Every minute, 300 new learners are born into this world. How can TED play a role in enriching their education? We need your help to answer this question. In a few weeks, TED will be launching an online forum. We're calling it the TED-ED Brain Trust. We're seeking the expertise of visionary educators, students, organizations, filmmakers and ot...

What's it like to have a song inside your head, itching to get out? A neuroscientist and a songwriter compare notes from the frontier of music and science. Music is the most complicated sound the brain can process. But why did our brains evolve such advanced tools to create and enjoy it? Neuroscientist and jazz musician Charles Limb (TED Talk: ...

While many wonder what the pervasive use of technology is doing to our overloaded mental circuits, the new TED Book Brain Power: From Neurons to Networks ponders that question in another way: can cutting-edge neurological research into child brain development teach us anything about how we shape the global “brain” of the Internet? As author Tiff...

One morning when she woke up, Jill Bolte Taylor felt pain behind her left eye similar to what she’d felt biting into an ice cream cone. Soon, her own appearance -- from her hands to her reflection -- felt utterly bizarre to her. Next she lost her balance and then her internal chatter simply stopped -- years of thinking dissolving into silenc...

Read Montague is interested in the human dopamine system -- or, as he puts it in this illuminating talk from TEDGlobal 2012, that which makes us "chase sex, food and salt" and therefore survive. Specifically, Montague and his team at the Roanoke Brain Study are interested in how dopamine and valuation systems work when two human beings inte...

Neuroscientist Uri Hasson takes us inside his lab's fascinating research -- and our heads -- to show the meeting of the minds that occurs every time we talk to each other. Imagine that a device was invented which could record all of my memories, dreams and ideas, and then transmit the entire contents to your brain. Sounds like a game-changing i...

Journey through the world of ideas with TED Radio Hour, a new program from NPR and TED that inspires imagination about modern life and places bets on tomorrow with today’s most compelling minds. The show’s first episode airs today, April 27 (check listings for your local station, which may vary). You can find the full hour-long episode, as w...

In his State of the Union address, US President Barack Obama teased the importance of mapping the human brain, hinting that it could be a good investment in the future. According to The New York Times, the president will soon announce a decade-long plan to support the comprehensive rendering of the brain as part of his budget proposal. The proje...

Watch this talk on TED.com Onstage at TED, Nancy Kanwisher starts by telling us one of the most surprising results from recent neuroscience discoveries: The brain is not a general-purpose processor, but a collection of specialized components, "collectively building up who we are as human beings and thinkers." Imagine, she says, walking...

Computers have become so powerful that the idea they can’t just do, you know, everything is almost unfathomable. Yet many calculations are still too big for even the biggest supercomputer to process -- like cracking complex encryptions or modeling global weather systems. That’s where the promise of quantum computing comes in. With the principles...

Ed Boyden is the head of the Synthetic Neurobiology group at the MIT Media Lab. He talks brains and optogenetics (a technique being used to better understand blindness and Parkinson’s disease) with futurist and venture capitalist Juan Enriquez. Juan Enriquez: So Ed, when Obama started his big BRAIN initiative, there were serious older pooh-ba...

Adopting a brain-healthy diet is a powerful tool in maximizing cognitive health and helping prevent dementia and Alzheimer’s disease, says neuroscientist and nutritionist Lisa Mosconi. What’s more, it may even ward off common ailments that affect many women, from slow metabolism to insomnia and depression. Here are 8 steps to take. Based on ...

Your brain is three and a half pounds of tissue -- and yet it’s the key to everything you experience. The National Geographic Channel show Brain Games seeks to give a better understanding of it – by looking at how the brain focuses, processes fears, makes decisions and much more. The show is hosted by Jason Silva, the “performance philosopher” w...

The brain in your head and the one in your gut are always exchanging info. But how do they do it? Neuroscientist Diego Bohórquez is trying to find out the answers. If you were asked where the human body’s nervous system is located, you’d probably answer “the brain” or “the spinal cord.” But besides the central nervous system, which consists of ...

Some staff picks of smart, funny, bizarre and cool stuff on the interwebs this week: Super-duper useful mandatory homework: Get a secure password now. As xkcd explains, most people's approach to secure passwords (a word bastardized with "random" capital letters and punctuation that's difficult to remember) is wrong. Now go get yourself a ...

A reformed computational neuroscientist, professor Read Montague takes the stage and admits he's nervous. Then he asks the audience to put their hands up if they think they have a behavioral superpower. "Oh! I actually see hands! TED really is a superconference." Montague is here to talk about people, relationships, and brains. As he tell...

Ray Kurzweil returns to the TED stage to explain his new (kind of old) theory of the mind. He first wrote his theory as a paper 50 years ago, but today there’s a plethora of new evidence to support it. First, a refresher on the story of the neocortex, which means “new rind.” Two hundred million years ago the thin layer covering the brains...

Many people have tried to sell me on the idea of meditating. Sometimes I try it, and have an incredible, refreshing experience. But usually, as I close my eyes and focus on my breathing, while I know that I’m supposed to be letting all thoughts go, more and more fly through my mind. Soon I have a laundry-list of “to-dos” in my head … and then my...

In his TEDTalk (watch now), Charles Limb reviews his groundbreaking work studying creativity and the brain -- by putting musicians inside an fMRI and watching as they improvise. For the past decade, he's been working with jazz piano players, revealing astonishing new data about the way the brain creates art. And his research has recently bra...

For decades, scientists said that the human brain contains 100 billion neurons. However, when neuroscientist Suzana Herculano-Houzel hunted for the source of this often-quoted number, she couldn't locate one. So she set out to count herself ... by making brain soup. She brings a vial of brain soup with her onto the TEDGlobal 2013 stage. T...

"Let's talk about what's in our heads and how to get it out," says Mary Lou Jepsen as she begins her talk at TED2013. Jepsen, a display engineer, recently had brain surgery. Afterward she faced a stigma: "Are you still smart? If not, can you make yourself smart again?" Well, her surgery gave her a chance to experiment in an extraordinary ...

Sebastian Seung is one of the most influential explorers of our time -- and his terrain is the human brain. You may remember Seung’s talk from TEDGlobal 2010, in which he uses the relatively new term “connectome,” to describe the connections between each of the hundreds of millions of neurons in our brains that make us who we are. Seung and ...

The past decade has brought us jaw-dropping insights about the hidden workings of our brains, in part thanks to a popular brain scan technique called fMRI. But a major new study has revealed that fMRI interpretation has a serious flaw, one that could mean that much of what we’ve learned about our brains this way might need a second look. On TV ...

"Fifteen years ago, it was widely assumed that the vast majority of brain development takes place in the first few years of life," says professor Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, who heads up the Developmental Group at the UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience. "Back then we didn't have the ability to look inside the living human brain and track dev...

Neuroscientist Madeline Lancaster generates living models of brains from a few stem cells. “Just to be clear, they are not really human brains,” Madeline Lancaster says of the strange assemblage of brain tissues she has grown by the hundreds at the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England. In her lab, she t...

As usual, the TED community has lots of news to share this week. Below, some highlights. Surface-level brain stimulation. The delivery of an electric current to the part of the brain involved in movement control, known as deep brain stimulation, is sometimes used to treat people with Parkinson’s disease, depression, epilepsy and obsessive...

Standing on the TED stage looking stunning in a blue dress, neuroscientist and author Sandra Aamodt  reveals that three and a half years ago on New Year's Eve, she made a decision: She gave worrying about her weight. Instead, she learned to eat mindfully -- and lost 10 pounds. For Aamodt, who had been dieting unsuccessfully for 30 years, thi...

"I have a brain cancer." Data artist and TED Fellow Salvatore Iaconesi posted these words this morning, along with a video of himself speaking. With his long ponytail reduced to a scruffy mohawk, he shares this story: Yesterday I went to get my digital medical records: I have to show them to many doctors. Sadly they were in a closed, pr...

Emerging research suggests that retirement could lead to a decline in your cognitive function, says gerontologist Ross Andel. Anyone who's retired or thinking about retirement should read this to learn more. Ah, retirement. It’s the never-ending weekend, that well-deserved oasis of freedom and rest we reach after decades of hard work. As long a...

As usual, the TED community has lots of news to share this week. Below, some highlights. A 4.37-lightyear starshot. Humanity has sent people to the moon and rovers to Mars. It might be about time we embark on interstellar travel. Russian philanthropist Yuri Milner, along with board member Stephen Hawking, unveiled a plan on Tuesday to sen...