And I know that vulnerability is the core of shame and fear and our struggle for worthiness, but it appears that it's also the birthplace of joy, of creativity, of belonging, of love.
They really didn't know what to do, until along came a German scientist who realized that they were using two words for forelimb and hind limb, whereas genetics does not differentiate and neither does German.
(Laughter) Complexity is the problem that any theory of biology has to solve, and you can't solve it by postulating an agent that is even more complex, thereby simply compounding the problem.
And you can't tell the story about pollinators -- bees, bats, hummingbirds, butterflies -- without telling the story about the invention of flowers and how they co-evolved over 50 million years.
I approach photographing these icebergs as if I'm making portraits of my ancestors, knowing that in these individual moments they exist in that way and will never exist that way again.
Okay, so what this tells us is that, contrary to the old adage, "monkey see, monkey do, " the surprise really is that all of the other animals really cannot do that -- at least not very much.
But in fact, it turns out that some time around 200, 000 years ago, when our species first arose and acquired social learning, that this was really the beginning of our story, not the end of our story.
Whatever it may be, you know the kind of thing I'm talking about -- people who are attracted to the ritualistic side, the moralistic, communal side of religion, but can't bear the doctrine.
So at the end of my first year at Harvard, a student who had not talked in class the entire semester, who I had said, "Look, you've gotta participate or else you're going to fail, " came into my office. I really didn't know her at all.
Because autistic or not, the differences that we have -- We've got a gift! Everyone's got a gift inside of us, and in all honesty, the pursuit of normality is the ultimate sacrifice of potential.
But, you know, the thing that always gets me about these letters is that most of them have been written by people that have never known themselves loved on a piece of paper.
All you need to do is to take 10 minutes out a day to step back, to familiarize yourself with the present moment so that you get to experience a greater sense of focus, calm and clarity in your life.
And those things are true, but they're only one half of the story, because the thing that we never say on camera, that I have never said on camera, is, "I am insecure."
Now, the last thing I wanted to do was leave New York, and my dream job, but I thought you made sacrifices for your soulmate, so I agreed, and I quit my job, and Conor and I left Manhattan together.
But before that, what actually happened was, I used to think about it as, you could take care of your health, or you could take care of obligations, and one always came at the cost of the other.
When he was threatened by the thugs of the Argentine military junta, he came back and said, "Oh, come on, how else can you threaten, other than with death?"
You can't really dispute what you see on the video, and there is a lot to be learned from that, and there are a lot of ways that we can grow as a profession when we actually get to see this.
Well, if our brain costs just as much energy as it should, and if we can't spend every waking hour of the day feeding, then the only alternative, really, is to somehow get more energy out of the same foods.
This whole finding compassion and common ground with your enemies thing is kind of like a political-spiritual practice for me, and I ain't the Dalai Lama.
Dr. Rudy Leibel of Columbia University has found that people who have lost 10 percent of their body weight burn 250 to 400 calories less because their metabolism is suppressed.
It's been my experience that when people take the time to interact with one another, it doesn't take long to realize that for the most part, we all want the same things out of life.
Inspiration can often come from an unexpected place, and the fact that a Jewish comedian had done more to positively influence my worldview than my own extremist father is not lost on me.
Have you ever thought that working on an issue between you was futile because it should just be easier than this, or this is supposed to happen just naturally?
JC: First of all, I never like to presume to speak for the TED community, but I would like to tell you that I have a feeling we can all agree that you are still charming, seductive and sexy. Yes?
Umm El-Saad, Asma and Fayza, and many women across the Arab world, show that it is possible to overcome barriers to education, which they know is the best means to a better future.
It was too hard to watch video content online, you had to put codecs in your browser and do all this stuff, and the company eventually went out of business in 2003.
This may seem like doom and gloom, like there's nothing we can do about it, like nothing has ever changed, like there will always be rich and powerful individuals.
And so, it seems to me, upon a lot of reflection, that the way that I have to work now, in order to continue writing, is that I have to create some sort of protective psychological construct, right?
It's probably as unlikely that you would nowadays become as rich and famous as Bill Gates, as it was unlikely in the 17th century that you would accede to the ranks of the French aristocracy.
A few years ago, I was thinking about this, and I went to "The Sunday Sport, " a tabloid newspaper I don't recommend you start reading if you're not familiar with it already.
I think there is one particular meaning to which we might restrict it, but by and large, this is something that we'll have to give up and we'll have to adopt the more complicated view of what well-being is.
Clearly, what is happening is money does not buy you experiential happiness, but lack of money certainly buys you misery, and we can measure that misery very, very clearly.
Okay, so they didn't tell us to become doctors or lawyers or anything like that, but my dad did read to us about Aristotle and pioneer germ-fighters, when lots of other kids were hearing "The Wheels on the Bus Go Round and Round."
CA: But are there risks with that, either to the individuals concerned or indeed to society at large, where leaking can actually have an unintended consequence?
These parents could not contemplate giving up the choice, because to do so would have gone contrary to everything they had been taught and everything they had come to believe about the power and purpose of choice.
Well, when there are lots of alternatives to consider, it's easy to imagine the attractive features of alternatives that you reject that make you less satisfied with the alternative that you've chosen.
Nowadays, the world we live in -- we affluent, industrialized citizens, with perfection the expectation -- the best you can ever hope for is that stuff is as good as you expect it to be.
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.
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And I know that vulnerability is the core of shame and fear and our struggle for worthiness, but it appears that it's also the birthplace of joy, of creativity, of belonging, of love. 