About this event: Eight Salem State University faculty members will present during the university's first ever TEDxSalemStateUniversity event. Our inaugural event’s theme is “Hospitality in a Changing World,” which connects to the city of Salem’s historical importance as a major hub for international commerce during the 17th and 18th centuries, as well as an eme...

About this event: The motto of the upcoming TEDxMünchen 2014 is "At Second Glance/ Auf den zweiten Blick". Together with our speakers, we will go below the surface and dig deeper. We would like to challenge bias and re-discover things we think to be well known. We want to pay attention to details that have been overlooked and look at things through the eyes of ot...

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...

It never hurts to have a basic set of guiding principles. TED partnered with Brightline Initiative to bring their 10 Guiding Principles to life.

Kirby Ferguson explores creativity in a world where "everything is a remix."

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...

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...

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...

By taking the phrase "Black Lives Matter" onto social media, Opal Tometi helped turn a hashtag into a networked movement.

About this event: You are cordially invited to the next TEDxTheHague salon! Our April edition — themed Isms Cause Schisms — is curated by TEDxTheHague: "Dogmatism, perfectionism, sensationalism... isms have the power to take over our lives — if we let them. But what’s behind these isms? Sometimes it’s a role we play, a mask we wear, to get the approval we crav...

Imagine a day filled with brilliant speakers, thought-provoking video and mind-blowing conversation. By organizing a TEDx event, you can create a unique gathering in your community that will unleash new ideas, inspire and inform.

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...

About this event: The theme for this late spring event is ALIVE! Maximum Living as a Human. We will explore big questions through (in TED fashion) the eyes of science, business, arts, letters, music and more. Our events have a San Francisco flavor, in that they have a technology and startup bias, and a broad spirit of inquiry. ALIVE! will examine the human ...

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...

Escape with host Saleem Reshamwala as he journeys across the globe in search of the world's most surprising and imaginative ideas. It's not a travel show, exactly. It's a deep dive into the ideas that shape a particular spot on the map, brought to you by local journalists and creators. Weave through the streets of Bangkok with a motorcycle mid...

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...

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. I caught up with a friend of mine a while ago. She's smart, she's brilliant, and she's talented. After we did the usual warm-up chitchat, she looked at me and sa...

  [embed]https://www.ted.com/talks/ray_dalio_how_to_build_a_company_where_the_best_ideas_win[/embed] The past few weeks have brimmed over with TED-related news. Below, some highlights. Exploring the ocean like never before. A school of ocean-loving TED speakers have teamed up to launch OceanX, an international initiative dedicated to di...

Featured image: Austrian physicist Lise Meitner, who first developed the theory explaining the process of nuclear fission. Theoretical physicist (and TED Fellow) Shohini Ghose has two great passions: physics, and advocating for gender equity in the sciences. “There are still relatively few women in physics – and the higher up the ladder in ac...

TED Blog exclusive video: Steve Rosenbaum takes us on a private tour of the 9/11 Museum, under construction now at the site of the World Trade Center towers. Below, he talks about why he joined the effort to create a memorial of the people and events of September 11, 2001. Why did you decide to document the curation and construction of the...