What would Latin America look like if colonization hadn't interrupted its ancient civilizations? Imagining a future where ancestral knowledge intertwines with modern aesthetics, designer Catalina Lotero shows how "pre-Columbian futurism" draws inspiration from Indigenous symbolism and technology — empowering Latin America to reclaim lost cultura...

Yami Joshi had just landed a dream job and a placement in graduate school when she got into a complex relationship ... with stress. In this delightful talk followed by a riveting eight-person dance, Joshi demonstrates how the cleansing qualities and symbolism of a two thousand year-old classical Indian dance can be a cure for our modern-day anxi...

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s “Die Zauberflöte” (“The Magic Flute”) is widely regarded as one of the most influential operas in history. And while it may seem like a childish fairytale at first glance, it’s actually full of subversive symbolism. Joshua Borths explains how many elements of "The Magic Flute" were inspired by Mozart’s somewhat controve...

In 1937, in one of the worst civilian casualties of the Spanish Civil War, Fascist forces bombed the village of Guernica in Northern Spain. For Pablo Picasso, the tragedy sparked a frenzied period of work in which he produced a massive anti-war mural, titled "Guernica." How can we make sense of this overwhelming image, and what makes it a master...

Genevieve von Petzinger studies the geometric signs found in early European Ice Age rock art sites.

The founder of Zimbabwe's first graphic arts college shares some teaching resources he loves. Ten years after writing the book on Africa's graphic design heritage, Saki Mafundikwa is now at work on a new text -- about the long, rich history of African art and innovation (TED Talk: Ingenuity and elegance in ancient African alphabets). Mafundik...

Ted Kaye wrote the book, Good Flag, Bad Flag: How to Design a Great Flag, and as I shared in my TED Talk, Why city flags might be the worst-designed thing you’ve never noticed, he came up with five basic principles for designing a great flag (and almost anything else): Keep it simple, so simple a child can draw it from memory. Use meanin...

About this event: This year's theme, inspired by the Avenues World Element "Abstraction," challenges speakers to think creatively and interpret ideas in unique ways. Abstraction can be applied to topics like art, technology, science, communication, or personal experiences. Abstraction is the conceptual process of deriving general rules and concepts from real-wor...

About this event: Kintsugi: Breaking, Mending, Renewing is a theme that places emphasis on taking risks and exploring the unknown. Talks will defy the norm and draw together conventionally disparate themes, ideas, or techniques. We hope to encourage radical thinking and embrace the discoveries that come from taking a chance to break the conventional and emerge wi...

In a session that honors the “deeply practical and the entirely improbable,” pyromantics and biosynthetic designers meet artists and flag-worshippers. Helen Walters, host of Session 10: Creative Ignition, calls this session a "celebration of the catalytic thinking that reshapes the world around us." Here's a recap: How to reboot society. ...

Last night's Opening Ceremony for the 2012 Olympics was filled with symbolism and storytelling over centuries of UK history. Intrigued by the stories and players? Dive into these related TEDTalks! The Olympic pageant begins with an idyllic vision of green fields -- coolly surveyed by a top-hatted engineer with grand plans to build the UK ...

About this event: The Circles. We can find them everywhere around us. From everlasting, they are being part of our world. They are universally comprehensible for all cultures, define and symbolize the perfection, the cycle of life and death, the universe, unity and order. Cirle appeares in the prehistorical cave paintings, in the Buddhist mandalas, even in the ...

Hailing from the Talent Search salon in Bangalore, Ajit Narayanan is here to tell us about his work helping autistic children to communicate. One of the challenges that faces those working in this field: People with autism can sometimes find it difficult to understand abstraction or symbolism--and therefore they struggle with language. Mu...

Neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky shows us the surprising ways that our brains get mixed up between the physical and metaphorical -- and how this can pit us against each other. When humans put pigment to wall in Lascaux Cave more than 17,000 years ago, the point was to minimize the distance between object and representation, to be as close as poss...

Turns out the fortune cookie that came with your chop suey isn’t actually Chinese … and neither is the chop suey. So where did they come from? In this TED Talk, journalist Jennifer 8. Lee shares the origins of some of America’s favorite “Chinese” food, and takes us on a culinary tour of Chinese restaurants around the world -- whose menus ofte...

A well-designed flag can be a thing of beauty, inspiring pledges of allegiance galore. But weirdly, bad flags can inspire passion and loyalty too, suggesting that democracy and design don’t always work together hand-in-hand. In 1926, the Union of South Africa needed a flag -- badly. Formed in 1910 by the joining of four former colonies, South ...

How, exactly, does a Leonardo da Vinci mural believed to be three times the width of The Last Supper get lost? This is a mystery that Maurizio Seracini has been trying to solve since 1975. After graduating with a degree in engineering from the University of California San Diego, Seracini was approached about a project in his hometown of Flo...

On the TED stage, illusionist Marco Tempest has explored the nature of truth and lies, brought a stick figure to life, charted the meaning of magic and told the sad tale of inventor Nikola Tesla. In his latest performance, given this summer at TEDGlobal, Tempest turns his eye to a magician’s classic: a deck of cards. With his augmented-real...

On Sunday, May 26, two rockets soared over Beirut, Lebanon, hitting a Shi’ite Muslim area in the southern part of the city. The rockets raised fears that Beirut could become embroiled in the civil war raging in nearby Syria. And yet, these bombs did not stop women throughout the city from lacing up their running sneakers and taking to the st...

You’ve probably heard of Area 51. But how about Area Zero? Area Zero is the flagship center of Sugata Mitra’s School in the Cloud, the idea that won him the 2013 TED Prize. It’s the final of Mitra’s labs dedicated to self-organized learning, and it opened this morning in Gocharan in West Bengal, India. A solar-powered building with large ...

By Damon Brown The morning of our wedding, my wife and I only had one major discussion: Should we bring our cell phones? She loved Facebook as much as I loved Twitter, and since we’ve lived and made friends all across the country, the social networks made it easier to stay connected to our loved ones far away. We wanted those who couldn’t mak...

No stranger to the TED stage himself, geo-strategist and author Parag Khanna is curating one of the sessions at this year’s TEDGlobal. “The Upside of Transparency” promises to be enlightening, thought-provoking -- and perhaps just a little bit scary. Helen Walters recently talked to Parag in London. An edited version of their conversation fo...

About this event: Explaining the myths ... \ n \ n The third year of TEDxChania takes us several years back when the king was still Minos. Our third year brings us to Mito. You can not miss us today in a labyrinth concealing a mythical monster, yet we can not avoid symbolism. We are disoriented at a time when it requires excellence at all levels. We often catc...

(Editor's note, as of Nov. 1, 2019: Ameenah Gurib-Fakim stepped down as president of Mauritius in March 2018, following accusations that she misused a credit card given to her by a nonprofit. Read more here.) You’ve heard of a philosopher king. But what about a biologist president? Ameenah Gurib-Fakim — the biologist who gave the TED T...

About this event: In our society, colors represent the symbolic meaning of different. In the case of occupational groups, the "white" for office workers and the "blue" for workers working in the field have also been established as their symbols, depending on the color of the clothes they wear. We also call the Fourth Industrial Revolution and types of occupations...

Russian artist Uldus Bakhtiozina, who has gained attention for her surreal, staged portraits, breaks down the magic of self-portraiture in our selfie-saturated time. It was only in 2013 that the Oxford English Dictionary named “selfie” the Word of the Year, but given the way the word has come to exemplify contemporary culture, it’s already hard...

Yes, you can have a successful divorce, says relationship therapist Esther Perel. The first step? Writing goodbye letters to each other. Our culture views divorce as a failure, and even more so when it is precipitated by an infidelity. Longevity is seen as the ultimate indicator of marital achievement, but plenty of people who stayed “till deat...

Monika Bulaj’s stunning, painting-like photographs blur religious and cultural divisions, exploding stereotypes. In your photography and writing, one of your main themes is to explore the “borders of monotheism.” What does that mean? I often focus on Judaism, Christianity (mainly Eastern Christianity) and Islam, to explore areas where the ...

While training for the military, Rye Barcott took leave to study ethnic conflict by living in Kibera, Kenya’s largest slum. Inspired by community-led initiatives there, Rye co-founded the non-profit Carolina for Kibera to support the projects. His newly released book, It Happened on the Way to War: A Marine’s Path to Peace chronicles his journ...

About this event: As the youth in a disruptive era, Generation Z in Indonesia shoulders a big responsibility in successfully transforming Indonesia into a developed nation to Indonesia Emas in 2045. The population growth is speculated to reach a point where Indonesia will enter a demographic bonus phase with a productive age group. It is one of the greatest oppor...