"ONLY THOSE WHO CARE ABOUT YOU CAN HEAR YOU WHEN YOU´RE QUIET"
Source: Pinterest
In this blog, teachers, students and all those who have some kind of interest in the English language will find useful, interesting, curious and funny things to be used in their classes or for their personal enjoyment.
Friday, November 27, 2015
GralInt-Friends & Care
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
"ONLY THOSE WHO CARE ABOUT YOU CAN HEAR YOU WHEN YOU´RE QUIET"
Source: Pinterest
"ONLY THOSE WHO CARE ABOUT YOU CAN HEAR YOU WHEN YOU´RE QUIET"
Source: Pinterest
MUS/GralInt-Adele cantando "Hello" con instrumentos musicales de juguete
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Adele cantando "Hello" con instrumentos musicales de juguete
La diosa del pop británico volvió a sorprender en TV: invitada al The tonight show with Jimmy Fallon, cantó su hit "Hello" acompañada por una banda con intrumentos musicales de juguete.
Adele sabe cómo hacerse notar: cantando, claro. Pero además, la última diosa del pop británico entiende a la perfección eso de las redes sociales, y sabe como seguir impactando. Y así como hace unos días la mostrábamos sorprendiendo en la tele británica a un grupo de imitadoras de Adele, esta vez se lució en la TV norteamericana, con la complicidad de Jimmy Fallon.
El cómico la invitó a The tonight show with Jimmy Fallon y le propuso cantar su hit, Hello,pero acompañada The roots, la banda de rap, quienes la acompañaron, pero utilizando intrumentos de juguete.
El resultado es tan bueno que, de inmediato, el tema se viralizó en las redes, para ser consumido por más de 6 millones de usuarios en YouTube. Nada raro, por otra parte. Adele acaba de lanzar 25, su último disco, que a partir del 20 de noviembre último trepó hasta la cima del ranking en Estados Unidos, entre otros paises.
LYRICS: "HELLO"
Hello, it's me
I was wondering if after all these years you'd like to meet
To go over everything
They say that time's supposed to heal ya
But I ain't done much healing
Hello, can you hear me
I'm in California dreaming about who we used to be
When we were younger and free
I've forgotten how it felt before the world fell at our feet
There's such a difference between us
And a million miles
Hello from the other side
I must have called a thousand times
To tell you I'm sorry for everything that I've done
But when I call you never seem to be home
Hello from the outside
At least I can say that I've tried
To tell you I'm sorry for breaking your heart
But it don't matter it clearly doesn't tear you apart anymore
Hello, how are you
It's so typical of me to talk about myself I'm sorry
I hope that you're well
Did you ever make it out of that town where nothing ever happened
It's no secret that the both of us
Are running out of time
So hello from the other side
I must have called a thousand times
To tell you I'm sorry for everything that I've done
But when I call you never seem to be home
Hello from the outside
At least I can say that I've tried
To tell you I'm sorry for breaking your heart
But it don't matter it clearly doesn't tear you apart anymore
[x4:]
(Highs highs highs highs
Lows lows lows lows)
Hello from the other side
I must have called a thousand times
To tell you I'm sorry for everything that I've done
But when I call you never seem to be home
Hello from the outside
At least I can say that I've tried
To tell you I'm sorry for breaking your heart
But it don't matter it clearly doesn't tear you apart anymore
Fuente/Source:http://www.clarin.com/extrashow/fama/adele-The_tonight_show_with_Jimmy_Fallon_0_1474652845.html/http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/adele/hello.html
Adele cantando "Hello" con instrumentos musicales de juguete
La diosa del pop británico volvió a sorprender en TV: invitada al The tonight show with Jimmy Fallon, cantó su hit "Hello" acompañada por una banda con intrumentos musicales de juguete.
Adele sabe cómo hacerse notar: cantando, claro. Pero además, la última diosa del pop británico entiende a la perfección eso de las redes sociales, y sabe como seguir impactando. Y así como hace unos días la mostrábamos sorprendiendo en la tele británica a un grupo de imitadoras de Adele, esta vez se lució en la TV norteamericana, con la complicidad de Jimmy Fallon.
El cómico la invitó a The tonight show with Jimmy Fallon y le propuso cantar su hit, Hello,pero acompañada The roots, la banda de rap, quienes la acompañaron, pero utilizando intrumentos de juguete.
El resultado es tan bueno que, de inmediato, el tema se viralizó en las redes, para ser consumido por más de 6 millones de usuarios en YouTube. Nada raro, por otra parte. Adele acaba de lanzar 25, su último disco, que a partir del 20 de noviembre último trepó hasta la cima del ranking en Estados Unidos, entre otros paises.
LYRICS: "HELLO"
Hello, it's me
I was wondering if after all these years you'd like to meet
To go over everything
They say that time's supposed to heal ya
But I ain't done much healing
Hello, can you hear me
I'm in California dreaming about who we used to be
When we were younger and free
I've forgotten how it felt before the world fell at our feet
There's such a difference between us
And a million miles
Hello from the other side
I must have called a thousand times
To tell you I'm sorry for everything that I've done
But when I call you never seem to be home
Hello from the outside
At least I can say that I've tried
To tell you I'm sorry for breaking your heart
But it don't matter it clearly doesn't tear you apart anymore
Hello, how are you
It's so typical of me to talk about myself I'm sorry
I hope that you're well
Did you ever make it out of that town where nothing ever happened
It's no secret that the both of us
Are running out of time
So hello from the other side
I must have called a thousand times
To tell you I'm sorry for everything that I've done
But when I call you never seem to be home
Hello from the outside
At least I can say that I've tried
To tell you I'm sorry for breaking your heart
But it don't matter it clearly doesn't tear you apart anymore
[x4:]
(Highs highs highs highs
Lows lows lows lows)
Hello from the other side
I must have called a thousand times
To tell you I'm sorry for everything that I've done
But when I call you never seem to be home
Hello from the outside
At least I can say that I've tried
To tell you I'm sorry for breaking your heart
But it don't matter it clearly doesn't tear you apart anymore
Fuente/Source:http://www.clarin.com/extrashow/fama/adele-The_tonight_show_with_Jimmy_Fallon_0_1474652845.html/http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/adele/hello.html
Thursday, November 26, 2015
POL/GralInt-Los políticos son inquilinos del poder
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Los políticos son inquilinos del poder
El kirchnerismo creyó que su mandato era de duración indefinida, pero la ciudadanía acaba de recordarle a toda la dirigencia que los contratos tienen plazos y no hay en ellos cláusulas de renovación automática
26 DE NOVIEMBRE DE 2015
por Alvaro Abos
Lo tuvimos que conducir nosotros. Los ciudadanos. Me refiero al largo proceso electoral argentino. Que incluyó primarias obligatorias, primera vuelta, segunda vuelta o ballottage. En cada caso, los políticos expusieron argumentos, promesas y caramelos varios. En cada caso, nosotros, los integrantes de la sociedad civil, y sobre todo quienes conformamos un electorado independiente y crítico, a esta altura altamente informado, discriminamos, desarticulamos ofertas truchas, dijimos no a tentaciones varias, preferimos a unos y descartamos a otros, evaluamos el género como quien entra a una tienda y manosea texturas. Y finalmente, decidimos.
Todo este largo proceso fue acompañado por un aluvión de interpretaciones. La política argentina está sobreanalizada y abundan las lecturas en un universo mediático que ofrece desde una sofisticada lucidez hasta una inane bullanguería, cuando no una astucia interesada más próxima a la viveza criolla que a cualquier equidistancia.
Se acusa a los encuestadores de haber fallado en sus predicciones sobre el escenario electoral. ¿Fue así? Los encuestadores alcanzaron a detectar las orientaciones principales. Así, en la primera vuelta presidencial, acertaron el orden: 1) Scioli, 2) Macri, 3) Massa, pero fallaron en las cifras: la mayoría pronosticó un triunfo de Scioli en la primera vuelta. En la segunda vuelta, volvieron a acertar el orden y a fallar en las cifras: pronosticaron que Macri le sacaría diez puntos a Scioli y fue sólo 2,8 por ciento. Pobre desempeño para una sociología electoral que a esta altura de las técnicas podría ser más afinada.
Banners_clubeala300x250_captacion
Con la figura de Horacio Rodríguez Larreta se detectó una tendencia fuerte en el largo proceso electoral. Larreta es gestión sin carga ideológica. Y esto es una necesidad que impregna a toda la sociedad urbana, porteña y no porteña, sea del nivel social que sea. ¿Es más importante una canilla que una idea? Es que sin canilla las ideas se vuelven entelequias y coartadas. Queremos un Estado que ordene los caos urbanos porque eso puede| ayudar a restaurar formas elementales de justicia.
Cuando tuvimos que votar por un jefe de gobierno, Larreta estuvo a punto de ser vencido por Martín Lousteau. Allí el vencedor, por si acaso no lo tuviera claro, recibió este mensaje: los servicios que se espera de usted estarán vigilados y si no satisfacen, tiene reemplazo a la brevedad. Señores políticos, la sociedad es la dueña del poder y los gobernantes son sus inquilinos. Los contratos tienen plazo de duración y no hay en ellos cláusulas de renovación automática. Nos veremos cuando el contrato se haya terminado. Y cuando el inquilino devuelva lo que recibió, contaremos hasta el último tenedor.
Mientras tanto, pondremos buena onda y ¡le deseamos suerte!
El equívoco sobre el concepto del Estado como bien propio explica lo sucedido en la elección presidencial. El kirchnerismo creyó que su mandato era de duración indefinida. El equívoco lo alimentó la muerte de Néstor Kirchner, en 2010. Al año siguiente, una sociedad conmovida -y muy movilizada por una fuerte campaña necrológica- reeligió a Cristina Kirchner. Esa carga emocional llevó a la ocupante de la Casa Rosada a pensarse eterna y disparó su codicia: "Vamos por todo". Un grupo de nostálgicos de sombrías insurgencias pretéritas revistió esa ambición con los disfraces de una narrativa epopéyica. Así, unos políticos sureños audaces se travistieron de revolucionarios y terminaron dejando un país enfermo de corrupción, inseguridad y pobreza. La falsa epopeya culminó encarnando en un candidato, Daniel Scioli, que había sido despreciado y humillado por los clarines de la pseudorrevolución y que convirtió la segunda vuelta en una orgía de la amenaza. A los viejitos y a los pobres los quisieron correr con el miedo: el cuco, decían, les iba a quitar las monedas que les da el Estado.
La idea K del poder como eternidad, una idea profundamente monárquica, fue desarticulada primero por Sergio Massa, que en la elección parlamentaria de 2013 canceló los proyectos de reforma constitucional continuista, y luego por Cambiemos, que resistió la campaña del miedo. En este sentido, la intuición social gobernó el proceso. Era necesario, se dijo, que Massa y Macri se unieran para desplazar al kirchnerismo. Macri resistió esa idea porque entendió que Massa recogería algunas piezas sueltas de un peronismo que ya había dejado atrás el proyecto K. Algunos temían que la división opositora entronizara ese proyecto. Fue al revés. El Frente Renovador recogió cosecha peronista y algunos votantes de Massa, en la segunda vuelta, definieron el ajustado resultado final a favor de Cambiemos.
Este proceso fue protagonizado por la sociedad y en especial por los votantes independientes y críticos que, en cada caso, evaluamos y optamos. Por Larreta, para premiar y advertir. Por Macri, para preferirlo a Massa como mejor representante del antikirchnerismo social, y, finalmente, por Macri, como nuevo inquilino de la Rosada. En cada caso, con sus contrapesos y advertencias. Massa, con más del 20% de los votos, debe ser tomado en cuenta. Y los K, ahora fuera del poder, enviados a la oposición. El partido del poder, el PRI argentino, irá al llano después de 14 años. Como debió hacerlo el peronismo en 1955, en condiciones muy distintas. Esta vez no los echaron las bombas y los tanques, sino los votos. El llano mostró que aquello no era flor de un día.
En 1983, recién llegado de años de exilio, fui ilusionado, casi estupefacto, a las dos concentraciones finales de ambos partidos en pugna. En la avenida 9 de Julio, Raúl Alfonsín recitó el Preámbulo de la Constitución como un rezo. Ítalo Luder dijo que volvía el pueblo y a su lado Herminio Iglesias quemó el ataúd. En cada caso, había en la calle un millón de personas. Esta vez los actos de cierre fueron poca cosa, apenas la televisión mostrando discursos que en general fueron desplazados por los partidos de Boca o de River.
No siento nostalgia de aquellos fastos. Estamos más serenos, ha corrido agua bajo los puentes y hemos aprendido, con dolor, que la vida es, como lo recuerda Félix de Azúa, un largo aprendizaje de la decepción.
Que la esperanza sea más chiquita, casi secreta, no quiere decir que no exista.
Fuente: www.lanacion.com.ar
Los políticos son inquilinos del poder
El kirchnerismo creyó que su mandato era de duración indefinida, pero la ciudadanía acaba de recordarle a toda la dirigencia que los contratos tienen plazos y no hay en ellos cláusulas de renovación automática
26 DE NOVIEMBRE DE 2015
por Alvaro Abos
Lo tuvimos que conducir nosotros. Los ciudadanos. Me refiero al largo proceso electoral argentino. Que incluyó primarias obligatorias, primera vuelta, segunda vuelta o ballottage. En cada caso, los políticos expusieron argumentos, promesas y caramelos varios. En cada caso, nosotros, los integrantes de la sociedad civil, y sobre todo quienes conformamos un electorado independiente y crítico, a esta altura altamente informado, discriminamos, desarticulamos ofertas truchas, dijimos no a tentaciones varias, preferimos a unos y descartamos a otros, evaluamos el género como quien entra a una tienda y manosea texturas. Y finalmente, decidimos.
Todo este largo proceso fue acompañado por un aluvión de interpretaciones. La política argentina está sobreanalizada y abundan las lecturas en un universo mediático que ofrece desde una sofisticada lucidez hasta una inane bullanguería, cuando no una astucia interesada más próxima a la viveza criolla que a cualquier equidistancia.
Se acusa a los encuestadores de haber fallado en sus predicciones sobre el escenario electoral. ¿Fue así? Los encuestadores alcanzaron a detectar las orientaciones principales. Así, en la primera vuelta presidencial, acertaron el orden: 1) Scioli, 2) Macri, 3) Massa, pero fallaron en las cifras: la mayoría pronosticó un triunfo de Scioli en la primera vuelta. En la segunda vuelta, volvieron a acertar el orden y a fallar en las cifras: pronosticaron que Macri le sacaría diez puntos a Scioli y fue sólo 2,8 por ciento. Pobre desempeño para una sociología electoral que a esta altura de las técnicas podría ser más afinada.
Banners_clubeala300x250_captacion
Con la figura de Horacio Rodríguez Larreta se detectó una tendencia fuerte en el largo proceso electoral. Larreta es gestión sin carga ideológica. Y esto es una necesidad que impregna a toda la sociedad urbana, porteña y no porteña, sea del nivel social que sea. ¿Es más importante una canilla que una idea? Es que sin canilla las ideas se vuelven entelequias y coartadas. Queremos un Estado que ordene los caos urbanos porque eso puede| ayudar a restaurar formas elementales de justicia.
Cuando tuvimos que votar por un jefe de gobierno, Larreta estuvo a punto de ser vencido por Martín Lousteau. Allí el vencedor, por si acaso no lo tuviera claro, recibió este mensaje: los servicios que se espera de usted estarán vigilados y si no satisfacen, tiene reemplazo a la brevedad. Señores políticos, la sociedad es la dueña del poder y los gobernantes son sus inquilinos. Los contratos tienen plazo de duración y no hay en ellos cláusulas de renovación automática. Nos veremos cuando el contrato se haya terminado. Y cuando el inquilino devuelva lo que recibió, contaremos hasta el último tenedor.
Mientras tanto, pondremos buena onda y ¡le deseamos suerte!
El equívoco sobre el concepto del Estado como bien propio explica lo sucedido en la elección presidencial. El kirchnerismo creyó que su mandato era de duración indefinida. El equívoco lo alimentó la muerte de Néstor Kirchner, en 2010. Al año siguiente, una sociedad conmovida -y muy movilizada por una fuerte campaña necrológica- reeligió a Cristina Kirchner. Esa carga emocional llevó a la ocupante de la Casa Rosada a pensarse eterna y disparó su codicia: "Vamos por todo". Un grupo de nostálgicos de sombrías insurgencias pretéritas revistió esa ambición con los disfraces de una narrativa epopéyica. Así, unos políticos sureños audaces se travistieron de revolucionarios y terminaron dejando un país enfermo de corrupción, inseguridad y pobreza. La falsa epopeya culminó encarnando en un candidato, Daniel Scioli, que había sido despreciado y humillado por los clarines de la pseudorrevolución y que convirtió la segunda vuelta en una orgía de la amenaza. A los viejitos y a los pobres los quisieron correr con el miedo: el cuco, decían, les iba a quitar las monedas que les da el Estado.
La idea K del poder como eternidad, una idea profundamente monárquica, fue desarticulada primero por Sergio Massa, que en la elección parlamentaria de 2013 canceló los proyectos de reforma constitucional continuista, y luego por Cambiemos, que resistió la campaña del miedo. En este sentido, la intuición social gobernó el proceso. Era necesario, se dijo, que Massa y Macri se unieran para desplazar al kirchnerismo. Macri resistió esa idea porque entendió que Massa recogería algunas piezas sueltas de un peronismo que ya había dejado atrás el proyecto K. Algunos temían que la división opositora entronizara ese proyecto. Fue al revés. El Frente Renovador recogió cosecha peronista y algunos votantes de Massa, en la segunda vuelta, definieron el ajustado resultado final a favor de Cambiemos.
Este proceso fue protagonizado por la sociedad y en especial por los votantes independientes y críticos que, en cada caso, evaluamos y optamos. Por Larreta, para premiar y advertir. Por Macri, para preferirlo a Massa como mejor representante del antikirchnerismo social, y, finalmente, por Macri, como nuevo inquilino de la Rosada. En cada caso, con sus contrapesos y advertencias. Massa, con más del 20% de los votos, debe ser tomado en cuenta. Y los K, ahora fuera del poder, enviados a la oposición. El partido del poder, el PRI argentino, irá al llano después de 14 años. Como debió hacerlo el peronismo en 1955, en condiciones muy distintas. Esta vez no los echaron las bombas y los tanques, sino los votos. El llano mostró que aquello no era flor de un día.
En 1983, recién llegado de años de exilio, fui ilusionado, casi estupefacto, a las dos concentraciones finales de ambos partidos en pugna. En la avenida 9 de Julio, Raúl Alfonsín recitó el Preámbulo de la Constitución como un rezo. Ítalo Luder dijo que volvía el pueblo y a su lado Herminio Iglesias quemó el ataúd. En cada caso, había en la calle un millón de personas. Esta vez los actos de cierre fueron poca cosa, apenas la televisión mostrando discursos que en general fueron desplazados por los partidos de Boca o de River.
No siento nostalgia de aquellos fastos. Estamos más serenos, ha corrido agua bajo los puentes y hemos aprendido, con dolor, que la vida es, como lo recuerda Félix de Azúa, un largo aprendizaje de la decepción.
Que la esperanza sea más chiquita, casi secreta, no quiere decir que no exista.
Fuente: www.lanacion.com.ar
GralInt-Un paso en falso para una transición ordenada
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Un paso en falso para una transición ordenada
La primera reunión entre Cristina Kirchner y Mauricio Macri distó de ser un buen ejemplo de cooperación por parte de la primera mandataria
26 DE NOVIEMBRE DE 2015
En cualquier república moderna, la transición entre dos presidentes debe constituir un ejemplo de convivencia democrática, caracterizado por la cooperación y el diálogo. Por lo visto hasta ahora, el traspaso del poder de Cristina Fernández de Kirchner a Mauricio Macri distará de serlo.
La primera mandataria desperdició anteanoche una magnífica oportunidad para brindar una señal de mancomunión a los argentinos y de previsibilidad al mundo entero, al no reparar en las más mínimas normas de civilidad, durante el fugaz encuentro que mantuvo con quien será su sucesor en la quinta presidencial de Olivos.
Apenas veinte minutos duró una reunión que, al decir de Macri, "no valió la pena", en tanto sólo se habló de formalidades vinculadas con el acto de traspaso del mando. Más grave aún es que, según lo expresado por el presidente electo, la jefa del Estado indicara que sus ministros sólo estarán a disposición de los futuros miembros del gabinete nominados por Macri después de la transmisión del poder, que tendrá lugar el 10 de diciembre.
El encuentro de Olivos era una ocasión perfecta para que la presidenta en ejercicio y el presidente electo testimoniaran en una foto, juntos, sus mutuas promesas de colaboración en esta transición. Pero no sólo no hubo ningún registro fotográfico del cónclave, sino que se le negó a Macri la posibilidad de brindar una conferencia de prensa en una sala de la residencia presidencial. El actual jefe de gobierno de la ciudad de Buenos Aires debió salir de Olivos por una puerta trasera en medio de un tumulto que tornó inviable el diálogo con los periodistas apostados en el lugar. Fue una escena penosa e indigna, que más que inmerecida para el futuro mandatario de todos los argentinos es degradante para la investidura presidencial y para la propia ciudadanía, que lo menos que puede esperar tras el veredicto de las urnas es un marco de respeto y buenos modales.
Evidentemente, en la presidenta de la Nación no ha cundido el excelente ejemplo que dos años atrás protagonizaron sus pares chilenos Sebastián Piñera y Michelle Bachelet, cuando ésta ganó las últimas elecciones presidenciales de su país y fue convocada por su antecesor a un encuentro donde, delante de las cámaras de televisión, se prodigaron elogios, al tiempo que Piñera comprometió una actitud constructiva, que justificó al decir: "Después de todo, más allá de nuestras diferencias, todos queremos lo mismo, lo mejor para Chile".
Afortunadamente, no hay que ir demasiado lejos para hallar buenos ejemplos de transición en democracia. En junio pasado, inmediatamente después de los comicios de gobernador en Mendoza, el mandatario electo, el radical Alfredo Cornejo, fue invitado por el gobernador Francisco "Paco" Pérez, de extracción peronista, a un desayuno con el fin de iniciar el proceso de transmisión del mando.
La misma situación de cooperación parecería estar dándose entre el gobernador bonaerense, Daniel Scioli, y su sucesora, María Eugenia Vidal, quien tras el encuentro mantenido ayer entre ambos se mostró conforme y anunció que podrían producirse más reuniones similares, incluso después de su asunción. En el mismo sentido, un día antes el ministro de Seguridad provincial, Alejandro Granados, participó de un acto con el dirigente macrista Cristian Ritondo, quien lo reemplazará en ese puesto cuando asuma la nueva administración. El problema de la inseguridad es, por lejos, la mayor preocupación de los bonaerenses, por lo que el citado encuentro podría ser un primer paso para que, en algún momento, la dirigencia política advierta la necesidad de diseñar una auténtica política de Estado tendiente a enfrentar ese flagelo.
La sociedad argentina tiene derecho a esperar una transición presidencial que deje de lado la crispación, el ensañamiento y los malos modales que han caracterizado la gestión nacional kirchnerista. La tolerancia y el diálogo deben imponerse sobre el desprecio y la descalificación del adversario, al tiempo que la cultura del encuentro debe empezar a suceder a la nefasta cultura de la confrontación.
Lamentablemente, la primera y tan esperada reunión mantenida por la jefa del Estado y quien la sucederá distó de ser una buena señal frente a los enormes problemas que heredará el próximo gobierno nacional. En particular, a partir de un déficit fiscal récord y de la incertidumbre en torno de las verdaderas reservas disponibles en las arcas del Banco Central.
En la víspera, durante un acto público realizado en El Palomar, Cristina Kirchner, tras las críticas que mereció por los escasos avances registrados en su encuentro con Macri, aseguró: "Jamás se nos ocurriría hacer algo que dañara la gobernabilidad y la convivencia de los argentinos".
Es de esperar que esas palabras se transformen rápidamente en hechos concretos, que coloquen a la Argentina en la senda del diálogo, del esfuerzo compartido y de la previsibilidad, tan necesaria en estos momentos para dejar atrás el estancamiento económico de los últimos años y potenciar las posibilidades de crecimiento del país.
Fuente: www.lanacion.com.ar
Un paso en falso para una transición ordenada
La primera reunión entre Cristina Kirchner y Mauricio Macri distó de ser un buen ejemplo de cooperación por parte de la primera mandataria
26 DE NOVIEMBRE DE 2015
En cualquier república moderna, la transición entre dos presidentes debe constituir un ejemplo de convivencia democrática, caracterizado por la cooperación y el diálogo. Por lo visto hasta ahora, el traspaso del poder de Cristina Fernández de Kirchner a Mauricio Macri distará de serlo.
La primera mandataria desperdició anteanoche una magnífica oportunidad para brindar una señal de mancomunión a los argentinos y de previsibilidad al mundo entero, al no reparar en las más mínimas normas de civilidad, durante el fugaz encuentro que mantuvo con quien será su sucesor en la quinta presidencial de Olivos.
Apenas veinte minutos duró una reunión que, al decir de Macri, "no valió la pena", en tanto sólo se habló de formalidades vinculadas con el acto de traspaso del mando. Más grave aún es que, según lo expresado por el presidente electo, la jefa del Estado indicara que sus ministros sólo estarán a disposición de los futuros miembros del gabinete nominados por Macri después de la transmisión del poder, que tendrá lugar el 10 de diciembre.
El encuentro de Olivos era una ocasión perfecta para que la presidenta en ejercicio y el presidente electo testimoniaran en una foto, juntos, sus mutuas promesas de colaboración en esta transición. Pero no sólo no hubo ningún registro fotográfico del cónclave, sino que se le negó a Macri la posibilidad de brindar una conferencia de prensa en una sala de la residencia presidencial. El actual jefe de gobierno de la ciudad de Buenos Aires debió salir de Olivos por una puerta trasera en medio de un tumulto que tornó inviable el diálogo con los periodistas apostados en el lugar. Fue una escena penosa e indigna, que más que inmerecida para el futuro mandatario de todos los argentinos es degradante para la investidura presidencial y para la propia ciudadanía, que lo menos que puede esperar tras el veredicto de las urnas es un marco de respeto y buenos modales.
Evidentemente, en la presidenta de la Nación no ha cundido el excelente ejemplo que dos años atrás protagonizaron sus pares chilenos Sebastián Piñera y Michelle Bachelet, cuando ésta ganó las últimas elecciones presidenciales de su país y fue convocada por su antecesor a un encuentro donde, delante de las cámaras de televisión, se prodigaron elogios, al tiempo que Piñera comprometió una actitud constructiva, que justificó al decir: "Después de todo, más allá de nuestras diferencias, todos queremos lo mismo, lo mejor para Chile".
Afortunadamente, no hay que ir demasiado lejos para hallar buenos ejemplos de transición en democracia. En junio pasado, inmediatamente después de los comicios de gobernador en Mendoza, el mandatario electo, el radical Alfredo Cornejo, fue invitado por el gobernador Francisco "Paco" Pérez, de extracción peronista, a un desayuno con el fin de iniciar el proceso de transmisión del mando.
La misma situación de cooperación parecería estar dándose entre el gobernador bonaerense, Daniel Scioli, y su sucesora, María Eugenia Vidal, quien tras el encuentro mantenido ayer entre ambos se mostró conforme y anunció que podrían producirse más reuniones similares, incluso después de su asunción. En el mismo sentido, un día antes el ministro de Seguridad provincial, Alejandro Granados, participó de un acto con el dirigente macrista Cristian Ritondo, quien lo reemplazará en ese puesto cuando asuma la nueva administración. El problema de la inseguridad es, por lejos, la mayor preocupación de los bonaerenses, por lo que el citado encuentro podría ser un primer paso para que, en algún momento, la dirigencia política advierta la necesidad de diseñar una auténtica política de Estado tendiente a enfrentar ese flagelo.
La sociedad argentina tiene derecho a esperar una transición presidencial que deje de lado la crispación, el ensañamiento y los malos modales que han caracterizado la gestión nacional kirchnerista. La tolerancia y el diálogo deben imponerse sobre el desprecio y la descalificación del adversario, al tiempo que la cultura del encuentro debe empezar a suceder a la nefasta cultura de la confrontación.
Lamentablemente, la primera y tan esperada reunión mantenida por la jefa del Estado y quien la sucederá distó de ser una buena señal frente a los enormes problemas que heredará el próximo gobierno nacional. En particular, a partir de un déficit fiscal récord y de la incertidumbre en torno de las verdaderas reservas disponibles en las arcas del Banco Central.
En la víspera, durante un acto público realizado en El Palomar, Cristina Kirchner, tras las críticas que mereció por los escasos avances registrados en su encuentro con Macri, aseguró: "Jamás se nos ocurriría hacer algo que dañara la gobernabilidad y la convivencia de los argentinos".
Es de esperar que esas palabras se transformen rápidamente en hechos concretos, que coloquen a la Argentina en la senda del diálogo, del esfuerzo compartido y de la previsibilidad, tan necesaria en estos momentos para dejar atrás el estancamiento económico de los últimos años y potenciar las posibilidades de crecimiento del país.
Fuente: www.lanacion.com.ar
Wednesday, November 25, 2015
HHRR/BUS/PSYCH/GralInt-TED Talks-Shawn Achor: The happy secret to better work
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Filmed May 2011 at TEDxBloomington
Shawn Achor: The happy secret to better work
We believe we should work hard in order to be happy, but could we be thinking about things backwards? In this fast-moving and very funny talk, psychologist Shawn Achor argues that, actually, happiness inspires us to be more productive.
Transcript:
When I was seven years old and my sister was just five years old, we were playing on top of a bunk bed. I was two years older than my sister at the time -- I mean, I'm two years older than her now -- but at the time it meant she had to do everything that I wanted to do, and I wanted to play war. So we were up on top of our bunk beds. And on one side of the bunk bed, I had put out all of my G.I. Joe soldiers and weaponry. And on the other side were all my sister's My Little Ponies ready for a cavalry charge.
There are differing accounts of what actually happened that afternoon, but since my sister is not here with us today, let me tell you the true story --
(Laughter)
which is my sister's a little on the clumsy side. Somehow, without any help or push from her older brother at all, Amy disappeared off of the top of the bunk bed and landed with this crash on the floor. I nervously peered over the side of the bed to see what had befallen my fallen sister and saw that she had landed painfully on her hands and knees on all fours on the ground.
I was nervous because my parents had charged me with making sure that my sister and I played as safely and as quietly as possible. And seeing as how I had accidentally broken Amy's arm just one week before --
(Laughter)
(Laughter ends)
heroically pushing her out of the way of an oncoming imaginary sniper bullet,
(Laughter) for which I have yet to be thanked, I was trying as hard as I could -- she didn't even see it coming -- I was trying hard to be on my best behavior.
And I saw my sister's face, this wail of pain and suffering and surprise threatening to erupt from her mouth and wake my parents from the long winter's nap for which they had settled. So I did the only thing my frantic seven year-old brain could think to do to avert this tragedy. And if you have children, you've seen this hundreds of times. I said, "Amy, wait. Don't cry. Did you see how you landed? No human lands on all fours like that. Amy, I think this means you're a unicorn."
(Laughter)
Now, that was cheating, because there was nothing she would want more than not to be Amy the hurt five year-old little sister, but Amy the special unicorn. Of course, this option was open to her brain at no point in the past. And you could see how my poor, manipulated sister faced conflict, as her little brain attempted to devote resources to feeling the pain and suffering and surprise she just experienced, or contemplating her new-found identity as a unicorn. And the latter won. Instead of crying or ceasing our play, instead of waking my parents, with all the negative consequences for me, a smile spread across her face and she scrambled back up onto the bunk bed with all the grace of a baby unicorn --
(Laughter)
with one broken leg.
What we stumbled across at this tender age of just five and seven -- we had no idea at the time -- was was going be at the vanguard of a scientific revolution occurring two decades later in the way that we look at the human brain. We had stumbled across something called positive psychology, which is the reason I'm here today and the reason that I wake up every morning.
When I started talking about this research outside of academia, with companies and schools, the first thing they said to never do is to start with a graph. The first thing I want to do is start with a graph. This graph looks boring, but it is the reason I get excited and wake up every morning. And this graph doesn't even mean anything; it's fake data. What we found is --
(Laughter)
If I got this data studying you, I would be thrilled, because there's a trend there, and that means that I can get published, which is all that really matters. There is one weird red dot above the curve, there's one weirdo in the room -- I know who you are, I saw you earlier -- that's no problem. That's no problem, as most of you know, because I can just delete that dot. I can delete that dot because that's clearly a measurement error. And we know that's a measurement error because it's messing up my data.
(Laughter)
So one of the first things we teach people in economics, statistics, business and psychology courses is how, in a statistically valid way, do we eliminate the weirdos. How do we eliminate the outliers so we can find the line of best fit? Which is fantastic if I'm trying to find out how many Advil the average person should be taking -- two.
But if I'm interested in your potential, or for happiness or productivity or energy or creativity, we're creating the cult of the average with science. If I asked a question like, "How fast can a child learn how to read in a classroom?" scientists change the answer to "How fast does the average child learn how to read in that classroom?" and we tailor the class towards the average. If you fall below the average, then psychologists get thrilled, because that means you're depressed or have a disorder, or hopefully both. We're hoping for both because our business model is, if you come into a therapy session with one problem, we want to make sure you leave knowing you have ten, so you keep coming back. We'll go back into your childhood if necessary, but eventually we want to make you normal again. But normal is merely average.
And positive psychology posits that if we study what is merely average, we will remain merely average. Then instead of deleting those positive outliers, what I intentionally do is come into a population like this one and say, why? Why are some of you high above the curve in terms of intellectual, athletic, musical ability, creativity, energy levels, resiliency in the face of challenge, sense of humor? Whatever it is, instead of deleting you, what I want to do is study you. Because maybe we can glean information, not just how to move people up to the average, but move the entire average up in our companies and schools worldwide.
The reason this graph is important to me is, on the news, the majority of the information is not positive. in fact it's negative. Most of it's about murder, corruption, diseases, natural disasters. And very quickly, my brain starts to think that's the accurate ratio of negative to positive in the world. This creates "the medical school syndrome." During the first year of medical training, as you read through a list of all the symptoms and diseases, suddenly you realize you have all of them.
(Laughter)
I have a brother in-law named Bobo, which is a whole other story. Bobo married Amy the unicorn. Bobo called me on the phone --
(Laughter)
from Yale Medical School, and Bobo said, "Shawn, I have leprosy."
(Laughter)
Which, even at Yale, is extraordinarily rare. But I had no idea how to console poor Bobo because he had just gotten over an entire week of menopause.
(Laughter)
We're finding it's not necessarily the reality that shapes us, but the lens through which your brain views the world that shapes your reality. And if we can change the lens, not only can we change your happiness, we can change every single educational and business outcome at the same time.
I applied to Harvard on a dare. I didn't expect to get in, and my family had no money for college. When I got a military scholarship two weeks later, they let me go. Something that wasn't even a possibility became a reality. I assumed everyone there would see it as a privilege as well, that they'd be excited to be there. Even in a classroom full of people smarter than you, I felt you'd be happy just to be in that classroom. But what I found is, while some people experience that, when I graduated after my four years and then spent the next eight years living in the dorms with the students -- Harvard asked me to; I wasn't that guy.
(Laughter)
I was an officer to counsel students through the difficult four years. And in my research and my teaching, I found that these students, no matter how happy they were with their original success of getting into the school, two weeks later their brains were focused, not on the privilege of being there, nor on their philosophy or physics, but on the competition, the workload, the hassles, stresses, complaints.
When I first went in there, I walked into the freshmen dining hall, which is where my friends from Waco, Texas, which is where I grew up -- I know some of you know this. When they'd visit, they'd look around, and say, "This dining hall looks like something out of Hogwart's." It does, because that was Hogwart's and that's Harvard. And when they see this, they say, "Why do you waste your time studying happiness at Harvard? What does a Harvard student possibly have to be unhappy about?"
Embedded within that question is the key to understanding the science of happiness. Because what that question assumes is that our external world is predictive of our happiness levels, when in reality, if I know everything about your external world, I can only predict 10% of your long-term happiness. 90 percent of your long-term happiness is predicted not by the external world, but by the way your brain processes the world. And if we change it, if we change our formula for happiness and success, we can change the way that we can then affect reality. What we found is that only 25% of job successes are predicted by IQ, 75 percent of job successes are predicted by your optimism levels, your social support and your ability to see stress as a challenge instead of as a threat.
I talked to a New England boarding school, probably the most prestigious one, and they said, "We already know that. So every year, instead of just teaching our students, we have a wellness week. And we're so excited. Monday night we have the world's leading expert will speak about adolescent depression. Tuesday night it's school violence and bullying. Wednesday night is eating disorders. Thursday night is illicit drug use. And Friday night we're trying to decide between risky sex or happiness."
(Laughter)
I said, "That's most people's Friday nights."
(Laughter)
(Applause)
Which I'm glad you liked, but they did not like that at all. Silence on the phone. And into the silence, I said, "I'd be happy to speak at your school, but that's not a wellness week, that's a sickness week. You've outlined all the negative things that can happen, but not talked about the positive."
The absence of disease is not health. Here's how we get to health: We need to reverse the formula for happiness and success. In the last three years, I've traveled to 45 countries, working with schools and companies in the midst of an economic downturn. And I found that most companies and schools follow a formula for success, which is this: If I work harder, I'll be more successful. And if I'm more successful, then I'll be happier. That undergirds most of our parenting and managing styles, the way that we motivate our behavior.
And the problem is it's scientifically broken and backwards for two reasons. Every time your brain has a success, you just changed the goalpost of what success looked like. You got good grades, now you have to get better grades, you got into a good school and after you get into a better one, you got a good job, now you have to get a better job, you hit your sales target, we're going to change it. And if happiness is on the opposite side of success, your brain never gets there. We've pushed happiness over the cognitive horizon, as a society. And that's because we think we have to be successful, then we'll be happier.
But our brains work in the opposite order. If you can raise somebody's level of positivity in the present, then their brain experiences what we now call a happiness advantage, which is your brain at positive performs significantly better than at negative, neutral or stressed. Your intelligence rises, your creativity rises, your energy levels rise. In fact, we've found that every single business outcome improves. Your brain at positive is 31% more productive than your brain at negative, neutral or stressed. You're 37% better at sales. Doctors are 19 percent faster, more accurate at coming up with the correct diagnosis when positive instead of negative, neutral or stressed.
Which means we can reverse the formula. If we can find a way of becoming positive in the present, then our brains work even more successfully as we're able to work harder, faster and more intelligently. We need to be able to reverse this formula so we can start to see what our brains are actually capable of. Because dopamine, which floods into your system when you're positive, has two functions. Not only does it make you happier, it turns on all of the learning centers in your brain allowing you to adapt to the world in a different way.
We've found there are ways that you can train your brain to be able to become more positive. In just a two-minute span of time done for 21 days in a row, we can actually rewire your brain, allowing your brain to actually work more optimistically and more successfully. We've done these things in research now in every company that I've worked with, getting them to write down three new things that they're grateful for for 21 days in a row, three new things each day. And at the end of that, their brain starts to retain a pattern of scanning the world not for the negative, but for the positive first.
Journaling about one positive experience you've had over the past 24 hours allows your brain to relive it. Exercise teaches your brain that your behavior matters. We find that meditation allows your brain to get over the cultural ADHD that we've been creating by trying to do multiple tasks at once and allows our brains to focus on the task at hand. And finally, random acts of kindness are conscious acts of kindness. We get people, when they open up their inbox, to write one positive email praising or thanking somebody in their support network.
And by doing these activities and by training your brain just like we train our bodies, what we've found is we can reverse the formula for happiness and success, and in doing so, not only create ripples of positivity, but a real revolution.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
Filmed May 2011 at TEDxBloomington
Shawn Achor: The happy secret to better work
We believe we should work hard in order to be happy, but could we be thinking about things backwards? In this fast-moving and very funny talk, psychologist Shawn Achor argues that, actually, happiness inspires us to be more productive.
Transcript:
When I was seven years old and my sister was just five years old, we were playing on top of a bunk bed. I was two years older than my sister at the time -- I mean, I'm two years older than her now -- but at the time it meant she had to do everything that I wanted to do, and I wanted to play war. So we were up on top of our bunk beds. And on one side of the bunk bed, I had put out all of my G.I. Joe soldiers and weaponry. And on the other side were all my sister's My Little Ponies ready for a cavalry charge.
There are differing accounts of what actually happened that afternoon, but since my sister is not here with us today, let me tell you the true story --
(Laughter)
which is my sister's a little on the clumsy side. Somehow, without any help or push from her older brother at all, Amy disappeared off of the top of the bunk bed and landed with this crash on the floor. I nervously peered over the side of the bed to see what had befallen my fallen sister and saw that she had landed painfully on her hands and knees on all fours on the ground.
I was nervous because my parents had charged me with making sure that my sister and I played as safely and as quietly as possible. And seeing as how I had accidentally broken Amy's arm just one week before --
(Laughter)
(Laughter ends)
heroically pushing her out of the way of an oncoming imaginary sniper bullet,
(Laughter) for which I have yet to be thanked, I was trying as hard as I could -- she didn't even see it coming -- I was trying hard to be on my best behavior.
And I saw my sister's face, this wail of pain and suffering and surprise threatening to erupt from her mouth and wake my parents from the long winter's nap for which they had settled. So I did the only thing my frantic seven year-old brain could think to do to avert this tragedy. And if you have children, you've seen this hundreds of times. I said, "Amy, wait. Don't cry. Did you see how you landed? No human lands on all fours like that. Amy, I think this means you're a unicorn."
(Laughter)
Now, that was cheating, because there was nothing she would want more than not to be Amy the hurt five year-old little sister, but Amy the special unicorn. Of course, this option was open to her brain at no point in the past. And you could see how my poor, manipulated sister faced conflict, as her little brain attempted to devote resources to feeling the pain and suffering and surprise she just experienced, or contemplating her new-found identity as a unicorn. And the latter won. Instead of crying or ceasing our play, instead of waking my parents, with all the negative consequences for me, a smile spread across her face and she scrambled back up onto the bunk bed with all the grace of a baby unicorn --
(Laughter)
with one broken leg.
What we stumbled across at this tender age of just five and seven -- we had no idea at the time -- was was going be at the vanguard of a scientific revolution occurring two decades later in the way that we look at the human brain. We had stumbled across something called positive psychology, which is the reason I'm here today and the reason that I wake up every morning.
When I started talking about this research outside of academia, with companies and schools, the first thing they said to never do is to start with a graph. The first thing I want to do is start with a graph. This graph looks boring, but it is the reason I get excited and wake up every morning. And this graph doesn't even mean anything; it's fake data. What we found is --
(Laughter)
If I got this data studying you, I would be thrilled, because there's a trend there, and that means that I can get published, which is all that really matters. There is one weird red dot above the curve, there's one weirdo in the room -- I know who you are, I saw you earlier -- that's no problem. That's no problem, as most of you know, because I can just delete that dot. I can delete that dot because that's clearly a measurement error. And we know that's a measurement error because it's messing up my data.
(Laughter)
So one of the first things we teach people in economics, statistics, business and psychology courses is how, in a statistically valid way, do we eliminate the weirdos. How do we eliminate the outliers so we can find the line of best fit? Which is fantastic if I'm trying to find out how many Advil the average person should be taking -- two.
But if I'm interested in your potential, or for happiness or productivity or energy or creativity, we're creating the cult of the average with science. If I asked a question like, "How fast can a child learn how to read in a classroom?" scientists change the answer to "How fast does the average child learn how to read in that classroom?" and we tailor the class towards the average. If you fall below the average, then psychologists get thrilled, because that means you're depressed or have a disorder, or hopefully both. We're hoping for both because our business model is, if you come into a therapy session with one problem, we want to make sure you leave knowing you have ten, so you keep coming back. We'll go back into your childhood if necessary, but eventually we want to make you normal again. But normal is merely average.
And positive psychology posits that if we study what is merely average, we will remain merely average. Then instead of deleting those positive outliers, what I intentionally do is come into a population like this one and say, why? Why are some of you high above the curve in terms of intellectual, athletic, musical ability, creativity, energy levels, resiliency in the face of challenge, sense of humor? Whatever it is, instead of deleting you, what I want to do is study you. Because maybe we can glean information, not just how to move people up to the average, but move the entire average up in our companies and schools worldwide.
The reason this graph is important to me is, on the news, the majority of the information is not positive. in fact it's negative. Most of it's about murder, corruption, diseases, natural disasters. And very quickly, my brain starts to think that's the accurate ratio of negative to positive in the world. This creates "the medical school syndrome." During the first year of medical training, as you read through a list of all the symptoms and diseases, suddenly you realize you have all of them.
(Laughter)
I have a brother in-law named Bobo, which is a whole other story. Bobo married Amy the unicorn. Bobo called me on the phone --
(Laughter)
from Yale Medical School, and Bobo said, "Shawn, I have leprosy."
(Laughter)
Which, even at Yale, is extraordinarily rare. But I had no idea how to console poor Bobo because he had just gotten over an entire week of menopause.
(Laughter)
We're finding it's not necessarily the reality that shapes us, but the lens through which your brain views the world that shapes your reality. And if we can change the lens, not only can we change your happiness, we can change every single educational and business outcome at the same time.
I applied to Harvard on a dare. I didn't expect to get in, and my family had no money for college. When I got a military scholarship two weeks later, they let me go. Something that wasn't even a possibility became a reality. I assumed everyone there would see it as a privilege as well, that they'd be excited to be there. Even in a classroom full of people smarter than you, I felt you'd be happy just to be in that classroom. But what I found is, while some people experience that, when I graduated after my four years and then spent the next eight years living in the dorms with the students -- Harvard asked me to; I wasn't that guy.
(Laughter)
I was an officer to counsel students through the difficult four years. And in my research and my teaching, I found that these students, no matter how happy they were with their original success of getting into the school, two weeks later their brains were focused, not on the privilege of being there, nor on their philosophy or physics, but on the competition, the workload, the hassles, stresses, complaints.
When I first went in there, I walked into the freshmen dining hall, which is where my friends from Waco, Texas, which is where I grew up -- I know some of you know this. When they'd visit, they'd look around, and say, "This dining hall looks like something out of Hogwart's." It does, because that was Hogwart's and that's Harvard. And when they see this, they say, "Why do you waste your time studying happiness at Harvard? What does a Harvard student possibly have to be unhappy about?"
Embedded within that question is the key to understanding the science of happiness. Because what that question assumes is that our external world is predictive of our happiness levels, when in reality, if I know everything about your external world, I can only predict 10% of your long-term happiness. 90 percent of your long-term happiness is predicted not by the external world, but by the way your brain processes the world. And if we change it, if we change our formula for happiness and success, we can change the way that we can then affect reality. What we found is that only 25% of job successes are predicted by IQ, 75 percent of job successes are predicted by your optimism levels, your social support and your ability to see stress as a challenge instead of as a threat.
I talked to a New England boarding school, probably the most prestigious one, and they said, "We already know that. So every year, instead of just teaching our students, we have a wellness week. And we're so excited. Monday night we have the world's leading expert will speak about adolescent depression. Tuesday night it's school violence and bullying. Wednesday night is eating disorders. Thursday night is illicit drug use. And Friday night we're trying to decide between risky sex or happiness."
(Laughter)
I said, "That's most people's Friday nights."
(Laughter)
(Applause)
Which I'm glad you liked, but they did not like that at all. Silence on the phone. And into the silence, I said, "I'd be happy to speak at your school, but that's not a wellness week, that's a sickness week. You've outlined all the negative things that can happen, but not talked about the positive."
The absence of disease is not health. Here's how we get to health: We need to reverse the formula for happiness and success. In the last three years, I've traveled to 45 countries, working with schools and companies in the midst of an economic downturn. And I found that most companies and schools follow a formula for success, which is this: If I work harder, I'll be more successful. And if I'm more successful, then I'll be happier. That undergirds most of our parenting and managing styles, the way that we motivate our behavior.
And the problem is it's scientifically broken and backwards for two reasons. Every time your brain has a success, you just changed the goalpost of what success looked like. You got good grades, now you have to get better grades, you got into a good school and after you get into a better one, you got a good job, now you have to get a better job, you hit your sales target, we're going to change it. And if happiness is on the opposite side of success, your brain never gets there. We've pushed happiness over the cognitive horizon, as a society. And that's because we think we have to be successful, then we'll be happier.
But our brains work in the opposite order. If you can raise somebody's level of positivity in the present, then their brain experiences what we now call a happiness advantage, which is your brain at positive performs significantly better than at negative, neutral or stressed. Your intelligence rises, your creativity rises, your energy levels rise. In fact, we've found that every single business outcome improves. Your brain at positive is 31% more productive than your brain at negative, neutral or stressed. You're 37% better at sales. Doctors are 19 percent faster, more accurate at coming up with the correct diagnosis when positive instead of negative, neutral or stressed.
Which means we can reverse the formula. If we can find a way of becoming positive in the present, then our brains work even more successfully as we're able to work harder, faster and more intelligently. We need to be able to reverse this formula so we can start to see what our brains are actually capable of. Because dopamine, which floods into your system when you're positive, has two functions. Not only does it make you happier, it turns on all of the learning centers in your brain allowing you to adapt to the world in a different way.
We've found there are ways that you can train your brain to be able to become more positive. In just a two-minute span of time done for 21 days in a row, we can actually rewire your brain, allowing your brain to actually work more optimistically and more successfully. We've done these things in research now in every company that I've worked with, getting them to write down three new things that they're grateful for for 21 days in a row, three new things each day. And at the end of that, their brain starts to retain a pattern of scanning the world not for the negative, but for the positive first.
Journaling about one positive experience you've had over the past 24 hours allows your brain to relive it. Exercise teaches your brain that your behavior matters. We find that meditation allows your brain to get over the cultural ADHD that we've been creating by trying to do multiple tasks at once and allows our brains to focus on the task at hand. And finally, random acts of kindness are conscious acts of kindness. We get people, when they open up their inbox, to write one positive email praising or thanking somebody in their support network.
And by doing these activities and by training your brain just like we train our bodies, what we've found is we can reverse the formula for happiness and success, and in doing so, not only create ripples of positivity, but a real revolution.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
GralInt-TED Talks-Dan Gilbert: The surprising science of happiness
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Filmed February 2004 at TED2004
Dan Gilbert: The surprising science of happiness
Dan Gilbert, author of "Stumbling on Happiness," challenges the idea that we’ll be miserable if we don’t get what we want. Our "psychological immune system" lets us feel truly happy even when things don’t go as planned.
Transcript:
When you have 21 minutes to speak, two million years seems like a really long time. But evolutionarily, two million years is nothing. And yet in two million years, the human brain has nearly tripled in mass, going from the one-and-a-quarter pound brain of our ancestor here, Habilis, to the almost three-pound meatloaf that everybody here has between their ears. What is it about a big brain that nature was so eager for every one of us to have one?
Well, it turns out when brains triple in size, they don't just get three times bigger; they gain new structures. And one of the main reasons our brain got so big is because it got a new part, called the "frontal lobe." Particularly, a part called the "pre-frontal cortex." What does a pre-frontal cortex do for you that should justify the entire architectural overhaul of the human skull in the blink of evolutionary time?
It turns out the pre-frontal cortex does lots of things, but one of the most important things it does is an experience simulator. Pilots practice in flight simulators so that they don't make real mistakes in planes. Human beings have this marvelous adaptation that they can actually have experiences in their heads before they try them out in real life. This is a trick that none of our ancestors could do, and that no other animal can do quite like we can. It's a marvelous adaptation. It's up there with opposable thumbs and standing upright and language as one of the things that got our species out of the trees and into the shopping mall.
(Laughter)
All of you have done this. Ben and Jerry's doesn't have liver-and-onion ice cream, and it's not because they whipped some up, tried it and went, "Yuck." It's because, without leaving your armchair, you can simulate that flavor and say "yuck" before you make it.
Let's see how your experience simulators are working. Let's just run a quick diagnostic before I proceed with the rest of the talk. Here's two different futures that I invite you to contemplate. You can try to simulate them and tell me which one you think you might prefer. One of them is winning the lottery. This is about 314 million dollars. And the other is becoming paraplegic.
(Laughter)
Just give it a moment of thought. You probably don't feel like you need a moment of thought.
Interestingly, there are data on these two groups of people, data on how happy they are. And this is exactly what you expected, isn't it? But these aren't the data. I made these up!
These are the data. You failed the pop quiz, and you're hardly five minutes into the lecture. Because the fact is that a year after losing the use of their legs, and a year after winning the lotto, lottery winners and paraplegics are equally happy with their lives.
Don't feel too bad about failing the first pop quiz, because everybody fails all of the pop quizzes all of the time. The research that my laboratory has been doing, that economists and psychologists around the country have been doing, has revealed something really quite startling to us, something we call the "impact bias," which is the tendency for the simulator to work badly. For the simulator to make you believe that different outcomes are more different than in fact they really are.
From field studies to laboratory studies, we see that winning or losing an election, gaining or losing a romantic partner, getting or not getting a promotion, passing or not passing a college test, on and on, have far less impact, less intensity and much less duration than people expect them to have. This almost floors me -- a recent study showing how major life traumas affect people suggests that if it happened over three months ago, with only a few exceptions, it has no impact whatsoever on your happiness.
04:07
Why? Because happiness can be synthesized. Sir Thomas Brown wrote in 1642, "I am the happiest man alive. I have that in me that can convert poverty to riches, adversity to prosperity. I am more invulnerable than Achilles; fortune hath not one place to hit me." What kind of remarkable machinery does this guy have in his head?
Well, it turns out it's precisely the same remarkable machinery that all off us have. Human beings have something that we might think of as a "psychological immune system." A system of cognitive processes, largely non-conscious cognitive processes, that help them change their views of the world, so that they can feel better about the worlds in which they find themselves. Like Sir Thomas, you have this machine. Unlike Sir Thomas, you seem not to know it.
We synthesize happiness, but we think happiness is a thing to be found. Now, you don't need me to give you too many examples of people synthesizing happiness, I suspect. Though I'm going to show you some experimental evidence, you don't have to look very far for evidence.
As a challenge to myself, since I say this once in a while in lectures, I took a copy of the New York Times and tried to find some instances of people synthesizing happiness. Here are three guys synthesizing happiness. "I am so much better off physically, financially, emotionally, mentally and almost every other way." "I don't have one minute's regret. It was a glorious experience." "I believe it turned out for the best."
Who are these characters who are so damn happy? The first one is Jim Wright. Some of you are old enough to remember: he was the chairman of the House of Representatives and he resigned in disgrace when this young Republican named Newt Gingrich found out about a shady book deal he had done. He lost everything. The most powerful Democrat in the country lost everything. He lost his money, he lost his power. What does he have to say all these years later? "I am so much better off physically, financially, mentally and in almost every other way." What other way would there be to be better off? Vegetably? Minerally? Animally? He's pretty much covered them there.
Moreese Bickham is somebody you've never heard of. Moreese Bickham uttered these words upon being released. He was 78 years old. He'd spent 37 years in a Louisiana State Penitentiary for a crime he didn't commit. [He was ultimately released for good behavior halfway through his sentence.] What did he say about his experience? "I don't have one minute's regret. It was a glorious experience." Glorious! He is not saying, "Well, there were some nice guys. They had a gym." "Glorious," a word we usually reserve for something like a religious experience.
Harry S. Langerman uttered these words, and he's somebody you might have known but didn't, because in 1949 he read a little article in the paper about a hamburger stand owned by two brothers named McDonalds. And he thought, "That's a really neat idea!" So he went to find them. They said, "We can give you a franchise on this for 3,000 bucks." Harry went back to New York, asked his brother, an investment banker, to loan him the $3,000, and his brother's immortal words were, "You idiot, nobody eats hamburgers." He wouldn't lend him the money, and of course, six months later Ray Kroc had exactly the same idea. It turns out people do eat hamburgers, and Ray Kroc, for a while, became the richest man in America.
And then finally -- you know, the best of all possible worlds -- some of you recognize this young photo of Pete Best, who was the original drummer for the Beatles, until they, you know, sent him out on an errand and snuck away and picked up Ringo on a tour. Well, in 1994, when Pete Best was interviewed -- yes, he's still a drummer; yes, he's a studio musician -- he had this to say: "I'm happier than I would have been with the Beatles."
Okay. There's something important to be learned from these people, and it is the secret of happiness. Here it is, finally to be revealed. First: accrue wealth, power, and prestige, then lose it.
(Laughter)
Second: spend as much of your life in prison as you possibly can.
(Laughter)
Third: make somebody else really, really rich. And finally: never ever join the Beatles.
(Laughter)
OK. Now I, like Ze Frank, can predict your next thought, which is, "Yeah, right." Because when people synthesize happiness, as these gentlemen seem to have done, we all smile at them, but we kind of roll our eyes and say, "Yeah right, you never really wanted the job." "Oh yeah, right. You really didn't have that much in common with her, and you figured that out just about the time she threw the engagement ring in your face." We smirk because we believe that synthetic happiness is not of the same quality as what we might call "natural happiness."
What are these terms? Natural happiness is what we get when we get what we wanted, and synthetic happiness is what we make when we don't get what we wanted. And in our society, we have a strong belief that synthetic happiness is of an inferior kind.
Why do we have that belief? Well, it's very simple. What kind of economic engine would keep churning if we believed that not getting what we want could make us just as happy as getting it? With all apologies to my friend Matthieu Ricard, a shopping mall full of Zen monks is not going to be particularly profitable, because they don't want stuff enough.
(Laughter)
I want to suggest to you that synthetic happiness is every bit as real and enduring as the kind of happiness you stumble upon when you get exactly what you were aiming for. I'm a scientist, so I'm going to do this not with rhetoric, but by marinating you in a little bit of data.
Let me first show you an experimental paradigm that is used to demonstrate the synthesis of happiness among regular old folks. And this isn't mine. It's a 50-year-old paradigm called the "free choice paradigm." It's very simple. You bring in, say, six objects, and you ask a subject to rank them from the most to the least liked. In this case, because this experiment uses them, these are Monet prints. So, everybody can rank these Monet prints from the one they like the most, to the one they like the least. Now we give you a choice: "We happen to have some extra prints in the closet. We're going to give you one as your prize to take home. We happen to have number three and number four," we tell the subject. This is a bit of a difficult choice, because neither one is preferred strongly to the other, but naturally, people tend to pick number three because they liked it a little better than number four.
Sometime later -- it could be 15 minutes; it could be 15 days -- the same stimuli are put before the subject, and the subject is asked to re-rank the stimuli. "Tell us how much you like them now." What happens? Watch as happiness is synthesized. This is the result that has been replicated over and over again. You're watching happiness be synthesized. Would you like to see it again? Happiness! "The one I got is really better than I thought! That other one I didn't get sucks!" That's the synthesis of happiness.
(Laughter)
Now, what's the right response to that? "Yeah, right!" Now, here's the experiment we did, and I hope this is going to convince you that "Yeah, right!" was not the right response.
We did this experiment with a group of patients who had anterograde amnesia. These are hospitalized patients. Most of them have Korsakoff's syndrome, a polyneuritic psychosis. They drank way too much, and they can't make new memories. OK? They remember their childhood, but if you walk in and introduce yourself, and then leave the room, when you come back, they don't know who you are.
We took our Monet prints to the hospital. And we asked these patients to rank them from the one they liked the most to the one they liked the least. We then gave them the choice between number three and number four. Like everybody else, they said, "Gee, thanks Doc! That's great! I could use a new print. I'll take number three." We explained we would have number three mailed to them. We gathered up our materials and we went out of the room, and counted to a half hour.
(Laughter)
Back into the room, we say, "Hi, we're back." The patients, bless them, say, "Ah, Doc, I'm sorry, I've got a memory problem; that's why I'm here. If I've met you before, I don't remember." "Really, you don't remember? I was just here with the Monet prints?" "Sorry, Doc, I just don't have a clue." "No problem, Jim. All I want you to do is rank these for me from the one you like the most to the one you like the least.
What do they do? Well, let's first check and make sure they're really amnesiac. We ask these amnesiac patients to tell us which one they own, which one they chose last time, which one is theirs. And what we find is amnesiac patients just guess. These are normal controls, where if I did this with you, all of you would know which print you chose. But if I do this with amnesiac patients, they don't have a clue. They can't pick their print out of a lineup.
Here's what normal controls do: they synthesize happiness. Right? This is the change in liking score, the change from the first time they ranked to the second time they ranked. Normal controls show -- that was the magic I showed you; now I'm showing it to you in graphical form -- "The one I own is better than I thought. The one I didn't own, the one I left behind, is not as good as I thought." Amnesiacs do exactly the same thing. Think about this result.
These people like better the one they own, but they don't know they own it. "Yeah, right" is not the right response! What these people did when they synthesized happiness is they really, truly changed their affective, hedonic, aesthetic reactions to that poster. They're not just saying it because they own it, because they don't know they own it.
Now, when psychologists show you bars, you know that they are showing you averages of lots of people. And yet, all of us have this psychological immune system, this capacity to synthesize happiness, but some of us do this trick better than others. And some situations allow anybody to do it more effectively than other situations do. It turns out that freedom -- the ability to make up your mind and change your mind -- is the friend of natural happiness, because it allows you to choose among all those delicious futures and find the one that you would most enjoy. But freedom to choose, to change and make up your mind, is the enemy of synthetic happiness.
And I'm going to show you why. Dilbert already knows, of course. You're reading as I'm talking. "Dogbert's tech support. How may I abuse you?" "My printer prints a blank page after every document." "Why complain about getting free paper?" "Free? Aren't you just giving me my own paper?" "Look at the quality of the free paper compared to your lousy regular paper! Only a fool or a liar would say that they look the same!" "Now that you mention it, it does seem a little silkier!" "What are you doing?" "I'm helping people accept the things they cannot change." Indeed.
The psychological immune system works best when we are totally stuck, when we are trapped. This is the difference between dating and marriage. You go out on a date with a guy, and he picks his nose; you don't go out on another date. You're married to a guy and he picks his nose? He has a heart of gold. Don't touch the fruitcake! You find a way to be happy with what's happened.
(Laughter)
Now, what I want to show you is that people don't know this about themselves, and not knowing this can work to our supreme disadvantage.
Here's an experiment we did at Harvard. We created a black-and-white photography course, and we allowed students to come in and learn how to use a darkroom. So we gave them cameras; they went around campus; they took 12 pictures of their favorite professors and their dorm room and their dog, and all the other things they wanted to have Harvard memories of. They bring us the camera; we make up a contact sheet; they figure out which are the two best pictures; and we now spend six hours teaching them about darkrooms. And they blow two of them up, and they have two gorgeous eight-by-10 glossies of meaningful things to them, and we say, "Which one would you like to give up?" They say, "I have to give one up?" "Yes, we need one as evidence of the class project. So you have to give me one. You have to make a choice. You get to keep one, and I get to keep one."
Now, there are two conditions in this experiment. In one case, the students are told, "But you know, if you want to change your mind, I'll always have the other one here, and in the next four days, before I actually mail it to headquarters," -- yeah, "headquarters" -- "I'll be glad to swap it out with you. In fact, I'll come to your dorm room, just give me an email. Better yet, I'll check with you. You ever want to change your mind, it's totally returnable." The other half of the students are told exactly the opposite: "Make your choice, and by the way, the mail is going out, gosh, in two minutes, to England. Your picture will be winging its way over the Atlantic. You will never see it again." Half of the students in each of these conditions are asked to make predictions about how much they're going to come to like the picture that they keep and the picture they leave behind. Other students are just sent back to their little dorm rooms and they are measured over the next three to six days on their liking, satisfaction with the pictures. And look at what we find.
First of all, here's what students think is going to happen. They think they're going to maybe come to like the picture they chose a little more than the one they left behind, but these are not statistically significant differences. It's a very small increase, and it doesn't much matter whether they were in the reversible or irreversible condition.
Wrong-o. Bad simulators. Because here's what's really happening. Both right before the swap and five days later, people who are stuck with that picture, who have no choice, who can never change their mind, like it a lot! And people who are deliberating -- "Should I return it? Have I gotten the right one? Maybe this isn't the good one? Maybe I left the good one?" -- have killed themselves. They don't like their picture, and in fact even after the opportunity to swap has expired, they still don't like their picture. Why? Because the [reversible] condition is not conducive to the synthesis of happiness.
So here's the final piece of this experiment. We bring in a whole new group of naive Harvard students and we say, "You know, we're doing a photography course, and we can do it one of two ways. We could do it so that when you take the two pictures, you'd have four days to change your mind, or we're doing another course where you take the two pictures and you make up your mind right away and you can never change it. Which course would you like to be in?" Duh! 66 percent of the students, two-thirds, prefer to be in the course where they have the opportunity to change their mind. Hello? 66 percent of the students choose to be in the course in which they will ultimately be deeply dissatisfied with the picture. Because they do not know the conditions under which synthetic happiness grows.
The Bard said everything best, of course, and he's making my point here but he's making it hyperbolically: "'Tis nothing good or bad / But thinking makes it so." It's nice poetry, but that can't exactly be right. Is there really nothing good or bad? Is it really the case that gall bladder surgery and a trip to Paris are just the same thing? That seems like a one-question IQ test. They can't be exactly the same.
In more turgid prose, but closer to the truth, was the father of modern capitalism, Adam Smith, and he said this. This is worth contemplating: "The great source of both the misery and disorders of human life seems to arise from overrating the difference between one permanent situation and another -- Some of these situations may, no doubt, deserve to be preferred to others, but none of them can deserve to be pursued with that passionate ardor which drives us to violate the rules either of prudence or of justice, or to corrupt the future tranquility of our minds, either by shame from the remembrance of our own folly, or by remorse for the horror of our own injustice." In other words: yes, some things are better than others.
We should have preferences that lead us into one future over another. But when those preferences drive us too hard and too fast because we have overrated the difference between these futures, we are at risk. When our ambition is bounded, it leads us to work joyfully. When our ambition is unbounded, it leads us to lie, to cheat, to steal, to hurt others, to sacrifice things of real value. When our fears are bounded, we're prudent, we're cautious, we're thoughtful. When our fears are unbounded and overblown, we're reckless, and we're cowardly.
The lesson I want to leave you with, from these data, is that our longings and our worries are both to some degree overblown, because we have within us the capacity to manufacture the very commodity we are constantly chasing when we choose experience.
Thank you.
Filmed February 2004 at TED2004
Dan Gilbert: The surprising science of happiness
Dan Gilbert, author of "Stumbling on Happiness," challenges the idea that we’ll be miserable if we don’t get what we want. Our "psychological immune system" lets us feel truly happy even when things don’t go as planned.
Transcript:
When you have 21 minutes to speak, two million years seems like a really long time. But evolutionarily, two million years is nothing. And yet in two million years, the human brain has nearly tripled in mass, going from the one-and-a-quarter pound brain of our ancestor here, Habilis, to the almost three-pound meatloaf that everybody here has between their ears. What is it about a big brain that nature was so eager for every one of us to have one?
Well, it turns out when brains triple in size, they don't just get three times bigger; they gain new structures. And one of the main reasons our brain got so big is because it got a new part, called the "frontal lobe." Particularly, a part called the "pre-frontal cortex." What does a pre-frontal cortex do for you that should justify the entire architectural overhaul of the human skull in the blink of evolutionary time?
It turns out the pre-frontal cortex does lots of things, but one of the most important things it does is an experience simulator. Pilots practice in flight simulators so that they don't make real mistakes in planes. Human beings have this marvelous adaptation that they can actually have experiences in their heads before they try them out in real life. This is a trick that none of our ancestors could do, and that no other animal can do quite like we can. It's a marvelous adaptation. It's up there with opposable thumbs and standing upright and language as one of the things that got our species out of the trees and into the shopping mall.
(Laughter)
All of you have done this. Ben and Jerry's doesn't have liver-and-onion ice cream, and it's not because they whipped some up, tried it and went, "Yuck." It's because, without leaving your armchair, you can simulate that flavor and say "yuck" before you make it.
Let's see how your experience simulators are working. Let's just run a quick diagnostic before I proceed with the rest of the talk. Here's two different futures that I invite you to contemplate. You can try to simulate them and tell me which one you think you might prefer. One of them is winning the lottery. This is about 314 million dollars. And the other is becoming paraplegic.
(Laughter)
Just give it a moment of thought. You probably don't feel like you need a moment of thought.
Interestingly, there are data on these two groups of people, data on how happy they are. And this is exactly what you expected, isn't it? But these aren't the data. I made these up!
These are the data. You failed the pop quiz, and you're hardly five minutes into the lecture. Because the fact is that a year after losing the use of their legs, and a year after winning the lotto, lottery winners and paraplegics are equally happy with their lives.
Don't feel too bad about failing the first pop quiz, because everybody fails all of the pop quizzes all of the time. The research that my laboratory has been doing, that economists and psychologists around the country have been doing, has revealed something really quite startling to us, something we call the "impact bias," which is the tendency for the simulator to work badly. For the simulator to make you believe that different outcomes are more different than in fact they really are.
From field studies to laboratory studies, we see that winning or losing an election, gaining or losing a romantic partner, getting or not getting a promotion, passing or not passing a college test, on and on, have far less impact, less intensity and much less duration than people expect them to have. This almost floors me -- a recent study showing how major life traumas affect people suggests that if it happened over three months ago, with only a few exceptions, it has no impact whatsoever on your happiness.
04:07
Why? Because happiness can be synthesized. Sir Thomas Brown wrote in 1642, "I am the happiest man alive. I have that in me that can convert poverty to riches, adversity to prosperity. I am more invulnerable than Achilles; fortune hath not one place to hit me." What kind of remarkable machinery does this guy have in his head?
Well, it turns out it's precisely the same remarkable machinery that all off us have. Human beings have something that we might think of as a "psychological immune system." A system of cognitive processes, largely non-conscious cognitive processes, that help them change their views of the world, so that they can feel better about the worlds in which they find themselves. Like Sir Thomas, you have this machine. Unlike Sir Thomas, you seem not to know it.
We synthesize happiness, but we think happiness is a thing to be found. Now, you don't need me to give you too many examples of people synthesizing happiness, I suspect. Though I'm going to show you some experimental evidence, you don't have to look very far for evidence.
As a challenge to myself, since I say this once in a while in lectures, I took a copy of the New York Times and tried to find some instances of people synthesizing happiness. Here are three guys synthesizing happiness. "I am so much better off physically, financially, emotionally, mentally and almost every other way." "I don't have one minute's regret. It was a glorious experience." "I believe it turned out for the best."
Who are these characters who are so damn happy? The first one is Jim Wright. Some of you are old enough to remember: he was the chairman of the House of Representatives and he resigned in disgrace when this young Republican named Newt Gingrich found out about a shady book deal he had done. He lost everything. The most powerful Democrat in the country lost everything. He lost his money, he lost his power. What does he have to say all these years later? "I am so much better off physically, financially, mentally and in almost every other way." What other way would there be to be better off? Vegetably? Minerally? Animally? He's pretty much covered them there.
Moreese Bickham is somebody you've never heard of. Moreese Bickham uttered these words upon being released. He was 78 years old. He'd spent 37 years in a Louisiana State Penitentiary for a crime he didn't commit. [He was ultimately released for good behavior halfway through his sentence.] What did he say about his experience? "I don't have one minute's regret. It was a glorious experience." Glorious! He is not saying, "Well, there were some nice guys. They had a gym." "Glorious," a word we usually reserve for something like a religious experience.
Harry S. Langerman uttered these words, and he's somebody you might have known but didn't, because in 1949 he read a little article in the paper about a hamburger stand owned by two brothers named McDonalds. And he thought, "That's a really neat idea!" So he went to find them. They said, "We can give you a franchise on this for 3,000 bucks." Harry went back to New York, asked his brother, an investment banker, to loan him the $3,000, and his brother's immortal words were, "You idiot, nobody eats hamburgers." He wouldn't lend him the money, and of course, six months later Ray Kroc had exactly the same idea. It turns out people do eat hamburgers, and Ray Kroc, for a while, became the richest man in America.
And then finally -- you know, the best of all possible worlds -- some of you recognize this young photo of Pete Best, who was the original drummer for the Beatles, until they, you know, sent him out on an errand and snuck away and picked up Ringo on a tour. Well, in 1994, when Pete Best was interviewed -- yes, he's still a drummer; yes, he's a studio musician -- he had this to say: "I'm happier than I would have been with the Beatles."
Okay. There's something important to be learned from these people, and it is the secret of happiness. Here it is, finally to be revealed. First: accrue wealth, power, and prestige, then lose it.
(Laughter)
Second: spend as much of your life in prison as you possibly can.
(Laughter)
Third: make somebody else really, really rich. And finally: never ever join the Beatles.
(Laughter)
OK. Now I, like Ze Frank, can predict your next thought, which is, "Yeah, right." Because when people synthesize happiness, as these gentlemen seem to have done, we all smile at them, but we kind of roll our eyes and say, "Yeah right, you never really wanted the job." "Oh yeah, right. You really didn't have that much in common with her, and you figured that out just about the time she threw the engagement ring in your face." We smirk because we believe that synthetic happiness is not of the same quality as what we might call "natural happiness."
What are these terms? Natural happiness is what we get when we get what we wanted, and synthetic happiness is what we make when we don't get what we wanted. And in our society, we have a strong belief that synthetic happiness is of an inferior kind.
Why do we have that belief? Well, it's very simple. What kind of economic engine would keep churning if we believed that not getting what we want could make us just as happy as getting it? With all apologies to my friend Matthieu Ricard, a shopping mall full of Zen monks is not going to be particularly profitable, because they don't want stuff enough.
(Laughter)
I want to suggest to you that synthetic happiness is every bit as real and enduring as the kind of happiness you stumble upon when you get exactly what you were aiming for. I'm a scientist, so I'm going to do this not with rhetoric, but by marinating you in a little bit of data.
Let me first show you an experimental paradigm that is used to demonstrate the synthesis of happiness among regular old folks. And this isn't mine. It's a 50-year-old paradigm called the "free choice paradigm." It's very simple. You bring in, say, six objects, and you ask a subject to rank them from the most to the least liked. In this case, because this experiment uses them, these are Monet prints. So, everybody can rank these Monet prints from the one they like the most, to the one they like the least. Now we give you a choice: "We happen to have some extra prints in the closet. We're going to give you one as your prize to take home. We happen to have number three and number four," we tell the subject. This is a bit of a difficult choice, because neither one is preferred strongly to the other, but naturally, people tend to pick number three because they liked it a little better than number four.
Sometime later -- it could be 15 minutes; it could be 15 days -- the same stimuli are put before the subject, and the subject is asked to re-rank the stimuli. "Tell us how much you like them now." What happens? Watch as happiness is synthesized. This is the result that has been replicated over and over again. You're watching happiness be synthesized. Would you like to see it again? Happiness! "The one I got is really better than I thought! That other one I didn't get sucks!" That's the synthesis of happiness.
(Laughter)
Now, what's the right response to that? "Yeah, right!" Now, here's the experiment we did, and I hope this is going to convince you that "Yeah, right!" was not the right response.
We did this experiment with a group of patients who had anterograde amnesia. These are hospitalized patients. Most of them have Korsakoff's syndrome, a polyneuritic psychosis. They drank way too much, and they can't make new memories. OK? They remember their childhood, but if you walk in and introduce yourself, and then leave the room, when you come back, they don't know who you are.
We took our Monet prints to the hospital. And we asked these patients to rank them from the one they liked the most to the one they liked the least. We then gave them the choice between number three and number four. Like everybody else, they said, "Gee, thanks Doc! That's great! I could use a new print. I'll take number three." We explained we would have number three mailed to them. We gathered up our materials and we went out of the room, and counted to a half hour.
(Laughter)
Back into the room, we say, "Hi, we're back." The patients, bless them, say, "Ah, Doc, I'm sorry, I've got a memory problem; that's why I'm here. If I've met you before, I don't remember." "Really, you don't remember? I was just here with the Monet prints?" "Sorry, Doc, I just don't have a clue." "No problem, Jim. All I want you to do is rank these for me from the one you like the most to the one you like the least.
What do they do? Well, let's first check and make sure they're really amnesiac. We ask these amnesiac patients to tell us which one they own, which one they chose last time, which one is theirs. And what we find is amnesiac patients just guess. These are normal controls, where if I did this with you, all of you would know which print you chose. But if I do this with amnesiac patients, they don't have a clue. They can't pick their print out of a lineup.
Here's what normal controls do: they synthesize happiness. Right? This is the change in liking score, the change from the first time they ranked to the second time they ranked. Normal controls show -- that was the magic I showed you; now I'm showing it to you in graphical form -- "The one I own is better than I thought. The one I didn't own, the one I left behind, is not as good as I thought." Amnesiacs do exactly the same thing. Think about this result.
These people like better the one they own, but they don't know they own it. "Yeah, right" is not the right response! What these people did when they synthesized happiness is they really, truly changed their affective, hedonic, aesthetic reactions to that poster. They're not just saying it because they own it, because they don't know they own it.
Now, when psychologists show you bars, you know that they are showing you averages of lots of people. And yet, all of us have this psychological immune system, this capacity to synthesize happiness, but some of us do this trick better than others. And some situations allow anybody to do it more effectively than other situations do. It turns out that freedom -- the ability to make up your mind and change your mind -- is the friend of natural happiness, because it allows you to choose among all those delicious futures and find the one that you would most enjoy. But freedom to choose, to change and make up your mind, is the enemy of synthetic happiness.
And I'm going to show you why. Dilbert already knows, of course. You're reading as I'm talking. "Dogbert's tech support. How may I abuse you?" "My printer prints a blank page after every document." "Why complain about getting free paper?" "Free? Aren't you just giving me my own paper?" "Look at the quality of the free paper compared to your lousy regular paper! Only a fool or a liar would say that they look the same!" "Now that you mention it, it does seem a little silkier!" "What are you doing?" "I'm helping people accept the things they cannot change." Indeed.
The psychological immune system works best when we are totally stuck, when we are trapped. This is the difference between dating and marriage. You go out on a date with a guy, and he picks his nose; you don't go out on another date. You're married to a guy and he picks his nose? He has a heart of gold. Don't touch the fruitcake! You find a way to be happy with what's happened.
(Laughter)
Now, what I want to show you is that people don't know this about themselves, and not knowing this can work to our supreme disadvantage.
Here's an experiment we did at Harvard. We created a black-and-white photography course, and we allowed students to come in and learn how to use a darkroom. So we gave them cameras; they went around campus; they took 12 pictures of their favorite professors and their dorm room and their dog, and all the other things they wanted to have Harvard memories of. They bring us the camera; we make up a contact sheet; they figure out which are the two best pictures; and we now spend six hours teaching them about darkrooms. And they blow two of them up, and they have two gorgeous eight-by-10 glossies of meaningful things to them, and we say, "Which one would you like to give up?" They say, "I have to give one up?" "Yes, we need one as evidence of the class project. So you have to give me one. You have to make a choice. You get to keep one, and I get to keep one."
Now, there are two conditions in this experiment. In one case, the students are told, "But you know, if you want to change your mind, I'll always have the other one here, and in the next four days, before I actually mail it to headquarters," -- yeah, "headquarters" -- "I'll be glad to swap it out with you. In fact, I'll come to your dorm room, just give me an email. Better yet, I'll check with you. You ever want to change your mind, it's totally returnable." The other half of the students are told exactly the opposite: "Make your choice, and by the way, the mail is going out, gosh, in two minutes, to England. Your picture will be winging its way over the Atlantic. You will never see it again." Half of the students in each of these conditions are asked to make predictions about how much they're going to come to like the picture that they keep and the picture they leave behind. Other students are just sent back to their little dorm rooms and they are measured over the next three to six days on their liking, satisfaction with the pictures. And look at what we find.
First of all, here's what students think is going to happen. They think they're going to maybe come to like the picture they chose a little more than the one they left behind, but these are not statistically significant differences. It's a very small increase, and it doesn't much matter whether they were in the reversible or irreversible condition.
Wrong-o. Bad simulators. Because here's what's really happening. Both right before the swap and five days later, people who are stuck with that picture, who have no choice, who can never change their mind, like it a lot! And people who are deliberating -- "Should I return it? Have I gotten the right one? Maybe this isn't the good one? Maybe I left the good one?" -- have killed themselves. They don't like their picture, and in fact even after the opportunity to swap has expired, they still don't like their picture. Why? Because the [reversible] condition is not conducive to the synthesis of happiness.
So here's the final piece of this experiment. We bring in a whole new group of naive Harvard students and we say, "You know, we're doing a photography course, and we can do it one of two ways. We could do it so that when you take the two pictures, you'd have four days to change your mind, or we're doing another course where you take the two pictures and you make up your mind right away and you can never change it. Which course would you like to be in?" Duh! 66 percent of the students, two-thirds, prefer to be in the course where they have the opportunity to change their mind. Hello? 66 percent of the students choose to be in the course in which they will ultimately be deeply dissatisfied with the picture. Because they do not know the conditions under which synthetic happiness grows.
The Bard said everything best, of course, and he's making my point here but he's making it hyperbolically: "'Tis nothing good or bad / But thinking makes it so." It's nice poetry, but that can't exactly be right. Is there really nothing good or bad? Is it really the case that gall bladder surgery and a trip to Paris are just the same thing? That seems like a one-question IQ test. They can't be exactly the same.
In more turgid prose, but closer to the truth, was the father of modern capitalism, Adam Smith, and he said this. This is worth contemplating: "The great source of both the misery and disorders of human life seems to arise from overrating the difference between one permanent situation and another -- Some of these situations may, no doubt, deserve to be preferred to others, but none of them can deserve to be pursued with that passionate ardor which drives us to violate the rules either of prudence or of justice, or to corrupt the future tranquility of our minds, either by shame from the remembrance of our own folly, or by remorse for the horror of our own injustice." In other words: yes, some things are better than others.
We should have preferences that lead us into one future over another. But when those preferences drive us too hard and too fast because we have overrated the difference between these futures, we are at risk. When our ambition is bounded, it leads us to work joyfully. When our ambition is unbounded, it leads us to lie, to cheat, to steal, to hurt others, to sacrifice things of real value. When our fears are bounded, we're prudent, we're cautious, we're thoughtful. When our fears are unbounded and overblown, we're reckless, and we're cowardly.
The lesson I want to leave you with, from these data, is that our longings and our worries are both to some degree overblown, because we have within us the capacity to manufacture the very commodity we are constantly chasing when we choose experience.
Thank you.
GralInt-TED Talks-Kare Anderson: Be an opportunity maker
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Filmed September 2014 at TED@IBM
Kare Anderson: Be an opportunity maker
We all want to use our talents to create something meaningful with our lives. But how to get started? (And ... what if you're shy?) Writer Kare Anderson shares her own story of chronic shyness, and how she opened up her world by helping other people use their own talents and passions.
Transcript:
I grew up diagnosed as phobically shy, and, like at least 20 other people in a room of this size, I was a stutterer. Do you dare raise your hand?
And it sticks with us. It really does stick with us, because when we are treated that way, we feel invisible sometimes, or talked around and at. And as I started to look at people, which is mostly all I did, I noticed that some people really wanted attention and recognition. Remember, I was young then. So what did they do? What we still do perhaps too often. We talk about ourselves. And yet there are other people I observed who had what I called a mutuality mindset. In each situation, they found a way to talk about us and create that "us" idea.
So my idea to reimagine the world is to see it one where we all become greater opportunity-makers with and for others. There's no greater opportunity or call for action for us now than to become opportunity-makers who use best talents together more often for the greater good and accomplish things we couldn't have done on our own. And I want to talk to you about that, because even more than giving, even more than giving, is the capacity for us to do something smarter together for the greater good that lifts us both up and that can scale. That's why I'm sitting here. But I also want to point something else out: Each one of you is better than anybody else at something. That disproves that popular notion that if you're the smartest person in the room, you're in the wrong room. (Laughter)
So let me tell you about a Hollywood party I went to a couple years back, and I met this up-and-coming actress, and we were soon talking about something that we both felt passionately about: public art. And she had the fervent belief that every new building in Los Angeles should have public art in it. She wanted a regulation for it, and she fervently started — who is here from Chicago? — she fervently started talking about these bean-shaped reflective sculptures in Millennium Park, and people would walk up to it and they'd smile in the reflection of it, and they'd pose and they'd vamp and they'd take selfies together, and they'd laugh. And as she was talking, a thought came to my mind. I said, "I know someone you ought to meet. He's getting out of San Quentin in a couple of weeks" — (Laughter) — "and he shares your fervent desire that art should engage and enable people to connect." He spent five years in solitary, and I met him because I gave a speech at San Quentin, and he's articulate and he's rather easy on the eyes because he's buff. He had workout regime he did every day. (Laughter) I think she was following me at that point. I said, "He'd be an unexpected ally." And not just that. There's James. He's an architect and he's a professor, and he loves place-making, and place-making is when you have those mini-plazas and those urban walkways and where they're dotted with art, where people draw and come up and talk sometimes. I think they'd make good allies. And indeed they were. They met together. They prepared. They spoke in front of the Los Angeles City Council. And the council members not only passed the regulation, half of them came down and asked to pose with them afterwards. They were startling, compelling and credible. You can't buy that.
What I'm asking you to consider is what kind of opportunity- makers we might become, because more than wealth or fancy titles or a lot of contacts, it's our capacity to connect around each other's better side and bring it out. And I'm not saying this is easy, and I'm sure many of you have made the wrong moves too about who you wanted to connect with, but what I want to suggest is, this is an opportunity. I started thinking about it way back when I was a Wall Street Journal reporter and I was in Europe and I was supposed to cover trends and trends that transcended business or politics or lifestyle. So I had to have contacts in different worlds very different than mine, because otherwise you couldn't spot the trends. And third, I had to write the story in a way stepping into the reader's shoes, so they could see how these trends could affect their lives. That's what opportunity-makers do.
And here's a strange thing: Unlike an increasing number of Americans who are working and living and playing with people who think exactly like them because we then become more rigid and extreme, opportunity-makers are actively seeking situations with people unlike them, and they're building relationships, and because they do that, they have trusted relationships where they can bring the right team in and recruit them to solve a problem better and faster and seize more opportunities. They're not affronted by differences, they're fascinated by them, and that is a huge shift in mindset, and once you feel it, you want it to happen a lot more. This world is calling out for us to have a collective mindset, and I believe in doing that. It's especially important now. Why is it important now? Because things can be devised like drones and drugs and data collection, and they can be devised by more people and cheaper ways for beneficial purposes and then, as we know from the news every day, they can be used for dangerous ones. It calls on us, each of us, to a higher calling.
But here's the icing on the cake: It's not just the first opportunity that you do with somebody else that's probably your greatest, as an institution or an individual. It's after you've had that experience and you trust each other. It's the unexpected things that you devise later on you never could have predicted. For example, Marty is the husband of that actress I mentioned, and he watched them when they were practicing, and he was soon talking to Wally, my friend the ex-con, about that exercise regime. And he thought, I have a set of racquetball courts. That guy could teach it. A lot of people who work there are members at my courts. They're frequent travelers. They could practice in their hotel room, no equipment provided. That's how Wally got hired. Not only that, years later he was also teaching racquetball. Years after that, he was teaching the racquetball teachers. What I'm suggesting is, when you connect with people around a shared interest and action, you're accustomed to serendipitous things happening into the future, and I think that's what we're looking at. We open ourselves up to those opportunities, and in this room are key players in technology, key players who are uniquely positioned to do this, to scale systems and projects together.
So here's what I'm calling for you to do. Remember the three traits of opportunity-makers. Opportunity-makers keep honing their top strength and they become pattern seekers. They get involved in different worlds than their worlds so they're trusted and they can see those patterns, and they communicate to connect around sweet spots of shared interest.
So what I'm asking you is, the world is hungry. I truly believe, in my firsthand experience, the world is hungry for us to unite together as opportunity-makers and to emulate those behaviors as so many of you already do — I know that firsthand — and to reimagine a world where we use our best talents together more often to accomplish greater things together than we could on our own. Just remember, as Dave Liniger once said, "You can't succeed coming to the potluck with only a fork." (Laughter)
Thank you very much. Thank you. (Applause)
Filmed September 2014 at TED@IBM
Kare Anderson: Be an opportunity maker
We all want to use our talents to create something meaningful with our lives. But how to get started? (And ... what if you're shy?) Writer Kare Anderson shares her own story of chronic shyness, and how she opened up her world by helping other people use their own talents and passions.
Transcript:
I grew up diagnosed as phobically shy, and, like at least 20 other people in a room of this size, I was a stutterer. Do you dare raise your hand?
And it sticks with us. It really does stick with us, because when we are treated that way, we feel invisible sometimes, or talked around and at. And as I started to look at people, which is mostly all I did, I noticed that some people really wanted attention and recognition. Remember, I was young then. So what did they do? What we still do perhaps too often. We talk about ourselves. And yet there are other people I observed who had what I called a mutuality mindset. In each situation, they found a way to talk about us and create that "us" idea.
So my idea to reimagine the world is to see it one where we all become greater opportunity-makers with and for others. There's no greater opportunity or call for action for us now than to become opportunity-makers who use best talents together more often for the greater good and accomplish things we couldn't have done on our own. And I want to talk to you about that, because even more than giving, even more than giving, is the capacity for us to do something smarter together for the greater good that lifts us both up and that can scale. That's why I'm sitting here. But I also want to point something else out: Each one of you is better than anybody else at something. That disproves that popular notion that if you're the smartest person in the room, you're in the wrong room. (Laughter)
So let me tell you about a Hollywood party I went to a couple years back, and I met this up-and-coming actress, and we were soon talking about something that we both felt passionately about: public art. And she had the fervent belief that every new building in Los Angeles should have public art in it. She wanted a regulation for it, and she fervently started — who is here from Chicago? — she fervently started talking about these bean-shaped reflective sculptures in Millennium Park, and people would walk up to it and they'd smile in the reflection of it, and they'd pose and they'd vamp and they'd take selfies together, and they'd laugh. And as she was talking, a thought came to my mind. I said, "I know someone you ought to meet. He's getting out of San Quentin in a couple of weeks" — (Laughter) — "and he shares your fervent desire that art should engage and enable people to connect." He spent five years in solitary, and I met him because I gave a speech at San Quentin, and he's articulate and he's rather easy on the eyes because he's buff. He had workout regime he did every day. (Laughter) I think she was following me at that point. I said, "He'd be an unexpected ally." And not just that. There's James. He's an architect and he's a professor, and he loves place-making, and place-making is when you have those mini-plazas and those urban walkways and where they're dotted with art, where people draw and come up and talk sometimes. I think they'd make good allies. And indeed they were. They met together. They prepared. They spoke in front of the Los Angeles City Council. And the council members not only passed the regulation, half of them came down and asked to pose with them afterwards. They were startling, compelling and credible. You can't buy that.
What I'm asking you to consider is what kind of opportunity- makers we might become, because more than wealth or fancy titles or a lot of contacts, it's our capacity to connect around each other's better side and bring it out. And I'm not saying this is easy, and I'm sure many of you have made the wrong moves too about who you wanted to connect with, but what I want to suggest is, this is an opportunity. I started thinking about it way back when I was a Wall Street Journal reporter and I was in Europe and I was supposed to cover trends and trends that transcended business or politics or lifestyle. So I had to have contacts in different worlds very different than mine, because otherwise you couldn't spot the trends. And third, I had to write the story in a way stepping into the reader's shoes, so they could see how these trends could affect their lives. That's what opportunity-makers do.
And here's a strange thing: Unlike an increasing number of Americans who are working and living and playing with people who think exactly like them because we then become more rigid and extreme, opportunity-makers are actively seeking situations with people unlike them, and they're building relationships, and because they do that, they have trusted relationships where they can bring the right team in and recruit them to solve a problem better and faster and seize more opportunities. They're not affronted by differences, they're fascinated by them, and that is a huge shift in mindset, and once you feel it, you want it to happen a lot more. This world is calling out for us to have a collective mindset, and I believe in doing that. It's especially important now. Why is it important now? Because things can be devised like drones and drugs and data collection, and they can be devised by more people and cheaper ways for beneficial purposes and then, as we know from the news every day, they can be used for dangerous ones. It calls on us, each of us, to a higher calling.
But here's the icing on the cake: It's not just the first opportunity that you do with somebody else that's probably your greatest, as an institution or an individual. It's after you've had that experience and you trust each other. It's the unexpected things that you devise later on you never could have predicted. For example, Marty is the husband of that actress I mentioned, and he watched them when they were practicing, and he was soon talking to Wally, my friend the ex-con, about that exercise regime. And he thought, I have a set of racquetball courts. That guy could teach it. A lot of people who work there are members at my courts. They're frequent travelers. They could practice in their hotel room, no equipment provided. That's how Wally got hired. Not only that, years later he was also teaching racquetball. Years after that, he was teaching the racquetball teachers. What I'm suggesting is, when you connect with people around a shared interest and action, you're accustomed to serendipitous things happening into the future, and I think that's what we're looking at. We open ourselves up to those opportunities, and in this room are key players in technology, key players who are uniquely positioned to do this, to scale systems and projects together.
So here's what I'm calling for you to do. Remember the three traits of opportunity-makers. Opportunity-makers keep honing their top strength and they become pattern seekers. They get involved in different worlds than their worlds so they're trusted and they can see those patterns, and they communicate to connect around sweet spots of shared interest.
So what I'm asking you is, the world is hungry. I truly believe, in my firsthand experience, the world is hungry for us to unite together as opportunity-makers and to emulate those behaviors as so many of you already do — I know that firsthand — and to reimagine a world where we use our best talents together more often to accomplish greater things together than we could on our own. Just remember, as Dave Liniger once said, "You can't succeed coming to the potluck with only a fork." (Laughter)
Thank you very much. Thank you. (Applause)
PSYCH/GralInt-TED Talks-Carol Dweck: The power of believing that you can improve
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Filmed November 2014 at TEDxNorrkoping
Carol Dweck: The power of believing that you can improve
Carol Dweck researches “growth mindset” — the idea that we can grow our brain's capacity to learn and to solve problems. In this talk, she describes two ways to think about a problem that’s slightly too hard for you to solve. Are you not smart enough to solve it … or have you just not solved it yet? A great introduction to this influential field.
Transcript:
The power of yet.
I heard about a high school in Chicago where students had to pass a certain number of courses to graduate, and if they didn't pass a course, they got the grade "Not Yet." And I thought that was fantastic, because if you get a failing grade, you think, I'm nothing, I'm nowhere. But if you get the grade "Not Yet" you understand that you're on a learning curve. It gives you a path into the future.
"Not Yet" also gave me insight into a critical event early in my career, a real turning point. I wanted to see how children coped with challenge and difficulty, so I gave 10-year-olds problems that were slightly too hard for them. Some of them reacted in a shockingly positive way. They said things like, "I love a challenge," or, "You know, I was hoping this would be informative." They understood that their abilities could be developed. They had what I call a growth mindset. But other students felt it was tragic, catastrophic. From their more fixed mindset perspective, their intelligence had been up for judgment and they failed. Instead of luxuriating in the power of yet, they were gripped in the tyranny of now.
So what do they do next? I'll tell you what they do next. In one study, they told us they would probably cheat the next time instead of studying more if they failed a test. In another study, after a failure, they looked for someone who did worse than they did so they could feel really good about themselves. And in study after study, they have run from difficulty. Scientists measured the electrical activity from the brain as students confronted an error. On the left, you see the fixed mindset students. There's hardly any activity. They run from the error. They don't engage with it. But on the right, you have the students with the growth mindset, the idea that abilities can be developed. They engage deeply. Their brain is on fire with yet. They engage deeply. They process the error. They learn from it and they correct it.
How are we raising our children? Are we raising them for now instead of yet? Are we raising kids who are obsessed with getting A's? Are we raising kids who don't know how to dream big dreams? Their biggest goal is getting the next A or the next test score? And are they carrying this need for constant validation with them into their future lives? Maybe, because employers are coming to me and saying, we have already raised a generation of young workers who can't get through the day without an award.
So what can we do? How can we build that bridge to yet?
Here are some things we can do. First of all, we can praise wisely, not praising intelligence or talent. That has failed. Don't do that anymore. But praising the process that kids engage in: their effort, their strategies, their focus, their perseverance, their improvement. This process praise creates kids who are hardy and resilient.
There are other ways to reward yet. We recently teamed up with game scientists from the University of Washington to create a new online math game that rewarded yet. In this game, students were rewarded for effort, strategy and progress. The usual math game rewards you for getting answers right right now, but this game rewarded process. And we got more effort, more strategies, more engagement over longer periods of time, and more perseverance when they hit really, really hard problems.
Just the words "yet" or "not yet," we're finding, give kids greater confidence, give them a path into the future that creates greater persistence. And we can actually change students' mindsets. In one study, we taught them that every time they push out of their comfort zone to learn something new and difficult, the neurons in their brain can form new, stronger connections, and over time they can get smarter.
Look what happened: in this study, students who were not taught this growth mindset continued to show declining grades over this difficult school transition, but those who were taught this lesson showed a sharp rebound in their grades. We have shown this now, this kind of improvement, with thousands and thousands of kids, especially struggling students.
So let's talk about equality. In our country, there are groups of students who chronically underperform, for example, children in inner cities, or children on Native American reservations. And they've done so poorly for so long that many people think it's inevitable. But when educators create growth mindset classrooms steeped in yet, equality happens. And here are just a few examples. In one year, a kindergarten class in Harlem, New York scored in the 95th percentile on the National Achievement Test. Many of those kids could not hold a pencil when they arrived at school. In one year, fourth grade students in the South Bronx, way behind, became the number one fourth grade class in the state of New York on the state math test. In a year to a year and a half, Native American students in a school on a reservation went from the bottom of their district to the top, and that district included affluent sections of Seattle. So the native kids outdid the Microsoft kids.
This happened because the meaning of effort and difficulty were transformed. Before, effort and difficulty made them feel dumb, made them feel like giving up, but now, effort and difficulty, that's when their neurons are making new connections, stronger connections. That's when they're getting smarter.
I received a letter recently from a 13-year-old boy. He said, "Dear Professor Dweck, I appreciate that your writing is based on solid scientific research, and that's why I decided to put it into practice. I put more effort into my schoolwork, into my relationship with my family, and into my relationship with kids at school, and I experienced great improvement in all of those areas. I now realize I've wasted most of my life."
Let's not waste any more lives, because once we know that abilities are capable of such growth, it becomes a basic human right for children, all children, to live in places that create that growth, to live in places filled with yet.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Filmed November 2014 at TEDxNorrkoping
Carol Dweck: The power of believing that you can improve
Carol Dweck researches “growth mindset” — the idea that we can grow our brain's capacity to learn and to solve problems. In this talk, she describes two ways to think about a problem that’s slightly too hard for you to solve. Are you not smart enough to solve it … or have you just not solved it yet? A great introduction to this influential field.
Transcript:
The power of yet.
I heard about a high school in Chicago where students had to pass a certain number of courses to graduate, and if they didn't pass a course, they got the grade "Not Yet." And I thought that was fantastic, because if you get a failing grade, you think, I'm nothing, I'm nowhere. But if you get the grade "Not Yet" you understand that you're on a learning curve. It gives you a path into the future.
"Not Yet" also gave me insight into a critical event early in my career, a real turning point. I wanted to see how children coped with challenge and difficulty, so I gave 10-year-olds problems that were slightly too hard for them. Some of them reacted in a shockingly positive way. They said things like, "I love a challenge," or, "You know, I was hoping this would be informative." They understood that their abilities could be developed. They had what I call a growth mindset. But other students felt it was tragic, catastrophic. From their more fixed mindset perspective, their intelligence had been up for judgment and they failed. Instead of luxuriating in the power of yet, they were gripped in the tyranny of now.
So what do they do next? I'll tell you what they do next. In one study, they told us they would probably cheat the next time instead of studying more if they failed a test. In another study, after a failure, they looked for someone who did worse than they did so they could feel really good about themselves. And in study after study, they have run from difficulty. Scientists measured the electrical activity from the brain as students confronted an error. On the left, you see the fixed mindset students. There's hardly any activity. They run from the error. They don't engage with it. But on the right, you have the students with the growth mindset, the idea that abilities can be developed. They engage deeply. Their brain is on fire with yet. They engage deeply. They process the error. They learn from it and they correct it.
How are we raising our children? Are we raising them for now instead of yet? Are we raising kids who are obsessed with getting A's? Are we raising kids who don't know how to dream big dreams? Their biggest goal is getting the next A or the next test score? And are they carrying this need for constant validation with them into their future lives? Maybe, because employers are coming to me and saying, we have already raised a generation of young workers who can't get through the day without an award.
So what can we do? How can we build that bridge to yet?
Here are some things we can do. First of all, we can praise wisely, not praising intelligence or talent. That has failed. Don't do that anymore. But praising the process that kids engage in: their effort, their strategies, their focus, their perseverance, their improvement. This process praise creates kids who are hardy and resilient.
There are other ways to reward yet. We recently teamed up with game scientists from the University of Washington to create a new online math game that rewarded yet. In this game, students were rewarded for effort, strategy and progress. The usual math game rewards you for getting answers right right now, but this game rewarded process. And we got more effort, more strategies, more engagement over longer periods of time, and more perseverance when they hit really, really hard problems.
Just the words "yet" or "not yet," we're finding, give kids greater confidence, give them a path into the future that creates greater persistence. And we can actually change students' mindsets. In one study, we taught them that every time they push out of their comfort zone to learn something new and difficult, the neurons in their brain can form new, stronger connections, and over time they can get smarter.
Look what happened: in this study, students who were not taught this growth mindset continued to show declining grades over this difficult school transition, but those who were taught this lesson showed a sharp rebound in their grades. We have shown this now, this kind of improvement, with thousands and thousands of kids, especially struggling students.
So let's talk about equality. In our country, there are groups of students who chronically underperform, for example, children in inner cities, or children on Native American reservations. And they've done so poorly for so long that many people think it's inevitable. But when educators create growth mindset classrooms steeped in yet, equality happens. And here are just a few examples. In one year, a kindergarten class in Harlem, New York scored in the 95th percentile on the National Achievement Test. Many of those kids could not hold a pencil when they arrived at school. In one year, fourth grade students in the South Bronx, way behind, became the number one fourth grade class in the state of New York on the state math test. In a year to a year and a half, Native American students in a school on a reservation went from the bottom of their district to the top, and that district included affluent sections of Seattle. So the native kids outdid the Microsoft kids.
This happened because the meaning of effort and difficulty were transformed. Before, effort and difficulty made them feel dumb, made them feel like giving up, but now, effort and difficulty, that's when their neurons are making new connections, stronger connections. That's when they're getting smarter.
I received a letter recently from a 13-year-old boy. He said, "Dear Professor Dweck, I appreciate that your writing is based on solid scientific research, and that's why I decided to put it into practice. I put more effort into my schoolwork, into my relationship with my family, and into my relationship with kids at school, and I experienced great improvement in all of those areas. I now realize I've wasted most of my life."
Let's not waste any more lives, because once we know that abilities are capable of such growth, it becomes a basic human right for children, all children, to live in places that create that growth, to live in places filled with yet.
Thank you.
(Applause)
HHRR/BUS/GralInt-TED Talks-Regina Hartley: Why the best hire might not have the perfect resume
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Filmed September 2015 at TED@UPS
Regina Hartley: Why the best hire might not have the perfect resume
Given the choice between a job candidate with a perfect resume and one who has fought through difficulty, human resources executive Regina Hartley always gives the "Scrapper" a chance. As someone who grew up with adversity, Hartley knows that those who flourish in the darkest of spaces are empowered with the grit to persist in an ever-changing workplace. "Choose the underestimated contender, whose secret weapons are passion and purpose," she says. "Hire the Scrapper."
Transcript:
Your company launches a search for an open position. The applications start rolling in, and the qualified candidates are identified. Now the choosing begins. Person A: Ivy League, 4.0, flawless resume, great recommendations. All the right stuff. Person B: state school, fair amount of job hopping, and odd jobs like cashier and singing waitress. But remember -- both are qualified. So I ask you: who are you going to pick?
My colleagues and I created very official terms to describe two distinct categories of candidates. We call A "the Silver Spoon," the one who clearly had advantages and was destined for success. And we call B "the Scrapper," the one who had to fight against tremendous odds to get to the same point. You just heard a human resources director refer to people as Silver Spoons and Scrappers --
(Laughter)
which is not exactly politically correct and sounds a bit judgmental. But before my human resources certification gets revoked --
(Laughter)
let me explain.
A resume tells a story. And over the years, I've learned something about people whose experiences read like a patchwork quilt, that makes me stop and fully consider them before tossing their resumes away. A series of odd jobs may indicate inconsistency, lack of focus, unpredictability. Or it may signal a committed struggle against obstacles. At the very least, the Scrapper deserves an interview.
To be clear, I don't hold anything against the Silver Spoon; getting into and graduating from an elite university takes a lot of hard work and sacrifice. But if your whole life has been engineered toward success, how will you handle the tough times? One person I hired felt that because he attended an elite university, there were certain assignments that were beneath him, like temporarily doing manual labor to better understand an operation. Eventually, he quit. But on the flip side, what happens when your whole life is destined for failure and you actually succeed?
I want to urge you to interview the Scrapper. I know a lot about this because I am a Scrapper. Before I was born, my father was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, and he couldn't hold a job in spite of his brilliance. Our lives were one part "Cuckoo's Nest," one part "Awakenings" and one part "A Beautiful Mind."
(Laughter)
I'm the fourth of five children raised by a single mother in a rough neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York. We never owned a home, a car, a washing machine, and for most of my childhood, we didn't even have a telephone. So I was highly motivated to understand the relationship between business success and Scrappers, because my life could easily have turned out very differently. As I met successful business people and read profiles of high-powered leaders, I noticed some commonality.
Many of them had experienced early hardships, anywhere from poverty, abandonment, death of a parent while young, to learning disabilities, alcoholism and violence. The conventional thinking has been that trauma leads to distress, and there's been a lot of focus on the resulting dysfunction. But during studies of dysfunction, data revealed an unexpected insight: that even the worst circumstances can result in growth and transformation. A remarkable and counterintuitive phenomenon has been discovered, which scientists call Post Traumatic Growth.
In one study designed to measure the effects of adversity on children at risk, among a subset of 698 children who experienced the most severe and extreme conditions, fully one-third grew up to lead healthy, successful and productive lives. In spite of everything and against tremendous odds, they succeeded. One-third.
Take this resume. This guy's parents give him up for adoption. He never finishes college. He job-hops quite a bit, goes on a sojourn to India for a year, and to top it off, he has dyslexia. Would you hire this guy? His name is Steve Jobs.
In a study of the world's most highly successful entrepreneurs, it turns out a disproportionate number have dyslexia. In the US, 35 percent of the entrepreneurs studied had dyslexia. What's remarkable -- among those entrepreneurs who experience post traumatic growth, they now view their learning disability as a desirable difficulty which provided them an advantage because they became better listeners and paid greater attention to detail. They don't think they are who they are in spite of adversity, they know they are who they are because of adversity. They embrace their trauma and hardships as key elements of who they've become, and know that without those experiences, they might not have developed the muscle and grit required to become successful.
One of my colleagues had his life completely upended as a result of the Chinese Cultural Revolution in 1966. At age 13, his parents were relocated to the countryside, the schools were closed and he was left alone in Beijing to fend for himself until 16, when he got a job in a clothing factory. But instead of accepting his fate, he made a resolution that he would continue his formal education. Eleven years later, when the political landscape changed, he heard about a highly selective university admissions test. He had three months to learn the entire curriculum of middle and high school. So, every day he came home from the factory, took a nap, studied until 4am, went back to work and repeated this cycle every day for three months. He did it, he succeeded. His commitment to his education was unwavering, and he never lost hope. Today, he holds a master's degree, and his daughters each have degrees from Cornell and Harvard.
Scrappers are propelled by the belief that the only person you have full control over is yourself. When things don't turn out well, Scrappers ask, "What can I do differently to create a better result?" Scrappers have a sense of purpose that prevents them from giving up on themselves, kind of like if you've survived poverty, a crazy father and several muggings, you figure, "Business challenges? --
(Laughter)
Really? Piece of cake. I got this."
(Laughter)
And that reminds me -- humor. Scrappers know that humor gets you through the tough times, and laughter helps you change your perspective.
And finally, there are relationships. People who overcome adversity don't do it alone. Somewhere along the way, they find people who bring out the best in them and who are invested in their success. Having someone you can count on no matter what is essential to overcoming adversity. I was lucky. In my first job after college, I didn't have a car, so I carpooled across two bridges with a woman who was the president's assistant. She watched me work and encouraged me to focus on my future and not dwell on my past. Along the way I've met many people who've provided me brutally honest feedback, advice and mentorship. These people don't mind that I once worked as a singing waitress to help pay for college.
(Laughter)
I'll leave you with one final, valuable insight. Companies that are committed to diversity and inclusive practices tend to support Scrappers and outperform their peers. According to DiversityInc, a study of their top 50 companies for diversity outperformed the S&P 500 by 25 percent.
So back to my original question. Who are you going to bet on: Silver Spoon or Scrapper? I say choose the underestimated contender, whose secret weapons are passion and purpose.
Hire the Scrapper.
(Applause)
Filmed September 2015 at TED@UPS
Regina Hartley: Why the best hire might not have the perfect resume
Given the choice between a job candidate with a perfect resume and one who has fought through difficulty, human resources executive Regina Hartley always gives the "Scrapper" a chance. As someone who grew up with adversity, Hartley knows that those who flourish in the darkest of spaces are empowered with the grit to persist in an ever-changing workplace. "Choose the underestimated contender, whose secret weapons are passion and purpose," she says. "Hire the Scrapper."
Transcript:
Your company launches a search for an open position. The applications start rolling in, and the qualified candidates are identified. Now the choosing begins. Person A: Ivy League, 4.0, flawless resume, great recommendations. All the right stuff. Person B: state school, fair amount of job hopping, and odd jobs like cashier and singing waitress. But remember -- both are qualified. So I ask you: who are you going to pick?
My colleagues and I created very official terms to describe two distinct categories of candidates. We call A "the Silver Spoon," the one who clearly had advantages and was destined for success. And we call B "the Scrapper," the one who had to fight against tremendous odds to get to the same point. You just heard a human resources director refer to people as Silver Spoons and Scrappers --
(Laughter)
which is not exactly politically correct and sounds a bit judgmental. But before my human resources certification gets revoked --
(Laughter)
let me explain.
A resume tells a story. And over the years, I've learned something about people whose experiences read like a patchwork quilt, that makes me stop and fully consider them before tossing their resumes away. A series of odd jobs may indicate inconsistency, lack of focus, unpredictability. Or it may signal a committed struggle against obstacles. At the very least, the Scrapper deserves an interview.
To be clear, I don't hold anything against the Silver Spoon; getting into and graduating from an elite university takes a lot of hard work and sacrifice. But if your whole life has been engineered toward success, how will you handle the tough times? One person I hired felt that because he attended an elite university, there were certain assignments that were beneath him, like temporarily doing manual labor to better understand an operation. Eventually, he quit. But on the flip side, what happens when your whole life is destined for failure and you actually succeed?
I want to urge you to interview the Scrapper. I know a lot about this because I am a Scrapper. Before I was born, my father was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, and he couldn't hold a job in spite of his brilliance. Our lives were one part "Cuckoo's Nest," one part "Awakenings" and one part "A Beautiful Mind."
(Laughter)
I'm the fourth of five children raised by a single mother in a rough neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York. We never owned a home, a car, a washing machine, and for most of my childhood, we didn't even have a telephone. So I was highly motivated to understand the relationship between business success and Scrappers, because my life could easily have turned out very differently. As I met successful business people and read profiles of high-powered leaders, I noticed some commonality.
Many of them had experienced early hardships, anywhere from poverty, abandonment, death of a parent while young, to learning disabilities, alcoholism and violence. The conventional thinking has been that trauma leads to distress, and there's been a lot of focus on the resulting dysfunction. But during studies of dysfunction, data revealed an unexpected insight: that even the worst circumstances can result in growth and transformation. A remarkable and counterintuitive phenomenon has been discovered, which scientists call Post Traumatic Growth.
In one study designed to measure the effects of adversity on children at risk, among a subset of 698 children who experienced the most severe and extreme conditions, fully one-third grew up to lead healthy, successful and productive lives. In spite of everything and against tremendous odds, they succeeded. One-third.
Take this resume. This guy's parents give him up for adoption. He never finishes college. He job-hops quite a bit, goes on a sojourn to India for a year, and to top it off, he has dyslexia. Would you hire this guy? His name is Steve Jobs.
In a study of the world's most highly successful entrepreneurs, it turns out a disproportionate number have dyslexia. In the US, 35 percent of the entrepreneurs studied had dyslexia. What's remarkable -- among those entrepreneurs who experience post traumatic growth, they now view their learning disability as a desirable difficulty which provided them an advantage because they became better listeners and paid greater attention to detail. They don't think they are who they are in spite of adversity, they know they are who they are because of adversity. They embrace their trauma and hardships as key elements of who they've become, and know that without those experiences, they might not have developed the muscle and grit required to become successful.
One of my colleagues had his life completely upended as a result of the Chinese Cultural Revolution in 1966. At age 13, his parents were relocated to the countryside, the schools were closed and he was left alone in Beijing to fend for himself until 16, when he got a job in a clothing factory. But instead of accepting his fate, he made a resolution that he would continue his formal education. Eleven years later, when the political landscape changed, he heard about a highly selective university admissions test. He had three months to learn the entire curriculum of middle and high school. So, every day he came home from the factory, took a nap, studied until 4am, went back to work and repeated this cycle every day for three months. He did it, he succeeded. His commitment to his education was unwavering, and he never lost hope. Today, he holds a master's degree, and his daughters each have degrees from Cornell and Harvard.
Scrappers are propelled by the belief that the only person you have full control over is yourself. When things don't turn out well, Scrappers ask, "What can I do differently to create a better result?" Scrappers have a sense of purpose that prevents them from giving up on themselves, kind of like if you've survived poverty, a crazy father and several muggings, you figure, "Business challenges? --
(Laughter)
Really? Piece of cake. I got this."
(Laughter)
And that reminds me -- humor. Scrappers know that humor gets you through the tough times, and laughter helps you change your perspective.
And finally, there are relationships. People who overcome adversity don't do it alone. Somewhere along the way, they find people who bring out the best in them and who are invested in their success. Having someone you can count on no matter what is essential to overcoming adversity. I was lucky. In my first job after college, I didn't have a car, so I carpooled across two bridges with a woman who was the president's assistant. She watched me work and encouraged me to focus on my future and not dwell on my past. Along the way I've met many people who've provided me brutally honest feedback, advice and mentorship. These people don't mind that I once worked as a singing waitress to help pay for college.
(Laughter)
I'll leave you with one final, valuable insight. Companies that are committed to diversity and inclusive practices tend to support Scrappers and outperform their peers. According to DiversityInc, a study of their top 50 companies for diversity outperformed the S&P 500 by 25 percent.
So back to my original question. Who are you going to bet on: Silver Spoon or Scrapper? I say choose the underestimated contender, whose secret weapons are passion and purpose.
Hire the Scrapper.
(Applause)
Tuesday, November 24, 2015
MUS/GralInt-Adele - Hello | Ten Second Songs 25 Style Cover
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Adele - Hello | Ten Second Songs 25 Style Cover
Published on Nov 23, 2015
My name is Anthony Vincent and I'm the voice of Ten Second Songs and I hope you all enjoy my cover of Adele's Hello performed in 25 different styles.
Source: www.youtube.com
Adele - Hello | Ten Second Songs 25 Style Cover
Published on Nov 23, 2015
My name is Anthony Vincent and I'm the voice of Ten Second Songs and I hope you all enjoy my cover of Adele's Hello performed in 25 different styles.
Source: www.youtube.com
GralInt-Some Love Quotes (Pinterest)
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
...thank you for your TRUE LOVE, my sweet E.S., CM.
Source: Pinterest
...thank you for your TRUE LOVE, my sweet E.S., CM.
Source: Pinterest
Saturday, November 21, 2015
GralInt-TED Talks-Genevieve von Petzinger: Why are these 32 symbols found in ancient caves all over Europe?
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Filmed August 2015 at TED Fellows Retreat 2015
Genevieve von Petzinger: Why are these 32 symbols found in ancient caves all over Europe?
Written language, the hallmark of human civilization, didn't just suddenly appear one day. Thousands of years before the first fully developed writing systems, our ancestors scrawled geometric signs across the walls of the caves they sheltered in. Paleoanthropologist, rock art researcher and TED Senior Fellow Genevieve von Petzinger has studied and codified these ancient markings in caves across Europe. The uniformity of her findings suggest that graphic communication, and the ability to preserve and transmit messages beyond a single moment in time, may be much older than we think.
Transcript:
here's something about caves -- a shadowy opening in a limestone cliff that draws you in. As you pass through the portal between light and dark, you enter a subterranean world -- a place of perpetual gloom, of earthy smells, of hushed silence.
Long ago in Europe, ancient people also entered these underground worlds. As witness to their passage, they left behind mysterious engravings and paintings, like this panel of humans, triangles and zigzags from Ojo Guareña in Spain. You now walk the same path as these early artists. And in this surreal, otherworldly place, it's almost possible to imagine that you hear the muffled footfall of skin boots on soft earth, or that you see the flickering of a torch around the next bend.
When I'm in a cave, I often find myself wondering what drove these people to go so deep to brave dangerous and narrow passageways to leave their mark? In this video clip, that was shot half a kilometer, or about a third of a mile, underground, in the cave of Cudon in Spain, we found a series of red paintings on a ceiling in a previously unexplored section of the cave. As we crawled forward, military-style, with the ceiling getting ever lower, we finally got to a point where the ceiling was so low that my husband and project photographer, Dylan, could no longer achieve focus on the ceiling with his DSLR camera. So while he filmed me, I kept following the trail of red paint with a single light and a point-and-shoot camera that we kept for that type of occasion. Half a kilometer underground.
Seriously. What was somebody doing down there with a torch or a stone lamp?
(Laughter)
I mean -- me, it makes sense, right?
But you know, this is the kind of question that I'm trying to answer with my research. I study some of the oldest art in the world. It was created by these early artists in Europe, between 10,000 and 40,000 years ago. And the thing is that I'm not just studying it because it's beautiful, though some of it certainly is. But what I'm interested in is the development of the modern mind, of the evolution of creativity, of imagination, of abstract thought, about what it means to be human. While all species communicate in one way or another, only we humans have really taken it to another level. Our desire and ability to share and collaborate has been a huge part of our success story. Our modern world is based on a global network of information exchange made possible, in large part, by our ability to communicate -- in particular, using graphic or written forms of communication. The thing is, though, that we've been building on the mental achievements of those that came before us for so long that it's easy to forget that certain abilities haven't already existed. It's one of the things I find most fascinating about studying our deep history. Those people didn't have the shoulders of any giants to stand on. They were the original shoulders. And while a surprising number of important inventions come out of that distant time, what I want to talk to you about today is the invention of graphic communication.
There are three main types of communication, spoken, gestural -- so things like sign language -- and graphic communication. Spoken and gestural are by their very nature ephemeral. It requires close contact for a message to be sent and received. And after the moment of transmission, it's gone forever. Graphic communication, on the other hand, decouples that relationship. And with its invention, it became possible for the first time for a message to be transmitted and preserved beyond a single moment in place and time.
Europe is one of the first places that we start to see graphic marks regularly appearing in caves, rock shelters and even a few surviving open-air sites. But this is not the Europe we know today. This was a world dominated by towering ice sheets, three to four kilometers high, with sweeping grass plains and frozen tundra. This was the Ice Age.
Over the last century, more than 350 Ice Age rock art sites have been found across the continent, decorated with animals, abstract shapes and even the occasional human like these engraved figures from Grotta dell'Addaura in Sicily. They provide us with a rare glimpse into the creative world and imagination of these early artists.
Since their discovery, it's been the animals that have received the majority of the study like this black horse from Cullalvera in Spain, or this unusual purple bison from La Pasiega. But for me, it was the abstract shapes, what we call geometric signs, that drew me to study the art. The funny this is that at most sites the geometric signs far outnumber the animal and human images. But when I started on this back in 2007, there wasn't even a definitive list of how many shapes there were, nor was there a strong sense of whether the same ones appeared across space or time. Before I could even get started on my questions, my first step was to compile a database of all known geometric signs from all of the rock art sites. The problem was that while they were well documented at some sites, usually the ones with the very nice animals, there was also a large number of them where it was very vague -- there wasn't a lot of description or detail. Some of them hadn't been visited in half a century or more. These were the ones that I targeted for my field work.
Over the course of two years, my faithful husband Dylan and I each spent over 300 hours underground, hiking, crawling and wriggling around 52 sites in France, Spain, Portugal and Sicily. And it was totally worth it. We found new, undocumented geometric signs at 75 percent of the sites we visited. This is the level of accuracy I knew I was going to need if I wanted to start answering those larger questions.
So let's get to those answers. Barring a handful of outliers, there are only 32 geometric signs. Only 32 signs across a 30,000-year time span and the entire continent of Europe. That is a very small number. Now, if these were random doodles or decorations, we would expect to see a lot more variation, but instead what we find are the same signs repeating across both space and time. Some signs start out strong, before losing popularity and vanishing, while other signs are later inventions. But 65 percent of those signs stayed in use during that entire time period -- things like lines, rectangles triangles, ovals and circles like we see here from the end of the Ice Age, at a 10,000-year-old site high in the Pyrenees Mountains. And while certain signs span thousands of kilometers, other signs had much more restricted distribution patterns, with some being limited to a single territory, like we see here with these divided rectangles that are only found in northern Spain, and which some researchers have speculated could be some sort of family or clan signs.
On a side note, there is surprising degree of similarity in the earliest rock art found all the way from France and Spain to Indonesia and Australia. With many of the same signs appearing in such far-flung places, especially in that 30,000 to 40,000-year range, it's starting to seem increasingly likely that this invention actually traces back to a common point of origin in Africa. But that I'm afraid, is a subject for a future talk.
So back to the matter at hand. There could be no doubt that these signs were meaningful to their creators, like these 25,000-year-old bas-relief sculptures from La Roque de Venasque in France. We might not know what they meant, but the people of the time certainly did. The repetition of the same signs, for so long, and at so many sites tells us that the artists were making intentional choices. If we're talking about geometric shapes, with specific, culturally recognized, agreed-upon meanings, than we could very well be looking at one of the oldest systems of graphic communication in the world.
I'm not talking about writing yet. There's just not enough characters at this point to have represented all of the words in the spoken language, something which is a requirement for a full writing system. Nor do we see the signs repeating regularly enough to suggest that they were some sort of alphabet. But what we do have are some intriguing one-offs, like this panel from La Pasiega in Spain, known as "The Inscription," with its symmetrical markings on the left, possible stylized representations of hands in the middle, and what looks a bit like a bracket on the right.
The oldest systems of graphic communication in the world -- Sumerian cuneiform, Egyptian hieroglyphs, the earliest Chinese script, all emerged between 4,000 and 5,000 years ago, with each coming into existence from an earlier protosystem made up of counting marks and pictographic representations, where the meaning and the image were the same. So a picture of a bird would really have represented that animal. It's only later that we start to see these pictographs become more stylized, until they almost become unrecognizable and that we also start to see more symbols being invented to represent all those other missing words in language -- things like pronouns, adverbs, adjectives.
So knowing all this, it seems highly unlikely that the geometric signs from Ice Age Europe were truly abstract written characters. Instead, what's much more likely is that these early artists were also making counting marks, maybe like this row of lines from Riparo di Za Minic in Sicily, as well as creating stylized representations of things from the world around them. Could some of the signs be weaponry or housing? Or what about celestial objects like star constellations? Or maybe even rivers, mountains, trees -- landscape features, possibly like this black penniform surrounded by strange bell-shaped signs from the site of El Castillo in Spain. The term penniform means "feather-shaped" in Latin, but could this actually be a depiction of a plant or a tree? Some researchers have begun to ask these questions about certain signs at specific sites, but I believe the time has come to revisit this category as a whole. The irony in all of this, of course, is that having just carefully classified all of the signs into a single category, I have a feeling that my next step will involve breaking it back apart as different types of imagery are identified and separated off.
Now don't get me wrong, the later creation of fully developed writing was an impressive feat in its own right. But it's important to remember that those early writing systems didn't come out of a vacuum. And that even 5,000 years ago, people were already building on something much older, with its origins stretching back tens of thousands of years -- to the geometric signs of Ice Age Europe and far beyond, to that point, deep in our collective history, when someone first came up with the idea of making a graphic mark, and forever changed the nature of how we communicate.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Filmed August 2015 at TED Fellows Retreat 2015
Genevieve von Petzinger: Why are these 32 symbols found in ancient caves all over Europe?
Written language, the hallmark of human civilization, didn't just suddenly appear one day. Thousands of years before the first fully developed writing systems, our ancestors scrawled geometric signs across the walls of the caves they sheltered in. Paleoanthropologist, rock art researcher and TED Senior Fellow Genevieve von Petzinger has studied and codified these ancient markings in caves across Europe. The uniformity of her findings suggest that graphic communication, and the ability to preserve and transmit messages beyond a single moment in time, may be much older than we think.
Transcript:
here's something about caves -- a shadowy opening in a limestone cliff that draws you in. As you pass through the portal between light and dark, you enter a subterranean world -- a place of perpetual gloom, of earthy smells, of hushed silence.
Long ago in Europe, ancient people also entered these underground worlds. As witness to their passage, they left behind mysterious engravings and paintings, like this panel of humans, triangles and zigzags from Ojo Guareña in Spain. You now walk the same path as these early artists. And in this surreal, otherworldly place, it's almost possible to imagine that you hear the muffled footfall of skin boots on soft earth, or that you see the flickering of a torch around the next bend.
When I'm in a cave, I often find myself wondering what drove these people to go so deep to brave dangerous and narrow passageways to leave their mark? In this video clip, that was shot half a kilometer, or about a third of a mile, underground, in the cave of Cudon in Spain, we found a series of red paintings on a ceiling in a previously unexplored section of the cave. As we crawled forward, military-style, with the ceiling getting ever lower, we finally got to a point where the ceiling was so low that my husband and project photographer, Dylan, could no longer achieve focus on the ceiling with his DSLR camera. So while he filmed me, I kept following the trail of red paint with a single light and a point-and-shoot camera that we kept for that type of occasion. Half a kilometer underground.
Seriously. What was somebody doing down there with a torch or a stone lamp?
(Laughter)
I mean -- me, it makes sense, right?
But you know, this is the kind of question that I'm trying to answer with my research. I study some of the oldest art in the world. It was created by these early artists in Europe, between 10,000 and 40,000 years ago. And the thing is that I'm not just studying it because it's beautiful, though some of it certainly is. But what I'm interested in is the development of the modern mind, of the evolution of creativity, of imagination, of abstract thought, about what it means to be human. While all species communicate in one way or another, only we humans have really taken it to another level. Our desire and ability to share and collaborate has been a huge part of our success story. Our modern world is based on a global network of information exchange made possible, in large part, by our ability to communicate -- in particular, using graphic or written forms of communication. The thing is, though, that we've been building on the mental achievements of those that came before us for so long that it's easy to forget that certain abilities haven't already existed. It's one of the things I find most fascinating about studying our deep history. Those people didn't have the shoulders of any giants to stand on. They were the original shoulders. And while a surprising number of important inventions come out of that distant time, what I want to talk to you about today is the invention of graphic communication.
There are three main types of communication, spoken, gestural -- so things like sign language -- and graphic communication. Spoken and gestural are by their very nature ephemeral. It requires close contact for a message to be sent and received. And after the moment of transmission, it's gone forever. Graphic communication, on the other hand, decouples that relationship. And with its invention, it became possible for the first time for a message to be transmitted and preserved beyond a single moment in place and time.
Europe is one of the first places that we start to see graphic marks regularly appearing in caves, rock shelters and even a few surviving open-air sites. But this is not the Europe we know today. This was a world dominated by towering ice sheets, three to four kilometers high, with sweeping grass plains and frozen tundra. This was the Ice Age.
Over the last century, more than 350 Ice Age rock art sites have been found across the continent, decorated with animals, abstract shapes and even the occasional human like these engraved figures from Grotta dell'Addaura in Sicily. They provide us with a rare glimpse into the creative world and imagination of these early artists.
Since their discovery, it's been the animals that have received the majority of the study like this black horse from Cullalvera in Spain, or this unusual purple bison from La Pasiega. But for me, it was the abstract shapes, what we call geometric signs, that drew me to study the art. The funny this is that at most sites the geometric signs far outnumber the animal and human images. But when I started on this back in 2007, there wasn't even a definitive list of how many shapes there were, nor was there a strong sense of whether the same ones appeared across space or time. Before I could even get started on my questions, my first step was to compile a database of all known geometric signs from all of the rock art sites. The problem was that while they were well documented at some sites, usually the ones with the very nice animals, there was also a large number of them where it was very vague -- there wasn't a lot of description or detail. Some of them hadn't been visited in half a century or more. These were the ones that I targeted for my field work.
Over the course of two years, my faithful husband Dylan and I each spent over 300 hours underground, hiking, crawling and wriggling around 52 sites in France, Spain, Portugal and Sicily. And it was totally worth it. We found new, undocumented geometric signs at 75 percent of the sites we visited. This is the level of accuracy I knew I was going to need if I wanted to start answering those larger questions.
So let's get to those answers. Barring a handful of outliers, there are only 32 geometric signs. Only 32 signs across a 30,000-year time span and the entire continent of Europe. That is a very small number. Now, if these were random doodles or decorations, we would expect to see a lot more variation, but instead what we find are the same signs repeating across both space and time. Some signs start out strong, before losing popularity and vanishing, while other signs are later inventions. But 65 percent of those signs stayed in use during that entire time period -- things like lines, rectangles triangles, ovals and circles like we see here from the end of the Ice Age, at a 10,000-year-old site high in the Pyrenees Mountains. And while certain signs span thousands of kilometers, other signs had much more restricted distribution patterns, with some being limited to a single territory, like we see here with these divided rectangles that are only found in northern Spain, and which some researchers have speculated could be some sort of family or clan signs.
On a side note, there is surprising degree of similarity in the earliest rock art found all the way from France and Spain to Indonesia and Australia. With many of the same signs appearing in such far-flung places, especially in that 30,000 to 40,000-year range, it's starting to seem increasingly likely that this invention actually traces back to a common point of origin in Africa. But that I'm afraid, is a subject for a future talk.
So back to the matter at hand. There could be no doubt that these signs were meaningful to their creators, like these 25,000-year-old bas-relief sculptures from La Roque de Venasque in France. We might not know what they meant, but the people of the time certainly did. The repetition of the same signs, for so long, and at so many sites tells us that the artists were making intentional choices. If we're talking about geometric shapes, with specific, culturally recognized, agreed-upon meanings, than we could very well be looking at one of the oldest systems of graphic communication in the world.
I'm not talking about writing yet. There's just not enough characters at this point to have represented all of the words in the spoken language, something which is a requirement for a full writing system. Nor do we see the signs repeating regularly enough to suggest that they were some sort of alphabet. But what we do have are some intriguing one-offs, like this panel from La Pasiega in Spain, known as "The Inscription," with its symmetrical markings on the left, possible stylized representations of hands in the middle, and what looks a bit like a bracket on the right.
The oldest systems of graphic communication in the world -- Sumerian cuneiform, Egyptian hieroglyphs, the earliest Chinese script, all emerged between 4,000 and 5,000 years ago, with each coming into existence from an earlier protosystem made up of counting marks and pictographic representations, where the meaning and the image were the same. So a picture of a bird would really have represented that animal. It's only later that we start to see these pictographs become more stylized, until they almost become unrecognizable and that we also start to see more symbols being invented to represent all those other missing words in language -- things like pronouns, adverbs, adjectives.
So knowing all this, it seems highly unlikely that the geometric signs from Ice Age Europe were truly abstract written characters. Instead, what's much more likely is that these early artists were also making counting marks, maybe like this row of lines from Riparo di Za Minic in Sicily, as well as creating stylized representations of things from the world around them. Could some of the signs be weaponry or housing? Or what about celestial objects like star constellations? Or maybe even rivers, mountains, trees -- landscape features, possibly like this black penniform surrounded by strange bell-shaped signs from the site of El Castillo in Spain. The term penniform means "feather-shaped" in Latin, but could this actually be a depiction of a plant or a tree? Some researchers have begun to ask these questions about certain signs at specific sites, but I believe the time has come to revisit this category as a whole. The irony in all of this, of course, is that having just carefully classified all of the signs into a single category, I have a feeling that my next step will involve breaking it back apart as different types of imagery are identified and separated off.
Now don't get me wrong, the later creation of fully developed writing was an impressive feat in its own right. But it's important to remember that those early writing systems didn't come out of a vacuum. And that even 5,000 years ago, people were already building on something much older, with its origins stretching back tens of thousands of years -- to the geometric signs of Ice Age Europe and far beyond, to that point, deep in our collective history, when someone first came up with the idea of making a graphic mark, and forever changed the nature of how we communicate.
Thank you.
(Applause)
BIOL/GralInt-TED Talks-Carl Safina: What are animals thinking and feeling?
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Filmed October 2015 at Mission Blue II
Carl Safina: What are animals thinking and feeling?
What's going on inside the brains of animals? Can we know what, or if, they're thinking and feeling? Carl Safina thinks we can. Using discoveries and anecdotes that span ecology, biology and behavioral science, he weaves together stories of whales, wolves, elephants and albatrosses to argue that just as we think, feel, use tools and express emotions, so too do the other creatures – and minds – that share the Earth with us.
Transcript:
Have you ever wondered what animals think and feel? Let's start with a question: Does my dog really love me, or does she just want a treat? Well, it's easy to see that our dog really loves us, easy to see, right, what's going on in that fuzzy little head. What is going on? Something's going on.
But why is the question always do they love us? Why is it always about us? Why are we such narcissists? I found a different question to ask animals. Who are you?
There are capacities of the human mind that we tend to think are capacities only of the human mind. But is that true? What are other beings doing with those brains? What are they thinking and feeling? Is there a way to know? I think there is a way in. I think there are several ways in. We can look at evolution, we can look at their brains and we can watch what they do.
The first thing to remember is: our brain is inherited. The first neurons came from jellyfish. Jellyfish gave rise to the first chordates. The first chordates gave rise to the first vertebrates. The vertebrates came out of the sea, and here we are. But it's still true that a neuron, a nerve cell, looks the same in a crayfish, a bird or you. What does that say about the minds of crayfish? Can we tell anything about that? Well, it turns out that if you give a crayfish a lot of little tiny electric shocks every time it tries to come out of its burrow, it will develop anxiety. If you give the crayfish the same drug used to treat anxiety disorder in humans, it relaxes and comes out and explores. How do we show how much we care about crayfish anxiety? Mostly, we boil them.
(Laughter)
Octopuses use tools, as well as do most apes and they recognize human faces. How do we celebrate the ape-like intelligence of this invertebrate? Mostly boiled. If a grouper chases a fish into a crevice in the coral, it will sometimes go to where it knows a moray eel is sleeping and it will signal to the moray, "Follow me," and the moray will understand that signal. The moray may go into the crevice and get the fish, but the fish may bolt and the grouper may get it. This is an ancient partnership that we have just recently found out about. How do we celebrate that ancient partnership? Mostly fried. A pattern is emerging and it says a lot more about us than it does about them.
Sea otters use tools and they take time away from what they're doing to show their babies what to do, which is called teaching. Chimpanzees don't teach. Killer whales teach and killer whales share food.
When evolution makes something new, it uses the parts it has in stock, off the shelf, before it fabricates a new twist. And our brain has come to us through the enormity of the deep sweep of time. If you look at the human brain compared to a chimpanzee brain, what you see is we have basically a very big chimpanzee brain. It's a good thing ours is bigger, because we're also really insecure.
(Laughter)
But, uh oh, there's a dolphin, a bigger brain with more convolutions. OK, maybe you're saying, all right, well, we see brains, but what does that have to say about minds? Well, we can see the working of the mind in the logic of behaviors. So these elephants, you can see, obviously, they are resting. They have found a patch of shade under the palm trees under which to let their babies sleep, while they doze but remain vigilant. We make perfect sense of that image just as they make perfect sense of what they're doing because under the arc of the same sun on the same plains, listening to the howls of the same dangers, they became who they are and we became who we are.
We've been neighbors for a very long time. No one would mistake these elephants as being relaxed. They're obviously very concerned about something. What are they concerned about? It turns out that if you record the voices of tourists and you play that recording from a speaker hidden in bushes, elephants will ignore it, because tourists never bother elephants. But if you record the voices of herders who carry spears and often hurt elephants in confrontations at water holes, the elephants will bunch up and run away from the hidden speaker. Not only do elephants know that there are humans, they know that there are different kinds of humans, and that some are OK and some are dangerous.
They have been watching us for much longer than we have been watching them. They know us better than we know them. We have the same imperatives: take care of our babies, find food, try to stay alive. Whether we're outfitted for hiking in the hills of Africa or outfitted for diving under the sea, we are basically the same. We are kin under the skin. The elephant has the same skeleton, the killer whale has the same skeleton, as do we. We see helping where help is needed. We see curiosity in the young. We see the bonds of family connections. We recognize affection. Courtship is courtship. And then we ask, "Are they conscious?"
When you get general anesthesia, it makes you unconscious, which means you have no sensation of anything. Consciousness is simply the thing that feels like something. If you see, if you hear, if you feel, if you're aware of anything, you are conscious, and they are conscious.
Some people say well, there are certain things that make humans humans, and one of those things is empathy. Empathy is the mind's ability to match moods with your companions. It's a very useful thing. If your companions start to move quickly, you have to feel like you need to hurry up. We're all in a hurry now. The oldest form of empathy is contagious fear. If your companions suddenly startle and fly away, it does not work very well for you to say, "Jeez, I wonder why everybody just left."
(Laughter)
Empathy is old, but empathy, like everything else in life, comes on a sliding scale and has its elaboration. So there's basic empathy: you feel sad, it makes me sad. I see you happy, it makes me happy.
Then there's something that I call sympathy, a little more removed: "I'm sorry to hear that your grandmother has just passed away. I don't feel that same grief, but I get it; I know what you feel and it concerns me."
And then if we're motivated to act on sympathy, I call that compassion.
Far from being the thing that makes us human, human empathy is far from perfect. We round up empathic creatures, we kill them and we eat them. Now, maybe you say OK, well, those are different species. That's just predation, and humans are predators. But we don't treat our own kind too well either. People who seem to know only one thing about animal behavior know that you must never attribute human thoughts and emotions to other species. Well, I think that's silly, because attributing human thoughts and emotions to other species is the best first guess about what they're doing and how they're feeling, because their brains are basically the same as ours. They have the same structures. The same hormones that create mood and motivation in us are in those brains as well. It is not scientific to say that they are hungry when they're hunting and they're tired when their tongues are hanging out, and then say when they're playing with their children and acting joyful and happy, we have no idea if they can possibly be experiencing anything. That is not scientific.
So OK, so a reporter said to me, "Maybe, but how do you really know that other animals can think and feel?" And I started to rifle through all the hundreds of scientific references that I put in my book and I realized that the answer was right in the room with me. When my dog gets off the rug and comes over to me -- not to the couch, to me -- and she rolls over on her back and exposes her belly, she has had the thought, "I would like my belly rubbed. I know that I can go over to Carl, he will understand what I'm asking. I know I can trust him because we're family. He'll get the job done, and it will feel good."
(Laughter)
She has thought and she has felt, and it's really not more complicated than that.
But we see other animals and we say, "Oh look, killer whales, wolves, elephants: that's not how they see it."
That tall-finned male is L41. He's 38 years old. The female right on his left side is L22. She's 44. They've known each other for decades. They know exactly who they are. They know who their friends are. They know who their rivals are. Their life follows the arc of a career. They know where they are all the time.
This is an elephant named Philo. He was a young male. This is him four days later. Humans not only can feel grief, we create an awful lot of it. We want to carve their teeth. Why can't we wait for them to die? Elephants once ranged from the shores of the Mediterranean Sea all the way down to the Cape of Good Hope. In 1980, there were vast strongholds of elephant range in Central and Eastern Africa. And now their range is shattered into little shards. This is the geography of an animal that we are driving to extinction, a fellow being, the most magnificent creature on land.
Of course, we take much better care of our wildlife in the United States. In Yellowstone National Park, we killed every single wolf. We killed every single wolf south of the Canadian border, actually. But in the park, park rangers did that in the 1920s, and then 60 years later they had to bring them back, because the elk numbers had gotten out of control. And then people came. People came by the thousands to see the wolves, the most accessibly visible wolves in the world.
And I went there and I watched this incredible family of wolves. A pack is a family. It has some breeding adults and the young of several generations. And I watched the most famous, most stable pack in Yellowstone National Park. And then, when they wandered just outside the border, two of their adults were killed, including the mother, which we sometimes call the alpha female. The rest of the family immediately descended into sibling rivalry. Sisters kicked out other sisters. That one on the left tried for days to rejoin her family. They wouldn't let her because they were jealous of her. She was getting too much attention from two new males, and she was the precocious one. That was too much for them. She wound up wandering outside the park and getting shot. The alpha male wound up being ejected from his own family. As winter was coming in, he lost his territory, his hunting support, the members of his family and his mate.
We cause so much pain to them. The mystery is, why don't they hurt us more than they do? This whale had just finished eating part of a grey whale with his companions who had killed that whale. Those people in the boat had nothing at all to fear. This whale is T20. He had just finished tearing a seal into three pieces with two companions. The seal weighed about as much as the people in the boat. They had nothing to fear. They eat seals. Why don't they eat us? Why can we trust them around our toddlers? Why is it that killer whales have returned to researchers lost in thick fog and led them miles until the fog parted and the researchers' home was right there on the shoreline? And that's happened more than one time.
In the Bahamas, there's a woman named Denise Herzing, and she studies spotted dolphins and they know her. She knows them very well. She knows who they all are. They know her. They recognize the research boat. When she shows up, it's a big happy reunion. Except, one time showed up and they didn't want to come near the boat, and that was really strange. And they couldn't figure out what was going on until somebody came out on deck and announced that one of the people onboard had died during a nap in his bunk. How could dolphins know that one of the human hearts had just stopped? Why would they care? And why would it spook them? These mysterious things just hint at all of the things that are going on in the minds that are with us on Earth that we almost never think about at all.
At an aquarium in South Africa was a little baby bottle-nosed dolphin named Dolly. She was nursing, and one day a keeper took a cigarette break and he was looking into the window into their pool, smoking. Dolly came over and looked at him, went back to her mother, nursed for a minute or two, came back to the window and released a cloud of milk that enveloped her head like smoke. Somehow, this baby bottle-nosed dolphin got the idea of using milk to represent smoke. When human beings use one thing to represent another, we call that art.
(Laughter)
The things that make us human are not the things that we think make us human. What makes us human is that, of all these things that our minds and their minds have, we are the most extreme. We are the most compassionate, most violent, most creative and most destructive animal that has ever been on this planet, and we are all of those things all jumbled up together. But love is not the thing that makes us human. It's not special to us. We are not the only ones who care about our mates. We are not the only ones who care about our children.
Albatrosses frequently fly six, sometimes ten thousand miles over several weeks to deliver one meal, one big meal, to their chick who is waiting for them. They nest on the most remote islands in the oceans of the world, and this is what it looks like. Passing life from one generation to the next is the chain of being. If that stops, it all goes away. If anything is sacred, that is, and into that sacred relationship comes our plastic trash. All of these birds have plastic in them now. This is an albatross six months old, ready to fledge -- died, packed with red cigarette lighters.
This is not the relationship we are supposed to have with the rest of the world. But we, who have named ourselves after our brains, never think about the consequences. When we welcome new human life into the world, we welcome our babies into the company of other creatures. We paint animals on the walls. We don't paint cell phones. We don't paint work cubicles. We paint animals to show them that we are not alone. We have company. And every one of those animals in every painting of Noah's ark, deemed worthy of salvation is in mortal danger now, and their flood is us.
So we started with a question: Do they love us? We're going to ask another question. Are we capable of using what we have to care enough to simply let them continue?
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
Filmed October 2015 at Mission Blue II
Carl Safina: What are animals thinking and feeling?
What's going on inside the brains of animals? Can we know what, or if, they're thinking and feeling? Carl Safina thinks we can. Using discoveries and anecdotes that span ecology, biology and behavioral science, he weaves together stories of whales, wolves, elephants and albatrosses to argue that just as we think, feel, use tools and express emotions, so too do the other creatures – and minds – that share the Earth with us.
Transcript:
Have you ever wondered what animals think and feel? Let's start with a question: Does my dog really love me, or does she just want a treat? Well, it's easy to see that our dog really loves us, easy to see, right, what's going on in that fuzzy little head. What is going on? Something's going on.
But why is the question always do they love us? Why is it always about us? Why are we such narcissists? I found a different question to ask animals. Who are you?
There are capacities of the human mind that we tend to think are capacities only of the human mind. But is that true? What are other beings doing with those brains? What are they thinking and feeling? Is there a way to know? I think there is a way in. I think there are several ways in. We can look at evolution, we can look at their brains and we can watch what they do.
The first thing to remember is: our brain is inherited. The first neurons came from jellyfish. Jellyfish gave rise to the first chordates. The first chordates gave rise to the first vertebrates. The vertebrates came out of the sea, and here we are. But it's still true that a neuron, a nerve cell, looks the same in a crayfish, a bird or you. What does that say about the minds of crayfish? Can we tell anything about that? Well, it turns out that if you give a crayfish a lot of little tiny electric shocks every time it tries to come out of its burrow, it will develop anxiety. If you give the crayfish the same drug used to treat anxiety disorder in humans, it relaxes and comes out and explores. How do we show how much we care about crayfish anxiety? Mostly, we boil them.
(Laughter)
Octopuses use tools, as well as do most apes and they recognize human faces. How do we celebrate the ape-like intelligence of this invertebrate? Mostly boiled. If a grouper chases a fish into a crevice in the coral, it will sometimes go to where it knows a moray eel is sleeping and it will signal to the moray, "Follow me," and the moray will understand that signal. The moray may go into the crevice and get the fish, but the fish may bolt and the grouper may get it. This is an ancient partnership that we have just recently found out about. How do we celebrate that ancient partnership? Mostly fried. A pattern is emerging and it says a lot more about us than it does about them.
Sea otters use tools and they take time away from what they're doing to show their babies what to do, which is called teaching. Chimpanzees don't teach. Killer whales teach and killer whales share food.
When evolution makes something new, it uses the parts it has in stock, off the shelf, before it fabricates a new twist. And our brain has come to us through the enormity of the deep sweep of time. If you look at the human brain compared to a chimpanzee brain, what you see is we have basically a very big chimpanzee brain. It's a good thing ours is bigger, because we're also really insecure.
(Laughter)
But, uh oh, there's a dolphin, a bigger brain with more convolutions. OK, maybe you're saying, all right, well, we see brains, but what does that have to say about minds? Well, we can see the working of the mind in the logic of behaviors. So these elephants, you can see, obviously, they are resting. They have found a patch of shade under the palm trees under which to let their babies sleep, while they doze but remain vigilant. We make perfect sense of that image just as they make perfect sense of what they're doing because under the arc of the same sun on the same plains, listening to the howls of the same dangers, they became who they are and we became who we are.
We've been neighbors for a very long time. No one would mistake these elephants as being relaxed. They're obviously very concerned about something. What are they concerned about? It turns out that if you record the voices of tourists and you play that recording from a speaker hidden in bushes, elephants will ignore it, because tourists never bother elephants. But if you record the voices of herders who carry spears and often hurt elephants in confrontations at water holes, the elephants will bunch up and run away from the hidden speaker. Not only do elephants know that there are humans, they know that there are different kinds of humans, and that some are OK and some are dangerous.
They have been watching us for much longer than we have been watching them. They know us better than we know them. We have the same imperatives: take care of our babies, find food, try to stay alive. Whether we're outfitted for hiking in the hills of Africa or outfitted for diving under the sea, we are basically the same. We are kin under the skin. The elephant has the same skeleton, the killer whale has the same skeleton, as do we. We see helping where help is needed. We see curiosity in the young. We see the bonds of family connections. We recognize affection. Courtship is courtship. And then we ask, "Are they conscious?"
When you get general anesthesia, it makes you unconscious, which means you have no sensation of anything. Consciousness is simply the thing that feels like something. If you see, if you hear, if you feel, if you're aware of anything, you are conscious, and they are conscious.
Some people say well, there are certain things that make humans humans, and one of those things is empathy. Empathy is the mind's ability to match moods with your companions. It's a very useful thing. If your companions start to move quickly, you have to feel like you need to hurry up. We're all in a hurry now. The oldest form of empathy is contagious fear. If your companions suddenly startle and fly away, it does not work very well for you to say, "Jeez, I wonder why everybody just left."
(Laughter)
Empathy is old, but empathy, like everything else in life, comes on a sliding scale and has its elaboration. So there's basic empathy: you feel sad, it makes me sad. I see you happy, it makes me happy.
Then there's something that I call sympathy, a little more removed: "I'm sorry to hear that your grandmother has just passed away. I don't feel that same grief, but I get it; I know what you feel and it concerns me."
And then if we're motivated to act on sympathy, I call that compassion.
Far from being the thing that makes us human, human empathy is far from perfect. We round up empathic creatures, we kill them and we eat them. Now, maybe you say OK, well, those are different species. That's just predation, and humans are predators. But we don't treat our own kind too well either. People who seem to know only one thing about animal behavior know that you must never attribute human thoughts and emotions to other species. Well, I think that's silly, because attributing human thoughts and emotions to other species is the best first guess about what they're doing and how they're feeling, because their brains are basically the same as ours. They have the same structures. The same hormones that create mood and motivation in us are in those brains as well. It is not scientific to say that they are hungry when they're hunting and they're tired when their tongues are hanging out, and then say when they're playing with their children and acting joyful and happy, we have no idea if they can possibly be experiencing anything. That is not scientific.
So OK, so a reporter said to me, "Maybe, but how do you really know that other animals can think and feel?" And I started to rifle through all the hundreds of scientific references that I put in my book and I realized that the answer was right in the room with me. When my dog gets off the rug and comes over to me -- not to the couch, to me -- and she rolls over on her back and exposes her belly, she has had the thought, "I would like my belly rubbed. I know that I can go over to Carl, he will understand what I'm asking. I know I can trust him because we're family. He'll get the job done, and it will feel good."
(Laughter)
She has thought and she has felt, and it's really not more complicated than that.
But we see other animals and we say, "Oh look, killer whales, wolves, elephants: that's not how they see it."
That tall-finned male is L41. He's 38 years old. The female right on his left side is L22. She's 44. They've known each other for decades. They know exactly who they are. They know who their friends are. They know who their rivals are. Their life follows the arc of a career. They know where they are all the time.
This is an elephant named Philo. He was a young male. This is him four days later. Humans not only can feel grief, we create an awful lot of it. We want to carve their teeth. Why can't we wait for them to die? Elephants once ranged from the shores of the Mediterranean Sea all the way down to the Cape of Good Hope. In 1980, there were vast strongholds of elephant range in Central and Eastern Africa. And now their range is shattered into little shards. This is the geography of an animal that we are driving to extinction, a fellow being, the most magnificent creature on land.
Of course, we take much better care of our wildlife in the United States. In Yellowstone National Park, we killed every single wolf. We killed every single wolf south of the Canadian border, actually. But in the park, park rangers did that in the 1920s, and then 60 years later they had to bring them back, because the elk numbers had gotten out of control. And then people came. People came by the thousands to see the wolves, the most accessibly visible wolves in the world.
And I went there and I watched this incredible family of wolves. A pack is a family. It has some breeding adults and the young of several generations. And I watched the most famous, most stable pack in Yellowstone National Park. And then, when they wandered just outside the border, two of their adults were killed, including the mother, which we sometimes call the alpha female. The rest of the family immediately descended into sibling rivalry. Sisters kicked out other sisters. That one on the left tried for days to rejoin her family. They wouldn't let her because they were jealous of her. She was getting too much attention from two new males, and she was the precocious one. That was too much for them. She wound up wandering outside the park and getting shot. The alpha male wound up being ejected from his own family. As winter was coming in, he lost his territory, his hunting support, the members of his family and his mate.
We cause so much pain to them. The mystery is, why don't they hurt us more than they do? This whale had just finished eating part of a grey whale with his companions who had killed that whale. Those people in the boat had nothing at all to fear. This whale is T20. He had just finished tearing a seal into three pieces with two companions. The seal weighed about as much as the people in the boat. They had nothing to fear. They eat seals. Why don't they eat us? Why can we trust them around our toddlers? Why is it that killer whales have returned to researchers lost in thick fog and led them miles until the fog parted and the researchers' home was right there on the shoreline? And that's happened more than one time.
In the Bahamas, there's a woman named Denise Herzing, and she studies spotted dolphins and they know her. She knows them very well. She knows who they all are. They know her. They recognize the research boat. When she shows up, it's a big happy reunion. Except, one time showed up and they didn't want to come near the boat, and that was really strange. And they couldn't figure out what was going on until somebody came out on deck and announced that one of the people onboard had died during a nap in his bunk. How could dolphins know that one of the human hearts had just stopped? Why would they care? And why would it spook them? These mysterious things just hint at all of the things that are going on in the minds that are with us on Earth that we almost never think about at all.
At an aquarium in South Africa was a little baby bottle-nosed dolphin named Dolly. She was nursing, and one day a keeper took a cigarette break and he was looking into the window into their pool, smoking. Dolly came over and looked at him, went back to her mother, nursed for a minute or two, came back to the window and released a cloud of milk that enveloped her head like smoke. Somehow, this baby bottle-nosed dolphin got the idea of using milk to represent smoke. When human beings use one thing to represent another, we call that art.
(Laughter)
The things that make us human are not the things that we think make us human. What makes us human is that, of all these things that our minds and their minds have, we are the most extreme. We are the most compassionate, most violent, most creative and most destructive animal that has ever been on this planet, and we are all of those things all jumbled up together. But love is not the thing that makes us human. It's not special to us. We are not the only ones who care about our mates. We are not the only ones who care about our children.
Albatrosses frequently fly six, sometimes ten thousand miles over several weeks to deliver one meal, one big meal, to their chick who is waiting for them. They nest on the most remote islands in the oceans of the world, and this is what it looks like. Passing life from one generation to the next is the chain of being. If that stops, it all goes away. If anything is sacred, that is, and into that sacred relationship comes our plastic trash. All of these birds have plastic in them now. This is an albatross six months old, ready to fledge -- died, packed with red cigarette lighters.
This is not the relationship we are supposed to have with the rest of the world. But we, who have named ourselves after our brains, never think about the consequences. When we welcome new human life into the world, we welcome our babies into the company of other creatures. We paint animals on the walls. We don't paint cell phones. We don't paint work cubicles. We paint animals to show them that we are not alone. We have company. And every one of those animals in every painting of Noah's ark, deemed worthy of salvation is in mortal danger now, and their flood is us.
So we started with a question: Do they love us? We're going to ask another question. Are we capable of using what we have to care enough to simply let them continue?
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
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