data/en-de/tst2021/IWSLT.TED.tst2021.en-de.en.xml

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<srcset setid="iwslt2020-tst2021" srclang="English">
<doc docid="37225" genre="lectures">
<talkid>37225</talkid>
<seg id="1">Pollinator decline is a grand challenge in the modern world.</seg>
<seg id="2">Of the 200,000 species of pollinators, honeybees are the most well-understood, partly because of our long history with them dating back 8,000 years ago to our cave drawings in what is now modern-day Spain.</seg>
<seg id="3">And yet we know that this indicator species is dying off.</seg>
<seg id="4">Last year alone, we lost 40 percent of all beehives in the United States.</seg>
<seg id="5">That number is even higher in areas with harsh winters, like here in Massachusetts, where we lost 47 percent of beehives in one year alone.</seg>
<seg id="6">Can you imagine if we lost half of our people last year? And if those were the food-producing people? It's untenable. And I predict that in 10 years, we will lose our bees.</seg>
<seg id="7">If not for the work of beekeepers replacing these dead beehives, we would be without foods that we rely upon: fruits, vegetables, crunchy almonds and nuts, tart apples, sour lemons.</seg>
<seg id="8">Even the food that our cattle rely upon to eat, hay and alfalfa -- gone, causing global hunger, economic collapse, a total moral crisis across earth.</seg>
<seg id="9">Now, I first started keeping bees here in Cape Cod right after I finished my doctorate in honeybee immunology.</seg>
<seg id="10">Imagine getting such a degree in a good economy -- and it was 2009: the Great Recession.</seg>
<seg id="11">And I was onto something.</seg>
<seg id="12">I knew that I could find out how to improve bee health.</seg>
<seg id="13">And so the community on Cape Cod here in Provincetown was ripe for citizen science, people looking for ways to get involved and to help.</seg>
<seg id="14">And so we met with people in coffee shops.</seg>
<seg id="15">A wonderful woman named Natalie got eight beehives at her home in Truro, and she introduced us to her friend Valerie, who let us set up 60 beehives at an abandoned tennis court on her property.</seg>
<seg id="16">And so we started testing vaccines for bees. We were starting to look at probiotics.</seg>
<seg id="17">We called it "bee yogurt" -- ways to make bees healthier.</seg>
<seg id="18">And our citizen science project started to take off.</seg>
<seg id="19">Meanwhile, back in my apartment here, I was a bit nervous about my landlord.</seg>
<seg id="20">I figured I should tell him what we were doing.</seg>
<seg id="21">I was terrified; I really thought I was going to get an eviction notice, which really was the last thing we needed, right?</seg>
<seg id="22">I must have caught him on a good day, though, because when I told him what we were doing and how we started our nonprofit urban beekeeping laboratory, he said, "That's great!</seg>
<seg id="23">Let's get a beehive in the back alley. "I was shocked. I was completely surprised.</seg>
<seg id="24">I mean, instead of getting an eviction notice, we got another data point.</seg>
<seg id="25">And in the back alley of this image, what you see here, this hidden beehive -- that beehive produced more honey that first year than we have ever experienced in any beehive we had managed.</seg>
<seg id="26">It shifted our research perspective forever.</seg>
<seg id="27">It changed our research question away from "How do we save the dead and dying bees?" to "Where are bees doing best?" And we started to be able to put maps together, looking at all of these citizen science beehives from people who had beehives at home decks, gardens, business rooftops.</seg>
<seg id="28">We started to engage the public, and the more people who got these little data points, the more accurate our maps became.</seg>
<seg id="29">And so when you're sitting here thinking, "How can I get involved?" you might think about a story of my friend Fred, who's a commercial real estate developer. He was thinking the same thing.</seg>
<seg id="30">He was at a meeting, thinking about what he could do for tenant relations and sustainability at scale.</seg>
<seg id="31">And while he was having a tea break, he put honey into his tea and noticed on the honey jar a message about corporate sustainability from the host company of that meeting.</seg>
<seg id="32">And it sparked an idea.</seg>
<seg id="33">He came back to his office.</seg>
<seg id="34">An email, a phone call later, and -- boom!</seg>
<seg id="35">-- we went national together.</seg>
<seg id="36">We put dozens of beehives on the rooftops of their skyscrapers across nine cities nationwide.</seg>
<seg id="37">Nine years later --</seg>
<seg id="38">Nine years later, we have raised over a million dollars for bee research.</seg>
<seg id="39">We have a thousand beehives as little data points across the country, 18 states and counting, where we have created paying jobs for local beekeepers, 65 of them, to manage beehives in their own communities, to connect with people, everyday people, who are now data points together making a difference.</seg>
<seg id="40">So in order to explain what's actually been saving bees, where they're thriving, I need to first tell you what's been killing them.</seg>
<seg id="41">The top three killers of bees are agricultural chemicals such as pesticides, herbicides, fungicides; diseases of bees, of which there are many; and habitat loss.</seg>
<seg id="42">So what we did is we looked on our maps and we identified areas where bees were thriving.</seg>
<seg id="43">This was mostly in cities, we found.</seg>
<seg id="44">Data are now showing that urban beehives produce more honey than rural beehives and suburban beehives.</seg>
<seg id="45">Urban beehives have a longer life span than rural and suburban beehives, and bees in the city are more biodiverse; there are more bee species in urban areas.</seg>
<seg id="46">Right? Why is this? That was our question.</seg>
<seg id="47">So we started with these three killers of bees, and we flipped it: Which of these is different in the cities?</seg>
<seg id="48">So the first one, pesticides. We partnered up with the Harvard School of Public Health. We shared our data with them.</seg>
<seg id="49">We collected samples from our citizen science beehives at people's homes and business rooftops. We looked at pesticide levels.</seg>
<seg id="50">We thought there would be less pesticides in areas where bees are doing better.</seg>
<seg id="51">That's not the case.</seg>
<seg id="52">So what we found here in our study is -- the orange bars are Boston, and we thought those bars would be the lowest, there would be the lowest levels of pesticides.</seg>
<seg id="53">And, in fact, there are the most pesticides in cities.</seg>
<seg id="54">So the pesticide hypothesis for what's saving bees -- less pesticides in cities -- is not it.</seg>
<seg id="55">And this is very typical of my life as a scientist.</seg>
<seg id="56">Anytime I've had a hypothesis, not only is it not supported, but the opposite is true.</seg>
<seg id="57">Which is still an interesting finding, right?</seg>
<seg id="58">We moved on. The disease hypothesis. We looked at diseases all over our beehives.</seg>
<seg id="59">And what we found in a similar study to this one with North Carolina State is: there's no difference between disease in bees in urban, suburban and rural areas.</seg>
<seg id="60">Diseases are everywhere; bees are sick and dying.</seg>
<seg id="61">In fact, there were more diseases of bees in cities.</seg>
<seg id="62">This was from Raleigh, North Carolina.</seg>
<seg id="63">So again, my hypothesis was not supported. The opposite was true. We're moving on.</seg>
<seg id="64">The habitat hypothesis. This said that areas where bees are thriving have a better habitat -- more flowers, right?</seg>
<seg id="65">But we didn't know how to test this.</seg>
<seg id="66">So I had a really interesting meeting.</seg>
<seg id="67">An idea sparked with my friend and colleague Anne Madden, fellow TED speaker.</seg>
<seg id="68">Have you done these?</seg>
<seg id="69">You spit in a tube and you find out, "I'm German!"</seg>
<seg id="70">Well, we developed this for honey.</seg>
<seg id="71">So we have a sample of honey and we look at all the plant DNA, and we find out, "I'm sumac!"</seg>
<seg id="72">And that's what we found here in Provincetown.</seg>
<seg id="73">So for the first time ever, I'm able to report to you what type of honey is from right here in our own community.</seg>
<seg id="74">HoneyDNA, a genomics test.</seg>
<seg id="75">Spring honey in Provincetown is from privet. What's privet? Hedges. What's the message?</seg>
<seg id="76">Don't trim your hedges to save the bees.</seg>
<seg id="77">I know we're getting crunchy and it's controversial, so before you throw your tomatoes, we'll move to the summer honey, which is water lily honey.</seg>
<seg id="78">If you have honey from Provincetown right here in the summer, you're eating water lily juice; in the fall, sumac honey.</seg>
<seg id="79">We're learning about our food for the first time ever.</seg>
<seg id="80">And now we're able to report, if you need to do any city planning: What are good things to plant?</seg>
<seg id="81">What do we know the bees are going to that's good for your garden?</seg>
<seg id="82">For the first time ever for any community, we now know this answer.</seg>
<seg id="83">What's more interesting for us is deeper in the data.</seg>
<seg id="84">So, if you're from the Caribbean and you want to explore your heritage, Bahamian honey is from the laurel family, cinnamon and avocado flavors.</seg>
<seg id="85">But what's more interesting is 85 different plant species in one teaspoon of honey.</seg>
<seg id="86">That's the measure we want, the big data.</seg>
<seg id="87">Indian honey: that is oak.</seg>
<seg id="88">Every sample we've tested from India is oak, and that's 172 different flavors in one taste of Indian honey.</seg>
<seg id="89">Provincetown honey goes from 116 plants in the spring to over 200 plants in the summer.</seg>
<seg id="90">These are the numbers that we need to test the habitat hypothesis.</seg>
<seg id="91">In another citizen science approach, you find out about your food and we get some interesting data.</seg>
<seg id="92">We're finding out now that in rural areas, there are 150 plants on average in a sample of honey. That's a measure for rural. Suburban areas, what might you think?</seg>
<seg id="93">Do they have less or more plants in suburban areas with lawns that look nice for people but they're terrible for pollinators?</seg>
<seg id="94">Suburbs have very low plant diversity, so if you have a beautiful lawn, good for you, but you can do more.</seg>
<seg id="95">You can have a patch of your lawn that's a wildflower meadow to diversify your habitat, to improve pollinator health.</seg>
<seg id="96">Anybody can do this.</seg>
<seg id="97">Urban areas have the most habitat, best habitat, as you can see here: over 200 different plants.</seg>
<seg id="98">We have, for the first time ever, support for the habitat hypothesis.</seg>
<seg id="99">We also now know how we can work with cities.</seg>
<seg id="100">The City of Boston has eight times better habitat than its nearby suburbs.</seg>
<seg id="101">And so when we work with governments, we can scale this.</seg>
<seg id="102">You might think on my tombstone, it'll say, "Here lies Noah.</seg>
<seg id="103">Plant a flower. "Right? I mean -- it's exhausting after all of this.</seg>
<seg id="104">But when we scale together, when we go to governments and city planners -- like in Boston, the honey is mostly linden trees, and we say, "If a dead tree needs to be replaced, consider linden." When we take this information to governments, we can do amazing things.</seg>
<seg id="105">This is a rooftop from Fred's company.</seg>
<seg id="106">We can plant those things on top of rooftops worldwide to start restoring habitat and securing food systems.</seg>
<seg id="107">We've worked with the World Bank and the presidential delegation from the country of Haiti.</seg>
<seg id="108">We've worked with wonderful graduate students at Yale University and Ethiopia.</seg>
<seg id="109">In these countries, we can add value to their honey by identifying what it is, but informing the people of what to plant to restore their habitat and secure their food systems.</seg>
<seg id="110">But what I think is even more important is when we think about natural disasters.</seg>
<seg id="111">For the first time, we now know how we can have a baseline measure of any habitat before it might be destroyed.</seg>
<seg id="112">Think about your hometown.</seg>
<seg id="113">What risks does the environment pose to it?</seg>
<seg id="114">This is how we're going to save Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria.</seg>
<seg id="115">We now have a baseline measure of honey, honey DNA from before and after the storm.</seg>
<seg id="116">We started in Humacao.</seg>
<seg id="117">This is right where Hurricane Maria made landfall.</seg>
<seg id="118">And we know what plants to replace and in what quantity and where by triangulating honey DNA samples.</seg>
<seg id="119">You might even think about right here, the beautiful land that connected us, that primed us, all the citizen science to begin with, the erosion, the winter storms that are getting more violent every year.</seg>
<seg id="120">What are we going to do about this, our precious land?</seg>
<seg id="121">Well, looking at honey DNA, we can see what plants are good for pollinators that have deep roots, that can secure the land, and together, everybody can participate.</seg>
<seg id="122">And the solution fits in a teaspoon.</seg>
<seg id="123">If your hometown might get swept away or destroyed by a natural disaster, we now have a blueprint suspended in time for how to restore that on Earth, or perhaps even in a greenhouse on Mars.</seg>
<seg id="124">I know it sounds crazy, but think about this: a new Provincetown, a new hometown, a place that might be familiar that's also good for pollinators for a stable food system, when we're thinking about the future.</seg>
<seg id="125">Now, together, we know what's saving bees -- by planting diverse habitat.</seg>
<seg id="126">Now, together, we know how bees are going to save us -- by being barometers for environmental health, by being blueprints, sources of information, little data factories suspended in time.</seg>
<seg id="127">Thank you.</seg>
</doc>
<doc docid="37861" genre="lectures">
<talkid>37861</talkid>
<seg id="1">I want to tell you a story about stories.</seg>
<seg id="2">And I want to tell you this story because I think we need to remember that sometimes the stories we tell each other are more than just tales or entertainment or narratives.</seg>
<seg id="3">They're also vehicles for sowing inspiration and ideas across our societies and across time.</seg>
<seg id="4">The story I'm about to tell you is about how one of the most advanced technological achievements of the modern era has its roots in stories, and how some of the most important transformations yet to come might also.</seg>
<seg id="5">The story begins over 300 years ago, when Galileo Galilei first learned of the recent Dutch invention that took two pieces of shaped glass and put them in a long tube and thereby extended human sight farther than ever before.</seg>
<seg id="6">When Galileo turned his new telescope to the heavens and to the Moon in particular, he discovered something incredible.</seg>
<seg id="7">These are pages from Galileo's book "Sidereus Nuncius," published in 1610.</seg>
<seg id="8">And in them, he revealed to the world what he had discovered.</seg>
<seg id="9">And what he discovered was that the Moon was not just a celestial object wandering across the night sky, but rather, it was a world, a world with high, sunlit mountains and dark "mare," the Latin word for seas.</seg>
<seg id="10">And once this new world and the Moon had been discovered, people immediately began to think about how to travel there.</seg>
<seg id="11">And just as importantly, they began to write stories about how that might happen and what those voyages might be like.</seg>
<seg id="12">One of the first people to do so was actually the Bishop of Hereford, a man named Francis Godwin.</seg>
<seg id="13">Godwin wrote a story about a Spanish explorer, Domingo Gonsales, who ended up marooned on the island of St. Helena in the middle of the Atlantic, and there, in an effort to get home, developed a machine, an invention, to harness the power of the local wild geese to allow him to fly -- and eventually to embark on a voyage to the Moon.</seg>
<seg id="14">Godwin's book, "The Man in the Moone, or a Discourse of a Voyage Thither," was only published posthumously and anonymously in 1638, likely on account of the number of controversial ideas that it contained, including an endorsement of the Copernican view of the universe that put the Sun at the center of the Solar System, as well as a pre-Newtonian concept of gravity that had the idea that the weight of an object would decrease with increasing distance from Earth.</seg>
<seg id="15">And that's to say nothing of his idea of a goose machine that could go to the Moon.</seg>
<seg id="16">And while this idea of a voyage to the Moon by goose machine might not seem particularly insightful or technically creative to us today, what's important is that Godwin described getting to the Moon not by a dream or by magic, as Johannes Kepler had written about, but rather, through human invention.</seg>
<seg id="17">And it was this idea that we could build machines that could travel into the heavens, that would plant its seed in minds across the generations.</seg>
<seg id="18">The idea was next taken up by his contemporary, John Wilkins, then just a young student at Oxford, but later, one of the founders of the Royal Society.</seg>
<seg id="19">John Wilkins took the idea of space travel in Godwin's text seriously and wrote not just another story but a nonfiction philosophical treatise, entitled, "Discovery of the New World in the Moon, or, a Discourse Tending to Prove that 'tis Probable There May Be Another Habitable World in that Planet." And note, by the way, that word "habitable." That idea in itself would have been a powerful incentive for people thinking about how to build machines that could go there.</seg>
<seg id="20">In his books, Wilkins seriously considered a number of technical methods for spaceflight, and it remains to this day the earliest known nonfiction account of how we might travel to the Moon.</seg>
<seg id="21">Other stories would soon follow, most notably by Cyrano de Bergerac, with his "Lunar Tales." By the mid-17th century, the idea of people building machines that could travel to the heavens was growing in complexity and technical nuance.</seg>
<seg id="22">And yet, in the late 17th century, this intellectual progress effectively ceased.</seg>
<seg id="23">People still told stories about getting to the Moon, but they relied on the old ideas or, once again, on dreams or on magic. Why? Well, because the discovery of the laws of gravity by Newton and the invention of the vacuum pump by Robert Hooke and Robert Boyle meant that people now understood that a condition of vacuum existed between the planets, and consequentially between the Earth and the Moon.</seg>
<seg id="24">And they had no way of overcoming this, no way of thinking about overcoming this.</seg>
<seg id="25">And so, for well over a century, the idea of a voyage to the Moon made very little intellectual progress until the rise of the Industrial Revolution and the development of steam engines and boilers and most importantly, pressure vessels.</seg>
<seg id="26">And these gave people the tools to think about how they could build a capsule that could resist the vacuum of space.</seg>
<seg id="27">So it was in this context, in 1835, that the next great story of spaceflight was written, by Edgar Allan Poe.</seg>
<seg id="28">Now, today we think of Poe in terms of gothic poems and telltale hearts and ravens.</seg>
<seg id="29">But he considered himself a technical thinker.</seg>
<seg id="30">He grew up in Baltimore, the first American city with gas street lighting, and he was fascinated by the technological revolution that he saw going on all around him.</seg>
<seg id="31">He considered his own greatest work not to be one of his gothic tales but rather his epic prose poem "Eureka," in which he expounded his own personal view of the cosmographical nature of the universe.</seg>
<seg id="32">In his stories, he would describe in fantastical technical detail machines and contraptions, and nowhere was he more influential in this than in his short story, "The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall."</seg>
<seg id="33">It's a story of an unemployed bellows maker in Rotterdam, who, depressed and tired of life -- this is Poe, after all -- and deeply in debt, he decides to build a hermetically enclosed balloon-borne carriage that is launched into the air by dynamite and from there, floats through the vacuum of space all the way to the lunar surface.</seg>
<seg id="34">And importantly, he did not develop this story alone, for in the appendix to his tale, he explicitly acknowledged Godwin's "A Man in the Moone" from over 200 years earlier as an influence, calling it "a singular and somewhat ingenious little book." And although this idea of a balloon-borne voyage to the Moon may seem not much more technically sophisticated than the goose machine, in fact, Poe was sufficiently detailed in the description of the construction of the device and in terms of the orbital dynamics of the voyage that it could be diagrammed in the very first spaceflight encyclopedia as a mission in the 1920s.</seg>
<seg id="35">And it was this attention to detail, or to "verisimilitude," as he called it, that would influence the next great story: Jules Verne's "From the Earth to the Moon," written in 1865.</seg>
<seg id="36">And it's a story that has a remarkable legacy and a remarkable similarity to the real voyages to the Moon that would take place over a hundred years later.</seg>
<seg id="37">Because in the story, the first voyage to the Moon takes place from Florida, with three people on board, in a trip that takes three days -- exactly the parameters that would prevail during the Apollo program itself.</seg>
<seg id="38">And in an explicit tribute to Poe's influence on him, Verne situated the group responsible for this feat in the book in Baltimore, at the Baltimore Gun Club, with its members shouting, "Cheers for Edgar Poe!" as they began to lay out their plans for their conquest of the Moon.</seg>
<seg id="39">And just as Verne was influenced by Poe, so, too, would Verne's own story go on to influence and inspire the first generation of rocket scientists.</seg>
<seg id="40">The two great pioneers of liquid fuel rocketry in Russia and in Germany, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and Hermann Oberth, both traced their own commitment to the field of spaceflight to their reading "From the Earth to the Moon" as teenagers, and then subsequently committing themselves to trying to make that story a reality.</seg>
<seg id="41">And Verne's story was not the only one in the 19th century with a long arm of influence.</seg>
<seg id="42">On the other side of the Atlantic, H.G. Wells's "War of the Worlds" directly inspired a young man in Massachusetts, Robert Goddard.</seg>
<seg id="43">And it was after reading "War of the Worlds" that Goddard wrote in his diary, one day in the late 1890s, of resting while trimming a cherry tree on his family's farm and having a vision of a spacecraft taking off from the valley below and ascending into the heavens.</seg>
<seg id="44">And he decided then and there that he would commit the rest of his life to the development of the spacecraft that he saw in his mind's eye.</seg>
<seg id="45">And he did exactly that.</seg>
<seg id="46">Throughout his career, he would celebrate that day as his anniversary day, his cherry tree day, and he would regularly read and reread the works of Verne and of Wells in order to renew his inspiration and his commitment over the decades of labor and effort that would be required to realize the first part of his dream: the flight of a liquid fuel rocket, which he finally achieved in 1926.</seg>
<seg id="47">So it was while reading "From the Earth to the Moon" and "The War of the Worlds" that the first pioneers of astronautics were inspired to dedicate their lives to solving the problems of spaceflight.</seg>
<seg id="48">And it was their treatises and their works in turn that inspired the first technical communities and the first projects of spaceflight, thus creating a direct chain of influence that goes from Godwin to Poe to Verne to the Apollo program and to the present-day communities of spaceflight.</seg>
<seg id="49">So why I have told you all this?</seg>
<seg id="50">Is it just because I think it's cool, or because I'm just weirdly fascinated by stories of 17th- and 19th-century science fiction?</seg>
<seg id="51">It is, admittedly, partly that.</seg>
<seg id="52">But I also think that these stories remind us of the cultural processes driving spaceflight and even technological innovation more broadly.</seg>
<seg id="53">As an economist working at NASA, I spend time thinking about the economic origins of our movement out into the cosmos.</seg>
<seg id="54">And when you look before the investments of billionaire tech entrepreneurs and before the Cold War Space Race, and even before the military investments in liquid fuel rocketry, the economic origins of spaceflight are found in stories and in ideas.</seg>
<seg id="55">It was in these stories that the first concepts for spaceflight were articulated.</seg>
<seg id="56">And it was through these stories that the narrative of a future for humanity in space began to propagate from mind to mind, eventually creating an intergenerational intellectual community that would iterate on the ideas for spacecraft until such a time as they could finally be built.</seg>
<seg id="57">This process has now been going on for over 300 years, and the result is a culture of spaceflight.</seg>
<seg id="58">It's a culture that involves thousands of people over hundreds of years.</seg>
<seg id="59">Because for hundreds of years, some of us have looked at the stars and longed to go.</seg>
<seg id="60">And because for hundreds of years, some of us have dedicated our labors to the development of the concepts and systems required to make those voyages possible.</seg>
<seg id="61">I also wanted to tell you about Godwin, Poe and Verne because I think their stories also tell us of the importance of the stories that we tell each other about the future more generally.</seg>
<seg id="62">Because these stories don't just transmit information or ideas.</seg>
<seg id="63">They can also nurture passions, passions that can lead us to dedicate our lives to the realization of important projects.</seg>
<seg id="64">Which means that these stories can and do influence social and technological forces centuries into the future.</seg>
<seg id="65">I think we need to realize this and remember it when we tell our stories.</seg>
<seg id="66">We need to work hard to write stories that don't just show us the possible dystopian paths we may take for a fear that the more dystopian stories we tell each other, the more we plant seeds for possible dystopian futures.</seg>
<seg id="67">Instead we need to tell stories that plant the seeds, if not necessarily for utopias, then at least for great new projects of technological, societal and institutional transformation.</seg>
<seg id="68">And if we think of this idea that the stories we tell each other can transform the future is fanciful or impossible, then I think we need to remember the example of this, our voyage to the Moon, an idea from the 17th century that propagated culturally for over 300 years until it could finally be realized.</seg>
<seg id="69">So, we need to write new stories, stories that, 300 years in the future, people will be able to look back upon and remark how they inspired us to new heights and to new shores, how they showed us new paths and new possibilities, and how they shaped our world for the better.</seg>
<seg id="70">Thank you.</seg>
</doc>
<doc docid="39689" genre="lectures">
<talkid>39689</talkid>
<seg id="1">The most important gift your mother and father ever gave you was the two sets of three billion letters of DNA that make up your genome.</seg>
<seg id="2">But like anything with three billion components, that gift is fragile.</seg>
<seg id="3">Sunlight, smoking, unhealthy eating, even spontaneous mistakes made by your cells, all cause changes to your genome.</seg>
<seg id="4">The most common kind of change in DNA is the simple swap of one letter, or base, such as C, with a different letter, such as T, G or A. In any day, the cells in your body will collectively accumulate billions of these single-letter swaps, which are also called "point mutations."</seg>
<seg id="5">Now, most of these point mutations are harmless.</seg>
<seg id="6">But every now and then, a point mutation disrupts an important capability in a cell or causes a cell to misbehave in harmful ways.</seg>
<seg id="7">If that mutation were inherited from your parents or occurred early enough in your development, then the result would be that many or all of your cells contain this harmful mutation.</seg>
<seg id="8">And then you would be one of hundreds of millions of people with a genetic disease, such as sickle cell anemia or progeria or muscular dystrophy or Tay-Sachs disease.</seg>
<seg id="9">Grievous genetic diseases caused by point mutations are especially frustrating, because we often know the exact single-letter change that causes the disease and, in theory, could cure the disease.</seg>
<seg id="10">Millions suffer from sickle cell anemia because they have a single A to T point mutations in both copies of their hemoglobin gene.</seg>
<seg id="11">And children with progeria are born with a T at a single position in their genome where you have a C, with the devastating consequence that these wonderful, bright kids age very rapidly and pass away by about age 14.</seg>
<seg id="12">Throughout the history of medicine, we have not had a way to efficiently correct point mutations in living systems, to change that disease-causing T back into a C. Perhaps until now.</seg>
<seg id="13">Because my laboratory recently succeeded in developing such a capability, which we call "base editing."</seg>
<seg id="14">The story of how we developed base editing actually begins three billion years ago.</seg>
<seg id="15">We think of bacteria as sources of infection, but bacteria themselves are also prone to being infected, in particular, by viruses.</seg>
<seg id="16">So about three billion years ago, bacteria evolved a defense mechanism to fight viral infection.</seg>
<seg id="17">That defense mechanism is now better known as CRISPR.</seg>
<seg id="18">And the warhead in CRISPR is this purple protein that acts like molecular scissors to cut DNA, breaking the double helix into two pieces.</seg>
<seg id="19">If CRISPR couldn't distinguish between bacterial and viral DNA, it wouldn't be a very useful defense system.</seg>
<seg id="20">But the most amazing feature of CRISPR is that the scissors can be programmed to search for, bind to and cut only a specific DNA sequence.</seg>
<seg id="21">So when a bacterium encounters a virus for the first time, it can store a small snippet of that virus's DNA for use as a program to direct the CRISPR scissors to cut that viral DNA sequence during a future infection.</seg>
<seg id="22">Cutting a virus's DNA messes up the function of the cut viral gene, and therefore disrupts the virus's life cycle.</seg>
<seg id="23">Remarkable researchers including Emmanuelle Charpentier, George Church, Jennifer Doudna and Feng Zhang showed six years ago how CRISPR scissors could be programmed to cut DNA sequences of our choosing, including sequences in your genome, instead of the viral DNA sequences chosen by bacteria.</seg>
<seg id="24">But the outcomes are actually similar.</seg>
<seg id="25">Cutting a DNA sequence in your genome also disrupts the function of the cut gene, typically, by causing the insertion and deletion of random mixtures of DNA letters at the cut site.</seg>
<seg id="26">Now, disrupting genes can be very useful for some applications.</seg>
<seg id="27">But for most point mutations that cause genetic diseases, simply cutting the already-mutated gene won't benefit patients, because the function of the mutated gene needs to be restored, not further disrupted.</seg>
<seg id="28">So cutting this already-mutated hemoglobin gene that causes sickle cell anemia won't restore the ability of patients to make healthy red blood cells.</seg>
<seg id="29">And while we can sometimes introduce new DNA sequences into cells to replace the DNA sequences surrounding a cut site, that process, unfortunately, doesn't work in most types of cells, and the disrupted gene outcomes still predominate.</seg>
<seg id="30">Like many scientists, I've dreamed of a future in which we might be able to treat or maybe even cure human genetic diseases.</seg>
<seg id="31">But I saw the lack of a way to fix point mutations, which cause most human genetic diseases, as a major problem standing in the way.</seg>
<seg id="32">Being a chemist, I began working with my students to develop ways on performing chemistry directly on an individual DNA base, to truly fix, rather than disrupt, the mutations that cause genetic diseases.</seg>
<seg id="33">The results of our efforts are molecular machines called "base editors." Base editors use the programmable searching mechanism of CRISPR scissors, but instead of cutting the DNA, they directly convert one base to another base without disrupting the rest of the gene.</seg>
<seg id="34">So if you think of naturally occurring CRISPR proteins as molecular scissors, you can think of base editors as pencils, capable of directly rewriting one DNA letter into another by actually rearranging the atoms of one DNA base to instead become a different base.</seg>
<seg id="35">Now, base editors don't exist in nature.</seg>
<seg id="36">In fact, we engineered the first base editor, shown here, from three separate proteins that don't even come from the same organism.</seg>
<seg id="37">We started by taking CRISPR scissors and disabling the ability to cut DNA while retaining its ability to search for and bind a target DNA sequence in a programmed manner.</seg>
<seg id="38">To those disabled CRISPR scissors, shown in blue, we attached a second protein in red, which performs a chemical reaction on the DNA base C, converting it into a base that behaves like T. Third, we had to attach to the first two proteins the protein shown in purple, which protects the edited base from being removed by the cell.</seg>
<seg id="39">The net result is an engineered three-part protein that for the first time allows us to convert Cs into Ts at specified locations in the genome.</seg>
<seg id="40">But even at this point, our work was only half done.</seg>
<seg id="41">Because in order to be stable in cells, the two strands of a DNA double helix have to form base pairs.</seg>
<seg id="42">And because C only pairs with G, and T only pairs with A, simply changing a C to a T on one DNA strand creates a mismatch, a disagreement between the two DNA strands that the cell has to resolve by deciding which strand to replace.</seg>
<seg id="43">We realized that we could further engineer this three-part protein to flag the nonedited strand as the one to be replaced by nicking that strand.</seg>
<seg id="44">This little nick tricks the cell into replacing the nonedited G with an A as it remakes the nicked strand, thereby completing the conversion of what used to be a C-G base pair into a stable T-A base pair.</seg>
<seg id="45">After several years of hard work led by a former post doc in the lab, Alexis Komor, we succeeded in developing this first class of base editor, which converts Cs into Ts and Gs into As at targeted positions of our choosing.</seg>
<seg id="46">Among the more than 35,000 known disease-associated point mutations, the two kinds of mutations that this first base editor can reverse collectively account for about 14 percent or 5,000 or so pathogenic point mutations.</seg>
<seg id="47">But correcting the largest fraction of disease-causing point mutations would require developing a second class of base editor, one that could convert As into Gs or Ts into Cs.</seg>
<seg id="48">Led by Nicole Gaudelli, a former post doc in the lab, we set out to develop this second class of base editor, which, in theory, could correct up to almost half of pathogenic point mutations, including that mutation that causes the rapid-aging disease progeria.</seg>
<seg id="49">We realized that we could borrow, once again, the targeting mechanism of CRISPR scissors to bring the new base editor to the right site in a genome.</seg>
<seg id="50">But we quickly encountered an incredible problem; namely, there is no protein that's known to convert A into G or T into C in DNA.</seg>
<seg id="51">Faced with such a serious stumbling block, most students would probably look for another project, if not another research advisor.  But Nicole agreed to proceed with a plan that seemed wildly ambitious at the time.</seg>
<seg id="52">Given the absence of a naturally occurring protein that performs the necessary chemistry, we decided we would evolve our own protein in the laboratory to convert A into a base that behaves like G, starting from a protein that performs related chemistry on RNA.</seg>
<seg id="53">We set up a Darwinian survival-of-the-fittest selection system that explored tens of millions of protein variants and only allowed those rare variants that could perform the necessary chemistry to survive.</seg>
<seg id="54">We ended up with a protein shown here, the first that can convert A in DNA into a base that resembles G. And when we attached that protein to the disabled CRISPR scissors, shown in blue, we produced the second base editor, which converts As into Gs, and then uses the same strand-nicking strategy that we used in the first base editor to trick the cell into replacing the nonedited T with a C as it remakes that nicked strand, thereby completing the conversion of an A-T base pair to a G-C base pair.</seg>
<seg id="55">Thank you.</seg>
<seg id="56">As an academic scientist in the US, I'm not used to being interrupted by applause.</seg>
<seg id="57">We developed these first two classes of base editors only three years ago and one and a half years ago.</seg>
<seg id="58">But even in that short time, base editing has become widely used by the biomedical research community.</seg>
<seg id="59">Base editors have been sent more than 6,000 times at the request of more than 1,000 researchers around the globe.</seg>
<seg id="60">A hundred scientific research papers have been published already, using base editors in organisms ranging from bacteria to plants to mice to primates.</seg>
<seg id="61">While base editors are too new to have already entered human clinical trials, scientists have succeeded in achieving a critical milestone towards that goal by using base editors in animals to correct point mutations that cause human genetic diseases.</seg>
<seg id="62">For example, a collaborative team of scientists led by Luke Koblan and Jon Levy, two additional students in my lab, recently used a virus to deliver that second base editor into a mouse with progeria, changing that disease-causing T back into a C and reversing its consequences at the DNA, RNA and protein levels.</seg>
<seg id="63">Base editors have also been used in animals to reverse the consequence of tyrosinemia, beta thalassemia, muscular dystrophy, phenylketonuria, a congenital deafness and a type of cardiovascular disease -- in each case, by directly correcting a point mutation that causes or contributes to the disease.</seg>
<seg id="64">In plants, base editors have been used to introduce individual single DNA letter changes that could lead to better crops.</seg>
<seg id="65">And biologists have used base editors to probe the role of individual letters in genes associated with diseases such as cancer.</seg>
<seg id="66">Two companies I cofounded, Beam Therapeutics and Pairwise Plants, are using base editing to treat human genetic diseases and to improve agriculture.</seg>
<seg id="67">All of these applications of base editing have taken place in less than the past three years: on the historical timescale of science, the blink of an eye.</seg>
<seg id="68">Additional work lies ahead before base editing can realize its full potential to improve the lives of patients with genetic diseases.</seg>
<seg id="69">While many of these diseases are thought to be treatable by correcting the underlying mutation in even a modest fraction of cells in an organ, delivering molecular machines like base editors into cells in a human being can be challenging.</seg>
<seg id="70">Co-opting nature's viruses to deliver base editors instead of the molecules that give you a cold is one of several promising delivery strategies that's been successfully used.</seg>
<seg id="71">Continuing to develop new molecular machines that can make all of the remaining ways to convert one base pair to another base pair and that minimize unwanted editing at off-target locations in cells is very important.</seg>
<seg id="72">And engaging with other scientists, doctors, ethicists and governments to maximize the likelihood that base editing is applied thoughtfully, safely and ethically, remains a critical obligation.</seg>
<seg id="73">These challenges notwithstanding, if you had told me even just five years ago that researchers around the globe would be using laboratory-evolved molecular machines to directly convert an individual base pair to another base pair at a specified location in the human genome efficiently and with a minimum of other outcomes, I would have asked you, "What science-fiction novel are you reading?" Thanks to a relentlessly dedicated group of students who were creative enough to engineer what we could design ourselves and brave enough to evolve what we couldn't, base editing has begun to transform that science-fiction-like aspiration into an exciting new reality, one in which the most important gift we give our children may not only be three billion letters of DNA, but also the means to protect and repair them.</seg>
<seg id="74">Thank you.</seg>
<seg id="75">Thank you.</seg>
</doc>
<doc docid="40930" genre="lectures">
<talkid>40930</talkid>
<seg id="1">So, we all have bad seasons in life.</seg>
<seg id="2">And I had one in 2013.</seg>
<seg id="3">My marriage had just ended, and I was humiliated by that failed commitment.</seg>
<seg id="4">My kids had left home for college or were leaving.</seg>
<seg id="5">I grew up mostly in the conservative movement, but conservatism had changed, so I lost a lot of those friends, too.</seg>
<seg id="6">And so what I did is, I lived alone in an apartment, and I just worked.</seg>
<seg id="7">If you opened the kitchen drawers where there should have been utensils, there were Post-it notes.</seg>
<seg id="8">If you opened the other drawers where there should have been plates, I had envelopes.</seg>
<seg id="9">I had work friends, weekday friends, but I didn't have weekend friends.</seg>
<seg id="10">And so my weekends were these long, howling silences. And I was lonely.</seg>
<seg id="11">And loneliness, unexpectedly, came to me in the form of -- it felt like fear, a burning in my stomach.</seg>
<seg id="12">And it felt a little like drunkenness, just making bad decisions, just fluidity, lack of solidity.</seg>
<seg id="13">And the painful part of that moment was the awareness that the emptiness in my apartment was just reflective of the emptiness in myself, and that I had fallen for some of the lies that our culture tells us.</seg>
<seg id="14">The first lie is that career success is fulfilling.</seg>
<seg id="15">I've had a fair bit of career success, and I've found that it helps me avoid the shame I would feel if I felt myself a failure, but it hasn't given me any positive good.</seg>
<seg id="16">The second lie is I can make myself happy, that if I just win one more victory, lose 15 pounds, do a little more yoga, I'll get happy.</seg>
<seg id="17">And that's the lie of self-sufficiency.</seg>
<seg id="18">But as anybody on their deathbed will tell you, the things that make people happy is the deep relationships of life, the losing of self-sufficiency.</seg>
<seg id="19">The third lie is the lie of the meritocracy. The message of the meritocracy is you are what you accomplish.</seg>
<seg id="20">The myth of the meritocracy is you can earn dignity by attaching yourself to prestigious brands.</seg>
<seg id="21">The emotion of the meritocracy is conditional love, you can "earn" your way to love.</seg>
<seg id="22">The anthropology of the meritocracy is you're not a soul to be purified, you're a set of skills to be maximized.</seg>
<seg id="23">And the evil of the meritocracy is that people who've achieved a little more than others are actually worth a little more than others.</seg>
<seg id="24">And so the wages of sin are sin.</seg>
<seg id="25">And my sins were the sins of omission-- not reaching out, failing to show up for my friends, evasion, avoiding conflict.</seg>
<seg id="26">And the weird thing was that as I was falling into the valley -- it was a valley of disconnection -- a lot of other people were doing that, too.</seg>
<seg id="27">And that's sort of the secret to my career; a lot of the things that happen to me are always happening to a lot of other people.</seg>
<seg id="28">I'm a very average person with above average communication skills.</seg>
<seg id="29">And so I was detached. And at the same time, a lot of other people were detached and isolated and fragmented from each other.</seg>
<seg id="30">Thirty-five percent of Americans over 45 are chronically lonely.</seg>
<seg id="31">Only eight percent of Americans report having meaningful conversation with their neighbors.</seg>
<seg id="32">Only 32 percent of Americans say they trust their neighbors, and only 18 percent of millennials.</seg>
<seg id="33">The fastest-growing religious movement is unaffiliated.</seg>
<seg id="34">Depression rates are rising, mental health problems are rising.</seg>
<seg id="35">The suicide rate has risen 30 percent since 1999. For teen suicides over the last several years, the suicide rate has risen by 70 percent.</seg>
<seg id="36">Forty-five thousand Americans kill themselves every year; 72,000 die from opioid addictions; life expectancy is falling, not rising.</seg>
<seg id="37">So what I mean to tell you, I flew out here to say that we have an economic crisis, we have environmental crisis, we have a political crisis.</seg>
<seg id="38">We also have a social and relational crisis; we're in the valley. We're fragmented from each other, we've got cascades of lies coming out of Washington... We're in the valley.</seg>
<seg id="39">And so I've spent the last five years -- how do you get out of a valley?</seg>
<seg id="40">The Greeks used to say, "You suffer your way to wisdom." And from that dark period where I started, I've had a few realizations.</seg>
<seg id="41">The first is, freedom sucks.</seg>
<seg id="42">Economic freedom is OK, political freedom is great, social freedom sucks.</seg>
<seg id="43">The unrooted man is the adrift man.</seg>
<seg id="44">The unrooted man is the unremembered man, because he's uncommitted to things.</seg>
<seg id="45">Freedom is not an ocean you want to swim in, it's a river you want to get across, so you can commit and plant yourself on the other side.</seg>
<seg id="46">The second thing I learned is that when you have one of those bad moments in life, you can either be broken, or you can be broken open.</seg>
<seg id="47">And we all know people who are broken.</seg>
<seg id="48">They've endured some pain or grief, they get smaller, they get angrier, resentful, they lash out.</seg>
<seg id="49">As the saying is, "Pain that is not transformed gets transmitted." But other people are broken open.</seg>
<seg id="50">Suffering's great power is that it's an interruption of life.</seg>
<seg id="51">It reminds you you're not the person you thought you were.</seg>
<seg id="52">The theologian Paul Tillich said what suffering does is it carves through what you thought was the floor of the basement of your soul, and it carves through that, revealing a cavity below, and it carves through that, revealing a cavity below.</seg>
<seg id="53">You realize there are depths of yourself you never anticipated, and only spiritual and relational food will fill those depths.</seg>
<seg id="54">And when you get down there, you get out of the head of the ego and you get into the heart, the desiring heart.</seg>
<seg id="55">The idea that what we really yearn for is longing and love for another, the kind of thing that Louis de Bernières described in his book, "Captain Corelli's Mandolin." He had an old guy talking to his daughter about his relationship with his late wife, and the old guy says, "Love itself is whatever is leftover when being in love is burned away.</seg>
<seg id="56">And this is both an art and a fortunate accident.</seg>
<seg id="57">Your mother and I had it.</seg>
<seg id="58">We had roots that grew towards each other underground, and when all the pretty blossoms had fallen from our branches, we discovered that we are one tree and not two. "That's what the heart yearns for.</seg>
<seg id="59">The second thing you discover is your soul.</seg>
<seg id="60">Now, I don't ask you to believe in God or not believe in God, but I do ask you to believe that there's a piece of you that has no shape, size, color or weight, but that gives you infinite dignity and value.</seg>
<seg id="61">Rich and successful people don't have more of this than less successful people.</seg>
<seg id="62">Slavery is wrong because it's an obliteration of another soul.</seg>
<seg id="63">Rape is not just an attack on a bunch of physical molecules, it's an attempt to insult another person's soul.</seg>
<seg id="64">And what the soul does is it yearns for righteousness. The heart yearns for fusion with another, the soul yearns for righteousness.</seg>
<seg id="65">And that led to my third realization, which I borrowed from Einstein: "The problem you have is not going to be solved at the level of consciousness on which you created it.</seg>
<seg id="66">You have to expand to a different level of consciousness. "</seg>
<seg id="67">So what do you do? Well, the first thing you do is you throw yourself on your friends and you have deeper conversations that you ever had before.</seg>
<seg id="68">But the second thing you do, you have to go out alone into the wilderness.</seg>
<seg id="69">You go out into that place where there's nobody there to perform, and the ego has nothing to do, and it crumbles, and only then are you capable of being loved.</seg>
<seg id="70">I have a friend who said that when her daughter was born, she realized that she loved her more than evolution required.</seg>
<seg id="71">And I've always loved that.</seg>
<seg id="72">Because it talks about the peace that's at the deep of ourself, our inexplicable care for one another.</seg>
<seg id="73">And when you touch that spot, you're ready to be rescued.</seg>
<seg id="74">The hard thing about when you're in the valley is that you can't climb out; somebody has to reach in and pull you out.</seg>
<seg id="75">It happened to me.</seg>
<seg id="76">I got, luckily, invited over to a house by a couple named Kathy and David, and they were -- They had a kid in the DC public school, his name's Santi.</seg>
<seg id="77">Santi had a friend who needed a place to stay because his mom had some health issues.</seg>
<seg id="78">And then that kid had a friend and that kid had a friend. When I went to their house six years ago, I walk in the door, there's like 25 around the kitchen table, a whole bunch sleeping downstairs in the basement.</seg>
<seg id="79">I reach out to introduce myself to a kid, and he says, "We don't really shake hands here.</seg>
<seg id="80">We just hug here. "And I'm not the huggiest guy on the face of the earth, but I've been going back to that home every Thursday night when I'm in town, and just hugging all those kids. They demand intimacy. They demand that you behave in a way where you're showing all the way up.</seg>
<seg id="81">And they teach you a new way to live, which is the cure for all the ills of our culture which is a way of direct -- really putting relationship first, not just as a word, but as a reality.</seg>
<seg id="82">And the beautiful thing is, these communities are everywhere.</seg>
<seg id="83">I started something at the Aspen Institute called "Weave: The Social Fabric." This is our logo here. And we plop into a place and we find weavers anywhere, everywhere.</seg>
<seg id="84">We find people like Asiaha Butler, who grew up in -- who lived in Chicago, in Englewood, in a tough neighborhood.</seg>
<seg id="85">And she was about to move because it was so dangerous, and she looked across the street and she saw two little girls playing in an empty lot with broken bottles, and she turned to her husband and she said, "We're not leaving.</seg>
<seg id="86">We're not going to be just another family that abandon that. "And she Googled" volunteer in Englewood, "and now she runs R.A.G.E., the big community organization there.</seg>
<seg id="87">Some of these people have had tough valleys.</seg>
<seg id="88">I met a woman named Sarah in Ohio who came home from an antiquing trip and found that her husband had killed himself and their two kids.</seg>
<seg id="89">She now runs a free pharmacy, she volunteers in the community, she helps women cope with violence, she teaches.</seg>
<seg id="90">She told me, "I grew from this experience because I was angry.</seg>
<seg id="91">I was going to fight back against what he tried to do to me by making a difference in the world.</seg>
<seg id="92">See, he didn't kill me.</seg>
<seg id="93">My response to him is, 'Whatever you meant to do to me, screw you, you're not going to do it.' "</seg>
<seg id="94">These weavers are not living an individualistic life, they're living a relationist life, they have a different set of values.</seg>
<seg id="95">They have moral motivations.</seg>
<seg id="96">They have vocational certitude, they have planted themselves down.</seg>
<seg id="97">I met a guy in Youngstown, Ohio, who just held up a sign in the town square, "Defend Youngstown." They have radical mutuality, and they are geniuses at relationship.</seg>
<seg id="98">There's a woman named Mary Gordon who runs something called Roots of Empathy.</seg>
<seg id="99">And what they do is they take a bunch of kids, an eighth grade class, they put a mom and an infant, and then the students have to guess what the infant is thinking, to teach empathy.</seg>
<seg id="100">There was one kid in a class who was bigger than the rest because he'd been held back, been through the foster care system, seen his mom get killed.</seg>
<seg id="101">And he wanted to hold the baby.</seg>
<seg id="102">And the mom was nervous because he looked big and scary.</seg>
<seg id="103">But she let this kid, Darren, hold the baby.</seg>
<seg id="104">He held it, and he was great with it.</seg>
<seg id="105">He gave the baby back and started asking questions about parenthood.</seg>
<seg id="106">And his final question was, "If nobody has ever loved you, do you think you can be a good father?" And so what Roots of Empathy does is they reach down and they grab people out of the valley.</seg>
<seg id="107">And that's what weavers are doing.</seg>
<seg id="108">Some of them switch jobs. Some of them stay in their same jobs.</seg>
<seg id="109">But one thing is, they have an intensity to them.</seg>
<seg id="110">I read this -- E.O. Wilson wrote a great book called "Naturalist," about his childhood.</seg>
<seg id="111">When he was seven, his parents were divorcing.</seg>
<seg id="112">And they sent him to Paradise Beach in North Florida.</seg>
<seg id="113">And he'd never seen the ocean before. And he'd never seen a jellyfish before.</seg>
<seg id="114">He wrote, "The creature was astonishing. It existed beyond my imagination." He was sitting on the dock one day and he saw a stingray float beneath his feet.</seg>
<seg id="115">And at that moment, a naturalist was born in the awe and wonder.</seg>
<seg id="116">And he makes this observation: that when you're a child, you see animals at twice the size as you do as an adult. And that has always impressed me, because what we want as kids is that moral intensity, to be totally given ourselves over to something and to find that level of vocation. And when you are around these weavers, they see other people at twice the size as normal people.</seg>
<seg id="117">They see deeper into them. And what they see is joy.</seg>
<seg id="118">On the first mountain of our life, when we're shooting for our career, we shoot for happiness.</seg>
<seg id="119">And happiness is good, it's the expansion of self.</seg>
<seg id="120">You win a victory, you get a promotion, your team wins the Super Bowl, you're happy.</seg>
<seg id="121">Joy is not the expansion of self, it's the dissolving of self.</seg>
<seg id="122">It's the moment when the skin barrier disappears between a mother and her child, it's the moment when a naturalist feels just free in nature.</seg>
<seg id="123">It's the moment where you're so lost in your work or a cause, you have totally self-forgotten.</seg>
<seg id="124">And joy is a better thing to aim for than happiness.</seg>
<seg id="125">I collect passages of joy, of people when they lose it.</seg>
<seg id="126">One of my favorite is from Zadie Smith.</seg>
<seg id="127">In 1999, she was in a London nightclub, looking for her friends, wondering where her handbag was.</seg>
<seg id="128">And suddenly, as she writes, "... a rail-thin man with enormous eyes reached across a sea of bodies for my hand.</seg>
<seg id="129">He kept asking me the same thing over and over, 'Are you feeling it?' My ridiculous heels were killing me, I was terrified that I might die, yet I felt simultaneously overwhelmed with delight that 'Can I Kick It?' should happen to be playing on this precise moment in the history of the world on the sound system, and it was now morphing into 'Teen Spirit.' I took the man's hand, the top of my head blew away, we danced, we danced, we gave ourselves up to joy. "</seg>
<seg id="130">And so what I'm trying to describe is two different life mindsets.</seg>
<seg id="131">The first mountain mindset, which is about individual happiness and career success.</seg>
<seg id="132">And it's a good mindset, I have nothing against it.</seg>
<seg id="133">But we're in a national valley, because we don't have the other mindset to balance it.</seg>
<seg id="134">We no longer feel good about ourselves as a people, we've lost our defining faith in our future, we don't see each other deeply, we don't treat each other as well.</seg>
<seg id="135">And we need a lot of changes. We need an economic change and environmental change. But we also need a cultural and relational revolution.</seg>
<seg id="136">We need to name the language of a recovered society.</seg>
<seg id="137">And to me, the weavers have found that language.</seg>
<seg id="138">My theory of social change is that society changes when a small group of people find a better way to live, and the rest of us copy them.</seg>
<seg id="139">And these weavers have found a better way to live.</seg>
<seg id="140">And you don't have to theorize about it.</seg>
<seg id="141">They are out there as community builders all around the country.</seg>
<seg id="142">We just have to shift our lives a little, so we can say, "I'm a weaver, we're a weaver." And if we do that, the hole inside ourselves gets filled, but more important, the social unity gets repaired.</seg>
<seg id="143">Thank you very much.</seg>
</doc>
<doc docid="41105" genre="lectures">
<talkid>41105</talkid>
<seg id="1">Thank you very much. Well, I would like to start with testicles.</seg>
<seg id="2">Men who sleep five hours a night have significantly smaller testicles than those who sleep seven hours or more.</seg>
<seg id="3">In addition, men who routinely sleep just four to five hours a night will have a level of testosterone which is that of someone 10 years their senior.</seg>
<seg id="4">So a lack of sleep will age a man by a decade in terms of that critical aspect of wellness.</seg>
<seg id="5">And we see equivalent impairments in female reproductive health caused by a lack of sleep.</seg>
<seg id="6">This is the best news that I have for you today.</seg>
<seg id="7">From this point, it may only get worse.</seg>
<seg id="8">Not only will I tell you about the wonderfully good things that happen when you get sleep, but the alarmingly bad things that happen when you don't get enough, both for your brain and for your body.</seg>
<seg id="9">Let me start with the brain and the functions of learning and memory, because what we've discovered over the past 10 or so years is that you need sleep after learning to essentially hit the save button on those new memories so that you don't forget.</seg>
<seg id="10">But recently, we discovered that you also need sleep before learning to actually prepare your brain, almost like a dry sponge ready to initially soak up new information.</seg>
<seg id="11">And without sleep, the memory circuits of the brain essentially become waterlogged, as it were, and you can't absorb new memories.</seg>
<seg id="12">So let me show you the data.</seg>
<seg id="13">Here in this study, we decided to test the hypothesis that pulling the all-nighter was a good idea.</seg>
<seg id="14">So we took a group of individuals and we assigned them to one of two experimental groups: a sleep group and a sleep deprivation group.</seg>
<seg id="15">Now the sleep group, they're going to get a full eight hours of slumber, but the deprivation group, we're going to keep them awake in the laboratory, under full supervision.</seg>
<seg id="16">There's no naps or caffeine, by the way, so it's miserable for everyone involved.</seg>
<seg id="17">And then the next day, we're going to place those participants inside an MRI scanner and we're going to have them try and learn a whole list of new facts as we're taking snapshots of brain activity.</seg>
<seg id="18">And then we're going to test them to see how effective that learning has been.</seg>
<seg id="19">And that's what you're looking at here on the vertical axis.</seg>
<seg id="20">And when you put those two groups head to head, what you find is a quite significant, 40-percent deficit in the ability of the brain to make new memories without sleep.</seg>
<seg id="21">I think this should be concerning, considering what we know is happening to sleep in our education populations right now.</seg>
<seg id="22">In fact, to put that in context, it would be the difference in a child acing an exam versus failing it miserably -- 40 percent.</seg>
<seg id="23">And we've gone on to discover what goes wrong within your brain to produce these types of learning disabilities.</seg>
<seg id="24">And there's a structure that sits on the left and the right side of your brain, called the hippocampus.</seg>
<seg id="25">And you can think of the hippocampus almost like the informational inbox of your brain.</seg>
<seg id="26">It's very good at receiving new memory files and then holding on to them.</seg>
<seg id="27">And when you look at this structure in those people who'd had a full night of sleep, we saw lots of healthy learning-related activity.</seg>
<seg id="28">Yet in those people who were sleep-deprived, we actually couldn't find any significant signal whatsoever.</seg>
<seg id="29">So it's almost as though sleep deprivation had shut down your memory inbox, and any new incoming files -- they were just being bounced.</seg>
<seg id="30">You couldn't effectively commit new experiences to memory.</seg>
<seg id="31">So that's the bad that can happen if I were to take sleep away from you, but let me just come back to that control group for a second.</seg>
<seg id="32">Do you remember those folks that got a full eight hours of sleep?</seg>
<seg id="33">Well, we can ask a very different question: What is it about the physiological quality of your sleep when you do get it that restores and enhances your memory and learning ability each and every day?</seg>
<seg id="34">And by placing electrodes all over the head, what we've discovered is that there are big, powerful brainwaves that happen during the very deepest stages of sleep that have riding on top of them these spectacular bursts of electrical activity that we call sleep spindles.</seg>
<seg id="35">And it's the combined quality of these deep-sleep brainwaves that acts like a file-transfer mechanism at night, shifting memories from a short-term vulnerable reservoir to a more permanent long-term storage site within the brain, and therefore protecting them, making them safe.</seg>
<seg id="36">And it is important that we understand what during sleep actually transacts these memory benefits, because there are real medical and societal implications.</seg>
<seg id="37">And let me just tell you about one area that we've moved this work out into, clinically, which is the context of aging and dementia.</seg>
<seg id="38">Because it's of course no secret that, as we get older, our learning and memory abilities begin to fade and decline.</seg>
<seg id="39">But what we've also discovered is that a physiological signature of aging is that your sleep gets worse, especially that deep quality of sleep that I was just discussing.</seg>
<seg id="40">And only last year, we finally published evidence that these two things, they're not simply co-occurring, they are significantly interrelated.</seg>
<seg id="41">And it suggests that the disruption of deep sleep is an underappreciated factor that is contributing to cognitive decline or memory decline in aging, and most recently we've discovered, in Alzheimer's disease as well.</seg>
<seg id="42">Now, I know this is remarkably depressing news.</seg>
<seg id="43">It's coming at you.</seg>
<seg id="44">But there's a potential silver lining here.</seg>
<seg id="45">Unlike many of the other factors that we know are associated with aging, for example changes in the physical structure of the brain, that's fiendishly difficult to treat.</seg>
<seg id="46">But that sleep is a missing piece in the explanatory puzzle of aging and Alzheimer's is exciting because we may be able to do something about it.</seg>
<seg id="47">And one way that we are approaching this at my sleep center is not by using sleeping pills, by the way.</seg>
<seg id="48">Unfortunately, they are blunt instruments that do not produce naturalistic sleep.</seg>
<seg id="49">Instead, we're actually developing a method based on this.</seg>
<seg id="50">It's called direct current brain stimulation. You insert a small amount of voltage into the brain, so small you typically don't feel it, but it has a measurable impact.</seg>
<seg id="51">Now if you apply this stimulation during sleep in young, healthy adults, as if you're sort of singing in time with those deep-sleep brainwaves, not only can you amplify the size of those deep-sleep brainwaves, but in doing so, we can almost double the amount of memory benefit that you get from sleep.</seg>
<seg id="52">The question now is whether we can translate this same affordable, potentially portable piece of technology into older adults and those with dementia.</seg>
<seg id="53">Can we restore back some healthy quality of deep sleep, and in doing so, can we salvage aspects of their learning and memory function?</seg>
<seg id="54">That is my real hope now.</seg>
<seg id="55">That's one of our moon-shot goals, as it were.</seg>
<seg id="56">So that's an example of sleep for your brain, but sleep is just as essential for your body.</seg>
<seg id="57">We've already spoken about sleep loss and your reproductive system.</seg>
<seg id="58">Or I could tell you about sleep loss and your cardiovascular system, and that all it takes is one hour.</seg>
<seg id="59">Because there is a global experiment performed on 1.6 billion people across 70 countries twice a year, and it's called daylight saving time.</seg>
<seg id="60">Now, in the spring, when we lose one hour of sleep, we see a subsequent 24-percent increase in heart attacks that following day.</seg>
<seg id="61">In the autumn, when we gain an hour of sleep, we see a 21-percent reduction in heart attacks.</seg>
<seg id="62">Isn't that incredible?</seg>
<seg id="63">And you see exactly the same profile for car crashes, road traffic accidents, even suicide rates.</seg>
<seg id="64">But as a deeper dive, I want to focus on this: sleep loss and your immune system.</seg>
<seg id="65">And here, I'll introduce these delightful blue elements in the image.</seg>
<seg id="66">They are called natural killer cells, and you can think of natural killer cells almost like the secret service agents of your immune system.</seg>
<seg id="67">They are very good at identifying dangerous, unwanted elements and eliminating them.</seg>
<seg id="68">In fact, what they're doing here is destroying a cancerous tumor mass.</seg>
<seg id="69">So what you wish for is a virile set of these immune assassins at all times, and tragically, that's what you don't have if you're not sleeping enough.</seg>
<seg id="70">So here in this experiment, you're not going to have your sleep deprived for an entire night, you're simply going to have your sleep restricted to four hours for one single night, and then we're going to look to see what's the percent reduction in immune cell activity that you suffer.</seg>
<seg id="71">And it's not small -- it's not 10 percent, it's not 20 percent.</seg>
<seg id="72">There was a 70-percent drop in natural killer cell activity.</seg>
<seg id="73">That's a concerning state of immune deficiency, and you can perhaps understand why we're now finding significant links between short sleep duration and your risk for the development of numerous forms of cancer.</seg>
<seg id="74">Currently, that list includes cancer of the bowel, cancer of the prostate and cancer of the breast.</seg>
<seg id="75">In fact, the link between a lack of sleep and cancer is now so strong that the World Health Organization has classified any form of nighttime shift work as a probable carcinogen, because of a disruption of your sleep-wake rhythms.</seg>
<seg id="76">So you may have heard of that old maxim that you can sleep when you're dead.</seg>
<seg id="77">Well, I'm being quite serious now -- it is mortally unwise advice.</seg>
<seg id="78">We know this from epidemiological studies across millions of individuals.</seg>
<seg id="79">There's a simple truth: the shorter your sleep, the shorter your life.</seg>
<seg id="80">Short sleep predicts all-cause mortality.</seg>
<seg id="81">And if increasing your risk for the development of cancer or even Alzheimer's disease were not sufficiently disquieting, we have since discovered that a lack of sleep will even erode the very fabric of biological life itself, your DNA genetic code.</seg>
<seg id="82">So here in this study, they took a group of healthy adults and they limited them to six hours of sleep a night for one week, and then they measured the change in their gene activity profile relative to when those same individuals were getting a full eight hours of sleep a night.</seg>
<seg id="83">And there were two critical findings.</seg>
<seg id="84">First, a sizable and significant 711 genes were distorted in their activity, caused by a lack of sleep.</seg>
<seg id="85">The second result was that about half of those genes were actually increased in their activity.</seg>
<seg id="86">The other half were decreased.</seg>
<seg id="87">Now those genes that were switched off by a lack of sleep were genes associated with your immune system, so once again, you can see that immune deficiency.</seg>
<seg id="88">In contrast, those genes that were actually upregulated or increased by way of a lack of sleep, were genes associated with the promotion of tumors, genes associated with long-term chronic inflammation within the body, and genes associated with stress, and, as a consequence, cardiovascular disease.</seg>
<seg id="89">There is simply no aspect of your wellness that can retreat at the sign of sleep deprivation and get away unscathed.</seg>
<seg id="90">It's rather like a broken water pipe in your home.</seg>
<seg id="91">Sleep loss will leak down into every nook and cranny of your physiology, even tampering with the very DNA nucleic alphabet that spells out your daily health narrative.</seg>
<seg id="92">And at this point, you may be thinking, "Oh my goodness, how do I start to get better sleep?</seg>
<seg id="93">What are you tips for good sleep? "Well, beyond avoiding the damaging and harmful impact of alcohol and caffeine on sleep, and if you're struggling with sleep at night, avoiding naps during the day, I have two pieces of advice for you.</seg>
<seg id="94">The first is regularity. Go to bed at the same time, wake up at the same time, no matter whether it's the weekday or the weekend.</seg>
<seg id="95">Regularity is king, and it will anchor your sleep and improve the quantity and the quality of that sleep.</seg>
<seg id="96">The second is keep it cool.</seg>
<seg id="97">Your body needs to drop its core temperature by about two to three degrees Fahrenheit to initiate sleep and then to stay asleep, and it's the reason you will always find it easier to fall asleep in a room that's too cold than too hot.</seg>
<seg id="98">So aim for a bedroom temperature of around 65 degrees, or about 18 degrees Celsius.</seg>
<seg id="99">That's going to be optimal for the sleep of most people.</seg>
<seg id="100">And then finally, in taking a step back, then, what is the mission-critical statement here?</seg>
<seg id="101">Well, I think it may be this: sleep, unfortunately, is not an optional lifestyle luxury.</seg>
<seg id="102">Sleep is a nonnegotiable biological necessity.</seg>
<seg id="103">It is your life-support system, and it is Mother Nature's best effort yet at immortality.</seg>
<seg id="104">And the decimation of sleep throughout industrialized nations is having a catastrophic impact on our health, our wellness, even the safety and the education of our children.</seg>
<seg id="105">It's a silent sleep loss epidemic, and it's fast becoming one of the greatest public health challenges that we face in the 21st century.</seg>
<seg id="106">I believe it is now time for us to reclaim our right to a full night of sleep, and without embarrassment or that unfortunate stigma of laziness.</seg>
<seg id="107">And in doing so, we can be reunited with the most powerful elixir of life, the Swiss Army knife of health, as it were.</seg>
<seg id="108">And with that soapbox rant over, I will simply say, good night, good luck, and above all... I do hope you sleep well.</seg>
<seg id="109">Thank you very much indeed.</seg>
<seg id="110">Thank you.</seg>
<seg id="111">Thank you so much.</seg>
<seg id="112">Stay there for a second.</seg>
<seg id="113">Good job not running away, though. I appreciate that. So that was terrifying.</seg>
<seg id="114">Matt Walker: You're welcome.</seg>
<seg id="115">DB: Yes, thank you, thank you.</seg>
<seg id="116">Since we can't catch up on sleep, what are we supposed to do?</seg>
<seg id="117">What do we do when we're, like, tossing and turning in bed late at night or doing shift work or whatever else?</seg>
<seg id="118">MW: So you're right, we can't catch up on sleep.</seg>
<seg id="119">Sleep is not like the bank.</seg>
<seg id="120">You can't accumulate a debt and then hope to pay it off at a later point in time.</seg>
<seg id="121">I should also note the reason that it's so catastrophic and that our health deteriorates so quickly, first, it's because human beings are the only species that deliberately deprive themselves of sleep for no apparent reason.</seg>
<seg id="122">DB: Because we're smart.</seg>
<seg id="123">MW: And I make that point because it means that Mother Nature, throughout the course of evolution, has never had to face the challenge of this thing called sleep deprivation.</seg>
<seg id="124">So she's never developed a safety net, and that's why when you undersleep, things just sort of implode so quickly, both within the brain and the body.</seg>
<seg id="125">So you just have to prioritize.</seg>
<seg id="126">DB: OK, but tossing and turning in bed, what do I do?</seg>
<seg id="127">MW: So if you are staying in bed awake for too long, you should get out of bed and go to a different room and do something different.</seg>
<seg id="128">The reason is because your brain will very quickly associate your bedroom with the place of wakefulness, and you need to break that association.</seg>
<seg id="129">So only return to bed when you are sleepy, and that way you will relearn the association that you once had, which is your bed is the place of sleep.</seg>
<seg id="130">So the analogy would be, you'd never sit at the dinner table, waiting to get hungry, so why would you lie in bed, waiting to get sleepy?</seg>
<seg id="131">DB: Well, thank you for that wake-up call.</seg>
<seg id="132">Great job, Matt.</seg>
<seg id="133">MW: You're very welcome. Thank you very much.</seg>
</doc>
<doc docid="41353" genre="lectures">
<talkid>41353</talkid>
<seg id="1">So when you think about a child, a close friend, or a romantic partner, the word "love" probably comes to mind, and instantly other emotions rush in: joy and hope, excitement, trust and security, and yes, sometimes sadness and disappointment.</seg>
<seg id="2">There might not be a word in the dictionary that more of us are connected to than love.</seg>
<seg id="3">Yet, given its central importance in our lives, isn't it interesting that we're never explicitly taught how to love?</seg>
<seg id="4">We build friendships, navigate early romantic relationships, get married and bring babies home from the hospital with the expectation that we'll figure it out.</seg>
<seg id="5">But the truth is, we often harm and disrespect the ones we love.</seg>
<seg id="6">It can be subtle things like guilting a friend into spending time with you or sneaking a peak at your partner's texts or shaming a child for their lack of effort at school.</seg>
<seg id="7">100 percent of us will be on the receiving end of unhealthy relationship behaviors and 100 percent of us will do unhealthy things.</seg>
<seg id="8">It's part of being human.</seg>
<seg id="9">In its worst form, the harm we inflict on loved ones shows up as abuse and violence, and relationship abuse is something that one in three women and one in four men will experience in their lifetime.</seg>
<seg id="10">Now, if you're like most people, when you hear those stats, you'll go, "Oh, no, no, no, that would never happen to me." It's instinctual to move away from the words "abuse" and "violence," to think that they happen to someone else somewhere else.</seg>
<seg id="11">But the truth is, unhealthy relationships and abuse are all around us.</seg>
<seg id="12">We just call them different things and ignore the connection.</seg>
<seg id="13">Abuse sneaks up on us disguised in unhealthy love.</seg>
<seg id="14">I work for an organization called One Love started by a family whose daughter Yeardley was killed by her ex-boyfriend.</seg>
<seg id="15">This was a tragedy no one saw coming, but when they looked back, they realized the warning signs were there just no one understood what they were seeing.</seg>
<seg id="16">Called crazy or drama or too much drinking, his actions weren't understood to be what they really were, which was clear signs of danger.</seg>
<seg id="17">Her family realized that if anyone had been educated about these signs, her death could have been prevented.</seg>
<seg id="18">So today we're on a mission to make sure that others have the information that Yeardley and her friends didn't.</seg>
<seg id="19">We have three main goals: give all of us a language for talking about a subject that's quite awkward and uncomfortable to discuss; empower a whole front line, namely friends, to help; and, in the process, improve all of our ability to love better.</seg>
<seg id="20">To do this, it's always important to start by illuminating the unhealthy signs that we frequently miss, and our work really focuses on creating content to start conversations with young people.</seg>
<seg id="21">As you'd expect, most of our content is pretty serious, given the subject at hand, but today I'm going to use one of our more light-hearted yet still thought-provoking pieces, "The Couplets," to illuminate five markers of unhealthy love.</seg>
<seg id="22">The first is intensity.</seg>
<seg id="23">Blue: I haven't seen you in a couple days.</seg>
<seg id="24">Orange: I've missed you too. (# thatslove)</seg>
<seg id="25">Blue: I haven't seen you in five minutes.</seg>
<seg id="26">It feels like a lifetime.</seg>
<seg id="27">What have you been doing without me for five whole minutes?</seg>
<seg id="28">Orange: It's been three minutes. (# thatsnotlove)</seg>
<seg id="29">Katie Hood: Anybody recognize that? I don't know. I do. Abusive relationships don't start out abusive.</seg>
<seg id="30">They start out exciting and exhilarating.</seg>
<seg id="31">There's an intensity of affection and emotion, a rush.</seg>
<seg id="32">It feels really good.</seg>
<seg id="33">You feel so lucky, like you've hit the jackpot.</seg>
<seg id="34">But in unhealthy love, these feelings shift over time from exciting to overwhelming and maybe a little bit suffocating.</seg>
<seg id="35">You feel it in your gut.</seg>
<seg id="36">Maybe it's when your new boyfriend or girlfriend says "I love you" faster than you were ready for or starts showing up everywhere, texting and calling a lot.</seg>
<seg id="37">Maybe they're impatient when you're slow to respond, even though they know you had other things going on that day.</seg>
<seg id="38">It's important to remember that it's not how a relationship starts that matters, it's how it evolves.</seg>
<seg id="39">It's important in the early days of a new relationship to pay attention to how you're feeling.</seg>
<seg id="40">Are you comfortable with the pace of intimacy?</seg>
<seg id="41">Do you feel like you have space and room to breathe?</seg>
<seg id="42">It's also really important to start practicing using your voice to talk about your own needs.</seg>
<seg id="43">Are your requests respected?</seg>
<seg id="44">A second marker is isolation.</seg>
<seg id="45">Orange 2: Want to hang out?</seg>
<seg id="46">Orange 1: Me and my boyfriend always have Monday Funday.</seg>
<seg id="47">Orange 2: Want to hang out?</seg>
<seg id="48">Orange 1: Me and my boyfriend always have Monday Funday.</seg>
<seg id="49">Orange 2: Tomorrow? Orange 1: It's our Tuesday Snooze Day.</seg>
<seg id="50">KH: If you ask me, isolation is one of the most frequently missed and misunderstood signs of unhealthy love. Why? Because every new relationship starts out with this intense desire to spend time together, it's easy to miss when something shifts.</seg>
<seg id="51">Isolation creeps in when your new boyfriend or girlfriend starts pulling you away from your friends and family, your support system, and tethering you more tightly to them.</seg>
<seg id="52">They might say things like, "Why do you hang out with them?</seg>
<seg id="53">They're such losers "about your best friends, or," They want us to break up.</seg>
<seg id="54">They're totally against us "about your family.</seg>
<seg id="55">Isolation is about sowing seeds of doubt about everyone from your prerelationship life.</seg>
<seg id="56">Healthy love includes independence, two people who love spending time together but who stay connected to the people and activities they cared about before.</seg>
<seg id="57">While at first you might spend every waking minute together, over time maintaining independence is key.</seg>
<seg id="58">You do this by making plans with friends and sticking to them and encouraging your partner to do the same.</seg>
<seg id="59">A third marker of unhealthy love is extreme jealousy.</seg>
<seg id="60">Blue 2: What are you so happy about?</seg>
<seg id="61">Blue 1: She just started following me on Instagram!</seg>
<seg id="62">Blue 2: What are you so nervous about?</seg>
<seg id="63">Blue 1: She, she just started following me, like, everywhere.</seg>
<seg id="64">(# thatsnotlove) KH: As the honeymoon period begins to fade, extreme jealousy can creep in.</seg>
<seg id="65">Your partner might become more demanding, needing to know where you are and who you're with all the time, or they might start following you everywhere, online and off.</seg>
<seg id="66">Extreme jealousy also brings with it possessiveness and mistrust, frequent accusations of flirting with other people or cheating, and refusal to listen to you when you tell them they have nothing to worry about and that you only love them.</seg>
<seg id="67">Jealousy is a part of any human relationship, but extreme jealousy is different.</seg>
<seg id="68">There's a threatening, desperate and angry edge to it.</seg>
<seg id="69">Love shouldn't feel like this.</seg>
<seg id="70">A fourth marker is belittling.</seg>
<seg id="71">Blue: Wanna hang out? Orange: I gotta study.</seg>
<seg id="72">Blue: You'll get an A anyway, A for amazing. (# thatslove)</seg>
<seg id="73">Blue: Wanna hang out?</seg>
<seg id="74">Orange: I gotta study.</seg>
<seg id="75">Blue: You'll get an F anyway, F for, F for... stupid. (# thatsnotlove)</seg>
<seg id="76">KH: Yeah, hmm.</seg>
<seg id="77">In unhealthy love, words are used as weapons.</seg>
<seg id="78">Conversations that used to be fun and lighthearted turn mean and embarrassing.</seg>
<seg id="79">Maybe your partner makes fun of you in a way that hurts, or maybe they tell stories and jokes for laughs at your expense.</seg>
<seg id="80">When you try to explain that your feelings have been hurt, they shut you down and accuse you of overreacting. "Why are you so sensitive?</seg>
<seg id="81">What's your problem.</seg>
<seg id="82">Give me a break. "You are silenced by these words.</seg>
<seg id="83">It seems pretty obvious, but your partner should have your back.</seg>
<seg id="84">Their words should build you up, not break you down.</seg>
<seg id="85">They should keep your secrets and be loyal.</seg>
<seg id="86">They should make you feel more confident, not less.</seg>
<seg id="87">Finally, a fifth marker: volatility.</seg>
<seg id="88">Orange 1: I'd be sad if we broke up.</seg>
<seg id="89">Orange 2: I'd be sad too. (# thatslove)</seg>
<seg id="90">Orange 1: I'd so depressed if we ever broke up.</seg>
<seg id="91">KH: Frequent breakups and makeups, high highs and low lows: as tension rises, so does volatility.</seg>
<seg id="92">Tearful, frustrated fights followed by emotional makeups, hateful and hurtful comments like, "You're worthless, I'm not even sure why I'm with you!" followed quickly by apologies and promises it will never happen again.</seg>
<seg id="93">By this point, you've been so conditioned to this relationship roller coaster that you may not realize how unhealthy and maybe even dangerous your relationship has become.</seg>
<seg id="94">It can be really hard to see when unhealthy love turns towards abuse, but it's fair to say that the more of these markers your relationship might have, the more unhealthy and maybe dangerous your relationship could be.</seg>
<seg id="95">And if your instinct is to break up and leave, which is advice so many of us give our friends when they're in unhealthy relationships, that's not always the best advice.</seg>
<seg id="96">Time of breakup can be a real trigger for violence.</seg>
<seg id="97">If you fear you might be headed towards abuse or in abuse, you need to consult with experts to get the advice on how to leave safely.</seg>
<seg id="98">But it's not just about romantic relationships and it's not just about violence.</seg>
<seg id="99">Understanding the signs of unhealthy love can help you audit and understand nearly every relationship in your life.</seg>
<seg id="100">For the first time, you might understand why you're disappointed in a friendship or why every interaction with a certain family member leaves you discouraged and anxious.</seg>
<seg id="101">You might even begin to see how your own intensity and jealousy is causing problems with colleagues at work.</seg>
<seg id="102">Understanding is the first step to improving, and while you can't make every unhealthy relationship healthy -- some you're going to have to leave behind -- you can do your part every day to do relationships better.</seg>
<seg id="103">And here's the exciting news: it's actually not rocket science.</seg>
<seg id="104">Open communication, mutual respect, kindness, patience -- we can practice these things every day.</seg>
<seg id="105">And while practice will definitely make you better, I have to promise you it's also not going to make you perfect.</seg>
<seg id="106">I do this for a living and every day I think and talk about healthy relationships, and still I do unhealthy things.</seg>
<seg id="107">Just the other day as I was trying to shuttle my four kids out the door amidst quarreling, squabbling and complaints about breakfast, I completely lost it.</seg>
<seg id="108">With an intentionally angry edge, I screamed, "Everybody just shut up and do what I say!</seg>
<seg id="109">You are the worst!</seg>
<seg id="110">I am going to take away screen time and dessert and anything else you could possibly ever enjoy in life! "</seg>
<seg id="111">Anybody been there?</seg>
<seg id="112">Volatility, belittling. My oldest son turned around and looked at me, and said, "Mom, that's not love."</seg>
<seg id="113">For a minute, I really wanted to kill him for calling me out. Trust me. But then I gathered myself and I thought, you know what, I'm actually proud.</seg>
<seg id="114">I'm proud that he has a language to make me pause.</seg>
<seg id="115">I want all of my kids to understand what the bar should be for how they're treated and to have a language and a voice to use when that bar is not met versus just accepting it.</seg>
<seg id="116">For too long, we've treated relationships as a soft topic, when relationship skills are one of the most important and hard to build things in life.</seg>
<seg id="117">Not only can understanding unhealthy signs help you avoid the rabbit hole that leads to unhealthy love, but understanding and practicing the art of being healthy can improve nearly every aspect of your life.</seg>
<seg id="118">I'm completely convinced that while love is an instinct and an emotion, the ability to love better is a skill we can all build and improve on over time.</seg>
<seg id="119">Thank you.</seg>
</doc>
<doc docid="41917" genre="lectures">
<talkid>41917</talkid>
<seg id="1">Alright, so I want you to imagine that you get a text from a friend, and it reads... "You will NOT believe what just happened.</seg>
<seg id="2">I'm SO MAD right now! "So you do the dutiful thing as a friend, and you ask for details.</seg>
<seg id="3">And they tell you a story about what happened to them at the gym or at work or on their date last night.</seg>
<seg id="4">And you listen and you try to understand why they're so mad.</seg>
<seg id="5">Maybe even secretly judge whether or not they should be so mad.</seg>
<seg id="6">And maybe you even offer some suggestions.</seg>
<seg id="7">Now, in that moment, you are doing essentially what I get to do every day, because I'm an anger researcher, and as an anger researcher, I spend a good part of my professional life -- who am I kidding, also my personal life -- studying why people get mad.</seg>
<seg id="8">I study the types of thoughts they have when they get mad, and I even study what they do when they get mad, whether it's getting into fights or breaking things, or even yelling at people in all caps on the internet.</seg>
<seg id="9">And as you can imagine, when people hear I'm an anger researcher, they want to talk to me about their anger, they want to share with me their anger stories.</seg>
<seg id="10">And it's not because they need a therapist, though that does sometimes happen, it's really because anger is universal.</seg>
<seg id="11">It's something we all feel and it's something they can relate to.</seg>
<seg id="12">We've been feeling it since the first few months of life, when we didn't get what we wanted in our cries of protests, things like, "What do you mean you won't pick up the rattle, Dad, I want it!"</seg>
<seg id="13">We feel it throughout our teenage years, as my mom can certainly attest to with me. Sorry, Mom. We feel it to the very end.</seg>
<seg id="14">In fact, anger has been with us at some of the worst moments of our lives.</seg>
<seg id="15">It's a natural and expected part of our grief.</seg>
<seg id="16">But it's also been with us in some of the best moments of our lives, with those special occasions like weddings and vacations often marred by these everyday frustrations -- bad weather, travel delays -- that feel horrible in the moment, but then are ultimately forgotten when things go OK.</seg>
<seg id="17">I have a lot of conversations with people about their anger and it's through those conversations that I've learned that many people, and I bet many people in this room right now, you see anger as a problem.</seg>
<seg id="18">You see the way it interferes in your life, the way it damages relationships, maybe even the ways it's scary.</seg>
<seg id="19">And while I get all of that, I see anger a little differently, and today, I want to tell you something really important about your anger, and it's this: anger is a powerful and healthy force in your life.</seg>
<seg id="20">It's good that you feel it.</seg>
<seg id="21">You need to feel it.</seg>
<seg id="22">But to understand all that, we actually have to back up and talk about why we get mad in the first place.</seg>
<seg id="23">A lot of this goes back to the work of an anger researcher named Dr. Jerry Deffenbacher, who wrote about this back in 1996 in a book chapter on how to deal with problematic anger.</seg>
<seg id="24">Now, for most of us, and I bet most of you, it feels as simple as this: I get mad when I'm provoked.</seg>
<seg id="25">They say things like, "It makes me so mad when people drive this slow," or, "I got mad because she left the milk out again." Or my favorite, "I don't have an anger problem -- people just need to stop messing with me."</seg>
<seg id="26">Now, in the spirit of better understanding those types of provocations, I ask a lot of people, including my friends and colleagues and even family, "What are the things that really get to you?</seg>
<seg id="27">What makes you mad? "By the way, now is a good time to point out one of the advantages of being an anger researcher is that I've spent more than a decade generating a comprehensive list of all the things that really irritate my colleagues.</seg>
<seg id="28">Just in case I need it.</seg>
<seg id="29">But their answers are fascinating, because they say things like, "when my sports team loses," "people who chew too loudly." That is surprisingly common, by the way. "People who walk too slowly," that one's mine.</seg>
<seg id="30">And of course, "roundabouts." Roundabouts --</seg>
<seg id="31">I can tell you honestly, there is no rage like roundabout rage.</seg>
<seg id="32">Sometimes their answers aren't minor at all.</seg>
<seg id="33">Sometimes they talk about racism and sexism and bullying and environmental destruction -- big, global problems we all face.</seg>
<seg id="34">But sometimes, their answers are very specific, maybe even oddly specific. "That wet line you get across your shirt when you accidentally lean against the counter of a public bathroom."</seg>
<seg id="35">Super gross, right?</seg>
<seg id="36">Or "Flash drives: there's only two ways to plug them in, so why does it always take me three tries?"</seg>
<seg id="37">Now whether it's minor or major, whether it's general or specific, we can look at these examples and we can tease out some common themes.</seg>
<seg id="38">We get angry in situations that are unpleasant, that feel unfair, where our goals are blocked, that could have been avoided, and that leave us feeling powerless.</seg>
<seg id="39">This is a recipe for anger.</seg>
<seg id="40">But you can also tell that anger is probably not the only thing we're feeling in these situations.</seg>
<seg id="41">Anger doesn't happen in a vacuum.</seg>
<seg id="42">We can feel angry at the same time that we're scared or sad, or feeling a host of other emotions.</seg>
<seg id="43">But here's the thing: these provocations -- they aren't making us mad. At least not on their own, and we know that, because if they were, we'd all get angry over the same things, and we don't.</seg>
<seg id="44">The reasons I get angry are different than the reasons you get angry, so there's got to be something else going on.</seg>
<seg id="45">What is that something else? Well, we know what we're doing and feeling at the moment of that provocation matters.</seg>
<seg id="46">We call this the pre-anger state -- are you hungry, are you tired, are you anxious about something else, are you running late for something?</seg>
<seg id="47">When you're feeling those things, those provocations feel that much worse.</seg>
<seg id="48">But what matters most is not the provocation, it's not the pre-anger state, it's this: it's how we interpret that provocation, it's how we make sense of it in our lives.</seg>
<seg id="49">When something happens to us, we first decide, is this good or bad?</seg>
<seg id="50">Is it fair or unfair, is it blameworthy, is it punishable?</seg>
<seg id="51">That's primary appraisal, it's when you evaluate the event itself.</seg>
<seg id="52">We decide what it means in the context of our lives and once we've done that, we decide how bad it is.</seg>
<seg id="53">That's secondary appraisal.</seg>
<seg id="54">We say, "Is this the worst thing that's ever happened, or can I cope with this?</seg>
<seg id="55">Now, to illustrate that, I want you to imagine you are driving somewhere.</seg>
<seg id="56">And before I go any further, I should tell you, if I were an evil genius and I wanted to create a situation that was going to make you mad, that situation would look a lot like driving.</seg>
<seg id="57">It's true. You are, by definition, on your way somewhere, so everything that happens -- traffic, other drivers, road construction -- it feels like it's blocking your goals.</seg>
<seg id="58">There are all these written and unwritten rules of the road, and those rules are routinely violated right in front of you, usually without consequence.</seg>
<seg id="59">And who's violating those rules?</seg>
<seg id="60">Anonymous others, people you will never see again, making them a very easy target for your wrath.</seg>
<seg id="61">So you're driving somewhere, thus teed up to be angry, and the person in front of you is driving well below the speed limit.</seg>
<seg id="62">And it's frustrating because you can't really see why they're driving so slow.</seg>
<seg id="63">That's primary appraisal.</seg>
<seg id="64">You've looked at this and you've said it's bad and it's blameworthy.</seg>
<seg id="65">But maybe you also decide it's not that big a deal.</seg>
<seg id="66">You're not in a hurry, doesn't matter.</seg>
<seg id="67">That's secondary appraisal -- you don't get angry.</seg>
<seg id="68">But now imagine you're on your way to a job interview.</seg>
<seg id="69">What that person is doing, it hasn't changed, right?</seg>
<seg id="70">So primary appraisal doesn't change; still bad, still blameworthy.</seg>
<seg id="71">But your ability to cope with it sure does.</seg>
<seg id="72">Because all of a sudden, you're going to be late to that job interview.</seg>
<seg id="73">All of a sudden, you are not going to get your dream job, the one that was going to give you piles and piles of money.</seg>
<seg id="74">Somebody else is going to get your dream job and you're going to be broke.</seg>
<seg id="75">You're going to be destitute.</seg>
<seg id="76">Might as well stop now, turn around, move in with your parents.</seg>
<seg id="77">Why? "Because of this person in front of me. This is not a person, this is a monster."</seg>
<seg id="78">And this monster is here just to ruin your life.</seg>
<seg id="79">Now that thought process, it's called catastrophizing, the one where we make the worst of things.</seg>
<seg id="80">And it's one of the primary types of thoughts that we know is associated with chronic anger.</seg>
<seg id="81">But there's a couple of others. Misattributing causation. Angry people tend to put blame where it doesn't belong.</seg>
<seg id="82">Not just on people, but actually inanimate objects as well.</seg>
<seg id="83">And if you think that sound ridiculous, think about the last time you lost your car keys and you said, "Where did those car keys go?" Because you know they ran off on their own.</seg>
<seg id="84">They tend to overgeneralize, they use words like "always," "never," "every," "this always happens to me," "I never get what I want" or "I hit every stoplight on the way here today." Demandingness: they put their own needs ahead of the needs of others: "I don't care why this person is driving so slow, they need to speed up or move over so I can get to this job interview." And finally, inflammatory labeling.</seg>
<seg id="85">They call people fools, idiots, monsters, or a whole bunch of things I've been told I'm not allowed to say during this TED Talk.</seg>
<seg id="86">So for a long time, psychologists have referred to these as cognitive distortions or even irrational beliefs.</seg>
<seg id="87">And yeah, sometimes they are irrational. Maybe even most of the time. But sometimes, these thoughts are totally rational.</seg>
<seg id="88">There is unfairness in the world.</seg>
<seg id="89">There are cruel, selfish people, and it's not only OK to be angry when we're treated poorly, it's right to be angry when we're treated poorly.</seg>
<seg id="90">If there's one thing I want you to remember from my talk today, it's this: your anger exists in you as an emotion because it offered your ancestors, both human and nonhuman, with an evolutionary advantage.</seg>
<seg id="91">Just as your fear alerts you to danger, your anger alerts you to injustice.</seg>
<seg id="92">It's one of the ways your brain communicates to you that you have had enough.</seg>
<seg id="93">What's more, it energizes you to confront that injustice.</seg>
<seg id="94">Think for a second about the last time you got mad. Your heart rate increased.</seg>
<seg id="95">Your breathing increased, you started to sweat.</seg>
<seg id="96">That's your sympathetic nervous system, otherwise known as your fight-or-flight system, kicking in to offer you the energy you need to respond.</seg>
<seg id="97">And that's just the stuff you noticed.</seg>
<seg id="98">At the same time, your digestive system slowed down so you could conserve energy.</seg>
<seg id="99">That's why your mouth went dry.</seg>
<seg id="100">And your blood vessels dilated to get blood to your extremities.</seg>
<seg id="101">That's why your face went red.</seg>
<seg id="102">It's all part of this complex pattern of physiological experiences that exist today because they helped your ancestors deal with cruel and unforgiving forces of nature.</seg>
<seg id="103">And the problem is that the thing your ancestors did to deal with their anger, to physically fight, they are no longer reasonable or appropriate.</seg>
<seg id="104">You can't and you shouldn't swing a club every time you're provoked.</seg>
<seg id="105">But here's the good news.</seg>
<seg id="106">You are capable of something your nonhuman ancestors weren't capable of.</seg>
<seg id="107">And that is the capacity to regulate your emotions.</seg>
<seg id="108">Even when you want to lash out, you can stop yourself and you can channel that anger into something more productive.</seg>
<seg id="109">So often when we talk about anger, we talk about how to keep from getting angry.</seg>
<seg id="110">We tell people to calm down or relax. We even tell people to let it go.</seg>
<seg id="111">And all of that assumes that anger is bad and that it's wrong to feel it.</seg>
<seg id="112">But instead, I like to think of anger as a motivator.</seg>
<seg id="113">The same way your thirst motivates you to get a drink of water, the same way your hunger motivates you to get a bite to eat, your anger can motivate you to respond to injustice.</seg>
<seg id="114">Because we don't have to think too hard to find things we should be mad about.</seg>
<seg id="115">When we go back to the beginning, yeah, some of those things, they're silly and not worth getting angry over.</seg>
<seg id="116">But racism, sexism, bullying, environmental destruction, those things are real, those things are terrible, and the only way to fix them is to get mad first and then channel that anger into fighting back.</seg>
<seg id="117">And you don't have to fight back with aggression or hostility or violence.</seg>
<seg id="118">There are infinite ways that you can express your anger.</seg>
<seg id="119">You can protest, you can write letters to the editor, you can donate to and volunteer for causes, you can create art, you can create literature, you can create poetry and music, you can create a community that cares for one another and does not allow those atrocities to happen.</seg>
<seg id="120">So the next time you feel yourself getting angry, instead of trying to turn it off, I hope you'll listen to what that anger is telling you.</seg>
<seg id="121">And then I hope you'll channel it into something positive and productive.</seg>
<seg id="122">Thank you.</seg>
</doc>
<doc docid="44339" genre="lectures">
<talkid>44339</talkid>
<seg id="1">So, asking for help is basically the worst, right?</seg>
<seg id="2">I've actually never seen it on one of those top ten lists of things people fear, like public speaking and death, but I'm pretty sure it actually belongs there.</seg>
<seg id="3">Even though in many ways it's foolish for us to be afraid to admit we need help, whether it's from a loved one or a friend or from a coworker or even from a stranger, somehow it always feel just a little bit uncomfortable and embarrassing to actually ask for help, which is, of course, why most of us try to avoid asking for help whenever humanly possible.</seg>
<seg id="4">My father was one of those legions of fathers who, I swear, would rather drive through an alligator-infested swamp than actually ask someone for help getting back to the road.</seg>
<seg id="5">When I was a kid, we took a family vacation.</seg>
<seg id="6">We drove from our home in South Jersey to Colonial Williamsburg.</seg>
<seg id="7">And I remember we got really badly lost.</seg>
<seg id="8">My mother and I pleaded with him to please just pull over and ask someone for directions back to the highway, and he absolutely refused, and, in fact, assured us that we were not lost, he had just always wanted to know what was over here.</seg>
<seg id="9">So if we're going to ask for help -- and we have to, we all do, practically every day -- the only way we're going to even begin to get comfortable with it is to get good at it, to actually increase the chances that when you ask for help from someone, they're actually going to say yes.</seg>
<seg id="10">And not only that, but they're going to find it actually satisfying and rewarding to help you, because that way, they'll be motivated to continue to help you into the future.</seg>
<seg id="11">So research that I and some of my colleagues have done has shed a lot of light on why it is that sometimes people say yes to our requests for help and why sometimes they say no.</seg>
<seg id="12">Now let me just start by saying right now: if you need help, you are going to have to ask for it. Out loud. OK? We all, to some extent, suffer from something that psychologists call "the illusion of transparency" -- basically, the mistaken belief that our thoughts and our feelings and our needs are really obvious to other people.</seg>
<seg id="13">This is not true, but we believe it.</seg>
<seg id="14">And so, we just mostly stand around waiting for someone to notice our needs and then spontaneously offer to help us with it.</seg>
<seg id="15">This is a really, really bad assumption.</seg>
<seg id="16">In fact, not only is it very difficult to tell what your needs are, but even the people close to you often struggle to understand how they can support you.</seg>
<seg id="17">My partner has actually had to adopt a habit of asking me multiple times a day, "Are you OK?</seg>
<seg id="18">Do you need anything? "because I am so, so bad at signaling when I need someone's help.</seg>
<seg id="19">Now, he is more patient than I deserve and much more proactive, much more, about helping than any of us have any right to expect other people to be.</seg>
<seg id="20">So if you need help, you're going to have to ask for it.</seg>
<seg id="21">And by the way, even when someone can tell that you need help, how do they know that you want it?</seg>
<seg id="22">Did you ever try to give unsolicited help to someone who, it turns out, did not actually want your help in the first place?</seg>
<seg id="23">They get nasty real quick, don't they?</seg>
<seg id="24">The other day -- true story -- my teenage daughter was getting dressed for school, and I decided to give her some unsolicited help about that.</seg>
<seg id="25">I happen to think she looks amazing in brighter colors.</seg>
<seg id="26">She tends to prefer sort of darker, more neutral tones.</seg>
<seg id="27">And so I said, very helpfully, that I thought maybe she could go back upstairs and try to find something a little less somber.</seg>
<seg id="28">So, if looks could kill, I would not be standing here right now.</seg>
<seg id="29">We really can't blame other people for not just spontaneously offering to help us when we don't actually know that that's what is wanted.</seg>
<seg id="30">In fact, actually, research shows that 90 percent of the help that coworkers give one another in the workplace is in response to explicit requests for help.</seg>
<seg id="31">So you're going to have to say the words "I need your help." Right? There's no getting around it.</seg>
<seg id="32">Now, to be good at it, to make sure that people actually do help you when you ask for it, there are a few other things that are very helpful to keep in mind.</seg>
<seg id="33">First thing: when you ask for help, be very, very specific about the help you want and why.</seg>
<seg id="34">Vague, sort of indirect requests for help actually aren't very helpful to the helper, right?</seg>
<seg id="35">We don't actually know what it is you want from us, and, just as important, we don't know whether or not we can be successful in giving you the help.</seg>
<seg id="36">Nobody wants to give bad help.</seg>
<seg id="37">Like me, you probably get some of these requests from perfectly pleasant strangers on LinkedIn who want to do things like "get together over coffee and connect" or "pick your brain." I ignore these requests literally every time.</seg>
<seg id="38">And it's not that I'm not a nice person.</seg>
<seg id="39">It's just that when I don't know what it is you want from me, like the kind of help you're hoping that can I provide, I'm not interested. Nobody is. I'd have been much more interested if they had just come out and said whatever it is was they were hoping to get from me, because I'm pretty sure they had something specific in mind.</seg>
<seg id="40">So go ahead and say, "I'm hoping to discuss opportunities to work in your company," or, "I'd like to propose a joint research project in an area I know you're interested in," or, "I'd like your advice on getting into medical school." Technically, I can't help you with that last one because I'm not that kind of doctor, but I could point you in the direction of someone who could.</seg>
<seg id="41">OK, second tip. This is really important: please avoid disclaimers, apologies and bribes.</seg>
<seg id="42">Really, really important.</seg>
<seg id="43">Do any of these sound familiar?</seg>
<seg id="44">(Clears throat)</seg>
<seg id="45">'I'm so, so sorry that I have to ask you for this. "" I really hate bothering you with this. "" If I had any way of doing this without your help, I would. "</seg>
<seg id="46">Sometimes it feels like people are so eager to prove that they're not weak and greedy when they ask your for help, they're completely missing out on how uncomfortable they're making you feel.</seg>
<seg id="47">And by the way -- how am I supposed to find it satisfying to help you if you really hated having to ask me for help?</seg>
<seg id="48">And while it is perfectly, perfectly acceptable to pay strangers to do things for you, you need to be very, very careful when it comes to incentivizing your friends and coworkers.</seg>
<seg id="49">When you have a relationship with someone, helping one another is actually a natural part of that relationship.</seg>
<seg id="50">It's how we show one another that we care.</seg>
<seg id="51">If you introduce incentives or payments into that, what can happen is, it starts to feel like it isn't a relationship, it's a transaction.</seg>
<seg id="52">And that actually is experienced as distancing, which, ironically, makes people less likely to help you.</seg>
<seg id="53">So a spontaneous gift after someone gives you some help to show your appreciation and gratitude -- perfectly fine.</seg>
<seg id="54">An offer to pay your best friend to help you move into your new apartment is not.</seg>
<seg id="55">OK, third rule, and I really mean this one: please do not ask for help over email or text.</seg>
<seg id="56">Really, seriously, please don't.</seg>
<seg id="57">Email and text are impersonal.</seg>
<seg id="58">I realize sometimes there's no alternative, but mostly what happens is, we like to ask for help over email and text because it feels less awkward for us to do so.</seg>
<seg id="59">You know what else feels less awkward over email and text? Telling you no. And it turns out, there's research to support this.</seg>
<seg id="60">In-person requests for help are 30 times more likely to get a yes than a request made by email.</seg>
<seg id="61">So when something is really important and you really need someone's help, make face time to make the request, or use your phone as a phone --</seg>
<seg id="62">to ask for the help that you need.</seg>
<seg id="63">OK. Last one, and this is actually a really, really important one and probably the one that is most overlooked when it comes to asking for help: when you ask someone for their help and they say yes, follow up with them afterward.</seg>
<seg id="64">There's a common misconception that what's rewarding about helping is the act of helping itself.</seg>
<seg id="65">This is not true.</seg>
<seg id="66">What is rewarding about helping is knowing that your help landed, that it had impact, that you were effective.</seg>
<seg id="67">If I have no idea how my help affected you, how am I supposed to feel about it?</seg>
<seg id="68">This happened; I was a university professor for many years, I wrote lots and lots of letters of recommendation for people to get jobs or to go into graduate school.</seg>
<seg id="69">And probably about 95 percent of them, I have no idea what happened.</seg>
<seg id="70">Now, how do I feel about the time and effort I took to do that, when I really have no idea if I helped you, if it actually helped you get the thing that you wanted?</seg>
<seg id="71">In fact, this idea of feeling effective is part of why certain kinds of donor appeals are so, so persuasive -- because they allow you to really vividly imagine the effect that your help is going to have.</seg>
<seg id="72">Take something like DonorsChoose. You go online, you can choose the individual teacher by name whose classroom you're going to be able to help by literally buying the specific items they've requested, like microscopes or laptops or flexible seating.</seg>
<seg id="73">An appeal like that makes it so easy for me to imagine the good that my money will do, that I actually get an immediate sense of effectiveness the minute I commit to giving.</seg>
<seg id="74">But you know what else they do? They follow up. Donors actually get letters from the kids in the classroom. They get pictures. They get to know that they made a difference.</seg>
<seg id="75">And this is something we need to all be doing in our everyday lives, especially if we want people to continue to give us help over the long term.</seg>
<seg id="76">Take time to tell your colleague that the help that they gave you really helped you land that big sale, or helped you get that interview that you were really hoping to get.</seg>
<seg id="77">Take time to tell your partner that the support they gave you really made it possible for you to get through a tough time.</seg>
<seg id="78">Take time to tell your catsitter that you're super happy that for some reason, this time the cats didn't break anything while you were away, and so they must have done a really good job.</seg>
<seg id="79">The bottom line is: I know -- believe me, I know -- that it is not easy to ask for help.</seg>
<seg id="80">We are all a little bit afraid to do it.</seg>
<seg id="81">It makes us feel vulnerable.</seg>
<seg id="82">But the reality of modern work and modern life is that nobody does it alone.</seg>
<seg id="83">Nobody succeeds in a vacuum.</seg>
<seg id="84">More than ever, we actually do have to rely on other people, on their support and collaboration, in order to be successful.</seg>
<seg id="85">So when you need help, ask for it out loud.</seg>
<seg id="86">And when you do, do it in a way that increases your chances that you'll get a yes and makes the other person feel awesome for having helped you, because you both deserve it.</seg>
<seg id="87">Thank you.</seg>
</doc>
<doc docid="48103" genre="lectures">
<talkid>48103</talkid>
<seg id="1">For a really long time, I had two mysteries that were hanging over me.</seg>
<seg id="2">I didn't understand them and, to be honest, I was quite afraid to look into them.</seg>
<seg id="3">The first mystery was, I'm 40 years old, and all throughout my lifetime, year after year, serious depression and anxiety have risen, in the United States, in Britain, and across the Western world.</seg>
<seg id="4">And I wanted to understand why.</seg>
<seg id="5">Why is this happening to us?</seg>
<seg id="6">Why is it that with each year that passes, more and more of us are finding it harder to get through the day?</seg>
<seg id="7">And I wanted to understand this because of a more personal mystery.</seg>
<seg id="8">When I was a teenager, I remember going to my doctor and explaining that I had this feeling, like pain was leaking out of me.</seg>
<seg id="9">I couldn't control it, I didn't understand why it was happening, I felt quite ashamed of it.</seg>
<seg id="10">And my doctor told me a story that I now realize was well-intentioned, but quite oversimplified. Not totally wrong. My doctor said, "We know why people get like this.</seg>
<seg id="11">Some people just naturally get a chemical imbalance in their heads -- you're clearly one of them.</seg>
<seg id="12">All we need to do is give you some drugs, it will get your chemical balance back to normal. "</seg>
<seg id="13">So I started taking a drug called Paxil or Seroxat, it's the same thing with different names in different countries.</seg>
<seg id="14">And I felt much better, I got a real boost.</seg>
<seg id="15">But not very long afterwards, this feeling of pain started to come back.</seg>
<seg id="16">So I was given higher and higher doses until, for 13 years, I was taking the maximum possible dose that you're legally allowed to take.</seg>
<seg id="17">And for a lot of those 13 years, and pretty much all the time by the end, I was still in a lot of pain.</seg>
<seg id="18">And I started asking myself, "What's going on here?</seg>
<seg id="19">Because you're doing everything you're told to do by the story that's dominating the culture -- why do you still feel like this? "</seg>
<seg id="20">So to get to the bottom of these two mysteries, for a book that I've written I ended up going on a big journey all over the world, I traveled over 40,000 miles.</seg>
<seg id="21">I wanted to sit with the leading experts in the world about what causes depression and anxiety and crucially, what solves them, and people who have come through depression and anxiety and out the other side in all sorts of ways.</seg>
<seg id="22">And I learned a huge amount from the amazing people I got to know along the way.</seg>
<seg id="23">But I think at the heart of what I learned is, so far, we have scientific evidence for nine different causes of depression and anxiety.</seg>
<seg id="24">Two of them are indeed in our biology.</seg>
<seg id="25">Your genes can make you more sensitive to these problems, though they don't write your destiny.</seg>
<seg id="26">And there are real brain changes that can happen when you become depressed that can make it harder to get out.</seg>
<seg id="27">But most of the factors that have been proven to cause depression and anxiety are not in our biology.</seg>
<seg id="28">They are factors in the way we live.</seg>
<seg id="29">And once you understand them, it opens up a very different set of solutions that should be offered to people alongside the option of chemical antidepressants.</seg>
<seg id="30">For example, if you're lonely, you're more likely to become depressed.</seg>
<seg id="31">If, when you go to work, you don't have any control over your job, you've just got to do what you're told, you're more likely to become depressed.</seg>
<seg id="32">If you very rarely get out into the natural world, you're more likely to become depressed.</seg>
<seg id="33">And one thing unites a lot of the causes of depression and anxiety that I learned about.</seg>
<seg id="34">Not all of them, but a lot of them.</seg>
<seg id="35">Everyone here knows you've all got natural physical needs, right? Obviously. You need food, you need water, you need shelter, you need clean air.</seg>
<seg id="36">If I took those things away from you, you'd all be in real trouble, real fast.</seg>
<seg id="37">But at the same time, every human being has natural psychological needs.</seg>
<seg id="38">You need to feel you belong.</seg>
<seg id="39">You need to feel your life has meaning and purpose.</seg>
<seg id="40">You need to feel that people see you and value you.</seg>
<seg id="41">You need to feel you've got a future that makes sense.</seg>
<seg id="42">And this culture we built is good at lots of things.</seg>
<seg id="43">And many things are better than in the past -- I'm glad to be alive today.</seg>
<seg id="44">But we've been getting less and less good at meeting these deep, underlying psychological needs.</seg>
<seg id="45">And it's not the only thing that's going on, but I think it's the key reason why this crisis keeps rising and rising.</seg>
<seg id="46">And I found this really hard to absorb.</seg>
<seg id="47">I really wrestled with the idea of shifting from thinking of my depression as just a problem in my brain, to one with many causes, including many in the way we're living.</seg>
<seg id="48">And it only really began to fall into place for me when one day, I went to interview a South African psychiatrist named Dr. Derek Summerfield.</seg>
<seg id="49">He's a great guy.</seg>
<seg id="50">And Dr. Summerfield happened to be in Cambodia in 2001, when they first introduced chemical antidepressants for people in that country.</seg>
<seg id="51">And the local doctors, the Cambodians, had never heard of these drugs, so they were like, what are they? And he explained. And they said to him, "We don't need them, we've already got antidepressants." And he was like, "What do you mean?" He thought they were going to talk about some kind of herbal remedy, like St. John's Wort, ginkgo biloba, something like that.</seg>
<seg id="52">Instead, they told him a story.</seg>
<seg id="53">There was a farmer in their community who worked in the rice fields.</seg>
<seg id="54">And one day, he stood on a land mine left over from the war with the United States, and he got his leg blown off.</seg>
<seg id="55">So they him an artificial leg, and after a while, he went back to work in the rice fields.</seg>
<seg id="56">But apparently, it's super painful to work under water when you've got an artificial limb, and I'm guessing it was pretty traumatic to go back and work in the field where he got blown up.</seg>
<seg id="57">The guy started to cry all day, he refused to get out of bed, he developed all the symptoms of classic depression.</seg>
<seg id="58">The Cambodian doctor said, "This is when we gave him an antidepressant." And Dr. Summerfield said, "What was it?" They explained that they went and sat with him.</seg>
<seg id="59">They listened to him.</seg>
<seg id="60">They realized that his pain made sense -- it was hard for him to see it in the throes of his depression, but actually, it had perfectly understandable causes in his life.</seg>
<seg id="61">One of the doctors, talking to the people in the community, figured, "You know, if we bought this guy a cow, he could become a dairy farmer, he wouldn't be in this position that was screwing him up so much, he wouldn't have to go and work in the rice fields." So they bought him a cow.</seg>
<seg id="62">Within a couple of weeks, his crying stopped, within a month, his depression was gone.</seg>
<seg id="63">They said to doctor Summerfield, "So you see, doctor, that cow, that was an antidepressant, that's what you mean, right?"</seg>
<seg id="64">If you'd been raised to think about depression the way I was, and most of the people here were, that sounds like a bad joke, right? "I went to my doctor for an antidepressant, she gave me a cow." But what those Cambodian doctors knew intuitively, based on this individual, unscientific anecdote, is what the leading medical body in the world, the World Health Organization, has been trying to tell us for years, based on the best scientific evidence.</seg>
<seg id="65">If you're depressed, if you're anxious, you're not weak, you're not crazy, you're not, in the main, a machine with broken parts.</seg>
<seg id="66">You're a human being with unmet needs.</seg>
<seg id="67">And it's just as important to think here about what those Cambodian doctors and the World Health Organization are not saying.</seg>
<seg id="68">They did not say to this farmer, "Hey, buddy, you need to pull yourself together.</seg>
<seg id="69">It's your job to figure out and fix this problem on your own. "On the contrary, what they said is," We're here as a group to pull together with you, so together, we can figure out and fix this problem. "This is what every depressed person needs, and it's what every depressed person deserves.</seg>
<seg id="70">This is why one of the leading doctors at the United Nations, in their official statement for World Health Day, couple of years back in 2017, said we need to talk less about chemical imbalances and more about the imbalances in the way we live.</seg>
<seg id="71">Drugs give real relief to some people -- they gave relief to me for a while -- but precisely because this problem goes deeper than their biology, the solutions need to go much deeper, too.</seg>
<seg id="72">But when I first learned that, I remember thinking, "OK, I could see all the scientific evidence, I read a huge number of studies, I interviewed a huge number of the experts who were explaining this," but I kept thinking, "How can we possibly do that?" The things that are making us depressed are in most cases more complex than what was going on with this Cambodian farmer.</seg>
<seg id="73">Where do we even begin with that insight?</seg>
<seg id="74">But then, in the long journey for my book, all over the world, I kept meeting people who were doing exactly that, from Sydney, to San Francisco, to São Paulo.</seg>
<seg id="75">I kept meeting people who were understanding the deeper causes of depression and anxiety and, as groups, fixing them.</seg>
<seg id="76">Obviously, I can't tell you about all the amazing people I got to know and wrote about, or all of the nine causes of depression and anxiety that I learned about, because they won't let me give a 10-hour TED Talk -- you can complain about that to them.</seg>
<seg id="77">But I want to focus on two of the causes and two of the solutions that emerge from them, if that's alright.</seg>
<seg id="78">Here's the first.</seg>
<seg id="79">We are the loneliest society in human history.</seg>
<seg id="80">There was a recent study that asked Americans, "Do you feel like you're no longer close to anyone?" And 39 percent of people said that described them. "No longer close to anyone." In the international measurements of loneliness, Britain and the rest of Europe are just behind the US, in case anyone here is feeling smug.</seg>
<seg id="81">I spent a lot of time discussing this with the leading expert in the world on loneliness, an incredible man named professor John Cacioppo, who was at Chicago, and I thought a lot about one question his work poses to us.</seg>
<seg id="82">Professor Cacioppo asked, "Why do we exist?</seg>
<seg id="83">Why are we here, why are we alive? "One key reason is that our ancestors on the savannas of Africa were really good at one thing.</seg>
<seg id="84">They weren't bigger than the animals they took down a lot of the time, they weren't faster than the animals they took down a lot of the time, but they were much better at banding together into groups and cooperating.</seg>
<seg id="85">This was our superpower as a species -- we band together, just like bees evolved to live in a hive, humans evolved to live in a tribe.</seg>
<seg id="86">And we are the first humans ever to disband our tribes.</seg>
<seg id="87">And it is making us feel awful.</seg>
<seg id="88">But it doesn't have to be this way.</seg>
<seg id="89">One of the heroes in my book, and in fact, in my life, is a doctor named Sam Everington.</seg>
<seg id="90">He's a general practitioner in a poor part of East London, where I lived for many years.</seg>
<seg id="91">And Sam was really uncomfortable, because he had loads of patients coming to him with terrible depression and anxiety.</seg>
<seg id="92">And like me, he's not opposed to chemical antidepressants, he thinks they give some relief to some people.</seg>
<seg id="93">But he could see two things.</seg>
<seg id="94">Firstly, his patients were depressed and anxious a lot of the time for totally understandable reasons, like loneliness.</seg>
<seg id="95">And secondly, although the drugs were giving some relief to some people, for many people, they didn't solve the problem. The underlying problem. One day, Sam decided to pioneer a different approach.</seg>
<seg id="96">A woman came to his center, his medical center, called Lisa Cunningham.</seg>
<seg id="97">I got to know Lisa later.</seg>
<seg id="98">And Lisa had been shut away in her home with crippling depression and anxiety for seven years.</seg>
<seg id="99">And when she came to Sam's center, she was told, "Don't worry, we'll carry on giving you these drugs, but we're also going to prescribe something else.</seg>
<seg id="100">We're going to prescribe for you to come here to this center twice a week to meet with a group of other depressed and anxious people, not to talk about how miserable you are, but to figure out something meaningful you can all do together so you won't be lonely and you won't feel like life is pointless. "The first time this group met, Lisa literally started vomiting with anxiety, it was so overwhelming for her.</seg>
<seg id="101">But people rubbed her back, the group started talking, they were like, "What could we do?" These are inner-city, East London people like me, they didn't know anything about gardening.</seg>
<seg id="102">They were like, "Why don't we learn gardening?" There was an area behind the doctors' offices that was just scrubland. "Why don't we make this into a garden?" They started to take books out of the library, started to watch YouTube clips.</seg>
<seg id="103">They started to get their fingers in the soil.</seg>
<seg id="104">They started to learn the rhythms of the seasons.</seg>
<seg id="105">There's a lot of evidence that exposure to the natural world is a really powerful antidepressant.</seg>
<seg id="106">But they started to do something even more important.</seg>
<seg id="107">They started to form a tribe.</seg>
<seg id="108">They started to form a group.</seg>
<seg id="109">They started to care about each other.</seg>
<seg id="110">If one of them didn't show up, the others would go looking for them -- "Are you OK?" Help them figure out what was troubling them that day.</seg>
<seg id="111">The way Lisa put it to me, "As the garden began to bloom, we began to bloom." This approach is called social prescribing, it's spreading all over Europe.</seg>
<seg id="112">And there's a small, but growing body of evidence suggesting it can produce real and meaningful falls in depression and anxiety.</seg>
<seg id="113">And one day, I remember standing in the garden that Lisa and her once-depressed friends had built -- it's a really beautiful garden -- and having this thought, it's very much inspired by a guy called professor Hugh Mackay in Australia.</seg>
<seg id="114">I was thinking, so often when people feel down in this culture, what we say to them -- I'm sure everyone here said it, I have -- we say, "You just need to be you, be yourself." And I've realized, actually, what we should say to people is, "Don't be you.</seg>
<seg id="115">Don't be yourself. Be us, be we. Be part of a group. "</seg>
<seg id="116">The solution to these problems does not lie in drawing more and more on your resources as an isolated individual -- that's partly what got us in this crisis.</seg>
<seg id="117">It lies on reconnecting with something bigger than you.</seg>
<seg id="118">And that really connects to one of the other causes of depression and anxiety that I wanted to talk to you about.</seg>
<seg id="119">So everyone knows junk food has taken over our diets and made us physically sick.</seg>
<seg id="120">I don't say that with any sense of superiority, I literally came to give this talk from McDonald's.</seg>
<seg id="121">I saw all of you eating that healthy TED breakfast, I was like no way.</seg>
<seg id="122">But just like junk food has taken over our diets and made us physically sick, a kind of junk values have taken over our minds and made us mentally sick.</seg>
<seg id="123">For thousands of years, philosophers have said, if you think life is about money, and status and showing off, you're going to feel like crap.</seg>
<seg id="124">That's not an exact quote from Schopenhauer, but that is the gist of what he said.</seg>
<seg id="125">But weirdly, hardy anyone had scientifically investigated this, until a truly extraordinary person I got to know, named professor Tim Kasser, who's at Knox College in Illinois, and he's been researching this for about 30 years now.</seg>
<seg id="126">And his research suggests several really important things.</seg>
<seg id="127">Firstly, the more you believe you can buy and display your way out of sadness, and into a good life, the more likely you are to become depressed and anxious.</seg>
<seg id="128">And secondly, as a society, we have become much more driven by these beliefs.</seg>
<seg id="129">All throughout my lifetime, under the weight of advertising and Instagram and everything like them.</seg>
<seg id="130">And as I thought about this, I realized it's like we've all been fed since birth, a kind of KFC for the soul.</seg>
<seg id="131">We've been trained to look for happiness in all the wrong places, and just like junk food doesn't meet your nutritional needs and actually makes you feel terrible, junk values don't meet your psychological needs, and they take you away from a good life.</seg>
<seg id="132">But when I first spent time with professor Kasser and I was learning all this, I felt a really weird mixture of emotions.</seg>
<seg id="133">Because on the one hand, I found this really challenging.</seg>
<seg id="134">I could see how often in my own life, when I felt down, I tried to remedy it with some kind of show-offy, grand external solution.</seg>
<seg id="135">And I could see why that did not work well for me.</seg>
<seg id="136">I also thought, isn't this kind of obvious?</seg>
<seg id="137">Isn't this almost like banal, right?</seg>
<seg id="138">If I said to everyone here, none of you are going to lie on your deathbed and think about all the shoes you bought and all the retweets you got, you're going to think about moments of love, meaning and connection in your life.</seg>
<seg id="139">I think that seems almost like a cliché.</seg>
<seg id="140">But I kept talking to professor Kasser and saying, "Why am I feeling this strange doubleness?" And he said, "At some level, we all know these things.</seg>
<seg id="141">But in this culture, we don't live by them. "We know them so well they've become clichés, but we don't live by them.</seg>
<seg id="142">I kept asking why, why would we know something so profound, but not live by it?</seg>
<seg id="143">And after a while, professor Kasser said to me, "Because we live in a machine that is designed to get us to neglect what is important about life." I had to really think about that. "Because we live in a machine that is designed to get us to neglect what is important about life."</seg>
<seg id="144">And professor Kasser wanted to figure out if we can disrupt that machine.</seg>
<seg id="145">He's done loads of research into this; I'll tell you about one example, and I really urge everyone here to try this with their friends and family.</seg>
<seg id="146">With a guy called Nathan Dungan, he got a group of teenagers and adults to come together for a series of sessions over a period of time, to meet up.</seg>
<seg id="147">And part of the point of the group was to get people to think about a moment in their life they had actually found meaning and purpose.</seg>
<seg id="148">For different people, it was different things.</seg>
<seg id="149">For some people, it was playing music, writing, helping someone -- I'm sure everyone here can picture something, right?</seg>
<seg id="150">And part of the point of the group was to get people to ask, "OK, how could you dedicate more of your life to pursuing these moments of meaning and purpose, and less to, I don't know, buying crap you don't need, putting it on social media and trying to get people to go, 'OMG, so jealous!'"</seg>
<seg id="151">And what they found was, just having these meetings, it was like a kind of Alcoholics Anonymous for consumerism, right?</seg>
<seg id="152">Getting people to have these meetings, articulate these values, determine to act on them and check in with each other, led to a marked shift in people's values.</seg>
<seg id="153">It took them away from this hurricane of depression-generating messages training us to seek happiness in the wrong places, and towards more meaningful and nourishing values that lift us out of depression.</seg>
<seg id="154">But with all the solutions that I saw and have written about, and many I can't talk about here, I kept thinking, you know: Why did it take me so long to see these insights?</seg>
<seg id="155">Because when you explain them to people -- some of them are more complicated, but not all -- when you explain this to people, it's not like rocket science, right?</seg>
<seg id="156">At some level, we already know these things.</seg>
<seg id="157">Why do we find it so hard to understand?</seg>
<seg id="158">I think there's many reasons.</seg>
<seg id="159">But I think one reason is that we have to change our understanding of what depression and anxiety actually are.</seg>
<seg id="160">There are very real biological contributions to depression and anxiety.</seg>
<seg id="161">But if we allow the biology to become the whole picture, as I did for so long, as I would argue our culture has done pretty much most of my life, what we're implicitly saying to people is, and this isn't anyone's intention, but what we're implicitly saying to people is, "Your pain doesn't mean anything.</seg>
<seg id="162">It's just a malfunction.</seg>
<seg id="163">It's like a glitch in a computer program, it's just a wiring problem in your head. "But I was only able to start changing my life when I realized your depression is not a malfunction. It's a signal.</seg>
<seg id="164">Your depression is a signal. It's telling you something.</seg>
<seg id="165">We feel this way for reasons, and they can be hard to see in the throes of depression -- I understand that really well from personal experience.</seg>
<seg id="166">But with the right help, we can understand these problems and we can fix these problems together.</seg>
<seg id="167">But to do that, the very first step is we have to stop insulting these signals by saying they're a sign of weakness, or madness or purely biological, except for a tiny number of people.</seg>
<seg id="168">We need to start listening to these signals, because they're telling us something we really need to hear.</seg>
<seg id="169">It's only when we truly listen to these signals, and we honor these signals and respect these signals, that we're going to begin to see the liberating, nourishing, deeper solutions.</seg>
<seg id="170">The cows that are waiting all around us.</seg>
<seg id="171">Thank you.</seg>
</doc>
<doc docid="48498" genre="lectures">
<talkid>48498</talkid>
<seg id="1">Oh, there's a lot of it. This is seaweed. It's pretty humble stuff.</seg>
<seg id="2">But it does have some remarkable qualities.</seg>
<seg id="3">For one, it grows really fast.</seg>
<seg id="4">So the carbon that is part of that seaweed, just a few weeks ago, was floating in the atmosphere as atmospheric CO2, driving all the adverse consequences of climate change.</seg>
<seg id="5">For the moment, it's locked safely away in the seaweed, but when that seaweed rots -- and by the smell of it, it's not far away -- when it rots, that CO2 will be released back to the atmosphere.</seg>
<seg id="6">Wouldn't it be fantastic if we could find a way of keeping that CO2 locked up long-term, and thereby significantly contributing to solving the climate problem?</seg>
<seg id="7">What I'm talking about here is drawdown.</seg>
<seg id="8">It's now become the other half of the climate challenge.</seg>
<seg id="9">And that's because we have delayed so long, in terms of addressing climate change, that we now have to do two very big and very difficult things at once.</seg>
<seg id="10">We have to cut our emissions and clean our energy supply at the same time that we draw significant volumes of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.</seg>
<seg id="11">If we don't do that, about 25 percent of the CO2 we put in the air will remain there, by human standards, forever.</seg>
<seg id="12">So we have to act.</seg>
<seg id="13">This is really a new phase in addressing the climate crisis and it demands new thinking.</seg>
<seg id="14">So, ideas like carbon offsets really don't make sense in the modern era. You know, when you offset something, you say, "I'll permit myself to put some greenhouse gas into the atmosphere, but then I'll offset it by drawing it down." When you've got to both cut your emissions and draw down CO2, that thinking doesn't make sense anymore.</seg>
<seg id="15">And when we're talking about drawdown, we're talking about putting large volumes of greenhouses gases, particularly CO2, out of circulation.</seg>
<seg id="16">And to do that, we need a carbon price.</seg>
<seg id="17">We need a significant price that we'll pay for that service that we'll all benefit from.</seg>
<seg id="18">We've made almost no progress so far with the second half of the climate challenge.</seg>
<seg id="19">It's not on most people's radar.</seg>
<seg id="20">And, you know, I must say, at times, I hear people saying, "I've lost hope that we can do anything about the climate crisis." And look, I've had my sleepless nights too, I can tell you.</seg>
<seg id="21">But I'm here today as an ambassador for this humble weed, seaweed.</seg>
<seg id="22">I think it has the potential to be a big part of addressing the challenge of climate change and a big part of our future.</seg>
<seg id="23">Now, what the scientists are telling us we need to do over the next 80-odd years to the end of this century, is to cut our greenhouse gas emissions by three percent every year, and draw three gigatons of CO2 out of the atmosphere every year.</seg>
<seg id="24">Those numbers are so large that they baffle us.</seg>
<seg id="25">But that's what the scientists tell us we need to do.</seg>
<seg id="26">I really hate showing this graph, but I'm sorry, I have to do it.</seg>
<seg id="27">It is very eloquent in terms of telling the story of my personal failure in terms of all the advocacy I've done in climate change work and in fact, our collective failure to address climate change.</seg>
<seg id="28">You can see our trajectory there in terms of warming and greenhouse gas concentrations.</seg>
<seg id="29">You can see all of the great scientific announcements that we've made, saying how much danger we face with climate change.</seg>
<seg id="30">You can see the political meetings.</seg>
<seg id="31">None of it has changed the trajectory.</seg>
<seg id="32">And this is why we need new thinking, we need a new approach.</seg>
<seg id="33">So how might we go about drawing down greenhouse gases at a large scale?</seg>
<seg id="34">There's really only two ways of doing it, and I've done a very deep dive into drawdown.</seg>
<seg id="35">And I'll preempt my -- And I would say this stuff comes up smelling like roses at the end of the day.</seg>
<seg id="36">It does, it's one of the best options, but there are many, many possibilities.</seg>
<seg id="37">There are chemical pathways and biological pathways.</seg>
<seg id="38">So two ways, really, of getting the job done.</seg>
<seg id="39">The biological pathways are fantastic because the energy source that's needed to drive them, the sun, is effectively free.</seg>
<seg id="40">We use the sun to drive photosynthesis in plants, break apart that CO2 and capture the carbon.</seg>
<seg id="41">There are also chemical pathways.</seg>
<seg id="42">They sound ominous, but actually, they're not bad at all.</seg>
<seg id="43">The difficulty they face is that we have to actually pay for the energy that's required to do the job or pay to facilitate that energy.</seg>
<seg id="44">Direct air capture is a great example of a chemical pathway, and people are using that right now to take CO2 out of the atmosphere and manufacture biofuels or manufacture plastics.</seg>
<seg id="45">Great progress is being made, but it will be many decades before those chemical pathways are drawing down a gigaton of CO2 a year.</seg>
<seg id="46">The biological pathways offer us a lot more hope, I think, in the short term. You've probably heard about reforestation, planting trees, as a solution to the climate problem.</seg>
<seg id="47">You know, it's a fair question: Can we plant our way out of this problem by using trees?</seg>
<seg id="48">I'm skeptical about that for a number of reasons.</seg>
<seg id="49">One is just the scale of the problem.</seg>
<seg id="50">All trees start as seeds, little tiny things, and it's many decades before they've reached their full carbon-capture potential.</seg>
<seg id="51">And secondly, if you look at the land surface, you see that it's so heavily utilized.</seg>
<seg id="52">We get our food from it, we get our forestry products from it, biodiversity protection and water and everything else.</seg>
<seg id="53">To expect that we'll find enough space to deal with this problem, I think is going to be quite problematic.</seg>
<seg id="54">But if we look offshore, wee see a solution where there's already an existing industry, and where there's a clearer way forward.</seg>
<seg id="55">The oceans cover about 70 percent of our planet.</seg>
<seg id="56">They play a really big role in regulating our climate, and if we can enhance the growth of seaweed in them, we can use them, I think, to develop a climate-altering crop.</seg>
<seg id="57">There are so many different kinds of seaweed, there's unbelievable genetic diversity in seaweed, and they're very ancient; they were some of the first multicellular organisms ever to evolve.</seg>
<seg id="58">People are using special kinds of seaweed now for particular purposes, like developing very high-quality pharmaceutical products.</seg>
<seg id="59">But you can also use seaweed to take a seaweed bath, it's supposed to be good for your skin; I can't testify to that, but you can do it.</seg>
<seg id="60">The scalability is the big thing about seaweed farming.</seg>
<seg id="61">You know, if we could cover nine percent of the world's ocean in seaweed farms, we could draw down the equivalent of all of the greenhouse gases we put up in any one year, more than 50 gigatons.</seg>
<seg id="62">Now, I thought that was fantastic when I first read it, but I thought I'd better calculate how big nine percent of the world's oceans is.</seg>
<seg id="63">It turns out, it's about four and a half Australias, the place I live in.</seg>
<seg id="64">And how close are we to that at the moment?</seg>
<seg id="65">How many ocean-going seaweed farms do we actually have out there? Zero. But we do have some prototypes, and therein lies some hope.</seg>
<seg id="66">This little drawing here of a seaweed farm that's currently under construction tells you some very interesting things about seaweed.</seg>
<seg id="67">You can see the seaweed growing on that rack, 25 meters down in the ocean there.</seg>
<seg id="68">It's really different from anything you see on land.</seg>
<seg id="69">And the reason being that, you know, seaweed is not like trees, it doesn't have nonproductive parts like roots and trunks and branches and bark.</seg>
<seg id="70">The whole of the plant is pretty much photosynthetic, so it grows fast.</seg>
<seg id="71">Seaweed can grow a meter a day.</seg>
<seg id="72">And how do we sequester the carbon?</seg>
<seg id="73">Again, it's very different from on land.</seg>
<seg id="74">All you need to do is cut that seaweed off -- drifts into the ocean abyss, Once it's down a kilometer, the carbon in that seaweed is effectively out of the atmospheric system for centuries or millennia.</seg>
<seg id="75">Whereas if you plant a forest, you've got to worry about forest fires, bugs, etc., releasing that carbon.</seg>
<seg id="76">The key to this farm, though, is that little pipe going down into the depths.</seg>
<seg id="77">You know, the mid-ocean is basically a vast biological desert.</seg>
<seg id="78">There's no nutrients there that were used up long ago.</seg>
<seg id="79">But just 500 meters down, there is cool, very nutrient-rich water.</seg>
<seg id="80">And with just a little bit of clean, renewable energy, you can pump that water up and use the nutrients in it to irrigate your seaweed crop.</seg>
<seg id="81">So I think this really has so many benefits.</seg>
<seg id="82">It's changing a biological desert, the mid-ocean, into a productive, maybe even planet-saving solution.</seg>
<seg id="83">So what could go wrong?</seg>
<seg id="84">Well, anything we're talking about at this scale involves a planetary-scale intervention.</seg>
<seg id="85">And we have to be very careful.</seg>
<seg id="86">I think that piles of stinking seaweed are probably going to be the least of our problems.</seg>
<seg id="87">There's other unforeseen things that will happen.</seg>
<seg id="88">One of the things that really worries me, when I talk about this, is the fate of biodiversity in the deep ocean.</seg>
<seg id="89">If we are putting gigatons of seaweed into the deep ocean, we're affecting life down there.</seg>
<seg id="90">The good news is that we know that a lot of seaweed already reaches the deep ocean, after storms or through submarine canyons.</seg>
<seg id="91">So we're not talking about a novel process here; we are talking about enhancing a natural process.</seg>
<seg id="92">And we'll learn as we go.</seg>
<seg id="93">I mean, it may be that these ocean-going seaweed farms will need to be mobile, to distribute the seaweed across vast areas of the ocean, rather than creating a big stinking pile in one place.</seg>
<seg id="94">It may be that we'll need to char the seaweed -- so create a sort of an inert, mineral biochar before we dispatch it into the deep.</seg>
<seg id="95">We won't know until we start the process, and we will learn effectively by doing.</seg>
<seg id="96">I just want to take you to contemporary seaweed farming.</seg>
<seg id="97">It's a big business -- it's a six-billion-dollar-a-year business.</seg>
<seg id="98">These seaweed farms off South Korea -- you can see them from space, they are huge. And they're increasingly not just seaweed farms.</seg>
<seg id="99">What people are doing in places like this is something called ocean permaculture.</seg>
<seg id="100">And in ocean permaculture, you grow fish, shellfish and seaweed all together.</seg>
<seg id="101">And the reason it works so well is that the seaweed makes the seawater less acid.</seg>
<seg id="102">It provides an ideal environment for growing marine protein.</seg>
<seg id="103">If we covered nine percent of the world's oceans in ocean permaculture, we would be producing enough protein in the form of fish and shellfish to give every person in a population of 10 billion 200 kilograms of high-quality protein per year.</seg>
<seg id="104">So, we've got a multipotent solution here.</seg>
<seg id="105">We can address climate change, we can feed the world, we can deacidify the oceans.</seg>
<seg id="106">The economics of all of this is going to be challenging.</seg>
<seg id="107">We'll be investing many, many billions of dollars into these solutions, and they will take decades to get to the gigaton scale.</seg>
<seg id="108">The reason that I'm convinced that this is going to happen is that unless we get the gas out of the air, it is going to keep driving adverse consequences.</seg>
<seg id="109">It will flood our cities, it will deprive us of food, it will cause all sorts of civil unrest.</seg>
<seg id="110">So anyone who's got a solution to dealing with this problem has a valuable asset.</seg>
<seg id="111">And already, as I've explained, ocean permaculture is well on the road to being economically sustainable.</seg>
<seg id="112">You know, in the next 30 years, we have to go from being a carbon-emitting economy to a carbon-absorbing economy.</seg>
<seg id="113">And that doesn't seem like very long.</seg>
<seg id="114">But half of the greenhouse gases that we've put into the atmosphere, we've put there in the last 30 years.</seg>
<seg id="115">My argument is, if we can put the gas in in 30 years, we can pull it out in 30 years.</seg>
<seg id="116">And if you doubt how much can be done over 30 years, just cast your mind back a century, to 1919, compare it with 1950.</seg>
<seg id="117">Now, in 1919, here in Edinburgh, you might have seen a canvas and wood biplane.</seg>
<seg id="118">Thirty years later, you'd be seeing jet aircraft.</seg>
<seg id="119">Transport in the street were horses in 1919.</seg>
<seg id="120">By 1950, they're motor vehicles.</seg>
<seg id="121">1919, we had gun powder; 1950, we had nuclear power.</seg>
<seg id="122">We can do a lot in a short period of time.</seg>
<seg id="123">But it all depends upon us believing that we can find a solution.</seg>
<seg id="124">Now what I would love to do is bring together all of the people with knowledge in this space.</seg>
<seg id="125">The engineers who know how to build structures offshore, the seaweed farmers, the financiers, the government regulators, the people who understand how things are done.</seg>
<seg id="126">And chart a way forward, say: How do we go from the existing six-billion-dollar-a-year, inshore seaweed industry, to this new form of industry, which has got so much potential, but will require large amounts of investment?</seg>
<seg id="127">I'm not a betting man, you know.</seg>
<seg id="128">But if I were, I'll tell you, my money would be on that stuff, it would be on seaweed.</seg>
<seg id="129">It's my hero.</seg>
<seg id="130">Thank you.</seg>
</doc>
<doc docid="49002" genre="lectures">
<talkid>49002</talkid>
<seg id="1">Spoons.</seg>
<seg id="2">Cardboard boxes.</seg>
<seg id="3">Toddler-size electric trains.</seg>
<seg id="4">Holiday ornaments.</seg>
<seg id="5">Bounce houses.</seg>
<seg id="6">Blankets.</seg>
<seg id="7">Baskets.</seg>
<seg id="8">Carpets.</seg>
<seg id="9">Tray tables.</seg>
<seg id="10">Smartphones.</seg>
<seg id="11">Pianos.</seg>
<seg id="12">Robes.</seg>
<seg id="13">Photographs.</seg>
<seg id="14">What do all of these things have in common, aside from the fact they're photos that I took in the last three months, and therefore, own the copyright to?</seg>
<seg id="15">They're all inventions that were created with the benefit of language.</seg>
<seg id="16">None of these things would have existed without language.</seg>
<seg id="17">Imagine creating any one of those things or, like, building an entire building like this, without being able to use language or without benefiting from any knowledge that was got by the use of language.</seg>
<seg id="18">Basically, language is the most important thing in the entire world.</seg>
<seg id="19">All of our civilization rests upon it.</seg>
<seg id="20">And those who devote their lives to studying it -- both how language emerged, how human languages differ, how they differ from animal communication systems -- are linguists.</seg>
<seg id="21">Formal linguistics is a relatively young field, more or less.</seg>
<seg id="22">And it's uncovered a lot of really important stuff.</seg>
<seg id="23">Like, for example, that human communication systems differ crucially from animal communication systems, that all languages are equally expressive, even if they do it in different ways.</seg>
<seg id="24">And yet, despite this, there are a lot of people who just love to pop off about language like they have an equal understanding of it as a linguist, because, of course, they speak a language.</seg>
<seg id="25">And if you speak a language, that means you have just as much right to talk about its function as anybody else.</seg>
<seg id="26">Imagine if you were talking to a surgeon, and you say, "Listen, buddy.</seg>
<seg id="27">I've had a heart for, like, 40 years now.</seg>
<seg id="28">I think I know a thing or two about aortic valve replacements.</seg>
<seg id="29">I think my opinion is just as valid as yours. "And yet, that's exactly what happens.</seg>
<seg id="30">This is Neil deGrasse Tyson, saying that in the film "Arrival," he would have brought a cryptographer -- somebody who can unscramble a message in a language they already know -- rather than a linguist, to communicate with the aliens, because what would a linguist -- why would that be useful in talking to somebody speaking a language we don't even know?</seg>
<seg id="31">Though, of course, the "Arrival" film is not off the hook.</seg>
<seg id="32">I mean, come on -- listen, film. Hey, buddy: there are aliens that come down to our planet in gigantic ships, and they want to do nothing except for communicate with us, and you hire one linguist?</seg>
<seg id="33">What's the US government on a budget or something?</seg>
<seg id="34">A lot of these things can be chalked up to misunderstandings, both about what language is and about the formal study of language, about linguistics.</seg>
<seg id="35">And I think there's something that underlies a lot of these misunderstandings that can be summed up by this delightful article in "Forbes," about why high school students shouldn't learn foreign languages.</seg>
<seg id="36">I'm going to pull out some quotes from this, and I want you to see if you can figure out what underlies some of these opinions and ideas. "Americans rarely read the classics, even in translation." So in other words, why bother learning a foreign language when they're not even going to read the classic in the original anyway?</seg>
<seg id="37">What's the point? "Studying foreign languages in school is a waste of time, compared to other things that you could be doing in school." "Europe has a lot of language groups clustered in a relatively small space." So for Americans, ah, what's the point of learning another language?</seg>
<seg id="38">You're not really going to get a lot of bang for your buck out of that.</seg>
<seg id="39">This is my favorite, "A student in Birmingham would have to travel about a thousand miles to get to the Mexican border, and even then, there would be enough people who speak English to get around." In other words, if you can kind of wave your arms around, and you can get to where you're going, then there's really no point in learning another language anyway.</seg>
<seg id="40">What underlies a lot of these attitudes is the conceptual metaphor, language is a tool.</seg>
<seg id="41">And there's something that rings very true about this metaphor.</seg>
<seg id="42">Language is kind of a tool in that, if you know the local language, you can do more than if you didn't.</seg>
<seg id="43">But the implication is that language is only a tool, and this is absolutely false.</seg>
<seg id="44">If language was a tool, it would honestly be a pretty poor tool.</seg>
<seg id="45">And we would have abandoned it long ago for something that was a lot better.</seg>
<seg id="46">Think about just any sentence.</seg>
<seg id="47">Here's a sentence that I'm sure I've said in my life: "Yesterday I saw Kyn." I have a friend named Kyn.</seg>
<seg id="48">And when I say this sentence, "Yesterday I saw Kyn," do you think it's really the case that everything in my mind is now implanted in your mind via this sentence?</seg>
<seg id="49">Hardly, because there's a lot of other stuff going on.</seg>
<seg id="50">Like, when I say "yesterday," I might think what the weather was like yesterday because I was there.</seg>
<seg id="51">And if I'm remembering, I'll probably remember there was something I forgot to mail, which I did.</seg>
<seg id="52">This was a preplanned joke, but I really did forget to mail something.</seg>
<seg id="53">And so that means I'm going to have to do it Monday, because that's when I'm going to get back home.</seg>
<seg id="54">And of course, when I think of Monday, I'll think of "Manic Monday" by the Bangles. It's a good song. And when I say the word "saw," I think of this phrase: "'I see!' said the blind man as he picked up his hammer and saw." I always do.</seg>
<seg id="55">Anytime I hear the word "saw" or say it, I always think of that, because my grandfather always used to say it, so it makes me think of my grandfather.</seg>
<seg id="56">And we're back to "Manic Monday" again, for some reason.</seg>
<seg id="57">And with Kyn, when I'm saying something like, "Yesterday I saw Kyn," I'll think of the circumstances under which I saw him.</seg>
<seg id="58">And this happened to be that day.</seg>
<seg id="59">Here he is with my cat.</seg>
<seg id="60">And of course, if I'm thinking of Kyn, I'll think he's going to Long Beach State right now, and I'll remember that my good friend John and my mother both graduated from Long Beach State, my cousin Katie is going to Long Beach State right now.</seg>
<seg id="61">And it's "Manic Monday" again.</seg>
<seg id="62">But this is just a fraction of what's going on in your head at any given time while you are speaking.</seg>
<seg id="63">And all we have to represent the entire mess that is going on in our head, is this.</seg>
<seg id="64">I mean, that's all we got.</seg>
<seg id="65">Is it any wonder that our system is so poor?</seg>
<seg id="66">So imagine, if I can give you an analogy, imagine if you wanted to know what is it like to eat a cake, if instead of just eating the cake, you instead had to ingest the ingredients of a cake, one by one, along with instructions about how these ingredients can be combined to form a cake.</seg>
<seg id="67">You had to eat the instructions, too.</seg>
<seg id="68">If that was how we had to experience cake, we would never eat cake.</seg>
<seg id="69">And yet, language is the only way -- the only way -- that we can figure out what is going on here, in our minds.</seg>
<seg id="70">This is our interiority, the thing that makes us human, the thing that makes us different from other animals, is all inside here somewhere, and all we have to do to represent it is our own languages.</seg>
<seg id="71">A language is our best way of showing what's going on in our head.</seg>
<seg id="72">Imagine if I wanted to ask a big question, like: "What is the nature of human thought and emotion?" What you'd want to do is you'd want to examine as many different languages as possible.</seg>
<seg id="73">One isn't just going to do it.</seg>
<seg id="74">To give you an example, here's a picture I took of little Roman, that I took with a 12-megapixel camera.</seg>
<seg id="75">Now, here's that same picture with a lot fewer pixels.</seg>
<seg id="76">Obviously, neither of these pictures is a real cat.</seg>
<seg id="77">But one gives you a lot better sense of what a cat is than the other.</seg>
<seg id="78">Language is not merely a tool.</seg>
<seg id="79">It is our legacy, it's our way of conveying what it means to be human.</seg>
<seg id="80">And of course, by "our" legacy, I mean all humans everywhere.</seg>
<seg id="81">And losing even one language makes that picture a lot less clear.</seg>
<seg id="82">So as a job for the past 10 years and also as recreation, just for fun, I create languages.</seg>
<seg id="83">These are called "conlangs," short for "constructed languages." Now, presenting these facts back to back, that we're losing languages on our planet and that I create brand-new languages, you might think that there's some nonsuperficial connection between these two.</seg>
<seg id="84">In fact, a lot of people have drawn a line between those dots.</seg>
<seg id="85">This is a guy who got all bent out of shape that there was a conlang in James Cameron's "Avatar." He says, "But in the three years it took James Cameron to get Avatar to the screen, a language died." Probably a lot more than that, actually. "Na'vi, alas, won't fill the hole where it used to be..." A truly profound and poignant statement -- if you don't think about it at all.</seg>
<seg id="86">But when I was here at Cal, I completed two majors.</seg>
<seg id="87">One of them was linguistics, but the other one was English.</seg>
<seg id="88">And of course, the English major, the study of English, is not actually the study of the English language, as we know, it's the study of literature.</seg>
<seg id="89">Literature is just a wonderful thing, because basically, literature, more broadly, is kind of like art; it falls under the rubric of art.</seg>
<seg id="90">And what we do with literature, authors create new, entire beings and histories.</seg>
<seg id="91">And it's interesting to us to see what kind of depth and emotion and just unique spirit authors can invest into these fictional beings.</seg>
<seg id="92">So much so, that, I mean -- take a look at this.</seg>
<seg id="93">There's an entire series of books that are written about fictional characters.</seg>
<seg id="94">Like, the entire book is just about one fictional, fake human being.</seg>
<seg id="95">There's an entire book on George F. Babbitt from Sinclair Lewis's "Babbitt," and I guarantee you, that book is longer than "Babbitt," which is a short book.</seg>
<seg id="96">Does anybody even remember that one?</seg>
<seg id="97">It's pretty good, I actually think it's better than "Main Street." That's my hot take.</seg>
<seg id="98">So we've never questioned the fact that literature is interesting.</seg>
<seg id="99">But despite the fact, not even linguists are actually interested in what created languages can tell us about the depth of the human spirit just as an artistic endeavor.</seg>
<seg id="100">I'll give you a nice little example here.</seg>
<seg id="101">There was an article written about me in the California alumni magazine a while back.</seg>
<seg id="102">And when they wrote this article, they wanted to get somebody from the opposing side, which, in hindsight, seems like a weird thing to do.</seg>
<seg id="103">You're just talking about a person, and you want to get somebody from the opposing side of that person.</seg>
<seg id="104">Essentially, this is just a puff piece, but whatever. So, they happened to get one of the most brilliant linguists of our time, George Lakoff, who's a linguist here at Berkeley.</seg>
<seg id="105">And his work has basically forever changed the fields of linguistics and cognitive science.</seg>
<seg id="106">And when asked about my work and about language creation in general, he said, "But there's a lot of things to be done in the study of language.</seg>
<seg id="107">You should spend the time on something real. "Yeah." Something real. "Does this remind you of anything?</seg>
<seg id="108">To use the very framework that he himself invented, let me refer back to this conceptual metaphor: language is a tool.</seg>
<seg id="109">And he appears to be laboring under this conceptual metaphor; that is, language is useful when it can be used for communication.</seg>
<seg id="110">Language is useless when it can't be used for communication.</seg>
<seg id="111">It might make you wonder: What do we do with dead languages? But anyway.</seg>
<seg id="112">So, because of this idea, it might seem like the very height of absurdity to have a Duolingo course on the High Valyrian language that I created for HBO's "Game of Thrones." You might wonder what, exactly, are 740,000 people learning?</seg>
<seg id="113">Well, let's take a look at it. What are they learning?</seg>
<seg id="114">What could they possibly be learning?</seg>
<seg id="115">Well, bearing in mind that the other language for this -- it's for people that speak English -- English speakers are learning quite a bit.</seg>
<seg id="116">Here's a sentence that they will probably never use for communication in their entire lives: "Vala ābre urnes." "The man sees the woman." The little middle line is the gloss, so it's word for word, that's what it says.</seg>
<seg id="117">And they're actually learning some very fascinating things, especially if they're English speakers.</seg>
<seg id="118">They're learning that a verb can come at the very end of a sentence.</seg>
<seg id="119">Doesn't really do that in English when you have two arguments.</seg>
<seg id="120">They're learning that sometimes a language doesn't have an equivalent for the word "the" -- it's totally absent.</seg>
<seg id="121">That's something language can do.</seg>
<seg id="122">They're learning that a long vowel can actually be longer in duration, as opposed to different in quality, which is what our long vowels do; they're actually the same length.</seg>
<seg id="123">They're learning that there are these little inflections. Hmm? Hmm? There are inflections called "cases" on the end of nouns --</seg>
<seg id="124">that tell you who does what to whom in a sentence.</seg>
<seg id="125">Even if you leave the order of the words the same and switch the endings, it changes who does what to whom.</seg>
<seg id="126">What they're learning is that languages do things, the same things, differently.</seg>
<seg id="127">And that learning languages can be fun.</seg>
<seg id="128">What they're learning is respect for Language: capital "L" Language.</seg>
<seg id="129">And given the fact that 88 percent of Americans only speak English at home, I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing.</seg>
<seg id="130">You know why languages die on our planet?</seg>
<seg id="131">It's not because government imposes one language on a smaller group, or because an entire group of speakers is wiped out.</seg>
<seg id="132">That certainly has happened in the past, and it's happening now, but it's not the main reason.</seg>
<seg id="133">The main reason is that a child is born to a family that speaks a language that is not widely spoken in their community, and that child doesn't learn it. Why? Because that language is not valued in their community.</seg>
<seg id="134">Because the language isn't useful.</seg>
<seg id="135">Because the child can't go and get a job if they speak that language.</seg>
<seg id="136">Because if language is just a tool, then learning their native language is about as useful as learning High Valyrian, so why bother?</seg>
<seg id="137">Now... Maybe language study isn't going to lead to a lot more linguistic fluency.</seg>
<seg id="138">But maybe that's not such a big deal.</seg>
<seg id="139">Maybe if more people are studying more languages, it will lead to more linguistic tolerance and less linguistic imperialism.</seg>
<seg id="140">Maybe if we actually respect language for what it is -- literally, the greatest invention in the history of humankind -- then in the future, we can celebrate endangered languages as living languages, as opposed to museum pieces.</seg>
<seg id="141">(High Valyrian) Kirimvose. Thank you.</seg>
</doc>
<doc docid="49732" genre="lectures">
<talkid>49732</talkid>
<seg id="1">Chris Anderson: So, you've been obsessed with this problem for the last few years.</seg>
<seg id="2">What is the problem, in your own words?</seg>
<seg id="3">Andrew Forrest: Plastic. Simple as that. Our inability to use it for the tremendous energetic commodity that it is, and just throw it away.</seg>
<seg id="4">CA: And so we see waste everywhere.</seg>
<seg id="5">At its extreme, it looks a bit like this.</seg>
<seg id="6">I mean, where was this picture taken?</seg>
<seg id="7">AF: That's in the Philippines, and you know, there's a lot of rivers, ladies and gentlemen, which look exactly like that.</seg>
<seg id="8">And that's the Philippines.</seg>
<seg id="9">So it's all over Southeast Asia.</seg>
<seg id="10">CA: So plastic is thrown into the rivers, and from there, of course, it ends up in the ocean.</seg>
<seg id="11">I mean, we obviously see it on the beaches, but that's not even your main concern. It's what's actually happening to it in the oceans. Talk about that.</seg>
<seg id="12">AF: OK, so look.</seg>
<seg id="13">Thank you, Chris. About four years ago, I thought I'd do something really barking crazy, and I committed to do a PhD in marine ecology.</seg>
<seg id="14">And the scary part about that was, sure, I learned a lot about marine life, but it taught me more about marine death and the extreme mass ecological fatality of fish, of marine life, marine mammals, very close biology to us, which are dying in the millions if not trillions that we can't count at the hands of plastic.</seg>
<seg id="15">CA: But people think of plastic as ugly but stable. Right? You throw something in the ocean, "Hey, it'll just sit there forever.</seg>
<seg id="16">Can't do any damage, right? "</seg>
<seg id="17">AF: See, Chris, it's an incredible substance designed for the economy.</seg>
<seg id="18">It is the worst substance possible for the environment.</seg>
<seg id="19">The worst thing about plastics, as soon as it hits the environment, is that it fragments.</seg>
<seg id="20">It never stops being plastic.</seg>
<seg id="21">It breaks down smaller and smaller and smaller, and the breaking science on this, Chris, which we've known in marine ecology for a few years now, but it's going to hit humans.</seg>
<seg id="22">We are aware now that nanoplastic, the very, very small particles of plastic, carrying their negative charge, can go straight through the pores of your skin.</seg>
<seg id="23">That's not the bad news.</seg>
<seg id="24">The bad news is that it goes straight through the blood-brain barrier, that protective coating which is there to protect your brain.</seg>
<seg id="25">Your brain's a little amorphous, wet mass full of little electrical charges.</seg>
<seg id="26">You put a negative particle into that, particularly a negative particle which can carry pathogens -- so you have a negative charge, it attracts positive-charge elements, like pathogens, toxins, mercury, lead.</seg>
<seg id="27">That's the breaking science we're going to see in the next 12 months.</seg>
<seg id="28">CA: So already I think you told me that there's like 600 plastic bags or so for every fish that size in the ocean, something like that.</seg>
<seg id="29">And they're breaking down, and there's going to be ever more of them, and we haven't even seen the start of the consequences of that.</seg>
<seg id="30">AF: No, we really haven't. The Ellen MacArthur Foundation, they're a bunch of good scientists, we've been working with them for a while. I've completely verified their work.</seg>
<seg id="31">They say there will be one ton of plastic, Chris, for every three tons of fish by, not 2050 -- and I really get impatient with people who talk about 2050 -- by 2025.</seg>
<seg id="32">That's around the corner.</seg>
<seg id="33">That's just the here and now.</seg>
<seg id="34">You don't need one ton of plastic to completely wipe out marine life.</seg>
<seg id="35">Less than that is going to do a fine job at it.</seg>
<seg id="36">So we have to end it straightaway.</seg>
<seg id="37">We've got no time.</seg>
<seg id="38">CA: OK, so you have an idea for ending it, and you're coming at this not as a typical environmental campaigner, I would say, but as a businessman, as an entrepreneur, who has lived -- you've spent your whole life thinking about global economic systems and how they work.</seg>
<seg id="39">And if I understand it right, your idea depends on heroes who look something like this. What's her profession?</seg>
<seg id="40">AF: She, Chris, is a ragpicker, and there were 15, 20 million ragpickers like her, until China stopped taking everyone's waste.</seg>
<seg id="41">And the price of plastic, minuscule that it was, collapsed.</seg>
<seg id="42">That led to people like her, which, now -- she is a child who is a schoolchild.</seg>
<seg id="43">She should be at school.</seg>
<seg id="44">That's probably very akin to slavery.</seg>
<seg id="45">My daughter Grace and I have met hundreds of people like her.</seg>
<seg id="46">CA: And there are many adults as well, literally millions around the world, and in some industries, they actually account for the fact that, for example, we don't see a lot of metal waste in the world.</seg>
<seg id="47">AF: That's exactly right.</seg>
<seg id="48">That little girl is, in fact, the hero of the environment.</seg>
<seg id="49">She's in competition with a great big petrochemical plant which is just down the road, the three-and-a-half-billion-dollar petrochemical plant.</seg>
<seg id="50">That's the problem.</seg>
<seg id="51">We've got more oil and gas in plastic and landfill than we have in the entire oil and gas resources of the United States.</seg>
<seg id="52">So she is the hero.</seg>
<seg id="53">And that's what that landfill looks like, ladies and gentlemen, and it's solid oil and gas.</seg>
<seg id="54">CA: So there's huge value potentially locked up in there that the world's ragpickers would, if they could, make a living from.</seg>
<seg id="55">AF: Because we have ingrained in us a price of plastic from fossil fuels, which sits just under what it takes to economically and profitably recycle plastic from plastic.</seg>
<seg id="56">See, all plastic is is building blocks from oil and gas.</seg>
<seg id="57">Plastic's 100 percent polymer, which is 100 percent oil and gas.</seg>
<seg id="58">And you know we've got enough plastic in the world for all our needs.</seg>
<seg id="59">And when we recycle plastic, if we can't recycle it cheaper than fossil fuel plastic, then, of course, the world just sticks to fossil fuel plastic.</seg>
<seg id="60">CA: So that's the fundamental problem, the price of recycled plastic is usually more than the price of just buying it made fresh from more oil.</seg>
<seg id="61">That's the fundamental problem.</seg>
<seg id="62">AF: A slight tweak of the rules here, Chris.</seg>
<seg id="63">I'm a commodity person.</seg>
<seg id="64">I understand that we used to have scrap metal and rubbish iron and bits of copper lying all round the villages, particularly in the developing world.</seg>
<seg id="65">And people worked out it's got a value. It's actually an article of value, not of waste.</seg>
<seg id="66">Now the villages and the cities and the streets are clean, you don't trip over scrap copper or scrap iron now, because it's an article of value, it gets recycled.</seg>
<seg id="67">CA: So what's your idea, then, to try to change that in plastics?</seg>
<seg id="68">AF: OK, so Chris, for most part of that PhD, I've been doing research.</seg>
<seg id="69">And the good thing about being a businessperson who's done OK at it is that people want to see you.</seg>
<seg id="70">Other businesspeople, even if you're kind of a bit of a zoo animal species they'd like to check out, they'll say, yeah, OK, we'll all meet Twiggy Forrest. And so once you're in there, you can interrogate them.</seg>
<seg id="71">And I've been to most of the oil and gas and fast-moving consumer good companies in the world, and there is a real will to change.</seg>
<seg id="72">I mean, there's a couple of dinosaurs who are going to hope for the best and do nothing, but there's a real will to change.</seg>
<seg id="73">So what I've been discussing is, the seven and a half billion people in the world don't actually deserve to have their environment smashed by plastic, their oceans rendered depauperate or barren of sea life because of plastic.</seg>
<seg id="74">So you come down that chain, and there's tens of thousands of brands which we all buy heaps of products from, but then there's only a hundred major resin producers, big petrochemical plants, that spew out all the plastic which is single use.</seg>
<seg id="75">CA: So one hundred companies are right at the base of this food chain, as it were.</seg>
<seg id="76">AF: Yeah.</seg>
<seg id="77">CA: And so what do you need those one hundred companies to do?</seg>
<seg id="78">AF: OK, so we need them to simply raise the value of the building blocks of plastic from oil and gas, which I call "bad plastic," raise the value of that, so that when it spreads through the brands and onto us, the customers, we won't barely even notice an increase in our coffee cup or Coke or Pepsi, or anything.</seg>
<seg id="79">CA: Like, what, like a cent extra?</seg>
<seg id="80">AF: Less. Quarter of a cent, half a cent.</seg>
<seg id="81">It'll be absolutely minimal.</seg>
<seg id="82">But what it does, it makes every bit of plastic all over the world an article of value.</seg>
<seg id="83">Where you have the waste worst, say Southeast Asia, India, that's where the wealth is most.</seg>
<seg id="84">CA: OK, so it feels like there's two parts to this.</seg>
<seg id="85">One is, if they will charge more money but carve out that excess and pay it -- into what?</seg>
<seg id="86">-- a fund operated by someone to tackle this problem of -- what?</seg>
<seg id="87">What would that money be used for, that they charge the extra for?</seg>
<seg id="88">AF: So when I speak to really big businesses, I say, "Look, I need you to change, and I need you to change really fast," their eyes are going to peel over in boredom, unless I say, "And it's good business." "OK, now you've got my attention, Andrew." So I say, "Right, I need you to make a contribution to an environmental and industry transition fund.</seg>
<seg id="89">Over two or three years, the entire global plastics industry can transition from getting its building blocks from fossil fuel to getting its building blocks from plastic. The technology is out there.</seg>
<seg id="90">It's proven. "I've taken two multibillion-dollar operations from nothing, recognizing that the technology can be scaled.</seg>
<seg id="91">I see at least a dozen technologies in plastic to handle all types of plastic.</seg>
<seg id="92">So once those technologies have an economic margin, which this gives them, that's where the global public will get all their plastic from, from existing plastic.</seg>
<seg id="93">CA: So every sale of virgin plastic contributes money to a fund that is used to basically transition the industry and start to pay for things like cleanup and other pieces.</seg>
<seg id="94">AF: Absolutely. Absolutely.</seg>
<seg id="95">CA: And it has the incredible side benefit, which is maybe even the main benefit, of creating a market.</seg>
<seg id="96">It suddenly makes recyclable plastic a giant business that can unlock millions of people around the world to find a new living collecting it.</seg>
<seg id="97">AF: Yeah, exactly.</seg>
<seg id="98">So all you do is, you've got fossil fuel plastics at this value and recycled plastic at this value. You change it. So recycled plastic is cheaper.</seg>
<seg id="99">What I love about this most, Chris, is that, you know, we waste into the environment 300, 350 million tons of plastic.</seg>
<seg id="100">On the oil and gas companies own accounts, it's going to grow to 500 million tons.</seg>
<seg id="101">This is an accelerating problem.</seg>
<seg id="102">But every ton of that is polymer.</seg>
<seg id="103">Polymer is 1,000 dollars, 1,500 dollars a ton.</seg>
<seg id="104">That's half a trillion dollars which could go into business and could create jobs and opportunities and wealth right across the world, particularly in the most impoverished.</seg>
<seg id="105">Yet we throw it away.</seg>
<seg id="106">CA: So this would allow the big companies to invest in recycling plants literally all over the world --</seg>
<seg id="107">AF: All over the world. Because the technology is low-capital cost, you can put it in at rubbish dumps, at the bottom of big hotels, garbage depots, everywhere, turn that waste into resin.</seg>
<seg id="108">CA: Now, you're a philanthropist, and you're ready to commit some of your own wealth to this.</seg>
<seg id="109">What is the role of philanthropy in this project?</seg>
<seg id="110">AF: I think what we have to do is kick in the 40 to 50 million US dollars to get it going, and then we have to create absolute transparency so everyone can see exactly what's going on.</seg>
<seg id="111">From the resin producers to the brands to the consumers, everyone gets to see who is playing the game, who is protecting the Earth, and who doesn't care.</seg>
<seg id="112">And that'll cost about a million dollars a week, and we're going to underwrite that for five years.</seg>
<seg id="113">Total contribution is circa 300 million US dollars.</seg>
<seg id="114">CA: Wow. Now --</seg>
<seg id="115">You've talked to other companies, like to the Coca-Colas of this world, who are willing to do this, they're willing to pay a higher price, they would like to pay a higher price, so long as it's fair.</seg>
<seg id="116">AF: Yeah, it's fair.</seg>
<seg id="117">So, Coca-Cola wouldn't like Pepsi to play ball unless the whole world knew that Pepsi wasn't playing ball.</seg>
<seg id="118">Then they don't care.</seg>
<seg id="119">So it's that transparency of the market where, if people try and cheat the system, the market can see it, the consumers can see it.</seg>
<seg id="120">The consumers want a role to play in this.</seg>
<seg id="121">Seven and a half billion of us.</seg>
<seg id="122">We don't want our world smashed by a hundred companies.</seg>
<seg id="123">CA: Well, so tell us, you've said what the companies can do and what you're willing to do.</seg>
<seg id="124">What can people listening do?</seg>
<seg id="125">AF: OK, so I would like all of us, all around the world, to go a website called noplasticwaste.org. You contact your hundred resin producers which are in your region.</seg>
<seg id="126">You will have at least one within an email or Twitter or a telephone contact from you, and let them know that you would like them to make a contribution to a fund which industry can manage or the World Bank can manage.</seg>
<seg id="127">It raises tens of billions of dollars per year so you can transition the industry to getting all its plastic from plastic, not from fossil fuel.</seg>
<seg id="128">We don't need that. That's bad. This is good. And it can clean up the environment.</seg>
<seg id="129">We've got enough capital there, we've got tens of billions of dollars, Chris, per annum to clean up the environment.</seg>
<seg id="130">CA: You're in the recycling business.</seg>
<seg id="131">Isn't this a conflict of interest for you, or rather, a huge business opportunity for you?</seg>
<seg id="132">AF: Yeah, look, I'm in the iron ore business, and I compete against the scrap metal business, and that's why you don't have any scrap lying around to trip over, and cut your toe on, because it gets collected.</seg>
<seg id="133">CA: This isn't your excuse to go into the plastic recycling business.</seg>
<seg id="134">AF: No, I am going to cheer for this boom.</seg>
<seg id="135">This will be the internet of plastic waste.</seg>
<seg id="136">This will be a boom industry which will spread all over the world, and particularly where poverty is worst because that's where the rubbish is most, and that's the resource.</seg>
<seg id="137">So I'm going to cheer for it and stand back.</seg>
<seg id="138">CA: Twiggy, we're in an era where so many people around the world are craving a new, regenerative economy, these big supply chains, these big industries, to fundamentally transform.</seg>
<seg id="139">It strikes me as a giant idea, and you're going to need a lot of people cheering you on your way to make it happen.</seg>
</doc>
<doc docid="50638" genre="lectures">
<talkid>50638</talkid>
<seg id="1">Malaria is still one of the biggest killers on the planet.</seg>
<seg id="2">Despite us making significant progress in the last 20 years, half the world's population is still at risk from this disease.</seg>
<seg id="3">In fact, every two minutes, a child under the age of two dies from malaria.</seg>
<seg id="4">Our progress has undoubtedly stalled.</seg>
<seg id="5">Now we face many challenges when it comes to tackling malaria, but one of the problems that we have is actually finding people who are infected with malaria in the first place.</seg>
<seg id="6">So, for example, if people have some level of immunity to the disease, then they can develop an infection and become infectious and still pass it on but not actually develop any symptoms, and that can be a big problem, because how do you find those people?</seg>
<seg id="7">It's like looking for a needle in a haystack.</seg>
<seg id="8">Now scientists have been trying to solve this problem for some years, but what I want to talk to you about today is that the solution to this problem may have been right under our noses this whole time.</seg>
<seg id="9">Now that was a bit of a heavy start, with lots of really important statistics, so I want us all to just relax a little bit and that'll help me to relax a little bit as well.</seg>
<seg id="10">So why don't we just all take a nice deep breath in... Wow.  And sigh, and, whoo, going to get blown away there.</seg>
<seg id="11">OK, now I want you to do it again, but this time, I want you to do it just through your nose, and I want you to really sense the environment around you.</seg>
<seg id="12">And in fact, I want you to really smell the person who's sitting next to you.</seg>
<seg id="13">Even if you don't know them, I don't care.</seg>
<seg id="14">Lean in, get your nose right into their armpit, come on, stop being so British about it, get your nose into the armpit, have a good old sniff, see what you can smell.</seg>
<seg id="15">Now each and every one of us would have had a very different sensory experience there.</seg>
<seg id="16">Some of us would have smelled something rather pleasant, perhaps somebody's perfume.</seg>
<seg id="17">But some of us might have smelled something a little bit less pleasant, perhaps somebody's bad breath or body odor.</seg>
<seg id="18">Maybe you even smelled your own body odor.</seg>
<seg id="19">But, you know, there's probably a good reason that some of us don't like certain body smells.</seg>
<seg id="20">Throughout history, there have been many examples of diseases being associated with a smell.</seg>
<seg id="21">So, for example, typhoid apparently smells like baked brown bread, and that's quite a nice smell, isn't it, but it starts to get a little bit worse.</seg>
<seg id="22">TB smells like stale beer, and yellow fever smells like the inside of a butcher shop, like raw meat.</seg>
<seg id="23">And in fact, when you look at the sort of words that are used to describe diseases, you tend to find these words: "rotting," "foul," "putrid" or "pungent." So it's no surprise, then, that smell and body odor gets a bit of bad reputation.</seg>
<seg id="24">If I was to say to you, "You smell," now, you're going to take that not exactly as a compliment, are you.</seg>
<seg id="25">But you do smell.</seg>
<seg id="26">You've just found that out. You do smell. It's a scientific fact.</seg>
<seg id="27">And I'd quite like to turn that on its head. What if we could actually think about smell in a positive way, put it to good use?</seg>
<seg id="28">What if we could detect the chemicals that are given off by our bodies when we're ill, and use that to diagnose people?</seg>
<seg id="29">Now we'd need to develop good sensors that would allow us to do this, but it turns out that the world's best sensors actually already exist, and they're called animals.</seg>
<seg id="30">Now animals are built to smell. They live their everyday lives according to their nose.</seg>
<seg id="31">They sense the environment, which tells them really important information about how to stay alive, essentially.</seg>
<seg id="32">Just imagine you're a mosquito and you've just flown in from outside and you've entered this room.</seg>
<seg id="33">Now you're going to be entering a really complex world.</seg>
<seg id="34">You're going to be bombarded with smells from everywhere. We've just found out that we're really smelly beasts.</seg>
<seg id="35">Each one of us is producing different volatile chemicals.</seg>
<seg id="36">It's not just one chemical, like BO -- lots and lots of chemicals.</seg>
<seg id="37">But it's not just you, it's the seats you're sitting on, the carpet, the glue that holds the carpet to the floor, the paint on the walls, the trees outside.</seg>
<seg id="38">Everything around you is producing an odor, and it's a really complex world that the mosquito has to fly through, and it has to find you within that really complex world.</seg>
<seg id="39">And each and every one of you will know -- Come on, hands up, who always gets bitten by mosquitoes?</seg>
<seg id="40">And who never gets bitten?</seg>
<seg id="41">There's always one or two really annoying people that never get bitten.</seg>
<seg id="42">But the mosquito has a really hard job to find you, and that's all to do with the way you smell.</seg>
<seg id="43">People who don't attract mosquitoes smell repellent, and what we know is that --</seg>
<seg id="44">I should clarify, repellent to mosquitoes, not to people.</seg>
<seg id="45">And what we know now is that that is actually controlled by our genes.</seg>
<seg id="46">But mosquitoes are able to do that because they have a highly sophisticated sense of smell, and they're able to see through all the, sort of, odor sludge to find you, that individual, and bite you as a blood meal.</seg>
<seg id="47">But what would happen if one of you was infected with malaria?</seg>
<seg id="48">Well, let's just have a quick look at the malaria life cycle.</seg>
<seg id="49">So it's quite complex, but basically, what happens is a mosquito has to bite somebody to become infected.</seg>
<seg id="50">Once it bites an infected person, the parasite travels through the mouth part into the gut and then bursts through the gut, creates cysts, and then the parasites replicate, and then they make a journey from the gut all the way to the salivary glands, where they are then injected back into another person when the mosquito bites, because it injects saliva as it bites.</seg>
<seg id="51">Then, inside the human, it goes through a whole other cycle, a whole other part of the life cycle, so it goes through a liver stage, changes shape, and then comes out into the bloodstream again, and eventually, that person will become infectious.</seg>
<seg id="52">Now, one thing we know about the parasite world is that they are incredibly good at manipulating their hosts to enhance their own transmission, to make sure that they get passed onwards.</seg>
<seg id="53">If this was to happen in the malaria system, it might make sense that it would be something to do with odor that they manipulate, because odor is the key.</seg>
<seg id="54">Odor is the thing that links us between mosquitoes.</seg>
<seg id="55">That's how they find us.</seg>
<seg id="56">This is what we call the malaria manipulation hypothesis, and it's something that we've been working on over the last few years.</seg>
<seg id="57">So one of the first things that we wanted to do in our study was to find out whether an infection with malaria actually makes you more attractive to mosquitoes or not.</seg>
<seg id="58">So in Kenya, with our colleagues, we designed an experiment where we had participants, children in Kenya, sleep inside tents.</seg>
<seg id="59">The odor from the tent was blown into a chamber which contained mosquitoes, and the mosquitoes would behaviorally respond.</seg>
<seg id="60">They would fly towards or fly away from the odors, depending on whether they liked them or not.</seg>
<seg id="61">Now some of the participants were infected with malaria, and some of them were uninfected, but importantly, none of the children had any symptoms whatsoever.</seg>
<seg id="62">Now when we found and saw the results, it was really quite staggering.</seg>
<seg id="63">People who were infected with malaria were significantly more attractive than people who were uninfected.</seg>
<seg id="64">So let me explain this graph. We have "number of mosquitoes attracted to the child," and we have two sets of data: before treatment and after treatment.</seg>
<seg id="65">On the far left-hand side, that bar represents a group of people who are uninfected, and as we move towards the right-hand side, these people have become infected and they're moving towards the stage that they're infectious.</seg>
<seg id="66">So right at the stage when people are infectious is when they are significantly more attractive.</seg>
<seg id="67">In this study, then, what we did is we obviously gave the children treatment to clear the parasites, and then we tested them again, and what we found was that highly attractive trait that was there disappeared after they had cleared the infection.</seg>
<seg id="68">So it wasn't just that the people were more attractive, it was that the parasite was manipulating its host in some way to make it more attractive to mosquitoes, standing out like a beacon to attract more mosquitoes so that it could continue its life cycle.</seg>
<seg id="69">The next thing we wanted to do was find out what it was the mosquito was actually smelling.</seg>
<seg id="70">What was it detecting?</seg>
<seg id="71">So to do that, we had to collect the body odor from the participants, and we did this by wrapping bags around their feet, which allowed us to collect the volatile odors from their feet, and feet are really important to mosquitoes.</seg>
<seg id="72">They really love the smell of feet.  Especially cheesy feet. Anybody got cheesy feet back there?</seg>
<seg id="73">Mosquitoes love that smell.</seg>
<seg id="74">So we focused on the feet, and we collected the body odor.</seg>
<seg id="75">Now when it comes to mosquitoes and olfaction, their sense of smell, it's very complex.</seg>
<seg id="76">It would be really nice if there was just one chemical that they detected, but it's not that simple.</seg>
<seg id="77">They have to detect a number of chemicals in the right concentration, the right ratios, the right combinations of chemicals.</seg>
<seg id="78">So you can sort of think about it like a musical composition.</seg>
<seg id="79">So, you know, if you get the note wrong or you play it too loud or too soft, it doesn't sound right.</seg>
<seg id="80">Or a recipe: if you get an ingredient wrong or you cook it too long or too little, it doesn't taste right. Well, smell is the same. It's made up of a suite of chemicals in the right combination.</seg>
<seg id="81">Now our machines in the lab are not particularly good at picking out this sort of signal -- it's quite complex.</seg>
<seg id="82">But animals can, and what we do in my laboratory is we connect microelectrodes to the antennae of a mosquito.</seg>
<seg id="83">Imagine how fiddly that is.</seg>
<seg id="84">But what we also do is connect them to individual cells within the antennae, which is incredible. You don't want to sneeze when you're doing this, that's for sure.</seg>
<seg id="85">But what this does is it allows us to measure the electrical response of the smell receptors in the antennae, and so we can see what a mosquito is smelling.</seg>
<seg id="86">So I'm going to show you what this looks like. Here's an insect's cell, and it will respond in a second when I press this button, and you'll see it sort of ticking over with this response.</seg>
<seg id="87">An odor will be blown over the cell, and it will go a bit crazy, sort of blow a raspberry, and then it will go back to its resting potential when we stop the odor.</seg>
<seg id="88">(Rapid crackling)</seg>
<seg id="89">(Low-pitch crackling)</seg>
<seg id="90">OK, there we go, so you can go home now and say that you've seen an insect smelling and even hearing an insect smelling -- it's a weird concept, isn't it? But this works really well, and this allows us to see what the insect is detecting.</seg>
<seg id="91">Now using this method with our malaria samples, we were able to find out what the mosquito was detecting, and we found the malaria-associated compounds, mainly aldehydes, a group of compounds that smelled, that signified the malaria signal here.</seg>
<seg id="92">So now we know what the smell of malaria is, and we've used the mosquito as a biosensor to tell us what the smell of malaria actually is.</seg>
<seg id="93">Now I'd like to imagine that you could, I don't know, put a harness on a little mosquito and put it on a lead and take it out and see if we can sniff people in a community -- that goes on in my head -- and see whether we could actually find people with malaria, but, of course, that's not really possible.</seg>
<seg id="94">But there is an animal that we can do that with.</seg>
<seg id="95">Now dogs have an incredible sense of smell, but there's something more special about them: they have an ability to learn.</seg>
<seg id="96">And most of you people will be familiar with this concept at airports, where dogs will go down a line and sniff out your luggage or yourself for drugs and explosives or even food as well.</seg>
<seg id="97">So we wanted to know, could we actually train dogs to learn the smell of malaria?</seg>
<seg id="98">And so we've been working with a charity called Medical Detection Dogs to see whether we can train them to learn the smell of malaria.</seg>
<seg id="99">And we went out to the Gambia and did some more odor collection on children that were infected and uninfected, but this time, we collected their odor by making them wear socks, nylon stockings, to collect their body odor.</seg>
<seg id="100">And we brought them back to the UK and then we handed them to this charity to run the experiment.</seg>
<seg id="101">Now I could show you a graph and tell you about that experiment works, but that'd be a bit dull, wouldn't it.</seg>
<seg id="102">Now, they do say never work with children or animals live, but we're going to break that rule today.</seg>
<seg id="103">So please welcome onto the stage Freya...</seg>
<seg id="104">and her trainers Mark and Sarah.</seg>
<seg id="105">Of course, this is the real star of the show.</seg>
<seg id="106">OK, so now what I'm going to ask is if you can all just be a little bit quiet, not move around too much.</seg>
<seg id="107">This is a very, very strange environment for Freya.</seg>
<seg id="108">She's having a good look at you guys now.</seg>
<seg id="109">So let's stay as calm as possible. That would be great.</seg>
<seg id="110">So what we're going to do here is basically, we're going to ask Freya to move down this line of contraptions here, and in each one of these contraptions, we have a pot, and in the pot is a sock that has been worn by a child in the Gambia.</seg>
<seg id="111">Now three of the socks have been worn by children who were uninfected, and just one of the socks was worn by a child who was infected with malaria.</seg>
<seg id="112">So just as you would see an airport, imagine these were people, and the dog is going to go down and have a good sniff.</seg>
<seg id="113">And let's see if you can see when she senses the malaria, and if she senses the malaria.</seg>
<seg id="114">This is a really tough test for her in this very strange environment, so I'm going to hand it over now to Mark.</seg>
<seg id="115">There we go. I didn't know which pot that was in. Mark didn't know. This was a blind test, genuinely.</seg>
<seg id="116">Sarah, was that correct? Sarah: Yes.</seg>
<seg id="117">JL: That was correct. Well done, Freya. That is fantastic. Whew.</seg>
<seg id="118">That is really wonderful. Now Sarah is going to actually change the pots around a little bit, and she's going to take the one with malaria away, and we're just going to have four pots that are containing socks from children that had no malaria, so in theory, Freya should go down the line and not stop at all.</seg>
<seg id="119">And this is really important, because we also need to know people who are not infected, she needs to be able to do that.</seg>
<seg id="120">And this is a tough test.</seg>
<seg id="121">These socks have been in the freezer for a couple of years now, and this is a tiny bit of a sock as well.</seg>
<seg id="122">So imagine if this was a whole person, giving off a big signal.</seg>
<seg id="123">So this is really incredible. OK, over to you, Mark.</seg>
<seg id="124">Brilliant. Fantastic.</seg>
<seg id="125">Really super. Thank you so much, guys. Big round of applause for Freya, Mark and Sarah. Well done, guys.</seg>
<seg id="126">What a good girl. She's going to get a treat later. Fantastic.</seg>
<seg id="127">So you've just seen that for your own eyes.</seg>
<seg id="128">That was a real live demonstration. I was quite nervous about it.</seg>
<seg id="129">I'm so glad that it worked.</seg>
<seg id="130">But it is really incredible, and when we do this, what we find is that these dogs can correctly tell us when somebody is infected with malaria 81 percent of the time. It's incredible. 92 percent of the time, they can tell us correctly when somebody does not have an infection.</seg>
<seg id="131">And those numbers are actually above the criteria set by the World Health Organization for a diagnostic.</seg>
<seg id="132">So we really are looking at deploying dogs in countries, and particularly at ports of entry, to detect people who have malaria.</seg>
<seg id="133">This could be a reality.</seg>
<seg id="134">But we can't deploy dogs everywhere, and so what we're also looking to do and working on at the moment is the development of technology, wearable tech that would empower the individual to allow them to self-diagnose.</seg>
<seg id="135">Imagine a patch that you wear on the skin that would detect in your sweat when you're infected with malaria and change color.</seg>
<seg id="136">Or something a little more technical, perhaps: a smartwatch that would alert you when you're infected with malaria.</seg>
<seg id="137">And if we can do this digitally, and we can collect data, imagine the amount of data that we can collect on a global scale.</seg>
<seg id="138">This could completely revolutionize the way that we track the spread of diseases, the way that we target our control efforts and respond to disease outbreaks, ultimately helping to lead to the eradication of malaria, and even beyond malaria, for other diseases that we already know have a smell.</seg>
<seg id="139">If we can harness the power of nature to find out what those smells are, we could do this and make this a reality.</seg>
<seg id="140">Now, as scientists, we're tasked with coming up with new ideas, new concepts, new technologies to tackle some of the world's greatest problems, but what never ceases to amaze me is that often nature has already done this for us, and the answer... is right under our nose.</seg>
<seg id="141">Thank you.</seg>
</doc>
<doc docid="52468" genre="lectures">
<talkid>52468</talkid>
<seg id="1">Growing up in central Wisconsin, I spent a lot of time outside.</seg>
<seg id="2">In the spring, I'd smell the heady fragrance of lilacs.</seg>
<seg id="3">In the summer, I loved the electric glow of fireflies as they would zip around on muggy nights.</seg>
<seg id="4">In the fall, the bogs were brimming with the bright red of cranberries.</seg>
<seg id="5">Even winter had its charms, with the Christmassy bouquet emanating from pine trees.</seg>
<seg id="6">For me, nature has always been a source of wonder and inspiration.</seg>
<seg id="7">As I went on to graduate school in chemistry, and in later years, I came to better understand the natural world in molecular detail.</seg>
<seg id="8">All the things that I just mentioned, from the scents of lilacs and pines to the bright red of cranberries and the glow of fireflies, have at least one thing in common: they're manufactured by enzymes.</seg>
<seg id="9">As I said, I grew up in Wisconsin, so of course, I like cheese and the Green Bay Packers.</seg>
<seg id="10">But let's talk about cheese for a minute.</seg>
<seg id="11">For at least the last 7,000 years, humans have extracted a mixture of enzymes from the stomachs of cows and sheep and goats and added it to milk.</seg>
<seg id="12">This causes the milk to curdle -- it's part of the cheese-making process.</seg>
<seg id="13">The key enzyme in this mixture is called chymosin.</seg>
<seg id="14">I want to show you how that works.</seg>
<seg id="15">Right here, I've got two tubes, and I'm going to add chymosin to one of these. Just a second here.</seg>
<seg id="16">Now my son Anthony, who is eight years old, was very interested in helping me figure out a demo for the TED Talk, and so we were in the kitchen, we were slicing up pineapples, extracting enzymes from red potatoes and doing all kinds of demos in the kitchen.</seg>
<seg id="17">And in the end, though, we thought the chymosin demo was pretty cool.</seg>
<seg id="18">And so what's happening here is the chymosin is swimming around in the milk, and it's binding to a protein there called casein.</seg>
<seg id="19">What it does then is it clips the casein -- it's like a molecular scissors.</seg>
<seg id="20">It's that clipping action that causes the milk to curdle.</seg>
<seg id="21">So here we are in the kitchen, working on this. OK. So let me give this a quick zip.</seg>
<seg id="22">And then we'll set these to the side and let these simmer for a minute. OK.</seg>
<seg id="23">If DNA is the blueprint of life, enzymes are the laborers that carry out its instructions. An enzyme is a protein that's a catalyst, it speeds up or accelerates a chemical reaction, just as the chymosin over here is accelerating the curdling of the milk.</seg>
<seg id="24">But it's not just about cheese.</seg>
<seg id="25">While enzymes do play an important role in the foods that we eat, they also are involved in everything from the health of an infant to attacking the biggest environmental challenges we have today.</seg>
<seg id="26">The basic building blocks of enzymes are called amino acids.</seg>
<seg id="27">There are 20 common amino acids, and we typically designate them with single-letter abbreviations, so it's really an alphabet of amino acids.</seg>
<seg id="28">In an enzyme, these amino acids are strung together, like pearls on a necklace.</seg>
<seg id="29">And it's really the identity of the amino acids, which letters are in that necklace, and in what order they are, what they spell out, that gives an enzyme its unique properties and differentiates it from other enzymes.</seg>
<seg id="30">Now, this string of amino acids, this necklace, folds up into a higher-order structure.</seg>
<seg id="31">And if you were to zoom in at the molecular level and take a look at chymosin, which is the enzyme working over here, you would see it looks like this.</seg>
<seg id="32">It's all these strands and loops and helices and twists and turns, and it has to be in just this conformation to work properly.</seg>
<seg id="33">Nowadays, we can make enzymes in microbes, and that can be like a bacteria or a yeast, for example.</seg>
<seg id="34">And the way we do this is we get a piece of DNA that codes for an enzyme that we're interested in, we insert that into the microbe, and we let the microbe use its own machinery, its own wherewithal, to produce that enzyme for us.</seg>
<seg id="35">So if you wanted chymosin, you wouldn't need a calf, nowadays -- you could get this from a microbe.</seg>
<seg id="36">And what's even cooler, I think, is we can now dial in completely custom DNA sequences to make whatever enzymes we want, stuff that's not out there in nature.</seg>
<seg id="37">And, to me, what's really the fun part is trying to design an enzyme for a new application, arranging the atoms just so.</seg>
<seg id="38">The act of taking an enzyme from nature and playing with those amino acids, tinkering with those letters, putting some letters in, taking some letters out, maybe rearranging them a little bit, is a little bit like finding a book and editing a few chapters or changing the ending.</seg>
<seg id="39">In 2018, the Nobel prize in chemistry was given for the development of this approach, which is known as directed evolution.</seg>
<seg id="40">Nowadays, we can harness the powers of directed evolution to design enzymes for custom purposes, and one of these is designing enzymes for doing applications in new areas, like laundry.</seg>
<seg id="41">So just as enzymes in your body can help you to break down the food that you eat, enzymes in your laundry detergent can help you to break down the stains on your clothes.</seg>
<seg id="42">It turns out that about 90 percent of the energy that goes into doing the wash is from water heating.</seg>
<seg id="43">And that's for good reason -- the warmer water helps to get your clothes clean.</seg>
<seg id="44">But what if you were able to do the wash in cold water instead?</seg>
<seg id="45">You certainly would save some money, and in addition to that, according to some calculations done by Procter and Gamble, if all households in the US were to do the laundry in cold water, we would save the emissions of 32 metric tons of CO2 each year.</seg>
<seg id="46">That's a lot, that's about the equivalent of the carbon dioxide emitted by 6.3 million cars.</seg>
<seg id="47">So, how would we go about designing an enzyme to realize these changes?</seg>
<seg id="48">Enzymes didn't evolve to clean dirty laundry, much less in cold water.</seg>
<seg id="49">But we can go to nature, and we can find a starting point.</seg>
<seg id="50">We can find an enzyme that has some starting activity, some clay that we can work with.</seg>
<seg id="51">So this is an example of such an enzyme, right here on the screen.</seg>
<seg id="52">And we can start playing with those amino acids, as I said, putting some letters in, taking some letters out, rearranging those.</seg>
<seg id="53">And in doing so, we can generate thousands of enzymes.</seg>
<seg id="54">And we can take those enzymes, and we can test them in little plates like this.</seg>
<seg id="55">So this plate that I'm holding in my hands contains 96 wells, and in each well is a piece of fabric with a stain on it.</seg>
<seg id="56">And we can measure how well each of these enzymes are able to remove the stains from the pieces of fabric, and in that way see how well it's working.</seg>
<seg id="57">And we can do this using robotics, like you'll see in just a second on the screen.</seg>
<seg id="58">OK, so we do this, and it turns out that some of the enzymes are sort of in the ballpark of the starting enzyme.</seg>
<seg id="59">That's nothing to write home about.</seg>
<seg id="60">Some are worse, so we get rid of those.</seg>
<seg id="61">And then some are better.</seg>
<seg id="62">Those improved ones become our version 1.0s. Those are the enzymes that we want to carry forward, and we can repeat this cycle again and again.</seg>
<seg id="63">And it's the repetition of this cycle that lets us come up with a new enzyme, something that can do what we want.</seg>
<seg id="64">And after several cycles of this, we did come up with something new.</seg>
<seg id="65">So you can go to the supermarket today, and you can buy a laundry detergent that lets you do the wash in cold water because of enzymes like this here.</seg>
<seg id="66">And I want to show you how this one works too.</seg>
<seg id="67">So I've got two more tubes here, and these are both milk again.</seg>
<seg id="68">And let me show you, I've got one that I'm going to add this enzyme to and one that I'm going to add some water to.</seg>
<seg id="69">And that's the control, so nothing should happen in that tube.</seg>
<seg id="70">You might find it curious that I'm doing this with milk.</seg>
<seg id="71">But the reason that I'm doing this is because milk is just loaded with proteins, and it's very easy to see this enzyme working in a protein solution, because it's a master protein chopper, that's its job.</seg>
<seg id="72">So let me get this in here.</seg>
<seg id="73">And you know, as I said, it's a master protein chopper and what you can do is you can extrapolate what it's doing in this milk to what it would be doing in your laundry. So this is kind of a way to visualize what would be happening.</seg>
<seg id="74">OK, so those both went in.</seg>
<seg id="75">And I'm going to give this a quick zip as well.</seg>
<seg id="76">OK, so we'll let these sit over here with the chymosin sample, so I'm going to come back to those toward the end.</seg>
<seg id="77">Well, what's on the horizon for enzyme design?</seg>
<seg id="78">Certainly, it will get it faster -- there are now approaches for evolving enzymes that allow researchers to go through far more samples than I just showed you.</seg>
<seg id="79">And in addition to tinkering with natural enzymes, like we've been talking about, some scientists are now trying to design enzymes from scratch, using machine learning, an approach from artificial intelligence, to inform their enzyme designs.</seg>
<seg id="80">Still others are adding unnatural amino acids to the mix.</seg>
<seg id="81">We talked about the 20 natural amino acids, the common amino acids, before -- they're adding unnatural amino acids to make enzymes with properties unlike those that could be found in nature.</seg>
<seg id="82">That's a pretty neat area.</seg>
<seg id="83">How will designed enzymes affect you in years to come?</seg>
<seg id="84">Well, I want to focus on two areas: human health and the environment.</seg>
<seg id="85">Some pharmaceutical companies now have teams that are dedicated to designing enzymes to make drugs more efficiently and with fewer toxic catalysts.</seg>
<seg id="86">For example, Januvia, which is a medication to treat type 2 diabetes, is made partially with enzymes.</seg>
<seg id="87">The number of drugs made with enzymes is sure to grow in the future.</seg>
<seg id="88">In another area, there are certain disorders in which a single enzyme in a person's body doesn't work properly.</seg>
<seg id="89">An example of this is called phenylketonuria, or PKU for short.</seg>
<seg id="90">People with PKU are unable to properly metabolize or digest phenylalanine, which is one of the 20 common amino acids that we've been talking about.</seg>
<seg id="91">The consequence of ingesting phenylalanine for people with PKU is that they are subject to permanent intellectual disabilities, so it's a scary thing to have.</seg>
<seg id="92">A lot of you.</seg>
<seg id="93">So may be familiar with PKUs, because all infants in the US are required to be tested for PKU.</seg>
<seg id="94">I remember when Anthony, my son, had his heel pricked to test for it.</seg>
<seg id="95">The big challenge with this is: What do you eat?</seg>
<seg id="96">Phenylalanine is in so many foods, it's incredibly hard to avoid.</seg>
<seg id="97">Now, Anthony has a nut allergy, and I thought that was tough, but PKU's on another level of toughness.</seg>
<seg id="98">However, new enzymes may soon enable PKU patients to eat whatever they want.</seg>
<seg id="99">Recently, the FDA approved an enzyme designed to treat PKU.</seg>
<seg id="100">This is big news for patients, and it's actually very big news for the field of enzyme-replacement therapy more generally, because there are other targets out there where this would be a good approach.</seg>
<seg id="101">So that was a little bit about health. Now I'm going to move to the environment. When I read about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch -- by the way, that's, like, this huge island of plastic, somewhere between California and Hawaii -- and about microplastics pretty much everywhere, it's upsetting.</seg>
<seg id="102">Plastics aren't going away anytime soon.</seg>
<seg id="103">But enzymes may help us in this area as well.</seg>
<seg id="104">Recently, bacteria producing plastic-degrading enzymes were discovered.</seg>
<seg id="105">Efforts are already underway to design improved versions of these enzymes.</seg>
<seg id="106">At the same time, there are enzymes that have been discovered and that are being optimized to make non-petroleum-derived biodegradable plastics.</seg>
<seg id="107">Enzymes may also offer some help in capturing greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide.</seg>
<seg id="108">Now, there is no doubt, these are major challenges, and none of them are easy.</seg>
<seg id="109">But our ability to harness enzymes may help us to tackle these in the future, so I think that's another area to be looking forward.</seg>
<seg id="110">So now I'm going to get back to the demo -- this is the fun part.</seg>
<seg id="111">So we'll start with the chymosin samples.</seg>
<seg id="112">So let me get these over here.</seg>
<seg id="113">And you can see here, this is the one that got the water, so nothing should happen to this milk.</seg>
<seg id="114">This is the one that got the chymosin.</seg>
<seg id="115">So you can see that it totally clarified up here.</seg>
<seg id="116">There's all this curdled stuff, that's cheese, we just made cheese in the last few minutes.</seg>
<seg id="117">So this is that reaction that people have been doing for thousands and thousands of years.</seg>
<seg id="118">I'm thinking about doing this one at our next Kids to Work Day demo but they can be a tough crowd, so we'll see.</seg>
<seg id="119">And then the other one I want to look at is this one.</seg>
<seg id="120">So this is the enzyme for doing your laundry.</seg>
<seg id="121">And you can see that it's different than the one that has the water added.</seg>
<seg id="122">It's kind of clarifying, and that's just what you want for an enzyme in your laundry, because you want to be able to have an enzyme that can be a protein chowhound, just chew them up, because you're going to get different protein stains on your clothes, like chocolate milk or grass stains, for example, and something like this is going to help you get them off.</seg>
<seg id="123">And this is also going to be the thing that allows you to do the wash in cold water, reduce your carbon footprint and save you some money.</seg>
<seg id="124">Well, we've come a long way, considering this 7,000-year journey from enzymes in cheese making to the present day and enzyme design.</seg>
<seg id="125">We're really at a creative crossroads, and with enzymes, can edit what nature wrote or write our own stories with amino acids.</seg>
<seg id="126">So next time you're outdoors on a muggy night and you see a firefly, I hope you think of enzymes.</seg>
<seg id="127">They're doing amazing things for us today.</seg>
<seg id="128">And by design, they could be doing even more amazing things tomorrow.</seg>
<seg id="129">Thank you.</seg>
</doc>
<doc docid="53582" genre="lectures">
<talkid>53582</talkid>
<seg id="1">So, on April 23 of 2013, the Associated Press put out the following tweet on Twitter. It said, "Breaking news: Two explosions at the White House and Barack Obama has been injured." This tweet was retweeted 4,000 times in less than five minutes, and it went viral thereafter.</seg>
<seg id="2">Now, this tweet wasn't real news put out by the Associated Press. In fact it was false news, or fake news, that was propagated by Syrian hackers that had infiltrated the Associated Press Twitter handle.</seg>
<seg id="3">Their purpose was to disrupt society, but they disrupted much more.</seg>
<seg id="4">Because automated trading algorithms immediately seized on the sentiment on this tweet, and began trading based on the potential that the president of the United States had been injured or killed in this explosion.</seg>
<seg id="5">And as they started tweeting, they immediately sent the stock market crashing, wiping out 140 billion dollars in equity value in a single day.</seg>
<seg id="6">Robert Mueller, special counsel prosecutor in the United States, issued indictments against three Russian companies and 13 Russian individuals on a conspiracy to defraud the United States by meddling in the 2016 presidential election.</seg>
<seg id="7">And what this indictment tells as a story is the story of the Internet Research Agency, the shadowy arm of the Kremlin on social media.</seg>
<seg id="8">During the presidential election alone, the Internet Agency's efforts reached 126 million people on Facebook in the United States, issued three million individual tweets and 43 hours' worth of YouTube content.</seg>
<seg id="9">All of which was fake -- misinformation designed to sow discord in the US presidential election.</seg>
<seg id="10">A recent study by Oxford University showed that in the recent Swedish elections, one third of all of the information spreading on social media about the election was fake or misinformation.</seg>
<seg id="11">In addition, these types of social-media misinformation campaigns can spread what has been called "genocidal propaganda," for instance against the Rohingya in Burma, triggering mob killings in India.</seg>
<seg id="12">We studied fake news and began studying it before it was a popular term.</seg>
<seg id="13">And we recently published the largest-ever longitudinal study of the spread of fake news online on the cover of "Science" in March of this year.</seg>
<seg id="14">We studied all of the verified true and false news stories that ever spread on Twitter, from its inception in 2006 to 2017.</seg>
<seg id="15">And when we studied this information, we studied verified news stories that were verified by six independent fact-checking organizations.</seg>
<seg id="16">So we knew which stories were true and which stories were false.</seg>
<seg id="17">We can measure their diffusion, the speed of their diffusion, the depth and breadth of their diffusion, how many people become entangled in this information cascade and so on.</seg>
<seg id="18">And what we did in this paper was we compared the spread of true news to the spread of false news.</seg>
<seg id="19">And here's what we found.</seg>
<seg id="20">We found that false news diffused further, faster, deeper and more broadly than the truth in every category of information that we studied, sometimes by an order of magnitude.</seg>
<seg id="21">And in fact, false political news was the most viral.</seg>
<seg id="22">It diffused further, faster, deeper and more broadly than any other type of false news.</seg>
<seg id="23">When we saw this, we were at once worried but also curious. Why? Why does false news travel so much further, faster, deeper and more broadly than the truth?</seg>
<seg id="24">The first hypothesis that we came up with was, "Well, maybe people who spread false news have more followers or follow more people, or tweet more often, or maybe they're more often 'verified' users of Twitter, with more credibility, or maybe they've been on Twitter longer." So we checked each one of these in turn.</seg>
<seg id="25">And what we found was exactly the opposite.</seg>
<seg id="26">False-news spreaders had fewer followers, followed fewer people, were less active, less often "verified" and had been on Twitter for a shorter period of time.</seg>
<seg id="27">And yet, false news was 70 percent more likely to be retweeted than the truth, controlling for all of these and many other factors.</seg>
<seg id="28">So we had to come up with other explanations.</seg>
<seg id="29">And we devised what we called a "novelty hypothesis." So if you read the literature, it is well known that human attention is drawn to novelty, things that are new in the environment.</seg>
<seg id="30">And if you read the sociology literature, you know that we like to share novel information.</seg>
<seg id="31">It makes us seem like we have access to inside information, and we gain in status by spreading this kind of information.</seg>
<seg id="32">So what we did was we measured the novelty of an incoming true or false tweet, compared to the corpus of what that individual had seen in the 60 days prior on Twitter.</seg>
<seg id="33">But that wasn't enough, because we thought to ourselves, "Well, maybe false news is more novel in an information-theoretic sense, but maybe people don't perceive it as more novel."</seg>
<seg id="34">So to understand people's perceptions of false news, we looked at the information and the sentiment contained in the replies to true and false tweets.</seg>
<seg id="35">And what we found was that across a bunch of different measures of sentiment -- surprise, disgust, fear, sadness, anticipation, joy and trust -- false news exhibited significantly more surprise and disgust in the replies to false tweets.</seg>
<seg id="36">And true news exhibited significantly more anticipation, joy and trust in reply to true tweets.</seg>
<seg id="37">The surprise corroborates our novelty hypothesis.</seg>
<seg id="38">This is new and surprising, and so we're more likely to share it.</seg>
<seg id="39">At the same time, there was congressional testimony in front of both houses of Congress in the United States, looking at the role of bots in the spread of misinformation.</seg>
<seg id="40">So we looked at this too -- we used multiple sophisticated bot-detection algorithms to find the bots in our data and to pull them out.</seg>
<seg id="41">So we pulled them out, we put them back in and we compared what happens to our measurement.</seg>
<seg id="42">And what we found was that, yes indeed, bots were accelerating the spread of false news online, but they were accelerating the spread of true news at approximately the same rate.</seg>
<seg id="43">Which means bots are not responsible for the differential diffusion of truth and falsity online.</seg>
<seg id="44">We can't abdicate that responsibility, because we, humans, are responsible for that spread.</seg>
<seg id="45">Now, everything that I have told you so far, unfortunately for all of us, is the good news.</seg>
<seg id="46">The reason is because it's about to get a whole lot worse.</seg>
<seg id="47">And two specific technologies are going to make it worse.</seg>
<seg id="48">We are going to see the rise of a tremendous wave of synthetic media.</seg>
<seg id="49">Fake video, fake audio that is very convincing to the human eye.</seg>
<seg id="50">And this will powered by two technologies.</seg>
<seg id="51">The first of these is known as "generative adversarial networks." This is a machine-learning model with two networks: a discriminator, whose job it is to determine whether something is true or false, and a generator, whose job it is to generate synthetic media.</seg>
<seg id="52">So the synthetic generator generates synthetic video or audio, and the discriminator tries to tell, "Is this real or is this fake?" And in fact, it is the job of the generator to maximize the likelihood that it will fool the discriminator into thinking the synthetic video and audio that it is creating is actually true.</seg>
<seg id="53">Imagine a machine in a hyperloop, trying to get better and better at fooling us.</seg>
<seg id="54">This, combined with the second technology, which is essentially the democratization of artificial intelligence to the people, the ability for anyone, without any background in artificial intelligence or machine learning, to deploy these kinds of algorithms to generate synthetic media makes it ultimately so much easier to create videos.</seg>
<seg id="55">The White House issued a false, doctored video of a journalist interacting with an intern who was trying to take his microphone.</seg>
<seg id="56">They removed frames from this video in order to make his actions seem more punchy.</seg>
<seg id="57">And when videographers and stuntmen and women were interviewed about this type of technique, they said, "Yes, we use this in the movies all the time to make our punches and kicks look more choppy and more aggressive." They then put out this video and partly used it as justification to revoke Jim Acosta, the reporter's, press pass from the White House.</seg>
<seg id="58">And CNN had to sue to have that press pass reinstated.</seg>
<seg id="59">There are about five different paths that I can think of that we can follow to try and address some of these very difficult problems today.</seg>
<seg id="60">Each one of them has promise, but each one of them has its own challenges.</seg>
<seg id="61">The first one is labeling.</seg>
<seg id="62">Think about it this way: when you go to the grocery store to buy food to consume, it's extensively labeled.</seg>
<seg id="63">You know how many calories it has, how much fat it contains -- and yet when we consume information, we have no labels whatsoever.</seg>
<seg id="64">What is contained in this information?</seg>
<seg id="65">Is the source credible?</seg>
<seg id="66">Where is this information gathered from?</seg>
<seg id="67">We have none of that information when we are consuming information.</seg>
<seg id="68">That is a potential avenue, but it comes with its challenges.</seg>
<seg id="69">For instance, who gets to decide, in society, what's true and what's false?</seg>
<seg id="70">Is it the governments? Is it Facebook? Is it an independent consortium of fact-checkers?</seg>
<seg id="71">And who's checking the fact-checkers?</seg>
<seg id="72">Another potential avenue is incentives.</seg>
<seg id="73">We know that during the US presidential election there was a wave of misinformation that came from Macedonia that didn't have any political motive but instead had an economic motive.</seg>
<seg id="74">And this economic motive existed, because false news travels so much farther, faster and more deeply than the truth, and you can earn advertising dollars as you garner eyeballs and attention with this type of information.</seg>
<seg id="75">But if we can depress the spread of this information, perhaps it would reduce the economic incentive to produce it at all in the first place.</seg>
<seg id="76">Third, we can think about regulation, and certainly, we should think about this option.</seg>
<seg id="77">In the United States, currently, we are exploring what might happen if Facebook and others are regulated.</seg>
<seg id="78">While we should consider things like regulating political speech, labeling the fact that it's political speech, making sure foreign actors can't fund political speech, it also has its own dangers.</seg>
<seg id="79">For instance, Malaysia just instituted a six-year prison sentence for anyone found spreading misinformation.</seg>
<seg id="80">And in authoritarian regimes, these kinds of policies can be used to suppress minority opinions and to continue to extend repression.</seg>
<seg id="81">The fourth possible option is transparency.</seg>
<seg id="82">We want to know how do Facebook's algorithms work.</seg>
<seg id="83">How does the data combine with the algorithms to produce the outcomes that we see?</seg>
<seg id="84">We want them to open the kimono and show us exactly the inner workings of how Facebook is working.</seg>
<seg id="85">And if we want to know social media's effect on society, we need scientists, researchers and others to have access to this kind of information.</seg>
<seg id="86">But at the same time, we are asking Facebook to lock everything down, to keep all of the data secure.</seg>
<seg id="87">So, Facebook and the other social media platforms are facing what I call a transparency paradox. We are asking them, at the same time, to be open and transparent and, simultaneously secure.</seg>
<seg id="88">This is a very difficult needle to thread, but they will need to thread this needle if we are to achieve the promise of social technologies while avoiding their peril.</seg>
<seg id="89">The final thing that we could think about is algorithms and machine learning.</seg>
<seg id="90">Technology devised to root out and understand fake news, how it spreads, and to try and dampen its flow.</seg>
<seg id="91">Humans have to be in the loop of this technology, because we can never escape that underlying any technological solution or approach is a fundamental ethical and philosophical question about how do we define truth and falsity, to whom do we give the power to define truth and falsity and which opinions are legitimate, which type of speech should be allowed and so on.</seg>
<seg id="92">Technology is not a solution for that.</seg>
<seg id="93">Ethics and philosophy is a solution for that.</seg>
<seg id="94">Nearly every theory of human decision making, human cooperation and human coordination has some sense of the truth at its core.</seg>
<seg id="95">But with the rise of fake news, the rise of fake video, the rise of fake audio, we are teetering on the brink of the end of reality, where we cannot tell what is real from what is fake.</seg>
<seg id="96">And that's potentially incredibly dangerous.</seg>
<seg id="97">We have to be vigilant in defending the truth against misinformation.</seg>
<seg id="98">With our technologies, with our policies and, perhaps most importantly, with our own individual responsibilities, decisions, behaviors and actions.</seg>
<seg id="99">Thank you very much.</seg>
</doc>
<doc docid="60405" genre="lectures">
<talkid>60405</talkid>
<seg id="1">When I was approximately nine weeks pregnant with my first child, I found out I'm a carrier for a fatal genetic disorder called Tay-Sachs disease.</seg>
<seg id="2">What this means is that one of the two copies of chromosome number 15 that I have in each of my cells has a genetic mutation.</seg>
<seg id="3">Because I still have one normal copy of this gene, the mutation doesn't affect me.</seg>
<seg id="4">But if a baby inherits this mutation from both parents, if both copies of this particular gene don't function properly, it results in Tay-Sachs, an incurable disease that progressively shuts down the central nervous system and causes death by age five.</seg>
<seg id="5">For many pregnant women, this news might produce a full-on panic.</seg>
<seg id="6">But I knew something that helped keep me calm when I heard this bombshell about my own biology.</seg>
<seg id="7">I knew that my husband, whose ancestry isn't Eastern European Jewish like mine, had a very low likelihood of also being a carrier for the Tay-Sachs mutation.</seg>
<seg id="8">While the frequency of heterozygotes, individuals who have one normal copy of the gene and one mutated copy, is about one out of 27 people among Jews of Ashkenazi descent, like me, in most populations, only one in about 300 people carry the Tay-Sachs mutation.</seg>
<seg id="9">Thankfully, it turned out I was right not to worry too much.</seg>
<seg id="10">My husband isn't a carrier, and we now have two beautiful and healthy children.</seg>
<seg id="11">As I said, because of my Jewish background, I was aware of the unusually high rate of Tay-Sachs in the Ashkenazi population. But it wasn't until a few years after my daughter was born when I created and taught a seminar in evolutionary medicine at Harvard, that I thought to ask, and discovered a possible answer to, the question "why?" The process of evolution by natural selection typically eliminates harmful mutations.</seg>
<seg id="12">So how did this defective gene persist at all?</seg>
<seg id="13">And why is it found at such a high frequency within this particular population?</seg>
<seg id="14">The perspective of evolutionary medicine offers valuable insight, because it examines how and why humans' evolutionary past has left our bodies vulnerable to diseases and other problems today.</seg>
<seg id="15">In doing so, it demonstrates that natural selection doesn't always make our bodies better.</seg>
<seg id="16">It can't necessarily.</seg>
<seg id="17">But as I hope to illustrate with my own story, understanding the implications of your evolutionary past can help enrich your personal health.</seg>
<seg id="18">When I started investigating Tay-Sachs using an evolutionary perspective, I came across an intriguing hypothesis.</seg>
<seg id="19">The unusually high rate of the Tay-Sachs mutation in Ashkenazi Jews today may relate to advantages the mutation gave this population in the past.</seg>
<seg id="20">Now I'm sure some of you are thinking, "I'm sorry, did you just suggest that this disease-causing mutation had beneficial effects?" Yeah, I did.</seg>
<seg id="21">Certainly not for individuals who inherited two copies of the mutation and had Tay-Sachs.</seg>
<seg id="22">But under certain circumstances, people like me, who had only one faulty gene copy, may have been more likely to survive, reproduce and pass on their genetic material, including that mutated gene.</seg>
<seg id="23">This idea that there can be circumstances in which heterozygotes are better off might sound familiar to some of you.</seg>
<seg id="24">Evolutionary biologists call this phenomenon heterozygote advantage.</seg>
<seg id="25">And it explains, for example, why carriers of sickle cell anemia are more common among some African and Asian populations or those with ancestry from these tropical regions.</seg>
<seg id="26">In these geographic regions, malaria poses significant risks to health.</seg>
<seg id="27">The parasite that causes malaria, though, can only complete its life cycle in normal, round red blood cells.</seg>
<seg id="28">By changing the shape of a person's red blood cells, the sickle cell mutation confers protection against malaria.</seg>
<seg id="29">People with the mutation aren't less likely to get bitten by the mosquitoes that transmit the disease, but they are less likely to get sick or die as a result.</seg>
<seg id="30">Being a carrier for sickle cell anemia is therefore the best possible genetic option in a malarial environment.</seg>
<seg id="31">Carriers are less susceptible to malaria, because they make some sickled red blood cells, but they make enough normal red blood cells that they aren't negatively affected by sickle cell anemia.</seg>
<seg id="32">Now in my case, the defective gene I carry won't protect me against malaria.</seg>
<seg id="33">But the unusual prevalence of the Tay-Sachs mutation in Ashkenazi populations may be another example of heterozygote advantage.</seg>
<seg id="34">In this case, increasing resistance to tuberculosis.</seg>
<seg id="35">The first hint of a possible relationship between Tay-Sachs and tuberculosis came in the 1970s, when researchers published data showing that among the Eastern European-born grandparents of a sample of American Ashkenazi children born with Tay-Sachs, tuberculosis was an exceedingly rare cause of death.</seg>
<seg id="36">In fact, only one out of these 306 grandparents had died of TB, despite the fact that in the early 20th century, TB caused up to 20 percent of deaths in large Eastern European cities.</seg>
<seg id="37">Now on the one hand, these results weren't surprising.</seg>
<seg id="38">People had already recognized that while Jews and non-Jews in Europe had been equally likely to contract TB during this time, the death rate among non-Jews was twice as high.</seg>
<seg id="39">But the hypothesis that these Ashkenazi grandparents had been less likely to die of TB specifically because at least some of them were Tay-Sachs carriers was novel and compelling.</seg>
<seg id="40">The data hinted that the persistence of the Tay-Sachs mutation among Ashkenazi Jews might be explained by the benefits of being a carrier in an environment where tuberculosis was prevalent.</seg>
<seg id="41">You'll notice, though, that this explanation only fills in part of the puzzle.</seg>
<seg id="42">Even if the Tay-Sachs mutation persisted because carriers were more likely to survive, reproduce and pass on their genetic material, why did this resistance mechanism proliferate among the Ashkenazi population in particular?</seg>
<seg id="43">One possibility is that the genes and health of Eastern European Jews were affected not simply by geography but also by historical and cultural factors.</seg>
<seg id="44">At various points in history this population was forced to live in crowded urban ghettos with poor sanitation. Ideal conditions for the tuberculosis bacterium to thrive.</seg>
<seg id="45">In these environments, where TB posed an especially high threat, those individuals who were not carriers of any genetic protection would have been more likely to die.</seg>
<seg id="46">This winnowing effect together with a strong cultural predilection for marrying and reproducing only within the Ashkenazi community, would have amplified the relative frequency of carriers, boosting TB resistance but increasing the incidence of Tay-Sachs as an unfortunate side effect.</seg>
<seg id="47">Studies from the 1980s support this idea.</seg>
<seg id="48">The segment of the American Jewish population that had the highest frequency of Tay-Sachs carriers traced their descent to those European countries where the incidence of TB was highest.</seg>
<seg id="49">The benefits of being a Tay-Sachs carrier were highest in those places where the risk of death due to TB was greatest.</seg>
<seg id="50">And while it was unclear in the 1970s or '80s how exactly the Tay-Sachs mutation offered protection against TB, recent work has identified how the mutation increases cellular defenses against the bacterium.</seg>
<seg id="51">So heterozygote advantage can help explain why problematic versions of genes persist at high frequencies in certain populations.</seg>
<seg id="52">But this is only one of the contributions evolutionary medicine can make in helping us understand human health.</seg>
<seg id="53">As I mentioned earlier, this field challenges the notion that our bodies should have gotten better over time.</seg>
<seg id="54">An idea that often stems from a misconception of how evolution works.</seg>
<seg id="55">In a nutshell, there are three basic reasons why human bodies, including yours and mine, remain vulnerable to diseases and other health problems today.</seg>
<seg id="56">Natural selection acts slowly, there are limitations to the changes it can make and it optimizes for reproductive success, not health.</seg>
<seg id="57">The way the pace of natural selection affects human health is probably most obvious in people's relationship with infectious pathogens.</seg>
<seg id="58">We're in a constant arms race with bacteria and viruses.</seg>
<seg id="59">Our immune system is continuously evolving to limit their ability to infect, and they are continuously developing ways to outmaneuver our defenses.</seg>
<seg id="60">And our species is at a distinct disadvantage due to our long lives and slow reproduction.</seg>
<seg id="61">In the time it takes us to evolve one mechanism of resistance, a pathogenic species will go through millions of generations, giving it ample time to evolve, so it can continue using our bodies as a host.</seg>
<seg id="62">Now what does it mean that there are limitations to the changes natural selection can make?</seg>
<seg id="63">Again, my examples of heterozygote advantage offer a useful illustration.</seg>
<seg id="64">In terms of resisting TB and malaria, the physiological effects of the Tay-Sachs and sickle cell anemia mutations are good.</seg>
<seg id="65">Taken to their extremes, though, they cause significant problems.</seg>
<seg id="66">This delicate balance highlights the constraints inherent in the human body, and the fact that the evolutionary process must work with the materials already available.</seg>
<seg id="67">In many instances, a change that improves survival or reproduction in one sense may have cascading effects that carry their own risk.</seg>
<seg id="68">Evolution isn't an engineer that starts from scratch to create optimal solutions to individual problems.</seg>
<seg id="69">Evolution is all about compromise.</seg>
<seg id="70">It's also important to remember, when considering our bodies' vulnerabilities, that from an evolutionary perspective, health isn't the most important currency. Reproduction is. Success is measured not by how healthy an individual is, or by how long she lives, but by how many copies of her genes she passes to the next generation.</seg>
<seg id="71">This explains why a mutation like the one that causes Huntington's disease, another degenerative neurological disorder, hasn't been eliminated by natural selection.</seg>
<seg id="72">The mutation's detrimental effects usually don't appear until after the typical age of reproduction, when affected individuals have already passed on their genes.</seg>
<seg id="73">As a whole, the biomedical community focuses on proximate explanations and uses them to shape treatment approaches.</seg>
<seg id="74">Proximate explanations for health conditions consider the immediate factors: What's going on inside someone's body right now that caused a particular problem.</seg>
<seg id="75">Nearsightedness, for example, is usually the result of changes to the shape of the eye and can be easily corrected with glasses.</seg>
<seg id="76">But as with the genetic conditions I've discussed, a proximate explanation only provides part of the bigger picture.</seg>
<seg id="77">Adopting an evolutionary perspective to consider the broader question of why do we have this problem to begin with -- what evolutionary medicine calls the ultimate perspective -- can give us insight into nonimmediate factors that affect our health.</seg>
<seg id="78">This is crucial, because it can suggest ways by which you can mitigate your own risk or that of friends and family.</seg>
<seg id="79">In the case of nearsightedness, some research suggests that one reason it's becoming more common in some populations is that many people today, including most of us in this room, spend far more time reading, writing and engaging with various types of screen than we do outside, interacting with the world on a bigger scale.</seg>
<seg id="80">In evolutionary terms, this is a recent change.</seg>
<seg id="81">For most of human evolutionary history, people used their vision across a broader landscape, spending more time in activities like hunting and gathering.</seg>
<seg id="82">The increase in recent years in what's termed "near work," focusing intensely on objects directly in front of us for long periods of time, strains our eyes differently and affects the physical shape of the eye.</seg>
<seg id="83">When we put all these pieces together, this ultimate explanation for nearsightedness -- that environmental and behavioral change impact the way we use our eyes -- helps us better understand the proximate cause.</seg>
<seg id="84">And an inescapable conclusion emerges -- my mother was right, I probably should have spent a little less time with my nose in a book.</seg>
<seg id="85">This is just one of many possible examples.</seg>
<seg id="86">So the next time you or a loved one are faced with a health challenge, whether it's obesity or diabetes, an autoimmune disorder, or a knee or back injury, I encourage you to think about what an ultimate perspective can contribute.</seg>
<seg id="87">Understanding that your health is affected not just by what's going on in your body right now, but also by your genetic inheritance, culture and history, can help you make more informed decisions about predispositions, risks and treatments.</seg>
<seg id="88">As for me, I won't claim that an evolutionary medicine perspective has always directly influenced my decisions, such as my choice of spouse.</seg>
<seg id="89">It turned out, though, that not following the traditional practice of marrying within the Jewish community ultimately worked in my favor genetically, reducing the odds of me having a baby with Tay-Sachs.</seg>
<seg id="90">It's a great example of why not every set of Ashkenazi parents should hope that their daughter marries "a nice Jewish boy."</seg>
<seg id="91">Woo-hoo!</seg>
<seg id="92">More importantly, though, the experience of learning about my own genes taught me to think differently about health in the long run, and I hope sharing my story inspires you to do the same.</seg>
<seg id="93">Thank you.</seg>
</doc>
<doc docid="63241" genre="lectures">
<talkid>63241</talkid>
<seg id="1">Memory is such an everyday thing that we almost take it for granted.</seg>
<seg id="2">We all remember what we had for breakfast this morning or what we did last weekend.</seg>
<seg id="3">It's only when memory starts to fail that we appreciate just how amazing it is and how much we allow our past experiences to define us.</seg>
<seg id="4">But memory is not always a good thing.</seg>
<seg id="5">As the American poet and clergyman John Lancaster Spalding once said, "As memory may be a paradise from which we cannot be driven, it may also be a hell from which we cannot escape." Many of us experience chapters of our lives that we would prefer to never have happened.</seg>
<seg id="6">It is estimated that nearly 90 percent of us will experience some sort of traumatic event during our lifetimes.</seg>
<seg id="7">Many of us will suffer acutely following these events and then recover, maybe even become better people because of those experiences.</seg>
<seg id="8">But some events are so extreme that many -- up to half of those who survive sexual violence, for example -- will go on to develop post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD.</seg>
<seg id="9">PTSD is a debilitating mental health condition characterized by symptoms such as intense fear and anxiety and flashbacks of the traumatic event.</seg>
<seg id="10">These symptoms have a huge impact on a person's quality of life and are often triggered by particular situations or cues in that person's environment.</seg>
<seg id="11">The responses to those cues may have been adaptive when they were first learned -- fear and diving for cover in a war zone, for example -- but in PTSD, they continue to control behavior when it's no longer appropriate.</seg>
<seg id="12">If a combat veteran returns home and is diving for cover when he or she hears a car backfiring or can't leave their own home because of intense anxiety, then the responses to those cues, those memories, have become what we would refer to as maladaptive.</seg>
<seg id="13">In this way, we can think of PTSD as being a disorder of maladaptive memory.</seg>
<seg id="14">Now, I should stop myself here, because I'm talking about memory as if it's a single thing. It isn't. There are many different types of memory, and these depend upon different circuits and regions within the brain.</seg>
<seg id="15">As you can see, there are two major distinctions in our types of memory.</seg>
<seg id="16">There are those memories that we're consciously aware of, where we know we know and that we can pass on in words.</seg>
<seg id="17">This would include memories for facts and events.</seg>
<seg id="18">Because we can declare these memories, we refer to these as declarative memories.</seg>
<seg id="19">The other type of memory is non-declarative.</seg>
<seg id="20">These are memories where we often don't have conscious access to the content of those memories and that we can't pass on in words.</seg>
<seg id="21">The classic example of a non-declarative memory is the motor skill for riding a bike.</seg>
<seg id="22">Now, this being Cambridge, the odds are that you can ride a bike.</seg>
<seg id="23">You know what you're doing on two wheels.</seg>
<seg id="24">But if I asked you to write me a list of instructions that would teach me how to ride a bike, as my four-year-old son did when we bought him a bike for his last birthday, you would really struggle to do that.</seg>
<seg id="25">How should you sit on the bike so you're balanced?</seg>
<seg id="26">How fast do you need to pedal so you're stable?</seg>
<seg id="27">If a gust of wind comes at you, which muscles should you tense and by how much so that you don't get blown off?</seg>
<seg id="28">I'll be staggered if you can give the answers to those questions.</seg>
<seg id="29">But if you can ride a bike, you do have the answers, you're just not consciously aware of them.</seg>
<seg id="30">Getting back to PTSD, another type of non-declarative memory is emotional memory.</seg>
<seg id="31">Now, this has a specific meaning in psychology and refers to our ability to learn about cues in our environment and their emotional and motivational significance.</seg>
<seg id="32">What do I mean by that?</seg>
<seg id="33">Well, think of a cue like the smell of baking bread, or a more abstract cue like a 20-pound note.</seg>
<seg id="34">Because these cues have been pegged with good things in the past, we like them and we approach them.</seg>
<seg id="35">Other cues, like the buzzing of a wasp, elicit very negative emotions and quite dramatic avoidance behavior in some people.</seg>
<seg id="36">Now, I hate wasps. I can tell you that fact.</seg>
<seg id="37">But what I can't give you are the non-declarative emotional memories for how I react when there's a wasp nearby.</seg>
<seg id="38">I can't give you the racing heart, the sweaty palms, that sense of rising panic.</seg>
<seg id="39">I can describe them to you, but I can't give them to you.</seg>
<seg id="40">Now, importantly, from the perspective of PTSD, stress has very different effects on declarative and non-declarative memories and the brain circuits and regions supporting them.</seg>
<seg id="41">Emotional memory is supported by a small almond-shaped structure called the amygdala and its connections.</seg>
<seg id="42">Declarative memory, especially the what, where and when of event memory, is supported by a seahorse-shaped region of the brain called the hippocampus.</seg>
<seg id="43">The extreme levels of stress experienced during trauma have very different effects on these two structures.</seg>
<seg id="44">As you can see, as you increase a person's level of stress from not stressful to slightly stressful, the hippocampus, acting to support the event memory, increases in its activity and works better to support the storage of that declarative memory.</seg>
<seg id="45">But as you increase to moderately stressful, intensely stressful and then extremely stressful, as would be found in trauma, the hippocampus effectively shuts down.</seg>
<seg id="46">This means that under the high levels of stress hormones that are experienced during trauma, we are not storing the details, the specific details of what, where and when.</seg>
<seg id="47">Now, while stress is doing that to the hippocampus, look at what it does to the amygdala, that structure important for the emotional, non-declarative memory.</seg>
<seg id="48">Its activity gets stronger and stronger.</seg>
<seg id="49">So what this leaves us with in PTSD is an overly strong emotional -- in this case fear -- memory that is not tied to a specific time or place, because the hippocampus is not storing what, where and when.</seg>
<seg id="50">In this way, these cues can control behavior when it's no longer appropriate, and that's how they become maladaptive.</seg>
<seg id="51">So if we know that PTSD is due to maladaptive memories, can we use that knowledge to improve treatment outcomes for patients with PTSD?</seg>
<seg id="52">A radical new approach being developed to treat post-traumatic stress disorder aims to destroy those maladaptive emotional memories that underlie the disorder.</seg>
<seg id="53">This approach has only been considered a possibility because of the profound changes in our understanding of memory in recent years.</seg>
<seg id="54">Traditionally, it was thought that making a memory was like writing in a notebook in pen: once the ink had dried, you couldn't change the information.</seg>
<seg id="55">It was thought that all those structural changes that happen in the brain to support the storage of memory were finished within about six hours, and after that, they were permanent.</seg>
<seg id="56">This is known as the consolidation view.</seg>
<seg id="57">However, more recent research suggests that making a memory is actually more like writing in a word processor.</seg>
<seg id="58">We initially make the memory and then we save it or store it.</seg>
<seg id="59">But under the right conditions, we can edit that memory.</seg>
<seg id="60">This reconsolidation view suggests that those structural changes that happen in the brain to support memory can be undone, even for old memories.</seg>
<seg id="61">Now, this editing process isn't happening all the time.</seg>
<seg id="62">It only happens under very specific conditions of memory retrieval.</seg>
<seg id="63">So let's consider memory retrieval as being recalling the memory or, like, opening the file.</seg>
<seg id="64">Quite often, we are simply retrieving the memory.</seg>
<seg id="65">We're opening the file as read-only.</seg>
<seg id="66">But under the right conditions, we can open that file in edit mode, and then we can change the information.</seg>
<seg id="67">In theory, we could delete the content of that file, and when we press save, that is how the file -- the memory -- persists.</seg>
<seg id="68">Not only does this reconsolidation view allow us to account for some of the quirks of memory, like how we all sometimes misremember the past, it also gives us a way to destroy those maladaptive fear memories that underlie PTSD.</seg>
<seg id="69">All we would need would be two things: a way of making the memory unstable -- opening that file in edit mode -- and a way to delete the information.</seg>
<seg id="70">We've made the most progress with working out how to delete the information.</seg>
<seg id="71">It was found fairly early on that a drug widely prescribed to control blood pressure in humans -- a beta-blocker called Propranolol -- could be used to prevent the reconsolidation of fear memories in rats.</seg>
<seg id="72">If Propranolol was given while the memory was in edit mode, rats behaved as if they were no longer afraid of a frightening trigger cue.</seg>
<seg id="73">It was as if they had never learned to be afraid of that cue.</seg>
<seg id="74">And this was with a drug that was safe for use in humans.</seg>
<seg id="75">Now, not long after that, it was shown that Propranolol could destroy fear memories in humans as well, but critically, it only works if the memory is in edit mode.</seg>
<seg id="76">Now, that study was with healthy human volunteers, but it's important because it shows that the rat findings can be extended to humans and ultimately, to human patients.</seg>
<seg id="77">And with humans, you can test whether destroying the non-declarative emotional memory does anything to the declarative event memory.</seg>
<seg id="78">And this is really interesting.</seg>
<seg id="79">Even though people who were given Propranolol while the memory was in edit mode were no longer afraid of that frightening trigger cue, they could still describe the relationship between the cue and the frightening outcome.</seg>
<seg id="80">It was as if they knew they should be afraid, and yet they weren't.</seg>
<seg id="81">This suggests that Propranolol can selectively target the non-declarative emotional memory but leave the declarative event memory intact.</seg>
<seg id="82">But critically, Propranolol can only have any effect on the memory if it's in edit mode.</seg>
<seg id="83">So how do we make a memory unstable?</seg>
<seg id="84">How do we get it into edit mode?</seg>
<seg id="85">Well, my own lab has done quite a lot of work on this.</seg>
<seg id="86">We know that it depends on introducing some but not too much new information to be incorporated into the memory.</seg>
<seg id="87">We know about the different chemicals the brain uses to signal that a memory should be updated and the file edited.</seg>
<seg id="88">Now, our work is mostly in rats, but other labs have found the same factors allow memories to be edited in humans, even maladaptive memories like those underlying PTSD.</seg>
<seg id="89">In fact, a number of labs in several different countries have begun small-scale clinical trials of these memory-destroying treatments for PTSD and have found really promising results.</seg>
<seg id="90">Now, these studies need replication on a larger scale, but they show the promise of these memory-destroying treatments for PTSD.</seg>
<seg id="91">Maybe trauma memories do not need to be the hell from which we cannot escape.</seg>
<seg id="92">Now, although this memory-destroying approach holds great promise, that's not to say that it's straightforward or without controversy.</seg>
<seg id="93">Is it ethical to destroy memories?</seg>
<seg id="94">What about things like eyewitness testimony?</seg>
<seg id="95">What if you can't give someone Propranolol because it would interfere with other medicines that they're taking?</seg>
<seg id="96">Well, with respect to ethics and eyewitness testimony, I would say the important point to remember is the finding from that human study.</seg>
<seg id="97">Because Propranolol is only acting on the non-declarative emotional memory, it seems unlikely that it would affect eyewitness testimony, which is based on declarative memory.</seg>
<seg id="98">Essentially, what these memory-destroying treatments are aiming to do is to reduce the emotional memory, not get rid of the trauma memory altogether.</seg>
<seg id="99">This should make the responses of those with PTSD more like those who have been through trauma and not developed PTSD than people who have never experienced trauma in the first place.</seg>
<seg id="100">I think that most people would find that more ethically acceptable than a treatment that aimed to create some sort of spotless mind.</seg>
<seg id="101">What about Propranolol? You can't give Propranolol to everyone, and not everyone wants to take drugs to treat mental health conditions.</seg>
<seg id="102">Well, here Tetris could be useful. Yes, Tetris. Working with clinical collaborators, we've been looking at whether behavioral interventions can also interfere with the reconsolidation of memories.</seg>
<seg id="103">Now, how would that work?</seg>
<seg id="104">Well, we know that it's basically impossible to do two tasks at the same time if they both depend on the same brain region for processing.</seg>
<seg id="105">Think trying to sing along to the radio while you're trying to compose an email.</seg>
<seg id="106">The processing for one interferes with the other.</seg>
<seg id="107">Well, it's the same when you retrieve a memory, especially in edit mode.</seg>
<seg id="108">If we take a highly visual symptom like flashbacks in PTSD and get people to recall the memory in edit mode and then get them to do a highly engaging visual task like playing Tetris, it should be possible to introduce so much interfering information into that memory that it essentially becomes meaningless.</seg>
<seg id="109">That's the theory, and it's supported by data from healthy human volunteers.</seg>
<seg id="110">Now, our volunteers watched highly unpleasant films -- so, think eye surgery, road traffic safety adverts, Scorsese's "The Big Shave." These trauma films produce something like flashbacks in healthy volunteers for about a week after viewing them.</seg>
<seg id="111">We found that getting people to recall those memories, the worst moments of those unpleasant films, and playing Tetris at the same time, massively reduced the frequency of the flashbacks.</seg>
<seg id="112">And again: the memory had to be in edit mode for that to work.</seg>
<seg id="113">Now, my collaborators have since taken this to clinical populations.</seg>
<seg id="114">They've tested this in survivors of road traffic accidents and mothers who've had emergency Caesarean sections, both types of trauma that frequently lead to PTSD, and they found really promising reductions in symptoms in both of those clinical cases.</seg>
<seg id="115">So although there is still much to learn and procedures to optimize, these memory-destroying treatments hold great promise for the treatment of mental health disorders like PTSD.</seg>
<seg id="116">Maybe trauma memories do not need to be a hell from which we cannot escape.</seg>
<seg id="117">I believe that this approach should allow those who want to to turn the page on chapters of their lives that they would prefer to never have experienced, and so improve our mental health.</seg>
<seg id="118">Thank you.</seg>
</doc>
</srcset>
</mteval>
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<talkid>63241</talkid>