Oncologist and writer Siddhartha Mukherjee suggests that what doctors fight against isn't so much disease -- it's their own biases. In the summer of 2003, I finished my three-year residency in internal medicine and began a fellowship in oncology. It was an exhilarating time. The Human Genome Project had laid the foundation for the new science o...

Photo: James Duncan Davidson Neuroscientist Tali Sharot comes on stage to discuss the "optimism bias." It's a topic that she's been studying in her lab and she claims that 80% of us experience it. "It" being the tendency to overestimate the likelihood of good things happening to us. As she puts it: "we're more optimistic than realistic, and...

I just might have the best job in the world. As a particle physicist and professor at Yale, I am a happy cog on the wheel of humanity, trying to understand the universe. I collaborate with brilliant people, young and old, from all over the globe. But while I love my job, the truth is I am part of a system that is rigged. We have come a long w...

We each live in the shadow of a personal apocalypse: the knowledge that -- someday, somehow -- we will die. It's a terrifying thought, and so we look for a way out. In my talk from TEDxBratislava (and in my book Immortality), I walk through four stories that people have told throughout cultures and time, as a way to manage this very real fea...

Making small tweaks to your meetings -- even changing the seating! -- can actually help set the stage for bigger shifts in our communities and companies, says social psychologist Dolly Chugh. Many organizations and companies today track diversity in sex, gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation and religion, among other factors. For some of ...

Join us for four in-depth conversations over two days, live from the Blue Room at TEDWomen, hosted by podcaster Manoush Zomorodi. Guests include TEDWomen speakers Gretchen Carlson, Sally Kohn, Cleo Wade and Justin Baldoni. Find them all on Facebook at facebook.com/TED -- or get direct links below to each super-worthwhile conversation [gal...

Behold, your recap of TED-related news: Habitat turns 50! First conceptualized in 1961 as part of architect Moshe Safdie’s thesis at McGill University, Habitat 67 has gone on to inspire several generations of architects. Combining high-rise living with community connection, Habitat’s concrete cluster of homes challenged the contemporary n...

Sometimes it seems as if the Internet has created a bold new era of openness. But if there is one place where openness appears to be lagging, it would be scientific research. The scientific community is full of intricate (and often little-known) systems that regulate and control it, sometimes to great purpose, but sometimes to its own detrim...

We need to have more honest, open-ended conversations about race and bias -- in our own lives and in the TV shows and movies we see, says diversity consultant Vernā Myers. It’s not every day that the TED world collides with a reality TV show, but recently on The Bachelorette, one of the most compelling conversations about race was initiated by ...

At TEDMED 2012, Ben Goldacre shared a startling reality: that doctors are not able to read all the studies conducted on a pharmaceutical before prescribing it to their patients. This is because of a bias in medical research toward positive results – while one study confirming a drug’s effectiveness may be published, the results of other stud...

The mad rush of the holidays can stress out the sunniest soul, and yet somehow, beneath it all, we remain cheerfully optimistic.  We look ahead, make New Year's resolutions and generally believe next year will be better than this one and the year before. Why? Tali Sharot, who spoke at TED2012, says we homo sapiens are genetically predisposed...

Overwhelmed by your news feed? Use tools from science to evaluate what’s true and what’s fake, suggests researcher Emma Frans. This post is part of TED’s “How to Be a Better Human” series, each of which contains a piece of helpful advice from someone in the TED community. To see all the posts, go here. In our daily reading, we encounter all ...

Photo: Michael Brands If watching a TEDTalk inspires insights (see this post for more) -- imagine giving one. From speakers' own blogs: Here's what Brené Brown learned >> The first lesson I learned is about vulnerability (no suprise). The folks in the picture are raising their hands in response to two questions that I asked du...

This week as usual, the TED community has lots of news to share. From an unusual neuroscience explainer to a heart-pounding documentary to a book cover reveal, some newsy highlights below. Shave your head for science? Neuroscientist Nancy Kanwisher has created a very cool video to explain where the regions of the brain actually are under th...

The world may be a tough and tenuous place, but we humans tend to think that the future will be better than the past. Why? In the new TED ebook, The Science of Optimism: Why We're Hard-Wired for Hope, author Tali Sharot expands on her earlier research into the optimism bias, and explores the many reasons why we are biologically predisposed to be...

Who would have thought when you left those high school math problems behind that you would one day be encountering algorithms on a daily basis? Zeynep Tufekci might have guessed; now an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina’s School of Information, Tufekci’s first job as a teenager was as a computer programmer. So it’s no sur...

On March 12, TED welcomed its latest class to the TED Residency program, an in-house incubator for breakthrough ideas. These 19 Residents will spend 14 weeks in TED’s New York headquarters working and thinking together; the class includes exceptional people from all over the map, including Brazil, the Netherlands and Korea. The new Reside...

Inspired by a book on silence, a director set out to explore and capture its many manifestations on film. The problem? Silence is much more slippery than he realized. Even before the omnipresent cacophony of modern life, people were seeking, pondering and preaching the elusive refuge of silence. It’s a key component of virtually every major rel...

Each week, we collect sharp critique, thought-provoking questions or interesting insights in response to TED Talks. This week's haul includes thoughts on the late Rita Pierson's call to educational arms, a response to Peter Saul's thoughtful talk about dying, and personal feedback to Stella Young's argument that just because she's in a wheelchai...

Photo: James Duncan Davidson As an architect, Michael Hansmeyer asks, "What is the origin of the forms we design?" And he asks: "What kind of forms would we design if we had no bias, if we had no preconception? What kind of forms would we design if we could free ourselves from our education?" "How," he says, "Would we go about creating...

At the intersections where we meet and collaborate, we can pool our collective wisdom to seek solutions to the world's greatest problems. But true change begs for more than incremental steps and passive reactions -- we need to galvanize transformation to create our collective future. To celebrate the effort of bold thinkers building a bet...

When I googled "english major who taught herself calculus," Google gave me the result I wanted -- plus a most unhelpful suggestion. I wondered why. Last Thursday morning, I was following up on a book recommendation from sometime-TED-blogger Ben Lillie. A writer he knows, an English major, taught herself calculus and wrote a book about it. Don...

At TED2012, Jon Ronson wove a mind-bending tale that asks: How can we truly tell who is a psychopath? What’s the line between crazy and sane? And is it something we can truly delineate, or are we trying to discern black and white in a color-soaked world? Today’s TEDWeekends on the Huffington Post picks up this question, using Ronson’s talk as...

John Searle studies consciousness -- which, as he points out in today's talk, is a “curiously neglected subject in our scientific and philosophical culture.” Curiously -- because it is, after all, a pre-condition for anything else we think about. And yet neglected -- because consciousness is a subject that makes scientists huffy (they see it a...

Here's a crash course in 3 proven ways -- scenario planning, premortems and red-teaming -- to help you spot hidden opportunities and pitfalls (and maybe even predict the future). Writer Steven Johnson explains. In the mid-1970s, environmental activist Paul Hawken was working with a nonprofit that taught intensive gardening techniques to people ...

African American writer Rich Benjamin spent two years living in -- and writing about -- America's whitest neighborhoods. The response to his book (and TED Talk) was honest, raw -- and sometimes misunderstood his purpose. Here, he responds to the response. In 2007, I embarked on a two-year, 27,000-mile trip. My destination? The fastest-growing a...

Photo: James Duncan Davidson Susan Cain, the author of Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking, is an introvert. So as she gets up to present from the TED2012 stage, bag in hand, it is not a comfortable experience. But it's an important one, and that's the point. Her family grew up reading -- they would read t...

Like it or not, charisma matters when it comes to leadership. But we should be aware of the power that persuasion can have on us, says business school professor and researcher Jochen Menges. Winston Churchill had it -- but so did Eva Perón. Nelson Mandela had it -- as did Adolf Hitler. Charisma is a force that can rally people during difficult ...

A plate of food overrun by roaches. A blood-encrusted scab. The squish of dog poo under one’s shoe. In this talk from TEDxEast, David Pizarro explains that each of these images elicits disgust, a visceral emotion that serves a good purpose -- to keep us away from harmful substances. But disgust may in fact do much more than that. “A growing...

At TED2012, Susan Cain asked us to stop the madness. That is: the group work madness. At offices and schools around the globe, the desire for collaboration has led to an onslaught of open floor plans and group projects where individuals aren’t given much space to think on their own. And this is a big problem, Cain explained, because a third to h...