TED英语演讲稿.docx

01. Remember to say thank youHi. Im here to talk to you about the importance of praise, admiration and thank you, and having it be specific and genuine.And the way I got interested in this was, I noticed in myself, when I was growing up, and until about a few years ago, that I would want to say thank you to someone, I would want to praise them, I would want to take in their praise of me and Id just stop it. And I asked myself, why? I felt shy, I felt embarrassed. And then my question became, am I the only one who does this? So, I decided to investigate.Im fortunate enough to work in the rehab facility, so I get to see people who are facing life and death with addiction. And sometimes it comes down to something as simple as, their core wound is their father died without ever saying hes proud of them. But then, they hear from all the family and friends that the father told everybody else that he was proud of him, but he never told the son. Its because he didnt know that his son needed to hear it.So my question is, why dont we ask for the things that we need? I know a gentleman, married for 25 years, whos longing to hear his wife say, Thank you for being the breadwinner, so I can stay home with the kids, but wont ask. I know a woman whos good at this. She, once a week, meets with her husband and says, Id really like you to thank me for all these things I did in the house and with the kids. And he goes, Oh, this is great, this is great. And praise really does have to be genuine, but she takes responsibility for that. And a friend of mine, April, who Ive had since kindergarten, she thanks her children for doing their chores. And she said, Why wouldnt I thank it, even though theyre supposed to do it?So, the question is, why was I blocking it? Why were other people blocking it? Why can I say, Ill take my steak medium rare, I need size six shoes, but I wont say, Would you praise me this way? And its because Im giving you critical data about me. Im telling you where Im insecure. Im telling you where I need your help. And Im treating you, my inner circle, like youre the enemy. Because what can you do with that data? You could neglect me. You could abuse it. Or you could actually meet my need.And I took my bike into the bike store- I love this - same bike, and theyd do something called truing the wheels. The guy said, You know, when you true the wheels, its going to make the bike so much better. I get the same bike back, and theyve taken all the little warps out of those same wheels Ive had for two and a half years, and my bike is like new. So, Im going to challenge all of you. I want you to true your wheels: be honest about the praise that you need to hear. What do you need to hear? Go home to your wife - go ask her, what does she need? Go home to your husband - what does he need? Go home and ask those questions, and then help the people around you.And its simple. And why should we care about this? We talk about world peace. How can we have world peace with different cultures, different languages? I think it starts household by household, under the same roof. So, lets make it right in our own backyard. And I want to thank all of you in the audience for being great husbands, great mothers, friends, daughters, sons. And maybe somebodys never said that to you, but youve done a really, really good job. And thank you for being here, just showing up and changing the world with your ideas.02. The benefits of a bilingual brainHablas espaol? Parlez-vous franais? ni hui shuo zhong wen ma? If you answered “si”,”oui” or ”hui” and you are watching this in English, chances are you belong to the world bilingual and multilingual majority. And besides having an easier time traveling, or watching movies without subtitles, knowing two or more languages means that your brain may actually look and work differently than those of your monolingual friends. So what does it really mean to know a language?Language ability is typically measured in two active parts, speaking and writing, and two passive parts, listening and reading. While a balanced bilingual has near equal abilities across the board in two languages, most bilinguals around the world know and use their languages in vary proportions. And depending on their situation and how they acquired each language, they can be classified into three general types.For example, lets take Gabriella, whose family immigrates to the US from Peru when she was two-years old. As a compound bilingual, Gabriella develops two linguistic codes simultaneously, with a single set of concepts, learning both English and Spanish as she begins to process the world around her. Her teenage brother, on the other hand, might be a coordinate bilingual, working with two sets of concepts, learning English in school, while continuing to speak Spanish at home and with friends.Finally, Gabriellas parents are likely to be subordinate bilinguals who learned a secondary language by filtering it through their primary language.Because all types of bilingual people can become fully proficient in a language regardless of accent and pronunciation, the difference may not be apparent to be a casual observer. But recent advances in imaging technology have given neurolinguists a glimpse into how specific aspects of language learning affect the bilingual brain.Its well known that the brains left hemisphere is more dominant and analytical in logical processes, while the right hemisphere is more active in emotional and social ones, though this is a matter of degree, not an absolute split.The fact that language involves both types of functions while lateralization develops gradually with age, has lead to the critical period hypothesis. According to this theory, children learn languages more easily because the plasticity of their developing brains let them use both hemispheres in language acquisition, while in most adults, language is lateralized to one hemisphere, usually the left.If this is true, learning a language in childhood may give you a more holistic grasp of its social and emotional contexts. Conversely, recent research showed that people who learned a second language in adulthood exhibit less emotional bias and a more rational approach when confronting problems in the second language than their native one.But regardless of when you acquire additional languages, being multilingual gives your brain some remarkable advantages. Some of these are even visible, such higher density of the gray matter that contains most of your brains neurons and synapses, and more activity in certain regions when engaging a second language. The heightened workout a bilingual brain receives throughout its life can also help delay the onset of diseases, like Alzheimers and Dementia by as much as 5 years.The idea of major cognitive benefits to bilingualism may seem intuitive now, but it would have surprised earlier experts. Before the 1960s, bilingualism was considered a handicap that slowed the childs development by forcing them to spend them too much energy distinguishing between languages, a view based largely on flawed studies.And while a more recent study did show that reaction times and errors increase for some bilingual students in cross-language tests, it also showed that the effort and attention needed to switch between languages triggered more activity in, and potentially strengthened, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. This is the part of brain that plays a large role in executive function, problem solving, switching between tasks, and focusing while filtering out irrelevant information.So, while bilingual may not necessarily make you smarter, it does make your brain more healthy, complex and actively engaged, and even if you didnt have the good fortune of learning a second language like a child, its never too late to do yourself a favor and make the linguistic leap from, ”Hello,” to “Hola”, ”Bonjour” or “ninhaos” because when it comes to our brains a little exercise can go a long way.03. Feats of memory anyone can doId like to invite you to close your eyes.Imagine yourself standing outside the front door of your home. Id like you to notice the color of the door, the material that its made out of. Now visualize a pack of overweight nudists on bicycles.They are competing in a naked bicycle race, and they are headed straight for your front door. I need you to actually see this. They are pedaling really hard, theyre sweaty, theyre bouncing around a lot. And they crash straight into the front door of your home. Bicycles fly everywhere, wheels roll past you, spokes end up in awkward places. Step over the threshold of your door into your foyer, your hallway, whatevers on the other side, and appreciate the quality of the light. The light is shining down on Cookie Monster. Cookie Monster is waving at you from his perch on top of a tan horse. Its a talking horse. You can practically feel his blue fur tickling your nose. You can smell the oatmeal raisin cookie that hes about to shovel into his mouth. Walk past him. Walk past him into your living room. In your living room, in full imaginative broadband, picture Britney Spears. She is scantily clad, shes dancing on your coffee table, and shes singing Hit Me Baby One More Time. And then, follow me into your kitchen. In your kitchen, the floor has been paved over with a yellow brick road, and out of your oven are coming towards you Dorothy, the Tin Man, the Scarecrow and the Lion from The Wizard of Oz, hand-in-hand, skipping straight towards you.Okay. Open your eyes.I want to tell you about a very bizarre contest that is held every spring in New York City. Its called the United States Memory Championship. And I had gone to cover this contest a few years back as a science journalist, expecting, I guess, that this was going to be like the Superbowl of savants. This was a bunch of guys and a few ladies, widely varying in both age and hygienic upkeep.They were memorizing hundreds of random numbers, looking at them just once. They were memorizing the names of dozens and dozens and dozens of strangers. They were memorizing entire poems in just a few minutes. They were competing to see who could memorize the order of a shuffled pack of playing cards the fastest. I was like, this is unbelievable. These people must be freaks of nature.And I started talking to a few of the competitors. This is a guy called Ed Cook, who had come over from England, where he had one of the best-trained memories. And I said to him, Ed, when did you realize that you were a savant? And Ed was like, Im not a savant. In fact, I have just an average memory. Everybody who competes in this contest will tell you that they have just an average memory. Weve all trained ourselves to perform these utterly miraculous feats of memory using a set of ancient techniques, techniques invented 2,500 years ago in Greece, the same techniques that Cicero had used to memorize his speeches, that medieval scholars had used to memorize entire books. And I said, Whoa. How come I never heard of this before?And we were standing outside the competition hall, and Ed, who is a wonderful, brilliant, but somewhat eccentric English guy, says to me, Josh, youre an American journalist. Do you know Britney Spears? Im like, What? No. Why? Because I really want to teach Britney Spears how to memorize the order of a shuffled pack of playing cards on U.S. national television. It will prove to the world that anybody can do this.I was like, Well, Im not Britney Spears, but maybe you could teach me. I mean, youve got to start somewhere, right? And that was the beginning of a very strange journey for me.I ended up spending the better part of the next year not only training my memory, but also investigating it, trying to understand how it works, why it sometimes doesnt work, and what its potential might be.And I met a host of really interesting people. This is a guy called E.P. Hes an amnesic who had, very possibly, the worst memory in the world. His memory was so bad, that he didnt even remember he had a memory problem, which is amazing. And he was this incredibly tragic figure, but he was a window into the extent to which our memories make us who we are.At the other end of the spectrum, I met this guy. This is Kim Peek, he was the basis for Dustin Hoffmans character in the movie Rain Man. We spent an afternoon together in the Salt Lake City Public Library memorizing phone books, which was scintillating.And I went back and I read a whole host of memory treatises, treatises written 2,000-plus years ago in Latin, in antiquity, and then later, in the Middle Ages. And I learned a whole bunch of really interesting stuff. One of the really interesting things that I learned is that once upon a time, this idea of having a trained, disciplined, cultivated memory was not nearly so alien as it would seem to us to be today. Once upon a time, people invested in their memories, in laboriously furnishing their minds.Over the last few millenia, weve invented a series of technologies - from the alphabet, to the scroll, to the codex, the printing press, photography, the computer, the smartphone - that have made it progressively easier and easier for us to externalize our memories, for us to essentially outsource this fundamental human capacity. These technologies have made our modern world possible, but theyve also changed us. Theyve changed us culturally, and I would argue that theyve changed us cognitively. Having little need to remember anymore, it sometimes seems like weve forgotten how.One of the last places on Earth where you still find people passionate about this idea of a trained, disciplined, cultivated memory, is at this totally singular memory contest. Its actually not that singular, there are contests held all over the world. And I was fascinated, I wanted to know how do these guys do it.A few years back a group of researchers at University College London brought a bunch of memory champions into the lab. They wanted to know: Do these guys have brains that are somehow structurally, anatomically different from the rest of ours? The answer was no. Are they smarter than the rest of us? They gave them a bunch of cognitive tests, and the answer was: not really.There was, however, one really interesting and telling difference between the brains of the memory champions and the control subjects that they were comparing them to. When they put these guys in an fMRI machine, scanned their brains while they were memorizing numbers and peoples faces and pictures of snowflakes, they found that the memory champions were lighting up different parts of the brain than everyone else. Of note, they were using, or they seemed to be using, a part of the brain thats involved in spatial memory and navigation. Why? And is there something that the rest of us can learn from this?The sport of competitive memorizing is driven by a kind of arms race where, every year, somebody comes up with a new way to remember more stuff more quickly, and then the rest of the field has to play catch-up.This is my friend Ben Pridmore, three-time world memory champion. On his desk in front of him are 36 shuffled packs of playing cards that he is about to try to memorize in one hour, using a technique that he invented and he alone has mastered. He used a similar technique to memorize the precise order of 4,140 random binary digits in half an hour.Yeah. And while there are a whole host of ways of remembering stuff in these competitions, everything, all of the techniques that are being used, ultimately come down to a concept that psychologists refer to as elaborative encoding.And its well-illustrated by a nifty paradox known as the Baker/baker paradox, which goes like this: If I tell two people to remember the same word, if I say to you, Remember that there is a guy named Baker. Thats his name. And I say to you, Remember that there is a guy who is a baker. Okay? And I come back to you at some point later on, and I say, Do you remember that word that I told you a while back? Do you remember what it was? The person who was told his name is Baker is less likely to remember the same word than the person was told his job is a baker. Same word, different amount of remembering; thats weird. Whats going on here?Well, the name Baker doesnt actually mean anything to you. It is entirely untethered from all of the other memories floating around in your skull. But the common noun baker - we know bakers. Bakers wear funny white hats. Bakers have flour on their hands. Bakers smell good when they come home from work. Maybe we even know a baker. And when we first hear that word, we start putting these associational hooks into it, that make it easier to fish it back out at some later date. The entire art of what is going on in these memory contests, and the entire art of remembering stuff better in everyday life, is figuring out ways to transform capital B Bakers into lower-case B bakers - to take information that is lacking in context, in significance, in meaning, and transform it in some way, so that it becomes meaningful in the light of all the other things that you have in your mind.One of the more elaborate techniques for doing this dates back 2,500 years to Ancient Greece. It came to be known as the memory palace. The story behind its creation goes like this:There was a poet called Simonides, who was attending a banquet. He was actually the hired entertainment, because back then, if you wanted to throw a really slamming party, you didnt hire a D.J., you hired a poet. And he stands up, delivers his poem from memory, walks out the door, and at the moment he does, the banquet hall collapses.