Stephen Strogatz is a mathematician who has studied synchrony in nature. Synchrony is the "spontaneous tendency of separate entities to act as a unit." Strogatz finds synchrony "everywhere" in nature. He stresses that you don't need to be smart to synchronize, nor do you need to have a brain or…
In this 2006 lecture at TED, philosopher Daniel Dennett (Breaking the Spell) takes on the "brilliant" contemporary redesign of religion by Rick Warren, author of The Purpose Driven Life. After acknowledging that Warren's book is, indeed, "brilliant" (it has sold 30 million copies and motivated comparable numbers of people), Dennett…
I've often heard about "flow," but never from the man who was personally responsible for developing the theory: Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced "cheeks sent me high").
In this TED video, astrophysicist, cosmologist and Nobel Prize winner George Smoot studies the cosmic microwave background radiation -- the afterglow of the Big Bang. Smoot presents his lecture with the help of dramatic images created through the crunching of massive amounts of real-life data. The bottom line is that…
There’s a TED video making the rounds to some high acclaim these days. The video features Jill Bolte Taylor giving a video presentation entitled “My stroke of insight.”
Here it is in a nutshell. Bolte Taylor is a neuroanatomist who suffered a stroke in 1996. She has recovered quite well from a serious challenge, as you can see from the embedded video. Her topic is one that fascinated me, and I watched her video with undivided attention. If you decide to watch this video, you might also be especially interested in her description of the struggles that she faced at the moments during which she was actually having her stroke. She describes experiencing the successive losses of her abilities to interpret visual and auditory input. Written words began to look like meaningless scribbles. Things became even more surreal when she “realized” that she couldn’t understand simple conversations.
It pains me to write what I am about to write , because I really want to believe that Bolte Taylor is accurately portraying real-life events. What she is describing is fascinating and her narrative is gripping. I am relieved to know that she has made a fantastic recovery and I admire her for stepping into the public eye in an attempt to provide a unique personal perspective regarding strokes. I have serious doubts about her narrative, however. I am concerned that Bolte Taylor is confabulating. I have several reasons for suggesting this.
The first thing I noticed was Bolte Taylor’s absolute lack …
