Arianna Huffington's small idea to help you unlock your big ideas: Sleep more. "I learned the hard way the value of sleep," said Arianna Huffington at TEDWomen in 2010. "Two and a half years ago, I fainted from exhaustion, and I hit my head on my desk." (Watch: Arianna Huffington: How to succeed? Get more sleep.) Since then, the media mogul has...

Our unresolved, unacknowledged feelings can lead us into anxiety, arguments and worse. Some educators believe it’s time to give our kids emotional instruction along with their ABCs. Who taught you how to identify and manage your emotions, how to recognize them when they arose and navigate your way through them? For many adults, the answer is: N...

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...

When we're overwhelmed by emotions, we’re usually not our best selves. We may blow up, say hurtful things or burst into tears. But what if we had a tool we could use to turn down the temperature at those times? Psychologist Marc Brackett has a helpful strategy. As founding director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, psychologist Mar...

TED is coming to Broadway. And curious minds of all kinds are invited. “TED Talks Live” will bring six nights of talks to The Town Hall Theater in New York City’s Theater district this November. The program will focus on three topics: The Education Revolution, War & Peace and Science & Wonder. Each night will be a thought-provokin...

As usual, the TED community has lots of news to share this week. Below, some highlights. Human rights for chimps? This week, TED2015 speaker Steven Wise and his organization, The Nonhuman Rights Project, successfully argued for Hercules and Leo, two chimpanzees who have been used for medical experimentation at Stony Brook University, to be ...

If you’ve ever experienced pleasure from people’s failures, well, join the rest of us. Here’s how to manage and make the most of your schadenfreude, says cultural historian Tiffany Watt Smith. I have a confession. Okay, several. I love daytime TV. I smoke, even though I officially gave it up years ago. I’m often late, and I usually lie about wh...

The speakers and performers who’ll be a part of TEDWomen 2015 know a bit about “Momentum.” Each of them has pushed forward fascinating research, created something out of a bold idea or moved the needle on a cause that’s central to them. The 34 speakers on our lineup — soon to be joined by a few more — range from former presidents (yes, plural...

This Friday, TED Radio Hour kicks off its third season. As one of the editorial consultants for the show on TED’s side, I am always impressed with the way Guy Raz and his team experiment with new ways of storytelling. In Friday’s episode, we’ll solve for x; the week after, we’ll take a look at the power of play. But before we move forward...

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...

Humanity is defined by its immense body of knowledge. Most times it inches forward, shedding light onto the mysteries of the universe and easing life's endeavors in small increments. But in some special moments, knowledge and understanding leap forward, when one concentrated mind or one crucial discovery redirects the course of things and ch...

How does being rich affect the way we behave? In today’s talk, social psychologist Paul Piff provides a convincing case for the answer: not well. “As a person’s levels of wealth increase, their feelings of compassion and empathy go down, and their feelings of entitlement, of deservingness, and their ideology of self-interest increases,” he sa...

This post is part of TED’s “How to Be a Better Human” series, each of which contains a piece of helpful advice from people in the TED community; browse through all the posts here. We’re currently living in an era of teamwork. Today, we take for granted the fact that we can be on the same team as somebody who lives on the other side of...

Obsessive navel-gazing can be satisfying, but the problem is, it can also be damaging. Organizational psychologist Tasha Eurich suggests ways to escape the loop of rumination and learn how to move forward for real. It was Tuesday evening around 11pm. Holed up in my dark office, I sat staring at a set of freshly analyzed data. A few weeks earlie...

To celebrate our billionth video view, we reached out to 24 incredible people in the fields of technology, entertainment and design, asking them to create playlists of the TED Talks that most resonated with them. Their lists are housed in a brand new section of our site: Playlists: Collections for curious minds. Check out the notable names w...

Neuroscientist and philosopher Sam Harris describes a scenario that is both terrifying and likely to occur. It’s not, he says, a good combination. I'm going to describe how the gains we make in artificial intelligence could ultimately destroy us. And, in fact, I think it's very difficult to see how they won't destroy us or inspire us to destroy...

As technology accelerates our lives, many of us feel an urgent need to slow down. One seductive solution: A secular sabbath. Pico Iyer makes the case, in this meditative excerpt from his new TED Book, The Art of Stillness: Adventures in Going Nowhere The idea of going nowhere is as universal as the law of gravity; that’s why wise souls from eve...

Advertising doesn’t have to be about convincing you to buy things. Great ads, just like great movies, can inspire thought. That’s why TED created Ads Worth Spreading, an initiative dedicated to advertisements that push the boundaries, from Chipotle’s stunning “Back to the Start” commercial to L’Oreal Paris’ spot starring model and athlete Aimee ...

Each week, TEDx chooses four of our favorite talks, highlighting just a few of the enlightening speakers from the TEDx community, and its diverse constellation of ideas worth spreading. Below, give this week’s talks a listen. Dyslexia doesn’t define me: Piper Otterbein at TEDxYouth@CEHS Growing up with dyslexia, Piper Otterbein strugg...

The seven speakers lived up to the two words in the title of the session. Their talks showcased both our collective insanity -- the algorithmically-assembled extremes of the Internet -- and our humanity -- the values and desires that extremists astutely tap into -- along with some speakers combining the two into a glorious salad. Let's dig i...

Anita Doron’s first feature film, The Lesser Blessed, is a love story that takes place in a remote community in the Northwest Territories. This moving film is being released theatrically in Canada today, and will arrive in the U.S. on June 13th. As it opens, we asked Doron to tell us about the film, her path from poet to filmmaker, and about...

Do we have the vision and the energy to confront seemingly impossible problems -- like predatory corporations, political deadlock, the wasted potential of millions of refugees? Session 5 rounded up people who are jumping right in. A call to action on fossil fuels. Costa Rica, climate advocate Monica Araya’s native country, gets almost 100 perce...

Three sessions of memorable TED Talks covering life, death and the future of humanity made the penultimate day of TED2018 a remarkable space for tech breakthroughs and dispatches from the edges of culture. Here are some of the themes we heard echoing through the opening day, as well as some highlights from around the conference venue in Vanco...

On February 25, TED welcomed its latest class to the TED Residency program, an in-house incubator for breakthrough ideas. These 11 Residents will spend 14 weeks at TED's New York headquarters, working and thinking together. New Residents include: A community organizer preserving disappearing languages An LGBTQ+ digital activist ed...

Is it possible to define, measure and even increase how wise a person is? Psychiatrist Dilip Jeste is attempting to answer those questions. To assess our health, we weigh ourselves, measure our blood pressure, and check our cholesterol. But one scientist is trying to figure out the connection between our well-being and something much more diffi...

Photo: James Duncan Davidson Michael Tilson Thomas is the music director of the San Francisco Symphony, founder and artistic director of the New World Symphony and principal guest conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra. Now he's up to round off this session in style, seated at a grand piano that's been wheeled onto the stage just for ...

Rick Ledgett is the deputy director of the National Security Agency. He's here to give a response to Edward Snowden's onstage/virtual appearance at TED earlier in the week. (See the talk, Here's how we take back the Internet.) On Tuesday, the former NSA sysadmin made the case for open government and private lives, arguing that "we don't have...

While it may result in tremendous good, empathy can also be narrow, biased and surprisingly insensitive, argues psychology professor Paul Bloom. Does empathy make the world a better place? It certainly looks like it. After all, empathy drives people to treat others’ suffering as if it were their own, which then motivates action to make the suff...

There are two ways to see a glass of water—some view it as half full, others refer to it as half empty. During the third day of TEDGlobal, the speakers fell into one of the two camps. While many spoke about the ways in which new technology and increasing global openness can bring people together in unique and fascinating ways, another subset of ...