And she said, "Well, I saw you speak, and I'm going to call you a researcher, I think, but I'm afraid if I call you a researcher, no one will come, because they'll think you're boring and irrelevant."
And in the course of that, I studied, I met with medical doctors, scientists, and I'm here to tell you that the way to a more productive, more inspired, more joyful life is getting enough sleep.
And I felt like saying to him -- but I didn't say -- I felt like saying, "You know what? if you had gotten five, this dinner would have been a lot more interesting."
And I'm going to paint solar systems on the backs of her hands so she has to learn the entire universe before she can say, "Oh, I know that like the back of my hand."
The poem was very indignant, and mainly exaggerated, but the only spoken-word poetry that I had seen up until that point was mainly indignant, so I thought that's what was expected of me.
But I think, actually, the alternative is to grasp the nettle of the word "atheism" itself, precisely because it is a taboo word, carrying frissons of hysterical phobia.
I did a little research, spoke to a couple of my contacts at the Met, and actually found out that this is a game called squall, which involves beating a goose with a stick on Shrove Tuesday.
How can the nervous system misinterpret an innocent sensation like the touch of a hand and turn it into the malevolent sensation of the touch of the flame?
How do you make children not just be more likely to eat carrots and drink milk, but to get more pleasure from eating carrots and drinking milk -- to think they taste better?
Had we chosen this option, sometime around 200, 000 years ago, we would probably still be living like the Neanderthals were when we first entered Europe 40, 000 years ago.
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.
And I know it's seductive to stand outside the arena, because I think I did it my whole life, and think to myself, I'm going to go in there and kick some ass when I'm bulletproof and when I'm perfect.
When I posted this secret, dozens of people sent voicemail messages from their phones, sometimes ones they'd been keeping for years, messages from family or friends who had died.
So two minutes lead to these hormonal changes that configure your brain to basically be either assertive, confident and comfortable, or really stress-reactive, and feeling sort of shut down.
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.
Approaching my daughter's third birthday, my wife said, "Hey, why don't you take Sabina back to New York and make it a father-daughter trip, and continue the ritual?"
On Saturday I tweeted for this crate and hat, because I did not want to schlep them from the East Coast, and they showed up care of this dude, Chris, from Newport Beach, who says hello.
Right at this same time, I'm signing and hugging after a gig, and a guy comes up to me and hands me a $10 bill, and he says, "I'm sorry, I burned your CD from a friend."
Four years earlier, when I was one, after the Chernobyl accident, the rain came down black, and my sister's hair fell out in clumps, and I spent nine months in the hospital.
And again, I get that feeling when we get a knock on the door of our apartment in Brooklyn, and my sister and I find a deliveryman with a box of pizza that we didn't order.
Then our neighbor pops her head in, and she turns red with rage when she realizes that those immigrants from downstairs have somehow gotten their hands on her pizza.
What would the world be like if we were speaking powerfully to people who were listening consciously in environments which were actually fit for purpose?
Or to make that a bit larger, what would the world be like if we were creating sound consciously and consuming sound consciously and designing all our environments consciously for sound?
ですが 手にした成績が 「未合格」 だったら 自分は 学習曲線上にいる とわかりますよね
But if you get the grade "Not Yet", you understand that you're on a learning curve.
(Applause) And that was so much fun, right, that it got me thinking: like, what would happen if I just spent as much time as could replying to as many scam emails as I could?
If the divine, cockeyed genius assigned to your case decides to let some sort of wonderment be glimpsed, for just one moment through your efforts, then "Olé!"
この成功報酬的な動機付け― If Then式に「これをしたら これが貰える」 というやり方は 状況によっては機能します
These contingent motivators -- if you do this, then you get that -- work in some circumstances.
What if my roommate knew about the female lawyer who recently went to court in Nigeria to challenge a ridiculous law that required women to get their husband's consent before renewing their passports?
Now, I don't know about you guys, but judging the circumstances, right, any judge in the whole world, would look at the statistics and the evidence, and they would find any government of old guilty of child abuse.
(Applause) (Applause ends) Now, if I came up here, and I wish I could come up here today and hang a cure for AIDS or cancer, you'd be fighting and scrambling to get to me.
But if there is someone here who has an autistic child, or knows an autistic child and feels kind of cut off from them, what advice would you give them?
Sometimes a knowledge of history and the past failures of Utopian ideals can be a burden, because you know that if everything were free, then the food stocks would become depleted and scarce and lead to chaos.
And they still have a child survival of only 70 to 80 percent, meaning that if you have six children born, there will be at least four who survive to the next generation.
And we then got a letter just this week from the company who wrote it, wanting to track down the source -- (Laughter) saying, "Hey, we want to track down the source."
[Everything was better back when everything was worse.] The reason that everything was better back when everything was worse is that when everything was worse, it was actually possible for people to have experiences that were a pleasant surprise.
If some of what enables people in our societies to make all of the choices we make were shifted to societies in which people have too few options, not only would those people's lives be improved, but ours would be improved also.
And she said, "Well, I saw you speak, and I'm going to call you a researcher, I think, but I'm afraid if I call you a researcher, no one will come, because they'll think you're boring and irrelevant." 