or red or green). Rather, it’s your mind that’s colored. Read the full essay »

Mario Livio: Reality, What a Concept!

Optical illusions reflect limitations in our perception of physical reality. But what really is physical reality? While dozens of philosophers have struggled for millennia with attempts to directly answer this question, modern science settled on a more modest goal — how can we explain reality’s behavior? More specifically, to identify those laws of nature that rule the cosmos and all phenomena within it. Admittedly, this search for a “theory of everything” in itself implicitly assumes the existence of some objective physical reality.

The famous mathematical physicist Roger Penrose even suggests that we have to explain not just one world, but three, with three mysteries interconnecting those worlds. Read the full essay »

Ben Thomas: We’re Pretty Much All Tripping, All the Time

The year was 1943, and the Pentagon had a problem. They’d poured millions of dollars into a new voice encryption system — dubbed the “X System” — but no one was certain how secure it was. So the top brass called in Claude Shannon to analyze their code and — if all went well — to prove that it was mathematically unbreakable.

Shannon was a new breed of mathematician: A specialist in what’s known today as information theory. To Shannon and his fellow theorists, information was something separate from the letters, numbers and facts it represented. Instead, it was something more abstract; more mathematical: in a word, it was non-redundancy. Read the full essay »

Tom Cornwall: Are You Right? What Makes You So Sure?

We all like to think that we are right. And we will often go to great lengths to persuade others that our view is the right view. But what Beau Lotto reveals in his powerful TEDTalk on optical illusions is that the reality is very different. He shows that our reality is merely a perception and, as Beau puts it, “the light that falls on your eye is meaningless”. Or in other words what we see is merely our perception of reality. What’s interesting is not just the way in which our mind can be tricked by these playful optical illusions but also how this affects our day-to-day decisions, our behavior and the world we live in.

Suppose that you were given a creative task to complete and that the test is given to you in a red font. Now suppose that another similar task was given to you the following week but this time in a blue colored font. Would this change in color have any effect on your performance? You like to think of yourself as creative so surely you would be creative regardless of something as trivial as the color of the font? Read the full essay »

Dishonesty. Fibbing. Telling an untruth. Purposeful distortion. Misleading. Gilding the lily. Deception. These are all synonyms for the same thing: lying.

In her classic talk from TEDGlobal 2011, “How to Spot a Liar,” Pamela Meyer outlines what she believes to be an epidemic and gives practical tips for how anyone can tell when someone is laying a whopper on them. Today’s TEDWeekends on the Huffington Post spins off from Meyer’s talk, delving into the topic of “Understanding deception.”

To the left, a visualization of the murky waters between truth, lies, understatements, exaggerations, concealments and equivocations. And below, some TEDWeekends essays that riff on the theme.

Pamela Myer: How to spot a liar

Lying: Even t-shirts know how bad it is.

The other day a guy walked past me wearing a t-shirt with two words on it: “Everybody lies.” It made me laugh.

Of course it’s true. We all lie, but mostly in harmless or benign ways. Like telling your husband you don’t mind if he watches football. Like telling your wife you like her new haircut when it’s too short. What’s the point in telling the truth? Her hair will take months to grow back anyway. Why cause a tidal wave of tears?

But our deception epidemic is not all cute, funny, and kind.

Read the full essay >>

Paul Spector: Let’s be honest, we’re all liars

Pamela Myers begins her TEDTalk on deception with an accusation that might start a fight with a different audience. “You are all liars.” I’d like to unwrap this idea in order to examine two areas. The first maps the broad spectrum of lies, from the socially sanctioned and the self-deceiving to the conscious intent to mislead. The second area pertains to the lying animal, homo mendax, us humans. Recent discoveries in how the brain edits reality are radically changing the view of our relationship to truth.

If you had to explain our understanding of honesty to an alien, it might prove quite difficult.

            Read the full piece >>

Dana Radcliffe: The cost of deceptive politics

At the heart of our ad-saturated democratic process is a moral paradox. Politicians raise and spend billions of dollars to convince us to trust them with the responsibility of governing us. But (as I argued in an earlier post) the fevered competition for votes virtually compels them to lie to us. Because lying inevitably undermines trust, including citizens’ trust in their leaders and in government generally, we have cause to worry about the increasing dishonesty of political campaigns. For leaders distrusted by their constituents cannot hope to unify them behind efforts to tackle the urgent problems afflicting our communities, states, and nation.

As this year’s elections proved, when today’s consultant-driven campaigns fixate on the likely “effectiveness” of their messages, accuracy is a secondary concern.

Read the full essay>>

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