Biomedical engineer David Camarillo reveals how much scientists still don't know about concussion and the brain. The word “concussion” evokes more fear than ever, and there’s definitely some evidence to support those fears. We know a repeated history of concussion can lead to chronic changes in the brain’s function and structure, resulting in e...

Counting the days ’til TED2015? Yeah: we are, too. Before the conference begins on March 16, dive into a great book written by one of our speakers. Books from speakers in Session 1, “Opening Gambit” National Insecurity: American Leadership in an Age of Fear, by David Rothkopf. The foreign policy specialist examines the way U.S. leaders have ...

Gamers, unite! Today, July 8, is officially known as Video Games Day. Whether you lose hours to your Xbox or stay glued to your smart phone to play, today is dedicated to all those games that rile you up and drive you crazy. These days, the most riveting video games use motion sensors, animation and artificial intelligence --  technologies that ...

Few people see the world in simple black-and-white terms -- instead, most of us, women and men alike, experience a wide spectrum of color, a world of differing viewpoints and nuance. This year's TEDxWomen, themed “The Space Between,” will explores the gradiation of the world around us. The event will feature six sessions: “Poverty and Plenty...

Art therapist Melissa Walker uses masks to allow service members with traumatic brain injuries to express their deepest emotions and experiences, helping them and their loved ones heal. Most people wear masks to obscure or change their identities. But through a unique art therapy program, veterans are using them to reveal truths -- often painfu...

TED2014, our 30th anniversary conference, is less than a month away! If you’re counting the days like we are, get a head start by reading some of the insightful and compelling books by the groundbreaking thinkers who will speak in Vancouver. Books from speakers in Session 1, “Liftoff” Being Digital, by Nicholas Negroponte. This 1995 bests...

By Liz Jacobs and Thu-Huong Ha   Our brains work in mysterious ways. They make us laugh, they make us cry, and sometimes, they make us 19-year old geniuses. The 11 speakers in this All-Stars session specialize in areas of the brain as diverse as personality, trauma and gender, but they all agree: Our minds matter. Below, read a deta...

Last week, I saw Barbara Walters' list of "The 10 Most Fascinating People of 2014." It included interesting thinkers like Elon Musk (watch his TED Talk) and George R.R. Martin (the author of Game of Thrones), along with crowd-pleasers like Taylor Swift and Oprah. But reading this list of almost exclusively marquee names made me think about s...

How many unresponsive patients actually have some consciousness of what’s occurring around them? Possibly up to 20 percent, according to neuroscientist Adrian Owen, who is determined to give them a voice. In groundbreaking research, neuroscientist Adrian Owen (TEDxUWO Talk: The quest for consciousness) has found that a significant number of peo...

Grégoire Courtine is the head of the Center for Neuroprosthetics and Brain Mind Institute of the Life Science School at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL). He starts his TED Talk with a story of a mentor of his, the late Christopher Reeve, who spent the last years of his life in a wheelchair after a paralyzing spinal c...

This summer, the country that perfected soccer proved it’s just as formidable a foe off the pitch as it is on. On the first day of the 2014 World Cup, 29-year-old Juliano Pinto, paralyzed from his chest to his toes, did the seemingly impossible: He gave the opening kick just by thinking. Eighteen months earlier, Brazilian neuroscientist M...

The second day of mainstage talks at TEDGlobal 2013 offered four densely packed sessions full of the possibility for natural, geopolitical, social and artistic change, both improvised and well-considered -- and more than one magic moment. Here are just a few of the best. Brain soup. Suzana Herculano-Houzel figured out how to count the num...

Grégoire Courtine and the scientists in his lab helped a paralyzed rat learn to walk again, voluntarily, through a treatment that combined drugs, electrical stimulation of the lower spinal cord, the support of a robotic arm and a little bit of chocolate. When their study appeared in the June 2012 issue of Science, it sparked a lot of excitem...

There are certain perils to watching a TED Talk live from the audience – occasionally you’ll be asked a stumper of a philosophical question or made the brunt of a speaker’s joke. Then again, you might be given seven and a half extra minutes to live, so it’s really a toss-up. In these talks, pulled from a range of TED and TEDGlobals, watch for au...

In January 2011, US Rep. Gabrielle Giffords was shot in the head in an attack on her entourage at a constituent meeting near Tucson. Six people died and thirteen others were injured. She survived, and her recovery has been a remarkable story. At TED2014 she took the stage with her husband, astronaut Mark Kelly, for a Q&A with the head of...

By spotting and changing a few bad habits, you can easily increase your reading speed without missing out on detail, says Jordan Harry. 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. Have you ever wished that yo...

By more clearly identifying our feelings or by recategorizing them, we can reduce suffering (yes!) and increase well-being, says neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett. “He’s an angry person”; “I’m a very anxious person.” We’ve all made statements like these. They point towards the belief that emotions are hardwired in our brains or automatically ...

A new technology aspires to harness the powerful human sense of smell to enhance our daily lives.  Someday this approach might even be used to benefit our health. How is this possible? Step one: Just inhale. We’re living in a playlist world, with many of us curating soundtracks to get us through life’s daily ups and downs, such as a tough commu...

Too many of us, too often, think of pain as something that needs to be eliminated, at any cost. But we -- doctors, patients, drug makers, and all of us -- can be part of a much-needed shift that  questions this attitude, says bioethicist Travis Rieder. Travis Rieder’s journey down the rabbit hole of opioid dependence began with his motorcycle a...

If you’ve ever seen grainy old sports footage—for example, a boxing match from the late 1800s, a Princeton/Yale game from 1903, or Babe Ruth’s famous home run from 1932—you probably noticed how different the game looks compared to its modern counterpart. The equipment looks clunky, the uniforms impossibly baggy. Even the bodies of the players lo...

Social violence in Guatemala, Mexican and Central American migrant communities in the United States, the aftermath of the Haiti earthquake, children with cerebral malaria in Uganda -- for the past decade, photographer Jon Lowenstein has been documenting the often violent and traumatic daily lives of individuals and communities living at the ...

By Kate Torgovnick, Helen Walters and Emily McManus Session 3 of TEDWomen begins with an empty stage. And then: the noise of drumming breaks through the quiet as four women, draped in shiny blue cloth with gold bands around their foreheads, march onstage carrying with them large, wooden drums. They place them on the red carpet and begin a...

"We need a different view of the world," says Chris Anderson, the host of Session 6: Radical Reframe, on the Wednesday morning of TED2015. Enjoy these recaps of the speaker in this session, who might just flip your thinking on things you thought you knew — from antibiotics to papayas. New metaphors, not new medicines. We often think that ...

Too many of us struggle to achieve a body ideal that’s just not obtainable by humans. It’s time to redefine what’s good, healthy and attractive on our own terms, say writers (and sisters) Emily Nagoski and Amelia Nagoski. The Bikini Industrial Complex. That’s our name for the $100 billion cluster of businesses that profit by setting an unachiev...

Surgeon Peter Attia sees a disconcerting paradox at work when it comes to our health: while people are talking about eating healthily and exercising perhaps more than ever, we’re seeing no reduction in the rates of obesity and diabetes. As it stands, more than 8% of Americans are diabetic and an additional 26% are pre-diabetic -- which represe...

The many-headed dragon of public anger has a mouthful of fire for parents who don't vaccinate. But such scolding misses the mark, alienating caring parents who just want their kids to be safe. When measles broke out at California’s Disneyland in 2015, sickening nearly 150 people across seven states and spreading to Mexico and Canada, the online...

LA Philharmonic violinist Robert Gupta performs for the homeless and mentally ill. In this interview, he discusses his experiences with the awesome healing power of music. Interactive Fellows Friday Feature: Join the conversation by answering Fellows’ weekly questions via Facebook. This week, Robert asks: With the advent of amazing onli...

From artists to scientists, mothers, mathematicians and business visionaries, people in every corner of the world are dreaming up solutions to our most pressing problems. Whether tackling war and peace or the principles of machine learning, ingenuity starts with one thing: a spark. And regardless of where the spark takes hold, inspiration...

Don’t be misled by the cringing creatures seen in The Lion King. From their biology to their social structure, spotted hyenas are complex creatures like none other on earth, explains author and conservationist Lucy Cooke. In the animal world, the hyena has been censured by more scandalous untruths than even the sloth. They are considered nature...

From tech to self-help via poetry, fiction and graphic novels, here are the books you need to read. What’s the one book you're always thrilled to discover that someone else has read? We posed that question to TED speakers -- and, well, they geeked out, offering us a list of hidden gems that wouldn’t typically crop up on a holiday shopping list....