TED Community » Avi Gadish
About Me
- Location:
- United States, New York, NY
- Gender:
- Male
- Areas of expertise:
- Technical Theatre
- Associations:
- IEEE, ACM - Association for Computing Machinery, National Society for Collegiate Scholars
- Languages:
- English, Hebrew
- Universities:
- Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science & Art
Favorite talks
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TEDCred score: +1.30 TEDCred reflects your contribution to the TED community.
A reply on Conversation: Will mind-reading eventually become a reality and what are the implications for humanity?
experiments involving memory especially have a lot of gray area. Can we remove someone's bad memories if it will make them happier (PSOD?) can we download memories of a witness in a murder trial? Of course these questions arent so important until such things are possible, but as Lauren states, this technology may very well be on the horizon!
With the Brain Mapping project proposed by President Obama, we will surely see very big advancements connected to brain activity and it will remain to be seen what the ramifications may be and how humanity responds.
Maybe Alison is right and its time to break out the aluminum foil hats.
A reply on Conversation: Will making rockstars out of women in science get more girls interested in science/technology/engineering/math (i.e. STEM) fields?
I dont think its accurate to say that any scientist is a rockstar... Perhaps in the scientific community there are certain people who are held at high esteem, but certainly the male members will tent to idealize the male scientists and I know that Hindi (OP) probably idealizes a few female scientists!
I think that peoples work stands for itself. We arent living in a time where women need to use male pseudonyms when they publish. Female work is represented in the scientific community, and worthy material will be idealized. The stigma is only residue of Old World ways.
A reply on Conversation: Is the heart overlooked when it comes to intelligence?
That aside, I think more than "Personal Space" as Casey mentioned, the field in question probably has more to do witha persons 'energy' or 'aura' which is cited in many homeopathic/(sor lack of a better term:)pseudoscience. In his book, The Essential Guide to Energy Healing, Dr. Michael Andron speaks about energies generated from the body which can be felt/detected and even altered by external and/or internal sources like a healer or a cancer.
Certainly, these energies could very well be "generated" at the heart (as opposed to the brain). This would closely relate to more "mystical" approaches which have held the heart in high regards for many centuries.
It seems that these ideas may bridge the gap between what we consider hard-science and what is sometimes termed pseudoscience!
A reply on Conversation: How can we better harness our human capabilities to develop medical technology?
New Innovations have also been geared towards better and less invasive detection methods. For example, a Technion based company, Insightec, has developed a "knife-free" surgery technique that "uses MRI to find trouble spots and focused ultrasound to treat such issues as brain lesions, uterine fibroids and several kinds of cancerous growths." Innovations like these will propel humankind to a better future in medicine.
To respond to Alison, I feel that the best way to utilize our human capabilities is to work alongside these new technologically advanced techniques and make them mainstream. We can collaborate on how to improve them, or tweak them to better suit our needs and serve the greater good.
A comment on Conversation: What good is being able to control our dreams?
One thing that is interesting about controlling ones dreams is that it allows us the ability to synthesize and process things that occur during our conscious life.
Wopert, I feel is incorrect in that our brains are only for movement. Emotions, thoughts, and ideas are all housed in brain functions and how could those exist if our brains are limited to only providing us physical movement.
Many mornings I wake from a dream and lay in bed until I can make sense of why a certain person or situationmanifested itself in my dream. It is truly eye opening to realize what my subconscious is working on during my slumbers.
When learning to control one's dreams, the first step is to begin a dream diary. As it is stated in the film Waking Life, "They say dreaming is dead, no one does it anymore. It’s not dead it’s just that it’s been forgotten, removed from our language. Nobody teaches it so nobody knows it exists. The dreamer is banished to obscurity."
I couldnt agree more. The importance of dreams was once so clear to humankind and it seems as though it has lost value as more people discard their dreams to obscurity.
The quote continues: "Well, I’m trying to change all that, and I hope you are too. By dreaming, every day. Dreaming with our hands and dreaming with our minds. Our planet is facing the greatest problems it’s ever faced, ever. So whatever you do, don’t be bored, this is absolutely the most exciting time we could have possibly hoped to be alive. And things are just starting."
A reply on Conversation: Do we rely too heavily on technology for medical diagnosis?
Doctors today gain SO MUCH information from the medical technology at their fingertips. In fact, when one hospital doesn't have the right test equipment, they'll send out a patient to get a certain test just because every bit of extra information can make a difference!
However, as Neema suggests, there is a case to say that perhaps too much weight is placed on the information of a computer. Computers have an incredible ability to synthesize information and compute probabilities, but they cannot think outside of the box (literally) when it comes to information that needs to be viewed in a more creative manner. This is why Dr. House gained so much popularity. He was a doctor who was able to come up with diagnoses based on facts that were often NOT based in medicine or tests. There is so many more factors than just test results that go into proper doctoring and ultimately that is why services such as webMD.com will never truly be able to replace good old fashioned medicine!
A comment on Conversation: Why don't we treat science experiments like primetime TV?
I think that a lot of the problem rests in disintrest. I recently found myself very frustrated when trying to show off a friends resume to a (clearly disinterested head-in-their-iphone) friend of mine. It wasn't that she didnt understand the engineering and inventing that went into his accomplishments, it was that, rather, she didnt feel as though the discovery/invention was useful, or even if it was, it was't available in the nearest shop!
I know that if a TV series that documented the works of a lab would either fail, or the science would have to be secondary to the dramatic chaos that would be written into the lives of the cute college interns who help the scientists work.
Finally, I want to encourage you, and raise your spirits! The new ever-growing discoveries are not lost onto the world. Perhaps not on TV, but on the internet I always see things on reddit, stumbleupon and facebook that discuss new achievements, inventions and ideas being worked on today. For instance, a facebook page (in)appropriately titled "i f***king love science" ("3,658,224 likes · 5,682,294 talking about this") posts graphics, links and articles about modern discoveries, as well as a weekly image summarizing the most important and relevant discoveries of the preceding week! If you dont mind the occasional f-bomb on your news feed, I definitely recommend subscribing to their page!
A reply on Conversation: How do we best balance collaboration and individual efforts to solve our grandest challenges?
We're currently in a world that's seeing exponential growth in terms of ways we can communicate and share our thoughts and ideas!
And aas Paul mentioned, were just getting introduced! Certainly, total collaboration is a tad farfetched, but where we are now in terms of collaborating with each other doesnt quite do the trick!
maybe instead of hashtagging silly things (currently trending: #askjackandfinn ... what?) the world could make some great strides if the current trending hashtag was something like #CureDiabetes and we'd have major biochemists tweeting each other about some interesting protein they've encountered.
My question is, wheres the balance of collaboration versus personal study? I dont believe we're at the right place today. Lets see where we go from here.
A reply on Conversation: How do we best balance collaboration and individual efforts to solve our grandest challenges?
I completely agree, the sense of collaboration that I invision as a succsessful means to solve our greatest challanges would have to be one of the honeycomb structure you speak of. We must be cautious of certain people who want to be "in charge" (may it be due to having money, title, seniority, etc.) who will strive to get their way. Ideally, it would have to be a community effort!
The internet is most likely the interface to get us there. Nowadays, crowdsourcing is gaining popularity; perhaps, the future of crowdsourcing will converge with scientific discovery and we will have to wait and see what the product will be.
A reply on Conversation: How do we best balance collaboration and individual efforts to solve our grandest challenges?
You bring up a great point, in that money seems to be a deciding factor for most scientific research. Whether it be grants, or individual investment, people want to see a return on their dollars. Back to when I mentioned the Human genome project, or Obama's new Brain Map, a huge focus was about finance and economy stimulation. Perhaps another important (TED) conversation about this would be the next step!