Eight Video Quotes from TED.com

Here are a few (not necessarily the best, but the ones that caught my attention) video clips from talks at TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) conferences—a series of scientific events organized by the corresponding American foundation. A few clips from TED.com talks—in my opinion, excellent ones. Below each screenshot is a link to the full talk; there, you can (if necessary) select Russian or other subtitles. Among other things, I can recommend the full versions of these talks (and many other lectures from the same source) as a way to practice English listening... Dan Gilbert: The Surprising Science of Happiness When Gilbert talks about the psychoimmune system, he’s referring to an innate mechanism that compels us to convince ourselves that the choice we made was the right one. The significant number of people who, looking back on their lives, are glad that they always did the right thing and therefore feel wise—is a consequence of this mechanism at work. Dan Dennett: Cute, Sexy, Sweet, Funny Dennett is right: chocolate cake is a superstimulus, a hyper-exploitation of our innate mechanisms that ensure the desired choice. In our evolutionary history, our ancestors did not encounter such superstimuli, and evolution was driven by less intense stimuli. But I wonder, did butts that looked like the ones in the photo play a role in our evolution? I think there have always been seductive girls, but they didn’t always display their wares so skillfully (I mean, their buttocks). Denis Dutton: A Darwinian Theory of Beauty The development of tool-making technologies as a form of self-expression...? But I really did come to believe that well-made stone axes are surprisingly attractive. And if they really weren’t used for work, that means they were used to be admired alongside attractive women. Jonathan Haidt: Religion, evolution, and the ecstasy of self-transcendence Perhaps our desire to feel part of a whole also relies on innate mechanisms. But how can we detect it? And what form of selection led to its formation? Kevin Kelly: How technology evolves Eldredge, one of the creators of the theory of punctuated equilibrium, as it turns out, collects clarinets—and doesn’t just collect them, but studies their evolution. And it turns out that the evolution of clarinets is fundamentally different from the evolution of trilobites. Richard Dawkins: Why the universe seems so strange Dawkins reads his text from the screen in a restrained manner. Very convincing: our ability to model other people is adaptive. And if that is the case, we are capable of personifying everything in the world. But in any case, our universe is such as we (in accordance with our innate properties) are capable of perceiving it. Robert Full: Engineering and Evolution Studying the mechanism of gecko adhesion is of interest from the perspective of bionics. But, still, what a marvel geckos are! VS Ramachandran: The neurons that shaped civilization Our nervous systems are not isolated from one another...