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anyway to cut a long story short he said we have to do a ted talk researched oh exciting that's great and then eventually you're going to go to even more exciting but what you need to do you need to teach the people lessons lessons that you've learned on your travels around the world with these tribes i thought lessons okay well what did i learn good question three you need three lessons and they need to be terribly profound
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last thing it was extraordinarily profound and it happened only two weeks ago two weeks ago i went back to the now the live in northern namibia on the border of angola and i'd been there a few times before and i'd gone back to present this book i'd made to show them the pictures to get into a discussion with them to say this is how i saw you this is how i love you this is how i respect you what do you think am i right am i wrong so i wanted this debate it was very very very emotional and one night we were sitting around the campfire and i have to be honest i think i'd had a little bit too much to drink and i was sort of sitting under the stars going this is great you've seen my pictures we love each other
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it's an amazing picture you're in his eyes i said what do you mean i'm in his eyes it's a picture of the she said no look look closely you're in his eyes and when you look closely at this picture there is a reflection of me in his eyes so i think perhaps he has my soul and i'm in his soul and whilst these pictures look at you i ask you to look at them you may not be reflected in his eyes but there is something extraordinarily important about these people i don't ultimately have the answers as i've just shared with you but you must do there must be something there so if you can briefly reflect on what i was discussing about beauty and about belonging and about our ancestors and our roots and i need you all to stand for me please
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does anybody know and sheets of film and you're setting it up putting it on the tripod i've got the family spent the better part of a day talking with them
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does anybody know and sheets of film and you're setting it up putting it on the tripod i've got the family spent the better part of a day talking with them they sort of understand what i'm on about they think i'm a bit crazy but that's another story and what's most important for me is the beauty and the aesthetic and that's based on the light so the light's setting on my left hand side and there's a balance in the communication with the the family of all ages there's babies and there's grandparents i'm getting them in the tree and waiting for the light to set and it's going going and i've got one sheet of film left and i think i'm okay i'm in control i'm in control i'm setting it up and i'm setting up and the light's just about to go and i want it to be golden i want it to be beautiful i want it to be hanging on the horizon so it lights these people in all the potential glory that they could be presented
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so the light's setting on my left hand side and there's a balance in the communication with the the family of all ages there's babies and there's grandparents i'm getting them in the tree and waiting for the light to set and it's going going and i've got one sheet of film left and i think i'm okay i'm in control i'm in control i'm setting it up and i'm setting up and the light's just about to go and i want it to be golden i want it to be beautiful i want it to be hanging on the horizon so it lights these people in all the potential glory that they could be presented and it's about to go and it's about to go and i put my sheet in the camera it's all focused and all of a sudden there's a massive whack and i'm looking around and in the top corner of the tree one of the girls slaps the girl next to her and the girl next to her pulls her hair and all hell breaks loose and i'm standing there going but the light the light wait i need the light stay still stay still and they start screaming and then one of the men turns around and starts screaming shouting and the whole tree collapses not the tree but the people in the tree they're all running around screaming and they run back off into the village in this sort of cloud of smoke and i'm left there standing behind my tripod i've got my sheet and the light's gone and i can't make the picture
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intelligence agencies watching over the rest of the world we've heard about these starting with the revelations from june edward snowden started leaking information top secret classified information from the u s intelligence agencies and we started learning about things like prism and and others and these are examples of the kinds of programs u s intelligence agencies are running right now against the whole rest of the world and if you look back about the forecasts on surveillance by george orwell well it turns out that george orwell was an optimist
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and this kind of wholesale surveillance means that they can collect our data and keep it basically forever keep it for extended periods of time keep it for years keep it for decades and this opens up completely new kinds of risks to us all and what this is is that it is wholesale blanket surveillance on everyone well not exactly everyone because the u s intelligence only has a legal right to monitor foreigners they can monitor foreigners when foreigners' data connections end up in the united states or pass through the united states and monitoring foreigners doesn't sound too bad until you realize that i'm a foreigner and you're a foreigner in fact percent of the planet are foreigners
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due to be opened very soon it will be both a supercomputing center and a data storage center you could basically imagine it has a large hall filled with hard drives storing data they are collecting and it's a pretty big building how big well i can give you the numbers square meters but that doesn't really tell you very much maybe it's better to imagine it as a comparison you think about the largest ikea store you've ever been in this is five times larger how many hard drives can you fit in an ikea store right it's pretty big we estimate that just the electricity bill for running this data center is going to be in the tens of millions of dollars a year
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right so it is wholesale blanket surveillance of all of us all of us who use telecommunications and the internet but don't get me wrong there are actually types of surveillance that are okay i love freedom but even i agree that some surveillance is fine if the law enforcement is trying to find a murderer or they're trying to catch a drug lord or trying to prevent a school shooting and they have leads and they have suspects then it's perfectly fine for them to tap the suspect's phone and to intercept his internet communications i'm not arguing that at all but that's not what programs like prism are about
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so peter approached me i lost it when i saw that clip he approached me with a vision of doing these things not for people for animals and then i was struck in the history of the internet this is what the internet looked like when it was born and you can call that the internet of middle aged white men mostly middle aged white men
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hold the hand palm up do this don't move the wrist over the heart don't move the wrist forward don't move the wrist up don't move the wrist over the heart don't move the wrist and forward yeah now logic logically you have got to this position from this without moving the wrist
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over the heart don't move the wrist forward don't move the wrist up don't move the wrist over the heart don't move the wrist and forward yeah now logic logically you have got to this position from this without moving the wrist now the shortcut but it was six moves
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nice and you can sit over there one item here was water right and i will give my tribute to water i think it's enough with water for me the other guys can talk about cheers
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now i will interact so a different person all the time so not the same person can answer so we have an agreement which one shall have a good poker hand which number one two three four or five audience three three good and here i had a mat here to make it a little the critical moment is sorry if a card shark gathers the cards together immediately when he before he deals the card now so i think number three i have arranged them in a full house
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no reaction that with even ok and this these look in order i'm probably hopefully yeah three four five six seven and but of course i will have the winning hand ten jack queen king ace yeah so good
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mix them now if you are interested i will demonstrate some underground techniques yes i work with kind of estimation shuffle tracking ah good impressive thank you
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so here to follow my cards i must look at the shuffle from the begin ah we are started together it's ok it's ok come to no no no no i'm joking yeah any style yeah good here i have to calculate but actually i don't like to calculate i work direct with the right brain if you pass the left brain you have to take care of logic and common sense direct in the right brain that's much better and so arthur benjamin did a little of the same thing
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now i drop the cards and you say stop anyway right not at the last card yeah when i'm sober i do this much quicker but we will check
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sorry one two three four five six seven eight nine ah yes it's the last now i do it quicker better ok another person oh i forgot i shouldn't shuffle but i think actually my technique is to peek all the time
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you see yeah perfect three four five six then i calculate yeah good
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another card audience seven of diamonds seven of diamonds perfect my favorite yeah seven so i will do it quick very quick but in slow motion so you can follow
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diamonds good i start here good thank you the thing i did i peeked i know where the card were then i chose it so another person another card
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it's not the same person even if it's the same spot we can take some over there later so now i will drop the cards and you'll say stop anywhere got it five of clubs not the last yes that's difficult to find a card here
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eight nine this is a kind of optical deal right when i put one card at a table look it's not one card it's look it's a bunch of cards that gives this impression yeah now some hard stuff i think we keep the queen here yes now to the satellites things this oh sorry don't look at the beam my fault
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but you see the hand ah good good good but now so now that was the reason right you see the cards yes
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perfect excellent so i start with the ace yeah ace ah yeah spades same mistake as before right so i arrange the spades the clubs i try to do this right here first i take the spades you see i don't work with prestige so always do mistakes it doesn't matter to me and now and then i get some extra sympathy points right one two three four yes the camera got it five six seven eight ah nine the jack jack of spades queen of i like that laugh yeah good queen
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now a little more difficult thing maybe you think i have the cards in order already so you help me to shuffle again another suit please armani pardon audience armani
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i like this guy yeah ok that should be my end effect but ok armani who said armani you i drop the cards and you which size which size it's a piece of cake i like challenges which size extra large extra large ok say stop audience stop
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i look at the cards and ok we try yeah you help me if i drop the card face up like this you reverse it zoe ok ok now do with both hands and quick yes good good
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duct tape i look shake the cards so i don't go ahead
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now you must agree that i'm i must rely on other senses right i work with vibration so what was the card diamonds ah i memorized hearts so now i have to improvise again maybe i'll stand up half diamonds i'll start with ace of diamonds just kidding warming up king of hearts
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it's a gift two and it was two of spades right sorry two of diamonds i'll do it quick now three three of diamonds yes four i like challenges yes yeah good you're peeking pardon you're peeking you just got to this is a request from the lady in the back
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so first we violate the common sense the logic all of you if you hold your hand like this degrees all of you not you
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officially i don't gamble but so if we are if we have five person and i will do a five handed poker game now i will interact so a different person all the time so not the same person can answer so we have an agreement
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one two three four five i start with three queens so here you see the contrast when i treat the cards
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so here you see the contrast when i treat the cards and two tens yeah thank you but also the other hand is good if all the other guys have good hands too so these guys have actually a stronger hand three aces and two kings this guy beats them with four of a kind or deuce deuce no reaction that with even ok and this these look in order i'm probably hopefully yeah
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so first the first term is estimation here i can estimate exactly how many cards are put between my royal flush of course i can count the cards but this is much quicker right you agree so here i have actually i know exactly where the cards are so here i can make a bet and this is actually one of the points where i get my money so here jack queen king ace ok next is a term i do it quick
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now another term called shuffle tracking shuffle tracking means i keep track of the cards even if another person shuffles this is a little risky so because if you look now i can still see it you agree but if you square square and shuffle and then a cut
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if you concentrate and calculate then you go to then it's the left brain but if you just look and talk in another language yeah great i think i have it so now different persons older tap please name any card anyone jack of spades
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yes right so oh jack of spades you said spades audience yes
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pardon audience ten of diamonds ten of diamonds yeah i think i do it the same way i like to so i know where it is
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i like to so i know where it is ten of diamonds but now i do it the regular speed right ten of diamonds good maybe you will cut lift excellent so thank you another person another card five of clubs
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very good ok ok i had to use a little force there i think we save five of clubs
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i love that card here i will do the most difficult thing for example you are sitting in las vegas and you're betting and you let the other guys peek this card by mistake
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armani ok ah this is tough ok a suit i had clubs before spades another suit audience diamonds
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good good two thank you i never ever miss two
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yeah six six with the thumb seven
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the soft approach to make people cooperate we need to make them like each other improve interpersonal feelings the more people like each other the more they will cooperate it is totally wrong it is even counterproductive look at home i have two why precisely not to have to cooperate with my wife
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communications telecommunications the internet enigma number two why is there so little engagement at work why do people feel so miserable even actively disengaged disengaging their colleagues acting against the interest of their company despite all the affiliation events the celebration the people initiatives the leadership development programs to train managers on how to better motivate their teams at the beginning i thought there was a chicken and egg issue because people are less engaged they are less productive or vice versa because they are less productive we put more pressure and they are less engaged but as we were doing our analysis we realized that there was a common root cause to these two issues that relates in fact to the basic pillars of management the way we organize is based on two pillars the hard structure processes systems
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but how do we get into the airport and here comes lesson number three persistence off we headed to the airport we got past the janitor and then it was his boss's boss and then the assistant office manager and then the office manager and then we got shuffled down two levels and thought well here comes the janitor again and after several days knocking on doors and just being kids on a mission we finally got to the commercial manager of bali airports and we gave him the bali of plastic bags speech and being a very nice man he said imitating the man's voice i cannot believe what i'm about say but i'm going to give authorization to collect signatures behind customs and
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also at the international airport of bali one of our supporters is planning to start a plastic bag free policy by handing out free plastic bags and bring in your own reusable bag is our next message to change that mindset of the public our short term campaign one island one voice is all about this we check and recognize the shops and restaurants that have declared themselves a plastic bag free zone and we put this sticker at their entrance and publish their names on social media and some important magazines on bali and conversely that highlights those who do not have the sticker
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and we've been working for almost three years now to try to say no to plastic bags on our home island and we have had some significant successes
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we are one of them she's a real inspiration
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in that moment madison believed that having solved this problem the country would run smoothly and that he had designed a technology that would minimize the results of factions so there would be no political parties remarkably he thought he had designed a constitution that was against political parties and would make them unnecessary he had gotten an enormous degree of help in the final marketing phase of his constitutional project from a man you may have heard of called alexander hamilton now hamilton was everything madison was not he was passionate where madison was restrained he was where madison didn't speak to a woman expect for once until he was years old and then married dolley and lived happily ever after for years
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so these two founders who had been such close friends and such close allies and such partners then began to produce enmity and they did it in the good old fashioned way first they founded political parties madison created a party originally called the democratic republican party republican for short and hamilton created a party called the federalist party those two parties adopted positions on national politics that were extreme and exaggerated to give you a clear example madison who had always believed that the country would have some manufacturing and some trade and some agriculture began attacking hamilton as a kind of tool of the financial markets whom hamilton himself intended to put in charge of the country that was an overstatement but it was something madison came to believe he also attacked city life and he said that the coasts were corrupt and what people needed to do was to look to the center of the country to farmers who were the essence of republican virtue and they should go back to the values that had made american great specifically the values of the revolution and those were the values of low taxes agriculture and less trade hamilton responded to this by saying that madison was nave that he was childish and that his goal was to turn the united states into a primitive self reliant and completely ineffectual on the global scale
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how does this end well as it turned out the constitution did its work but it did its work in surprising ways that madison himself had not fully anticipated first there was a series of elections and the first two times out of the box the federalists destroyed the republicans madison was astonished of course he blamed the press
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us politics and trying to make sense of it for the last year or so you might have hit on something like the following three propositions one us partisanship has never been so bad before two for the first time it's geographically we're divided between the coasts which want to look outwards and the center of the country which wants to look and third there's nothing we can do about it i'm here to today to say that all three of these propositions all of which sound reasonable are not true in fact our us partisanship goes all the way back to the very beginning of the republic it was geographically in almost eerily the same way that it is today and it often has been throughout us history and last and by far most importantly we actually have an extraordinary mechanism that's designed to help us manage factional disagreement and partisanship that technology is the constitution
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the person who's at the core of that story is james madison and at the moment that this began james madison was riding high he himself was the einstein of not only the us constitution but of constitutional thought more globally and to give him his due he knew it in a period of time of just three years from to he had conceived theorized designed passed and gotten ratified the us constitution
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once the new government was in place hamilton became secretary of the treasury and he had a very specific idea in mind and that was to do for financial institutions and infrastructure exactly what madison had done for constitutions again his contemporaries all knew it one of them told madison who can't have liked it very much that hamilton was the newton of infrastructure
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again his contemporaries all knew it one of them told madison who can't have liked it very much that hamilton was the newton of infrastructure the idea was pretty straightforward hamilton would give the united states a national bank a permanent national debt he said it would be immortal his phrase and a manufacturing policy that would enable trade and manufacturing rather than agriculture which was where the country's primary wealth had historically been madison went utterly ballistic and in this pivotal critical decision instead of just telling the world that his old friend hamilton was wrong and was adopting the wrong policies he actually began to argue that hamilton's ideas were unconstitutional that they violated the very nature of the constitution that the two of them had drafted together hamilton responded the way you would expect he declared madison to be his personal and political enemy these are his words so these two founders who had been such close friends and such close allies and such partners then began to produce enmity
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but despite the fact that the federalists once in power actually enacted laws that criminalized criticism of the government that happened in the united states nevertheless the republicans fought back and madison began to emphasize the freedom of speech which he had built into the bill of rights and the capacity of civil society to organize and sure enough nationally small local groups they were called democratic republican societies began to form and protest against federalist dominated hegemony eventually the republicans managed to win a national election that was in madison became the secretary of state his friend and mentor jefferson became president and they actually over time managed to put the federalists completely out of business
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wait wait what what do men have to do with gender equality gender equality is about women right i mean the word gender is about women actually i'm even here speaking as a middle class white man now i wasn't always a middle class white man it all happened for me about years ago when i was in graduate school and a bunch of us graduate students got together one day and we said you know there's an explosion of writing and thinking in feminist theory but there's no courses yet so we did what graduate students typically do in a situation like that we said ok let's have a study group we'll read a text we'll talk about it we'll have a potluck dinner
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to me race is visible but to you race is invisible you don't see it and then she said something really startling she said that's how privilege works privilege is invisible to those who have it it is a luxury i will say to the white people sitting in this room not to have to think about race every split second of our lives privilege is invisible to those who have it now remember i was the only man in this group so when i witnessed this i went oh no
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so i like to think that was the moment i became a middle class white man that class and race and gender were not about other people they were about me i had to start thinking about them and it had been privilege that had kept it invisible to me for so long now i wish i could tell you this story ends years ago in that little discussion group but i was reminded of it quite recently at my university where i teach i have a colleague and she and i both teach the sociology of gender course on alternate semesters so she gives a guest lecture for me when i teach i give a guest lecture for her when she teaches
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they have lower job turnover they have lower levels of attrition they have an easier time recruiting they have higher rates of retention higher job satisfaction higher rates of productivity so the question i'm often asked in companies is boy this gender equality thing that's really going to be expensive huh and i say oh no in fact what you have to start calculating is how much gender inequality is already costing you it is extremely expensive so it is good for business and the other thing is it's good for men it is good for the kind of lives we want to live because young men especially have changed enormously and they want to have lives that are animated by terrific relationships with their children
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because here's what the data show when men share housework and childcare their children do better in school their children have lower rates of absenteeism higher rates of achievement they are less likely to be diagnosed with they are less likely to see a child psychiatrist they are less likely to be put on medication so when men share housework and childcare their children are happier and healthier and men want this
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i need to do the same thing and he did he walked for two days and two nights and he risked his life and he got out and the only thing he wanted was to see her the only thing that was in his mind was to see her the story was they did meet i know you're wondering if they did meet they did meet she had been recruited when she was and she left when she was so there were a lot of other complications but they did eventually meet i don't know if they're together now but i can find out
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the rest of the car has to be very light to offset the mass of the pack and then you have to have a low drag coefficient so that you have good highway range and in fact customers of the model s are sort of competing with each other to try to get the highest possible range i think somebody recently got miles out of a single charge bruno bowden who's here did that broke the world record em congratulations that was the good news the bad news was that to do it he had to drive at miles an hour constant speed and got pulled over by the cops
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i'm extremely confident that solar will be at least a plurality of power and most likely a majority and i predict it will be a plurality in less than years i made that bet with someone ca definition of plurality is more from solar than any other source ah who did you make the bet with with a friend who will remain nameless just between us
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this let's make it reusable how is that going that was just a simulation video we saw how's it going we're actually we've been making some good progress recently with something we call the grasshopper test project where we're testing the vertical landing portion of the flight the sort of terminal portion which is quite tricky and we've had some good tests can we see yeah so that's just to give a sense of scale we dressed a cowboy as johnny cash and bolted the mannequin to the rocket
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kind of crazy dream would persuade you to think of trying to take on the auto industry and build an all electric car well it goes back to when i was in university i thought about what are the problems that are most likely to affect the future of the world or the future of humanity i think it's extremely important that we have sustainable transport and sustainable energy production that sort of overall sustainable energy problem is the biggest problem that we have to solve this century independent of environmental concerns in fact even if producing was good for the environment given that we're going to run out of hydrocarbons we need to find some sustainable means of operating
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of american electricity comes from burning fossil fuels how can an electric car that plugs into that electricity help right there's two elements to that answer one is that even if you take the same source fuel and produce power at the power plant and use it to charge electric cars you're still better off so if you take say natural gas which is the most prevalent hydrocarbon source fuel if you burn that in a modern general electric natural gas turbine you'll get about percent efficiency if you put that same fuel in an internal combustion engine car you get about percent efficiency
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so in order to accelerate the advent of electric transport and i should say that i think actually all modes of transport will become fully electric with the ironic exception of rockets there's just no way around newton's third law the question is how do you accelerate the advent of electric transport and in order to do that for cars you have to come up with a really energy efficient car so that means making it incredibly light and so what you're seeing here is the only all aluminum body and chassis car made in north america in fact we applied a lot of rocket design techniques to make the car light despite having a very large battery pack and then it also has the lowest drag coefficient of any car of its size
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i mean you can certainly drive if you drive it miles an hour under normal conditions miles is a reasonable number let's show that second video showing the tesla in action on ice not at all a dig at the new york times this by the way what is the most surprising thing about the experience of driving the car in creating an electric car the responsiveness of the car is really incredible so we wanted really to have people feel as though they've almost got to mind meld with the car so you just feel like you and the car are kind of one and as you corner and accelerate it just happens like the car has
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hold on there i go hey i want to start today talk about the structure of a
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that i seem to be drawn to and i was thinking about this what to talk about at ted when i talked to the kind rep from ted and i said listen you know what should i talk about he said don't worry about it just be profound
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mystery magic box the premise behind the mystery magic box was the following dollars buys you dollars worth of magic which is a savings
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i think it just happened hey hey hey get away from abrams years ago if we wanted to do that we'd have to kill a
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so my favorite visual effect in the movie is the one i'm about to show you it's a scene in which tom's character wakes up he's drowsy he's crazy and the guy wakes up and he shoves this gun in his nose and shoots this little capsule into his brain that he's going to use later to kill him as bad guys do good morning ok now when we shot that scene the actor who had the gun an english actor eddie sweetheart great guy he kept taking the gun and putting it into tom's nose and it was hurting tom's nose and i learned this very early on in my career don't hurt tom's nose
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i'm like we have to make this look good and i realized that we had to do something because it wasn't working and i thought back to what i would have done using the super camera that my grandfather got me sitting in that room and i realized that hand didn't have to be eddie it could be tom's and tom would know just how hard to push the gun he wouldn't hurt himself so we took his hand and we painted it to look a little bit more like eddie's we put it in eddie's sleeve and so the hand that you see that's not eddie's hand that's tom's so tom is playing two roles
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i was trying to think what do i talk about good question why do i do so much stuff that involves mystery and i started trying to figure it out and i started thinking about why do i do any of what i do and i started thinking about my grandfather i loved my grandfather harry kelvin was his name my mother's father he died in he was an amazing guy and one of the reasons he was amazing after world war he began an electronics company he started selling surplus parts kits to schools and stuff
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and i'm obsessed with engineering of paper the scoring of it the printing of it where the thing gets glued the registration marks for the ink
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so i found myself getting this stuff thanks to her assist and suddenly you know i had a synthesizer when i was years old this kind of stuff and it let me make things which to me was sort of the dream
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and i realize that mystery is the catalyst for imagination now it's not the most ground breaking idea but when i started to think that maybe there are times when mystery is more important than knowledge
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in terms of the content of it you look at stories you think what are stories but mystery boxes there's a fundamental question in tv the first act is called the teaser it's literally the teaser it's the big question so you're drawn into it then there's another question and it goes on look at star wars the meet the mysterious woman
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so there's this thing with mystery boxes that i started feeling compelled then there's the thing of mystery in terms of imagination the withholding of information you know doing that intentionally is much more engaging whether it's like the shark in jaws if spielberg's mechanical shark bruce had worked it would not be remotely as scary you would have seen it too much in alien they never really showed the alien terrifying even in a movie like a romantic comedy the graduate they're having that date and they're in the car and it's loud and so they put the top up you don't hear anything they're saying you can't hear a word but it's the most romantic date ever and you love it because you don't hear it so to me there's that and then finally there's this idea stretching the paradigm a little bit but the idea of the mystery box
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novelists put this best like philip roth who said and yet what are we to do about this terribly significant business of other people so ill equipped are we all to envision one another's interior workings and invisible aims so as a teacher and as a spouse this is of course a problem i confront every day but as a scientist i'm interested in a different problem of other minds and that is the one i'm going to introduce to you today and that problem is how is it so easy to know other minds so to start with an illustration you need almost no information one snapshot of a stranger to guess what this woman is thinking or what this man is and put another way the crux of the problem is the machine that we use for thinking about other minds our brain is made up of pieces brain cells that we share with all other animals with monkeys and mice and even sea slugs and yet you put them together in a particular network and what you get is the capacity to write romeo and juliet or to say as alan greenspan did i know you think you understand what you thought i said but i'm not sure you realize that what you heard is not what i meant
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so first the first thing i want to tell you is that there is a brain region in the human brain in your brains whose job it is to think about other people's thoughts this is a picture of it it's called the right parietal junction it's above and behind your right ear and this is the brain region you used when you saw the pictures i showed you or when you read romeo and juliet or when you tried to understand alan greenspan and you don't use it for solving any other kinds of logical problems so this brain region is called the right and this picture shows the average activation in a group of what we call typical human adults they're mit undergraduates
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was ivan being mean and naughty for taking sandwich um yeah and so it is not until age seven that we get what looks more like an adult response should ivan get in trouble for taking sandwich no because the wind should get in trouble he says the wind should get in trouble for switching the sandwiches
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to give the last word back to the novelists and to philip roth who ended by saying the fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway it's getting them wrong that is living getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then on careful reconsideration getting them wrong again thank you so i have a question when you start talking about using magnetic pulses to change people's moral judgments that sounds alarming
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not i mean they're calling but i'm not taking the call
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question there is this thing called the hard problem of consciousness that puzzles a lot of people the notion that you can understand why a brain works perhaps but why does anyone have to feel anything why does it seem to require these beings who sense things for us to operate you're a brilliant young neuroscientist i mean what chances do you think there are that at some time in your career someone you or someone else is going to come up with some paradigm shift in understanding what seems an impossible problem i hope they do and i think they probably won't why it's not called the hard problem of consciousness for nothing
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so i'm going to tell you three things about this today obviously the whole project here is huge and i'm going to tell you just our first few steps about the discovery of a special brain region for thinking about other people's thoughts some observations on the slow development of this system as we learn how to do this difficult job
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i'm going to show you a little bit of that long extended process the first thing i'm going to show you is a change between age three and five as kids learn to understand that somebody else can have beliefs that are different from their own so i'm going to show you a five who is getting a standard kind of puzzle that we call the false belief task this is the first pirate
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and ivan puts his sandwich over here on top of the pirate chest and ivan says you know what i need a drink with my lunch and so ivan goes to get a drink and while ivan is away the wind comes and it blows the sandwich down onto the grass
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and ivan says you know what i need a drink with my lunch and so ivan goes to get a drink and while ivan is away the wind comes and it blows the sandwich down onto the grass and now here comes the other pirate this pirate is called joshua and joshua also really loves cheese sandwiches so joshua has a cheese sandwich and he says yum yum yum yum yum i love cheese sandwiches and he puts his cheese sandwich over here on top of the pirate chest so that one is his
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that one is that's right and then his went on the ground that's exactly right so he won't know which one is his oh so now joshua goes off to get a drink
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the problem is that although there are many good scientists working on what they think are human pheromones and they're publishing in respectable journals at the basis of this despite very sophisticated experiments there really is no good science behind it because it's based on a problem which is nobody has systematically gone through all the odors that humans produce and there are thousands of molecules that we give off we're mammals we produce a lot of smell nobody has gone through systematically to work out which molecules really are pheromones they've just plucked a few and all these experiments are based on those but there's no good evidence at all now that's not to say that smell is not important to people it is and some people are real enthusiasts and one of these was napoleon and famously you may remember that out on the campaign trail for war he wrote to his lover empress josephine saying don't wash i'm coming home
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pheromone is a very powerful word it conjures up sex abandon loss of control and you can see it's very important as a word but it's only years old it was invented in now if you put that word into the web as you may have done you'll come up with millions of hits and almost all of those sites are trying to sell you something to make you irresistible for dollars or more now this is a very attractive idea and the molecules they mention sound really science y
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