Author: Helen Walters

“The thing about the intensive care unit is that the lights never go off and the noise is constant,” says photographer Giles Duley. He should know. After he stepped on an IED while on assignment in Afghanistan in 2011, he spent 46 days in intensive care in a hospital in his native United Kingdom. Forty-six days! That’s a horrifying amount of time. The usual ICU stint is a few days at most. Add to that the fact that Duley, who lost both legs and one arm in the blast, could only communicate by blinking his eyelids, and you have something of a real-life nightmare scenario. “During that whole time, they thought I wouldn’t make it, so my family would come in to say good-bye and I had no way of communicating with them. Obviously it was pretty scary,” he says. Gulp.

To stop himself from being driven insane by the light, the noise and the fear while he lay in bed, Duley began a thought experiment. He’d photographed a bunch of celebrities in his time, and he’d also documented “the stories of the forgotten,” as he described in this TEDxObserver talk in 2012. Now he got to wondering who he’d shoot if he ever had the chance to pick up a camera again. “I made this fantasy list of 100 people,” he remembered in a recent telephone conversation. “Each time I came back to consciousness, I’d play one of those memory games. I’d try to remember the people on my list, and I’d imagine the shoot. And I always resolved if I did make it and found some way of taking pictures again, I would contact everyone on the list and see if I could take their portrait.”

That time is now. Two years, 30 operations and a long rehabilitation later, his project, 100 Portraits Before I Die, is officially under way, and he has published the first two portraits — of Sudanese surgeon Gino Strada (above) and author Ben Okri. He’s not revealing his full wish list just yet, but he does share that future subjects include musician PJ Harvey and fellow war photographer Don McCullin.

Most important to Duley is that this isn’t simply a list of random personalities. Instead, it’s a nuanced list of people who have had an influence on his life. That’s why actor Henry Winkler is there. “I was addicted to Happy Days as a kid; I watched it religiously,” Duley says with a laugh. “That might be cheesy, but this is a journey back through my life, a mosaic of people.” This combination of image and story makes the portraits both intensely personal and hugely powerful, a genuine collaboration between photographer and subject. Look at the expression on Strada’s face in the image above. The connection between the two is clear; this is a rare glimpse of pure intimacy.

“They’re not doing it because they’re publicizing something they’re doing, or they’re trying to get something out of it. It’s a gift,” says Duley, who despite (or perhaps because of) his fashion and music magazine heritage shows robust disdain for a celebrity-driven culture in which someone is only deemed interesting because they have something to promote. “I don’t like the phrase ‘to take a photograph.’ A photograph is something that’s given to you. It’s a conversation between two people.”

So far, everyone Duley has contacted has agreed to take part … all but one: the Beat poet Gary Snyder turned him down. “But the reason his agent gave was brilliant,” Duley recalls. “‘Gary is far too old and he lives far too out in the woods.’ That’s quite a lovely thing, isn’t it? ‘He lives far too out in the woods.’ I love that. That’s how I want to end up.”

Architect Alastair Parvin came to TED2013 with questions that challenge our preconceptions about building. How about we involve everyone in the architectural design process, not just professional architects building for the super-wealthy? What about a world in which cities are built by citizens?

Alastair Parvin: Architecture for the people by the peopleParvin isn’t merely being rhetorical, as he shares in today’s talk. He and his London-based team have come up with a way to democratize both the design and the manufacturing of buildings. It’s called WikiHouse.

“The idea is to make it possible for anyone to go online and access a freely shared library of 3D models which they can download and adapt in Sketchup,” he says in today’s talk. “Almost at the click of a switch, they can generate a series of cutting files, which allow them in effect to print out the parts from a house using a CNC machine and a standard sheet material like plywood. The parts are all numbered, and basically what you end up with is a really big IKEA kit.”

Sounds intriguing… so how does it really work? We got Parvin to break it down, visually:

WikiHouse is an “open source construction kit.” It enables anyone with an Internet connection to access a shared library of structural designs.

Users simply choose a design. By clicking a button marked, “Make this house,” WikiHouse generates a set of cutting files for each of the parts that goes into that particular structure.

Using a CNC machine, the parts can be “printed” from a standard sheet material such as plywood.

All of the parts in the open source construction kit are numbered, and designed to minimize confusion. “The principles of openness go right to the mundane physical details,” Parvin says. “Don’t design a piece that can’t be picked up, and don’t design a piece that could be put in the wrong way around.”

The WikiHouse system is designed so that it slots together using wedges and pegs. Here’s another radical idea: even the tools used to make the house can be crafted using the WikiHouse technology. Design and manufacture your own mallet!

“People get confused between construction work and having fun,” jokes Parvin, who points out that before the Industrial Revolution, barn-raisings were a common occurrence. Why shouldn’t family and friends be involved in the construction of a modern house?

A building’s panels are screwed into place. A small team can complete a house structure in about a day. As Parvin lyrically describes, imagine “a future where the factory is everywhere, the design team is everyone.”

Mod cons might not be included in a WikiHouse, but they can certainly be incorporated. The frame of the house can easily be adapted to include the likes of cladding, insulation and windows as well as other amenities. Maybe one day, those will be downloadable files, too.

It’s still early days for the WikiHouse project (buildings take time to make, after all.) But here’s an intriguing timelapse video, filmed at the OUI Share Fest in Paris, which shows wiki-building at work.

Read much more about WikiHouse »

This is how speakers stay focused as they give TED Talks: a “confidence” monitor onstage, shown here at TED2011. Slide design: WORKSHOP/staff. Photograph: James Duncan Davidson.

It is, indeed, a monumental day here at TED Towers. We’re winners! Or, as June Cohen, executive producer of TED Media, described this morning’s news of our winning the 2013 National Design Award for corporate and institutional achievement: “We’re thrilled!”

“Design and design thinking has always been core to TED’s mission. After all, it’s the ‘D’ in TED,” she continued. “That’s reflected in everything we do, from staging and hosting our conferences, to filming and publishing our speakers’ talks, to building TED.com and our apps, to creating TED-Ed animations, to helping TEDx organizers put on independent events. We’re so grateful to the network of talented designers we partner with — as well as our in-house team — for their tireless efforts in moving TED’s mission forward.”

Stage design is a big part of the TED conference experience. Here, young African innovator Richard Turere tells his story at TED2013. Photograph: James Duncan Davidson.

The field of corporate design has evolved since its romantic heyday, when hero designers such as Paul Rand or Massimo Vignelli created iconic visual systems for companies such as IBM, UPS or American Airlines. These days, a company’s identity needs to be able to work in many different contexts, to adapt to the ever-changing needs and demands of a digitally driven universe even as it holds true to the principles at its core. This is especially true as TED’s list of initiatives is always growing.

The TED branding works in many different contexts. Here, at right is a print program guide designed by Albertson Design, with TEDActive programs and dogtags designed by WORKSHOP.

Mike Femia, TED’s director of design services, explains how he and the team work across the company’s many extensions. The key? To focus on the mission statement of “ideas worth spreading.”

“We want a certain simplicity to be the basis of everything we do, so that TED can be a platform for ideas. We don’t want to overshadow them or impose unnecessary branding flourishes,” he said. “At the same time, we are very open to new design directions, and we work with many outside studios and designers who have unique viewpoints. The fundamental question: how can we use design to help encourage the spread of ideas? Our best work comes about when we bring all of these elements together.”

The theme of the conference is the basis of print pieces produced for attendees. Here, the cover of the program guide for TED2010, designed by Paper Plane Studio. Photograph: Marla Aufmuth.

Thaniya Keereepart, TED’s product development director, echoes the importance of remaining focused, a task that anyone who’s ever had anything to do with modern life knows is easier said than done. “Design should be simple. Quiet. It should bring to light the content and enhance the experience of content consumption,” she explained. “If you go to a website and the first thing you see is the design, that’s not TED.”

Both Keereepart and Femia are quick to share any credit for TED’s award with their many collaborators, both internal and external, and it’s safe to say we’re thrilled. Last word to the Cooper-Hewitt’s acting director, Caroline Baumann, who said this morning, “TED draws an enormous and varied audience who find inspiration and ideas from the conference, as do the speakers themselves. TED is an invaluable resource and experience for designers in all industries.”

TED playlists are “collections for curious minds.” Just added to the site this year, it puts new spin on TED’s classic page design.

“I’m not arguing that this stuff shouldn’t exist,” says Juan Enriquez. “I’m saying that precisely because this stuff is so powerful, we should be careful and think about what we’re doing, instead of treating it like a lark, thinking if we post something at 2am that no one will care.”

The Boston-based entrepreneur and many-time TED speaker is mulling the impact of social media and new technology in an interview with the TED Blog yesterday. As he asks in this short talk from TED2013, what if the “digital tattoos” we create by using programs such as Facebook, Twitter, and Google are in fact as enduring as any embellishment on our physical selves? Shouldn’t we at least try to avoid being branded with the digital equivalent of an embarrassing tramp stamp?

Juan Enriquez: Your online life, permanent as a tattoo It’s a new metaphor for an old topic, one that’s busied writers and thinkers of every generation. As Enriquez himself points out, the ancient Greeks were terribly taken with ideas of immortality and how they might be remembered. Yet he believes that in modern life we’re not at all savvy about the long-term consequences of impulsive decisions. He points to Andrea Benitez, the young Mexican woman who recently ran afoul of social media when she proudly and publicly wrote about getting her father to shut down a restaurant she considered didn’t treat her with enough deference. “Now she’s ‘Lady Profeco,’ essentially Lady Macbeth,” says Enriquez of the girl, who’s been roundly trashed within social media, even the subject of an article in The New York Times.

Enriquez is not arguing that Ms. Benitez should have been free to exploit her father’s status. Neither is he saying that the solution is to swear off social media for good. Rather, he’s advocating a path of conscious tolerance. “We’re demanding that young people be responsible for stuff that lasts for a long time,” he says. “Folks should pay attention.”

But isn’t Enriquez just being old school, I ask? Sure, he and I might be horrified by the idea of every last thoughtless jape of our younger selves being captured and broadcast to a virtual audience of millions. But, well, it wasn’t. Why does he think those growing up in a new status quo won’t simply figure out the best way to manage the deluge? Might not society mores shift, so that what he sees as a permanent stain might in fact be as fleeting as a temporary tattoo? “I do wonder,” he allows. “If all our lives become transparent, if you actually get a full picture of the good and the bad of someone sitting next to you in church, how would our societal norms change?”

“I don’t know that there’s one answer,” he adds. “I’d like to think we’d be more tolerant, but often when things are exposed we clamp down and deem something unacceptable.”

In other words, it’s the grey areas we should watch for, and we should foster open conversation about the impact of our media on our actions and behavior. The solution isn’t to deny digital, though heaven knows there are plenty of such ideas in the works. (Enriquez mentions these glasses designed to impede facial identification software.) Instead, we must be thoughtful, smart, and conscious of the decisions we’re making, the tradeoffs we’re making, and the potential consequences of our actions. To apply (whisper it) common sense. That’s a concept that’s as old as the ancient Greeks … and one that’ll never go out of style.

The vast tail of a Southern right whale, photographed near Argentina in 2004.

Ask photojournalists to name a peer they admire, and Sebastião Salgado’s name is sure to crop up. The Brazilian is renowned for the long-term projects he undertakes, devoting years at a time to documenting the story of a particular people or the evolution of a certain place. Sebastião Salgado: The silent drama of photographyAs he describes in the talk he gave at TED2013, his attention to detail and his personal attachment to his subjects caused health problems that nearly killed him.

Thankfully, he didn’t give up. His most recent project is Genesis, which he describes as “my love letter to the planet” and for which he spent eight years traveling the world to photograph humans, animals and nature in their native glory. (To read more details about Salgado’s process, see this rather lovely Q&A with TED photographer Ryan Lash.) The resulting black-and-white images include the astonishing shot, above, of a Southern right whale, which he photographed in the Valdés Peninsula in Argentina in 2004. Together, the series forms the focus of a book (including a vast, two-volume edition that costs $9,000 and comes complete with a wooden stand designed by the Japanese architect Tadao Ando; mere mortals can pick up a hardcover version for $69.99). There’s also a documentary, Shade and Light, filmed by Salgado’s son and Wim Wenders, and exhibitions in cities around the world.

The scale is appropriate. This is truly breathtaking work. And, for all that the scenes Salgado captures will likely feel alien to most of us, the images are imbued with no less than the spirit of humanity. If that sounds overblown, seriously, check these out:

An iceberg photographed on the Antarctic Peninsula. Note the “castle tower,” at top right, apparently carved in the ice by wind erosion. (2005.)

Waura Indians fish in the Puilanga Lake near their village in the Upper Xingu region of Brazil’s Mato Grosso state. (2005.)

The Mursi and the Surma women in Ethiopia are, Salgado says, the last women in the world to wear lip plates. It’s unclear precisely why or how this custom evolved, but it is a mark of women of high birth. (2007.)

Teureum is the leader of the Mentawai clan, which lives on Siberut Island in West Sumatra. The shaman is preparing a filter for sago. (2008.)

Women of the Zo’é village of Towari Ypy in Brazil. (2009.)

Look, ma! No hands! Salgado photographed these chinstrap penguins on icebergs between the Zavodovski and Visokoi islands in the South Sandwich Islands, near Antarctica. (2009.)

Shot from Navajo Native American territory, this breathtaking image captures the junction of the Colorado and Little Colorado rivers, at the gateway to the Grand Canyon National Park, in Arizona in the United States. (2010.)

Light streams across an elephant disappearing into the bush. Kafue National Park, Zambia. (2010.)

The Nenet people, living deep within the Yamal peninsula in Siberia, inside the Arctic Circle. (2011.)

“I wanted to reframe the way we use information, the way we work together.”

Such was the kernel of an idea from one Tim Berners-Lee, a software engineer working at CERN back in the 1980s. Working on this idea was a side project for Berners-Lee, one dubbed “vague but exciting” by his boss at the time. Yet today, the results of the experiment turn 20 years old. As his former employer puts it, “On 30 April 1993, CERN published a statement making W3 technology available on a royalty free basis, allowing the web to flourish.” That’s a very less-than-vague achievement we should all take a moment to celebrate.

In 2009, Berners-Lee gave a TED Talk in which he described some of the history of developing the web, and detailed some of his ideas for what might happen next. He essentially documents principles of innovation that hold as true today as they did back when he was experimenting with his radical idea of web-style interoperability, and they’re certainly worth any would-be entrepreneur thinking about in the go-go bubble days of the current tech climate. Innovation, it turns out, is often very less than the result of a Eureka moment of genius insight. Instead, it’s the result of hard work and deep application.

Here, some lessons from Berners-Lee and his twenty-something baby, the World Wide Web.

1. Harness Your Own Frustration

Berners-Lee was annoyed that he couldn’t collaborate easily and seamlessly with the many colleagues who came through CERN’s doors, each one clutching potentially valuable insights and information locked away behind a ton of different formats. He became obsessed with wanting to figure out a way to develop a system to break this problem once and for all. Focusing on solving an actual tangible issue provides a solid foundation for unlocking true innovation potential, yet it’s one that many founders too often seem to overlook. For Berners-Lee, the potential was in the solution it would afford him personally, not in developing a particular technology per se.

2. Involve Others Early

In fact, Berners-Lee is explicit about his focus. “The most exciting thing was not the technology but the community and spirit of people getting together,” he says. It’s a philosophy echoed by a fellow Internet pioneer, Danny Hillis, who described the close-knit spirit of early experimentation in a talk given at TED2013. (Watch the talk below, and do check out his copy of the ARPANET Directory, which included the names and addresses of everyone with an email address in 1982.)

This idea holds particularly true in our age of “launch first, re-launch often.” The point: find your people and figure out how to harness their ideas and input. The web has enabled people from all sorts of locations and backgrounds to connect; there’s simply no excuse for existing in a lone bubble.

3. Don’t Stop

You might think that if you were responsible for launching the World Wide Web, you could kick back, pop open the champagne, and watch the praise and plaudits roll in. Not Berners-Lee. What’s inspiring about his 2009 TED Talk is the passion he clearly shows for his latest project, linked data. It’s clear that he’s proud of his baby, now leaving its teen years and entering adulthood. But it’s also apparent that he feels the conditions are ripe for new invention. His frustration at the walled gardens that have taken over the web (see 1), his excitement at persuading people to provide sources of data (see 2), and his clear drive and excitement at what might be next (see, um, 3) make it clear. We ain’t seen nothing yet.

David Pogue outlines 10 computer/smartphone tricks everyone should know, but many don’t, at TED U during TED2013. Photo: Ryan Lash

David Pogue is a member of a very select club. As of today, he’s one of the few people with four talks featured on TED.com.David Pogue: 10 top time-saving tech tips (Two others who’ve reached this mark: Julian Treasure and Juan Enriquez.) Yes, we’ve shown you his talks on simplicity in tech design, cool phone tricks and the downloading wars. But we just couldn’t help but add this charming talk that The New York Times technology critic gave at TED University during TED2013. Genuinely useful technology hacks for the whole family? Sign us up.

Watch the talk – it’s Pogue’s delivery that’s half the brilliance. But below, find a condensed version of the 10 tech basics everyone should know:

1. Use the space bar to scroll down a page. Hold the shift key and the space bar at the same time to scroll back up again.
2. Tab between boxes on online forms. When there’s a pop-up menu to input details of your state, type the first letter of the state to scroll through options.
3. To make web text larger, press control +. Mac users, make that “Command +.”
4. Don’t bother with punctuation on your smartphone. Hit the space bar twice for a period and the next letter will be automatically capitalized.
5. Hit the call button of your phone to redial the last person you spoke to. No need to go into your contacts.
6. Speaking of phones, carriers have keystrokes that let you bypass the “15 seconds of fricking instructions, like we haven’t had answer machines for 45 years.” Sadly, each shortcut is different. “I didn’t say these were going to be perfect,” Pogue allows.
7. Use Google as a dictionary by typing “define” followed with the word you want to understand. You can also use it as an FAA database for flight details.
8. To highlight a word, don’t drag across it with the mouse. Double click it. And don’t bother deleting text; just type.
9. Avoid shutter lag by half pressing down the button of your camera before you take a picture. For folks who still use cameras.
10. Press “b” to black out a slide (or “w” to white it out). And make sure people are paying attention to your wonderful presentation.

So, sure. These tricks help you get the most out of your technology. And what with our recent TED@250 salon on spring cleaning your life, we here at TED Towers have been thinking about neat tricks to streamline other parts of life. So below, I’ve collected some favorite tips from the TED staff for a better, easier existence. It’s true, you might not have even realized some of the things being solved were actually issues, and it’s possible you might be right in suspecting that these are the very essence of “first world problems.” But there it is and, well, here you are: 15 more life hacks you likely had no idea you needed.

1. “My father hangs a tennis ball from the garage ceiling so he knows exactly where to park the car so there’s ample walking room on all sides. We later saw this on TV but my father definitely invented it.” —Thu-Huong Ha
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2. “You can use a piece of dry spaghetti to light candles that have burned down inside their holder.” —Nick Weinberg
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3. “If you have kids, you know two things: 1) they fill reams of paper with “artwork;” and 2) you will be going to a lot of birthday parties. Use their “masterpieces” to wrap presents; it saves money and it’s more personalized.” —Michael McWatters
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4. “Empty the dishwasher bottom rack first, so that the puddles of washwater on the top of all your mugs, in the top rack, don’t drip all over your plates on the bottom rack. Don’t even MOVE the top rack until you’ve emptied the bottom rack.” —Emily McManus
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5. “A trick I learned from a co-worker just yesterday: Facial cleansing wipes do an amazing job of getting mud off of nice shoes.” —Kate Torgovnick
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6. “Lay out all your credit / bank cards from your wallet on the copy machine and email yourself scans of the front and back. That way you have all the card numbers and the 800 numbers for customer service. If your wallet gets stolen (especially when on the road) you have quick access and a way to remember which cards to cancel.” —Gwen Schroeder
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7. “Here’s a great one for removing oil stains from anything (including the leather seats of your parents’ car…): generously cover the stained area with flour or cornstarch.  Let it sit for a while and it will miraculously soak up your oil stains.” —Roxanne Hai Lash
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8. “Stop using spoons for your coffee. Simply add your stuff (sugar, milk, rum, what-have-you) to your empty coffee mug, then pour your coffee in. It mixes just as well, and you don’t have a dirty spoon left over.” —Michael McWatters
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9. “Pour coffee into an ice tray, so you make coffee-flavored cubes that don’t water down your iced coffee.” —Nick Weinberg
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10. “Crack an egg on a flat surface, not on the side of a bowl. This minimizes the likelihood of pieces of shell getting into your egg.” —Becky Chung
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11. “Use an empty plastic bottle to separate egg yolk from white. My mom does this. It’s pretty awesome.” —Thu-Huong Ha
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12. “To call your voicemail from another phone, dial your own number, and when your message picks up, hit # and your password.” —Morton Bast
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13. “Change your contact lenses on the first of every month! That way you don’t wear them for eons, which is bad for your vision and for your eyes in the longrun.” —Kate Torgovnick
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14. “Every time you use up a household necessity (box of spaghetti, carton of milk, bag of chocolate chips), take a photo of the empty package with your mobile phone. When you’re in the store, just review your photos to see what you need. Delete the photos as you add things to your shopping cart.” —Michael McWatters
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15. “Honey and olive oil make a cheap face mask. The acid in the honey removes dead skin cells and brightens. Olive oil moisturizes.” —Becky Chung
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Photo: James Duncan Davidson

One of the things we’re interested in exploring here at TED is … what happens after a talk? Most often, a speaker is telling us a story without an ending — a tale that’s just beginning rather than coming to an end. That’s certainly the case with TED2013 speaker Alastair Parvin, whose project, Wikihouse, is really just getting started. Parvin has created an open-source construction set for a house, and I caught up with him in a break at the conference to get more details about some of the projects that are underway to build on it.

One application for this cookie-cutter build-your-own-house system is disaster relief. At least, if done responsibly. “Actually, the last thing you want to do after a disaster is build,” Parvin points out. But those caught up in the aftermath of an event such as an earthquake can find themselves stuck in grim emergency housing for long periods of time. Parvin describes a Wikihouse-enabled project in Christchurch, New Zealand, an area that experienced a huge earthquake in February 2011, and where citizens are still trying to rebuild.

Might Wikihouse help empower them? Parvin hopes so. “They’re looking at coming up with a construction model for sustainable housing rebuilding, led by communities there,” he explains. It’s that last phrase that’s crucial. “It’s an interesting flip from disaster relief housing to community-led development.”

Then there’s Wikihouse/Rio, which is using the system in a rather different way — as an “open-source maker lab in the heart of the favela.”

“There, they said not to worry about making a structure,” Parvin says. “Kids and teenagers can start experimenting, maybe creating furniture. Maybe that will lead to building, but it’s not about us defining what happens from the outset. It’s about being open. We’re giving people amazing tools and saying this could be a serious form of community development, but it’s led by them. If they get to the point where they want to build, that’s great.”

This diversity of applications is central to the promise and potential of Wikihouse. “It’s great to do a TED Talk,” says Parvin, for whom Wikihouse is a passion project he works on alongside the others he undertakes as part of the Zero Zero architecture collective in London. “But this is an open-source project. It’s not about me standing up on stage and showing everyone what we’ve done. It’s more about issuing an invitation to others. Frankly the less control we have, the happier we get.”

Photo: James Duncan Davidson

Orly Wahba is here to talk to us about the magic of kindness. As a middle-school teacher, she wanted to make a difference in the life of her students, so she designed “Act of Kindness” cards. These super-simple cards contained directions such as “open the door for someone” or “invite someone to have lunch with you,” along with an instruction to pass on the card once you were done. She wanted her kids to see the ripple effect of kindness.

One day, some construction workers were outside her house. It was hot out, so she brought them drinks — and kindness cards. One of them got a card with the instruction “call your mother and father and tell them how much you love them.” He hadn’t seen his parents in 10 years; he approached her, incredulous. He just needed the prompt.

Wahba shows us a film she put together to tell the story of the world we all live in. “Sometimes we just need to change our perspective.” And she tells us about Life Vest Inside, the organization she founded ”because kindness keeps the world afloat.”

Photos: James Duncan Davidson

Daniel Reisel is here to talk about our brains. In particular, how we might change them–and how this kind of thinking might just change the tenor of society as a whole.

He introduces us to Joe, who’s 32, and a murderer. Reisel met Joe in Wormwood Scrubs, a high-security prison that houses England’s most dangerous prisoners. On a grant from the UK Department of Health, Reisel visited the jail to study inmates’ brains and try to find out what lay at the root of their behavior. “Was there a neurological cause for their condition?” he asks. “And if there was a neurological cause, could we find a cure?”

Initial research showed that psychopaths like Joe indeed had a different physiological response to emotions such as distress or sadness. “They failed to show the emotions required; they failed to show the physical response. It was as though they knew the words but not the music of empathy,” Reisel describes. MRI scans (yes, transporting psychopaths across London in rush hour to place them in a scanner, unadorned by metal objects such as, say, shackles, was a nightmare) showed an interesting phenomenon and a tentative answer: “Our population of inmates had a deficient amygdala, which likely led to their lack of empathy and their immoral behavior.”

Acquiring moral behavior is a part of growing up, like learning to speak. By 6 months, we can discriminate between animate and inanimate objects. By 10 months, we can imitate actions. By the time we’re 4, most of us are able to understand the intentions of others, a prerequisite for empathy. But that’s not to say that it’s not possible to learn such behaviors in later life.

Reisel wants to talk neurogenesis. This is the birth of new neurons in the adult brain, and Reisel is fascinated by its promise. He left his work with psychopaths to work on mice, whose brains he studied in very different environments. Some were kept in a shoebox devoid of entertainment (similar to, say, a prison cell); others lived in an “enriched environment.” Mice in the former condition lost their ability to bond with their fellow mouse; those in the latter showed the growth of new brain cells and connections. “They also perform better on a range of learning and memory tasks,” says Reisel. “Of course, these mice do not develop morality to the point of carrying the shopping bags of little old mice across the street. But their improved environment results in healthy, sociable behavior.”

Could this research influence the design of our prison systems? “When you think about it, it is ironic that our current solution for people with dysfunctional amygdalas is to place them in an environment that actually inhibits any chance of further growth,” he says. He’s not suggesting that we should pack up all our prisons. Instead, perhaps we might think of rehabilitation through programs such as Restorative Justice, which encourages perpetrators to take responsibility for their actions. “This stimulates the amygdala and may be a more effective rehabilitative practice than simple incarceration,” says Reisel. It’s a fascinating proposition. “Such programs won’t work for everyone. But for many, they could be a way to break the frozen sea within.”

It’s a charming, chilling, thought-provoking talk. Reisel leaves us with three lessons from his work over the past fifteen years. We need to change our mindset, he says. “The moment we speak about prisons, it’s like we’re back in Dickensian — if not medieval — times. For too long we’ve allowed ourselves to be persuaded of the false notion that human beings can’t change, and, as a society, it’s costing us dearly.” Next, we need to prompt and promote cross-disciplinary collaboration. “We need people from different disciplines, lab-based scientists, clinicians, social workers and policy makers, to work together.”

Finally, we need to use our own brains, our own amygdalas, and we need to rethink our view of prisoners such as Joe. After all, if we see psychopaths as irredeemable, how are they ever going to see themselves as any different? Wouldn’t it be better for Joe to spend his time in jail by training his amygdala and generating new brain cells? Reisel concludes: “Surely that would be in the interest of all of us.”

Photo: James Duncan Davidson

Yesterday, Kate Stone charmed the assembled TED audience with her tales of failing exams, living on a sheep farm in Australia, and developing genuinely interactive paper. Today, she shared three simple skills she’s learned along the way–and described why she thinks these are actually critical life skills.

1. Know how to dig a hole.

Stone was instructed to dig a hole for a cattle grid during her time farming sheep in the Outback of Australia. “You know how to dig a hole?” the farmer asked her. Pfft. Of course she did. Turns out, she had no idea. “He came back and just looked at how far I’d got. I thought I was doing a really good job, digging out the top soil, and working across the space that needed to be a hole.” Incorrect. Turns out, the most effective technique involves making the deepest hole possible, and then letting the surrounding earth cave in so you can shovel the earth away, nice and easy. Why is this relevant? “If you want to make change, if you want to make anything happen, you can either convince the whole world you’re right or you can affect a few people deeply,” she explains. The latter is easier. “If you’re right, they’ll tell some people who will tell more people. Focus on something deeply; let it infect everything else.”

2. Learn how to ride a motorbike.

Asked by one farmer who employed her whether she knew how to ride a motorcycle, Stone again led with a bald-faced lie. “I said I could, when I’d never ridden a motorbike in my life.” She wrote off at least four bikes on that particular farm, she confesses, though she argues that the terrain was hardly conducive to a beginner. “I swear I fell off every single day,” she says cheerfully. Sounds awful; so why is this a life skill? It’s all about your focus. “I have a distinct image of going down this little hill, I’d see a rock in the road and I’d think ‘I’m going to hit it! I’m going to hit it!’” she laughs. Invariably, she’d hit the rock and fall. But one time, she saw two rocks and couldn’t figure out which one to look at, so she stared at the gap. Herein lies the lesson. “Where you look is where you go. If you only see the way forward, you don’t see the obstacles. If all you look at is the obstacles, you’ll fall off.”

3. Figure out how to pour from a barrel of oil.

“With big oil cans, the holes are at the side on the top,” Stone describes. “The intuitive way to pour from it is to pour with the hole at the bottom.” But then the air can’t get in, so you invariably end up with a big mess. The first time she did this, her farmer boss asked her what on earth she thought she was doing. “Twist the barrel around, have the hole at the top so air can go in the top half and oil can come out the bottom half and you pour it out nice and easy. It made me realize that, quite often, the way you do something appears to be counterintuitive. Doing things the way you think you should do them is often the worst way possible.”

Photo: James Duncan Davidson

Spoken-word poet and artist Shane Koyczan is onstage at TED, sharing his own experiences and charming us silly. This is an intimate, heartfelt look into a life that has not always been easy. “I’ve been shot down so many times I get altitude sickness just from standing up for myself,” he says.

Being told to stand up for yourself is a common response to trouble. But “that’s hard to do if you don’t know who you are.” Asked what he wanted to do when he grew up, Koyczan found it a difficult question to answer. “When I was a kid, I wanted to be a man,” he says. “When I was a kid, I wanted to shave. Now, not so much.” (Koyczan, it should be noted, has an impressively full beard.) “When I was 8, I wanted to be a marine biologist. When I was 9, I saw the movie Jaws and said ‘no thank you.’”

He said he wanted to be a writer. And he was told: “Choose something realistic.” He said he wanted to be a professional wrestler. “They said, don’t be stupid. They asked me what I wanted to be, then told me what not to be. I wondered what made my dreams so easy to dismiss.”

In Koyczan’s world, even his dreams were called names. But he kept on. I was going to be a wrestler, and my name would be the Garbage Man. “My finishing move was going to be the Trash Compactor.” He turned to poetry, and he concludes this beautiful, lyrical presentation by reading the poem “To This Day,” which he wrote to explore the impact of bullying, and which was animated through an open call for contributions (the film plays in the background). It’s a clarion call for action, and it makes the audience decidedly weepy. A sample:

so we grew up believing no one
would ever fall in love with us
that we’d be lonely forever
that we’d never meet someone
to make us feel like the sun
was something they built for us
in their tool shed

It’s a bravura performance, and a tearful Koyczan receives a prolonged standing ovation.

Photo: James Duncan Davidson

Eleanor Longden did well at school, and gleefully entered student life at university in England. By all appearances, she was a happy, typical student … but it wasn’t true. Underneath it all, Longden was “fundamentally frightened,” and while she did a good job of concealing her fear, she was about to come undone. She started to hear the voice in the second term of that first year, a narrator in her head calmly describing everything she did in the third person. The voice was neutral, impassive, even reassuring, though it would sound frustrated were Longden to hide her anger. “It was clear that it had something to communicate to me about my emotions, particularly emotions that were remote and inaccessible,” she says.

Longden’s first fatal mistake was to tell a friend about the voice. That didn’t go so well–the implication was that normal people don’t hear voices–and she was persuaded to go to a doctor, her next mistake. ”She is digging her own grave,” the voice said at the appointment. Doctors don’t like voices in heads, and things began to unravel. Hospital admissions followed, then a diagnosis of schizophrenia, and then a “psychic civil war.” The voices increased and grew menacing, and Longden retreated into a nightmarish world. It’s hard to listen. “A vicious cycle of fear, avoidance, mistrust, misunderstanding had been established.”

Two years later, her deterioration had been dramatic. The voices had turned terrifying, and her mental health status was a catalyst for verbal, even sexual assault. A doctor told her, “Eleanor, you’d be better off with cancer; it’s easier to cure than schizophrenia.” She even attempted to drill a hole in her head to get rid of the voices.

Yet Longden is a survivor: “Many people have harmed me, and I remember them all, but the memories grow pale in comparison to the people who helped me.” With a group of supporters around her, she began a long journey back to health. She first had to understand that the voices were a reaction to traumatic childhood events. “Each voice was closely related to aspects of myself, sexual trauma, anger, shame, guilt, low self-worth,” she says. Crucially, “the most hostile and aggressive voices represented the parts that had been hurt most profoundly. These had to be shown the most compassion and care.”

Eventually, she came off medication, and returned to psychiatry … as a professional. To this day, she argues the relevance of a particular approach. The important question in psychiatry isn’t “what’s wrong with you?” but “what happened to you?”

Now Longden lives with her voices with peace, respect, compassion and acceptance. She is a part of Intervoice, the organizational body for the hearing voices movement. The group has networks in 26 countries on five continents, and it promotes a sense of dignity, solidarity and empowerment for individuals in mental distress. “We don’t have to live our lives forever defined by the damaging things that have happened to us,” she concludes. “My psychiatrist said: ‘Don’t tell me what other people have told you about yourself. Tell me about you.’”

.@junecohen asks: Did you hear voices during your talk? Eleanor Longden: Yes, they reminded me of parts of the talk I forgot. #TED2013—
TED Live (@TEDLiveHQ) March 01, 2013

Photos: James Duncan Davidson

Pedrito Martinez is back onstage at TED, and this time he’s brought his band, including the dynamite Ariacne Trujillo on keys. “They have almost a psychic communication,” says TED music advisor, Bill Bragin, a longtime fan who describes taking guests who visit New York City to go see Martinez play at the local Cuban restaurant at which he plays three times a week. “When artists want to see a slice of New York, I often bring them to see Pedrito. It always blows them away.” The TED audience, too.

Photos: James Duncan Davidson

Ron Finley describes himself as a “renegade gardener,” and he’s here to tell us all about his home, in South Central, or South Los Angeles, as city planners attempted to rebrand the area. Whatever you call it, the truth is that the area comprises liquor stores, fast food and vacant lots, and it epitomizes the stark reality that 26.5 million Americans live in a food desert. Truth is, “the drive-thrus are killing more people than the drive-bys,” says Finley. “People are dying from curable diseases in South Central Los Angeles. The obesity rate in my neighborhood is five times what it is in Beverly Hills, eight miles away.”

Tired of seeing wheelchairs “bought and sold like used cars,” tired of seeing ”drop-in dialysis centers popping up like Starbucks,” and tired of “driving a 45-minute round trip to get an apple that was not impregnated with pesticide,” he could only come to one conclusion: “This has to stop.”

So he started working with the organization L.A. Green Grounds to install a vegetable garden on the 150 ft x 10 ft patch of ground in front of his house, that strip between the sidewalk and the street that the city owns but the resident has to keep up … and was promptly issued with a citation to remove the garden. Then he was served with a warrant for arrest. “Come on, really? A warrant for growing food on a strip of land you could give a f– … care less about? I said cool. Bring it.” Finley, it is clear, is not one to be cowed. The city backed off, a councilman endorsed what he was doing, and the city of Los Angeles is now set to change its ordinance. And why not? “There are 26 square miles of vacant lots in the city,” Finley says. “That’s 20 Central Parks; that’s enough space for 724,838,400 tomato plants. Why in the hell would they not okay this?”

“Growing your own food is like printing your own money,” he says, to applause. Then he tells us why this really matters to him. “I raised my sons in South Central. I have a legacy here. I refuse to be a part of this reality that was manufactured by other people; I manufactured my own reality,” he says. “I am an artist. Gardening is my graffiti. A graffiti artist beautifies walls; I beautify parkways and yards. I treat the garden as a piece of cloth and the plants and the trees are the embellishment of that cloth. You’d be surprised what soil can do if you let it be your canvas.”

“Gardening is the most therapeutic and defiant act you can do, especially in the inner city,” he continues. “Plus, you get strawberries.”

One night, he looked outside to see a mother and daughter in his garden at 10:30. “They looked so ashamed,” says Finley. “It made me feel ashamed to see people this close to me who were hungry. This reinforced why I do this. People ask me, ‘Aren’t you afraid people are going to steal your food?’ Hell, no! That’s why it’s on the street! That’s the whole idea! I want them to take it and take back their health.”

To date, Green Grounds has planted 20 gardens; 50 volunteers have come to their “dig ins.” The benefits are clear, says Finley: “If kids grow kale, they eat kale. If they grow tomatoes, they eat tomatoes. But if they’re not shown how food affects the mind and the body, they blindly eat whatever’s put in front of them.” He wants to help the young people he sees, guide the disenfranchised away from a track leading nowhere. As far as he’s concerned, gardening provides an opportunity to take over those communities, to have a sustainable life.

He wants to plant a whole block of gardens, he tells us. “I want to take shipping containers and turn them into healthy cafés,” he says. And for anyone concerned about the business model. “I’m not talking about no free shit. Free is not sustainable. The funny thing about sustainability: you have to sustain it.” The audience loves this. “What I’m talking about is putting people to work, getting kids off the street, about the pride and the honor of growing your own food. We’ve got to make this sexy,” he proclaims. “Let’s all become renegades, gangster gardeners. We have to flip the script on what a gangster is. If you ain’t a gardener, you ain’t gangster. Let that be your weapon of choice!”

Finley knows he has the audience’s attention. He’s not done yet.

“If you want to meet with me, don’t call me if you want to sit around in cushy chairs and have meetings where you talk about doing some shit,” he concludes. “If you want to meet with me, come to the garden with your shovel so we can plant some shit. Peace.” A standing ovation.

Photos: James Duncan Davidson

“The TED Salon in Seoul was lit up by this performer, by her extraordinary passion for her music,” says TED curator Chris Anderson by way of introduction. He’s referring to the Talent Search auditions held in 14 cities around the world that provided the conference with 33 speakers this year. And in particular, he’s talking about Ji-Hae Park, who now takes the TED stage to wow us with her violin-based virtuosity. “Classical music can rock you!” she announces proudly.

Between songs, Ji-Hae talks about her own struggle with depression — and how she began to play music in churches, nursing homes, anywhere but the concert hall. “It set me free from the pressure of becoming a successful violinist,” she says — though she’s certainly become one of those too. As Chris says, her emotions come through in every note. “Do you feel like you’re all alone?,” she asks the audience. “I hope this piece will touch and heal your heart as it did for me.”

Photos: James Duncan Davidson

We’ve seen a number of “the young” of the conference’s theme in this session of TED2013. Now, to play us off out into the night are Sleepy Man Banjo Boys, a trio of brothers from New Jersey, the youngest of whom became a YouTube sensation in 2011 when he was only eight years old. “They’re fantastic musicians, really incredible players,” says TED music advisor Bill Bragin of the three, the oldest of whom even now is only 15 years old. “And there’s something about the interaction of a bluegrass band and the way the fiddle, the banjo, and the guitar intersect because they’re brothers. There’s a real intuitive sense that happens when they’re locked in that really comes across.” The crowd certainly feels it; whoops and hollers round off the end of the rollercoaster first day at TED.

TED’s own Lisa Bu takes the TED2013 stage now to tell a very personal tale of a journey through literature that began, well, with a shattered dream. Growing up in Hunan, China, in the 1970s, Bu’s parents (yes, she had a Tiger Mother) believed there was only one sure way to happiness: a safe and well-paid job; no matter whether she actually liked it or not. She, in contrast, dreamed of making a career as a Chinese opera singer. But no adults would take her seriously, and when she reached the age of 15, she knew that she was too old to be trained. Her dream was not to be. “I was afraid that for the rest of my life, second-class happiness would be the best I could hope for,” she says. “But that was so unfair! I was determined to find another calling.”

With no one around to teach her, she turned to books, and what follows is her fresh take on some old favorites, including what she took from titles such as Jane Eyre, Cheaper by the Dozen, and Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth, a book banned in China she was only able to read after she moved to the US in 1995. “The Bible,” she comments, “is interesting, but strange.” A big laugh here — “that’s a topic for a different day,” she adds wryly.

Moving to a new culture, Bu developed a new habit: Comparative reading, a standard practice in academia that she took to with alacrity. She read books in pairs, to understand the same tale from different perspectives. She read books written by friends such as Katharine Graham and Warren Buffett to compare shared experiences. She read books on different religions. She read books in different languages–finding herself not lost but found in translation.

“Books have given me a magic portal to connect with people of the past and the present,” says Bu. “I know I shall never feel lonely or powerless again. Having your dream shattered is nothing compared to what many others have suffered. I have come to believe that coming true is not the only purpose of a dream. Its most important purpose is to get us in touch with where dreams come from, where passion comes from, where happiness comes from. Even a shattered dream can do that for you.”

It is because of books, she concludes, that she is on the TED stage today. “I live happy, with purpose and clarity (most of the time). May books be always with you,” she says, to applause from many more than just her TED colleagues.

Here are the books only available in Mandarin:

Correspondence in the Family of Fou Lei 傅雷家书

Complete Works of Sanmao 三毛全集

Lessons from History 历史的经验，by Nan Huaijin 南怀瑾