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...

Actress + playwright

About this event: Here's the recap from our discussion: Thank you for joining our engaging discussion on VS Ramachandran’s The neurons that shaped civilization. As a follow up to our conversation about the brain and cognitive function, we've put together a list of resources for further exploration. Medicine/Healing National Center for Complementary and...

About this event: TEDxSacramento's stream of TEDxWomen -- hosted by Pat Mitchell and the Paley Center for Media - will take place at The Urban Hive on Saturday, December 1st, 2012. Themed The Space Between -- This is the second edition of TEDxWomen - the first brought to the stage speakers such as Gloria Steinem, Dr. Oz and Jane Fonda and was viewed by 120 TEDx ...

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...

At his lab at Stanford School of Medicine, Tony Wyss-Coray studies aging -- and potential cures for it.

About this event: CJ Hendry After seven years, two incomplete degrees and a HECs debt she describes as from here to Africa, CJ Hendry decided to chase her dream. Armed with only paper and pen, she creates magnificent, photorealistic black-and-white images in large format, creating a sensation in the art world and around the globe. Jesse Richardson Jesse is a...

Here's a TED first: an animated Socratic dialog! In a time when irrationality seems to rule both politics and culture, has reasoned thinking finally lost its power? Watch as psychologist Steven Pinker is gradually, brilliantly persuaded by philosopher Rebecca Newberger Goldstein that reason is actually the key driver of human moral progress, eve...

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 ...

Grégoire Courtine and his interdisciplinary lab imagine new ways to recover after devastating, mobility-impairing injury to the spinal cord.

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...

Eva Vertes is a microbiology prodigy. Her discovery, at age 17, of a compound that stops fruit-fly brain cells from dying was regarded as a step toward curing Alzheimer's. Now she aims to find better ways to treat -- and avoid -- cancer.

(NOTE: Some of the findings presented in this talk have been referenced in an ongoing debate among social scientists about robustness and reproducibility. Read "Criticisms & updates" below for more details as well as Amy Cuddy's response.) Body language affects how others see us, but it may also change how we see ourselves. Social psychologi...

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...

In 1995, the British Medical Journal published a report about a builder who accidentally jumped onto a nail, which pierced straight through his steel-toed boot. He was in such agonizing pain that any movement was unbearable. But when the doctors took off his boot, they discovered that the nail had never touched his foot at all. What's going on? ...

"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...