From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
Seventeen of the top twenty universities in the world are in the USA, one third of all students who leave their countries to study in another come to the USA.
I argue that the ecosystem where idea pathogens originate from is the university; it takes intellectuals to come up with some of the most moronic ideas possible.
Interaction is paramount for cognitive development, enhancing intelligence through the growth of brain cells and the formation of new neurotransmitter connections. This concept of active engagement contrasts sharply with more passive forms of media consumption.
The world is so impossibly complex, beautiful and fragile and this gives us so many questions that we should ask. Curiosity is powerful, and that is the heart of TED.
The only way for you to discover something new is to acknowledge the ocean of ignorance in which you are just an island. Experts have a problem with that – they want to get prizes, and get recognised by their colleagues and peers as being very smart.
We crystallize and store knowledge in specialised sounds and language, and then play with it – build and forge and mould it and model with it – using it to grip hold of the past and to imagine and plan the future.
Each time we learn something new or encounter a fresh experience, we trigger a reconfiguration of our brains. Neuroplasticity is highest during youth, explaining why children and young adults up to the age of 25 absorb knowledge so rapidly. Their learning capacity is immense, akin to sponges soaking up water.
There's a vested interest – if the ideas you're teaching and have worked on are completely abandoned in favour of something else, then your legacy goes to zero. I think that's a big force.
Postmodernists are intellectual terrorists who fly their planes of bullshit into the edifices of reason.
We are all creative beings, but we're brought up being told not to colour outside the lines – but why? It's OK to be different…. It's more than OK to be different, and we need to encourage that.
We are the same people, physically: today, we have no additional neurons, no better wiring. But our tools for thinking – our ideas, hypotheses, theories, models – are marvellously improved. The only reason we are better at thinking and doing things now is that we accumulate knowledge and pass ideas and information from one generation to the next.
In postmodernism, there are no absolute truths; everything is relative, of course other than the one absolute truth that there are no absolute truths. This is a form of intellectual terrorism, nihilism.