经典TED英语演讲稿范文（热门15篇）

经典TED英语演讲稿范文（精选15篇）

经典TED英语演讲稿范文 篇1

We're going to go on a dive to the deep sea， and anyone that's had that lovely opportunity knows that for about two and half hours on the way down， it's a perfectly positively pitch—black world。 And we used to see the most mysterious animals out the windowthat you couldn't describe： these blinking lights —— a world of bioluminescence， like fireflies。 Dr。 Edith Widder —— she's now at the Ocean Research and Conservation Association —— was able to come up with a camera that could capture some of these incredible animals， and that's what you're seeing here on the screen。

好了，我们即将潜入海底深处。 任何一个有过这种美妙机会的人都知道 在这两个半小时的下降过程中， 是一个完全漆黑的世界。 我们透过窗户会看见世界上各种最神秘的动物， 各种无法形容的动物。这些闪亮着的光， 完美地构成了如萤火虫般发光的世界。 研究保护协会的Edith Witter博士 发明了一种照相机， 这种照相机可以拍下这些令人难以置信的生物。 这就是你现在在屏幕上看到的。

That's all bioluminescence。 So， like I said： just like fireflies。 There's a flying turkey under a tree。 （Laughter） I'm a geologist by training。 But I love that。 And you see， some of the bioluminescence they use to avoid being eaten， some they use to attract prey， but all of it， from an artistic point of view， is positively amazing。 And a lot of what goes on inside 。。。 there's a fish with glowing eyes， pulsating eyes。 Some of the colors are designed to hypnotize， these lovely patterns。 And then this last one， one of my favorites， this pinwheel design。 Just absolutely amazing， every single dive。

他们全部都是生物发光体。像我说的，就像萤火虫一样。 这是个会飞的火鸡，在树下。（笑声） 我知道我现在像是个实习期的地质学家，不过我就是喜欢。 你可以看到这些生物发出的光， 有些是为了避免被吃掉。 有些又是为引诱食物上钩。 尽管如此，用艺术的角度来看，这些都如此神奇。 再来看看这里发生了些什么—— 这条鱼有着会发光，闪烁的眼睛。 有些颜色则可以催眠。 多么有趣的图案。这是最后一个： 也是我的最爱，像转轮一样的设计。 每一次潜水都充满着惊喜。

That's the unknown world， and today we've only explored about 3 percent of what's out there in the ocean。 Already we've found the world's highest mountains， the world's deepest valleys， underwater lakes， underwater waterfalls —— a lot of that we shared with you from the stage。 And in a place where we thought no life at all， we find more life， we think， and diversity and density than the tropical rainforest， which tells us that we don't know much about this planet at all。 There's still 97 percent， and either that 97 percent is empty or just full of surprises。

这正是一个未知的世界。到今天为止，我们只探索了其中的极小部分， 大约只占了所有海洋的3%。 到现在，我们已经发现了世界上最高的山峰， 最深的峡谷， 水下湖，水下瀑布， 还有我们刚才看到的。 然而，恰是我们曾经以为根本不可能有生命的地方， 我们发现了众多的生物，还有它们的密度和多样性， 都超过了热带雨林。这告诉我们 我们实际上对自己的星球还不甚了解。 还有剩下的97%，那里要不就是一片荒芜，要不就是充满惊喜。

But I want to jump up to shallow water now and look at some creatures that are positively amazing。Cephalopods —— head—foots。 As a kid I knew them as calamari， mostly。 （Laughter） This is an octopus —— this is the work of Dr。 Roger Hanlon at the Marine Biological Lab —— and it's just fascinating how cephalopods can， with their incredible eyes， sense their surroundings， look at light， look at patterns。 Here's an octopus moving across the reef， finds a spot to settle down， curls up and then disappears into the background。 Tough thing to do。

不过我现在还是想说说浅水里的世界， 来看看那些神奇的生物。 头足类动物，有头有角。小时候我把他们当作是枪乌贼。 这是一条章鱼。 这是来自Roger Hanlon博士，海洋生物实验室的成果。 这些头足类动物真令人着迷， 它用它们的眼睛，它们那难以置信的眼睛来观察周围的环境， 看光，看图案。 这有只章鱼正在穿过礁石。 找到一个位置，停下来，卷起，然后马上消失在背景之中。 这很难做到。

In the next bit， we're going to see a couple squid。 These are squid。 Now males， when they fight， if they're really aggressive， they turn white。 And these two males are fighting， they do it by bouncing their butts together， which is an interesting concept。 Now， here's a male on the left and a female on the right， and the male has managed to split his coloration so the female only always sees the kinder gentler squid in him。 And the male 。。。 （Laughter） We're going to see it again。 Let's take a look at it again。 Watch the coloration： white on the right， brown on the left。 He takes a step back —— so he's keeping off the other males by splitting his body —— and comes up on the other side 。。。 Bingo！ Now I'm told that's not just a squid phenomenon with males， but I don't know。 （Laughter）

接下来，再来一起看一对鱿鱼。 这就是鱿鱼。当雄性鱿鱼搏斗时， 如果它们想要显示出自己的侵略性，它们就变为白色了。 这有两条雄鱿鱼在搏斗。 它们用撞屁股的方式来搏斗， 真是挺有意思的方法。这里有一条雄性在左边， 雌性在右边。 看，这条雄性能有办法利用颜色把自己分为两半， 所以雌性只能看到它温顺，优雅的一边， 雄性—— （笑声）再来看一次。 让我们再看一次。注意它的颜色： 白色在右边，棕色在左边。 它后退一步，让其它的雄性无法靠近 来到另外一边，并且马上转换颜色。 瞧！以前有人告诉我 这个雄性特征不仅仅是在鱿鱼身上，不过我也不太确定。 （掌声）

经典TED英语演讲稿范文 篇2

When you are a kid, you get asked this one particular question a lot, it really gets kind of annoying. What do you want to be when you grow up? Now, adults are hoping for answers like, I want to be an astronaut or I want to be a neurosurgeon, you’re adults in your imaginations.

Kids, they’re most likely to answer with pro-skateboarder, surfer or minecraft player. I asked my little brother, and he said, seriously dude, I’m 10, I have no idea, probably a pro-skier, let’s go get some ice cream.

See, us kids are going to answer something we’re stoked on, what we think is cool, what we have experience with, and that’s typically the opposite of what adults want to hear.

But if you ask a little kid, sometimes you’ll get the best answer, something so simple, so obvious and really profound. When I grow up, I want to be happy.

For me, when I grow up, I want to continue to be happy like I am now. I’m stoked to be here at TedEx, I mean, I’ve been watching Ted videos for as long as I can remember, but I never thought I’d make it on the stage here so soon. I mean, I just became a teenager, and like most teenage boys, I spend most of my time wondering, how did my room get so messy all on its own.

Did I take a shower today? And the most perplexing of all, how do I get girls to like me? Neurosciences say that the teenage brain is pretty weird, our prefrontal cortex is underdeveloped, but we actually have more neurons than adults, which is why we can be so creative, and impulsive and moody and get bummed out.

But what bums me out is to know that, a lot of kids today are just wishing to be happy, to be healthy, to be safe, not bullied, and be loved for who they are. So it seems to me when adults say, what do you want to be when you grow up? They just assume that you’ll automatically be happy and healthy.

Well, maybe that’s not the case, go to school, go to college, get a job, get married, boom, then you’ll be happy, right? You don’t seem to make learning how to be happy and healthy a priority in our schools, it’s separate from schools. And for some kids, it doesn’t exists at all? But what if we didn’t make it separate? What if we based education on the study and practice of being happy and healthy, because that’s what it is, a practice, and a simple practice at that?

Education is important, but why is being happy and healthy not considered education, I just don’t get it. So I’ve been studying the science of being happy and healthy. It really comes down to practicing these eight things. Exercise, diet and nutrition, time in nature, contribution, service to others, relationships, recreation, relaxation and stress management, and religious or spiritual involvement, yes, got that one.

So these eight things come from Dr. Roger Walsh, he calls them Therapeutic Lifestyle Changes or TLCs for short. He is a scientist that studies how to be happy and healthy. In researching this talk, I got a chance to ask him a few questions like; do you think that our schools today are making these eight TLCs a priority? His response was no surprise, it was essentially no. But he did say that many people do try to get this kind of education outside of the traditional arena, through reading and practices such as meditation or yoga.

But what I thought was his best response was that, much of education is oriented for better or worse towards making a living rather than making a life.

In 20__, Sir Ken Robinson gave the most popular Ted talk of all time. Schools kill creativity. His message is that creativity is as important as literacy, and we should treat it with the same status.

A lot of parents watched those videos, some of those parents like mine counted it as one of the reasons they felt confident to pull their kids from traditional school to try something different. I realized I’m part of this small, but growing revolution of kids who are going about their education differently, and you know what? It freaks a lot of people out.

Even though I was only nine, when my parents pulled me out of the school system, I can still remember my mom being in tears when some of her friends told her she was crazy and it was a stupid idea.

Looking back, I’m thankful she didn’t cave to peer pressure, and I think she is too. So, out of the 200 million people that have watched Sir Ken Robinson’s talk, why aren’t there more kids like me out there?

Shane McConkey is my hero. I loved him because he was the world’s best skier. But then, one day I realized what I really loved about Shane, he was a hacker. Not a computer hacker, he hacked skiing. His creativity and inventions made skiing what it is today, and why I love to ski. A lot of people think of hackers as geeky computer nerds who live in their parent’s basement and spread computer viruses, but I don’t see it that way.

Hackers are innovators, hackers are people who challenge and change the systems to make them work differently, to make them work better, it’s just how they think, it’s a mindset.

I’m growing up in a world that needs more people with the hacker mindset, and not just for technology, everything is up for being hacked, even skiing, even education. So whether it’s Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg or Shane McConkey having the hacker mindset can change the world.

Healthy, happy, creativity in the hacker mindset are all a large part of my education. I call it Hackschooling, I don’t use any one particular curriculum, and I’m not dedicated to any one particular approach, I hack my education.

I take advantage of opportunities in my community, and through a network of my friends and family. I take advantage of opportunities to experience what I’m learning, and I’m not afraid to look for shortcuts or hacks to get a better faster result. It’s like a remix or a mash-up of learning. It’s flexible, opportunistic, and it never loses sight of making happy, healthy and creativity a priority.

And here is the cool part, because it’s a mindset, not a system. Hackschooling can be used anyone, even traditional schools. Soo what does my school look like? Well, it looks like Starbucks a lot of the time, but like most kids I study lot of math, science, history and writing. I didn’t used to like to write because my teachers made me write about butterflies and rainbows, and I wanted to write about skiing.

It was a relief for my good friend’s mom, started the Squaw Valley Kids Institute, where I got to write through my experiences and my interests, while, connecting with great speakers from around the nation, and that sparked my love of writing.

I realized that once you’re motivated to learn something, you can get a lot done in a short amount of time, and on your own, Starbucks is pretty great for that. Hacking physics was fun, we learned all about Newton and Galileo, and we experienced some basic physics concepts like kinetic energy through experimenting and making mistakes.

My favorite was the giant Newton’s cradle that we made out of bowling balls, no bocce balls. We experimented with lot of other things like bowling balls and event giant jawbreakers.

Project Discovery’s ropes course is awesome, and slightly stressful. When you’re 60 feet off the ground, you have to learn how to handle your fears, communicate clearly, and most importantly, trust each other.

Community organizations play a big part in my education, High Fives Foundation’s Basics Program being aware and safe in critical situations. We spent a day with the Squaw Valley Ski Patrol to learn more about mountain safety, then the next day we switched to science of snow, weather and avalanches.

But most importantly, we learned that making bad decisions puts you and your friends at risk. Young should talk, well brings history to life. You study a famous character in history, and so that you can stand on stage and perform as that character, and answer any question about their lifetime.

In this photo, you see Al Capone and Bob Marley getting grilled with questions at the historical Piper’s Opera House in Virginia City, the same stage where Harry Houdini got his start.

Time and nature is really important to me, it’s calm, quiet and I get to just log out of reality. I spend one day a week, outside all day. At my Fox Walkers classes, our goal is to be able to survive in the wilderness with just a knife. We learn to listen to nature, we learn to sense our surroundings, and I’ve gained a spiritual connection to nature that, I never knew existed.

But the best part is that we get to make spears, bows and arrows, fires with just a bow drill and survival shelters for the snowy nights when we camp out. Hanging out at the Moment Factory where they hand make skis and design clothes, has really inspired me to one day have my own business. The guys at the factory showed me why I need to be good at math, be creative and get good at selling.

So I got an internship at Big Shark Print to get better at design and selling. Between fetching lunch, scrubbing toilets and breaking their vacuum cleaner, I’m getting to contribute to clothing design, customizing hats and selling them. The people who work there are happy, healthy, creative, and stoked to be doing what they are doing, this is by far my favorite class.

So, this is why I’m really happy, powder days, and it’s a good metaphor for my life, my education, my hackschooling. If everyone ski this mountain, like most people think of education, everyone will be skiing the same line, probably the safest and most of the powder would go untouched.

I look at this, and see a thousand possibilities, dropping the corners, shredding the spine, looking for a churning from cliff-to-cliff. Skiing to me is freedom, and so is my education, it’s about being creative; doing things differently, it’s about community and helping each other. It’s about being happy and healthy among my very best friends.

So I’m starting to think, I know what I might want to do when I grow up, but if you ask me what do I want to be when I grow up? I’ll always know that I want to be happy. Thank you.

经典TED英语演讲稿范文 篇3

I'm a lifelong traveler. Even as a little kid, I was actually working out that it would be cheaper to go to boarding school in England than just to the best school down the road from my parents' house in California.

我这辈子都是个旅行者。 即使还是一个小孩子的时候， 我便了解，事实上， 去读英国寄宿学校会比 去加州父母家附近 最好的学校就读还来得便宜。

So, from the time I was nine years old I was flying alone several times a year over the North Pole, just to go to school. And of course the more I flew the more I came to love to fly, so the very week after I graduated from high school, I got a job mopping tables so that I could spend every season of my 18th year on a different continent.

所以，当我 9 岁时， 我在一年中，会独自飞行几回， 穿越北极，就只是去上学。 当然，飞得越频繁， 我越是爱上旅行， 所以就在我高中毕业后一周， 我找到一份清理桌子的工作， 为了让自己可以在 18 岁那年， 在地球不同的大陆上， 分别待上一季。

And then, almost inevitably, I became a travel writer so my job and my joy could become one.

接着，几乎不可避免地 我成了一个旅游作家， 使我的工作和志趣 可以结合在一块儿。

And I really began to feel that if you were lucky enough to walk around the candlelit temples of Tibet or to wander along the seafronts in Havana with music passing all around you, you could bring those sounds and the high cobalt skies and the flash of the blue ocean back to your friends at home, and really bring some magic and clarity to your own life.

我真的开始发觉 如果你可以幸运地 漫步于西藏的烛光寺庙， 或者在音乐的缭绕间 悠然信步于哈瓦那海岸， 你便能将那声音、天际 与靛蓝海洋的闪烁光芒 带给你家乡的朋友， 真确地捎来些许神奇， 点亮自身生命。

Except, as you all know, one of the first things you learn when you travel is that nowhere is magical unless you can bring the right eyes to it.

除了，如你们所知， 当旅行时，你学到的第一件事情是 你必须以正确的视角看世界， 否则大地依然黯淡无光。

You take an angry man to the Himalayas, he just starts complaining about the food. And I found that the best way that I could develop more attentive and more appreciative eyes was, oddly, by going nowhere, just by sitting still.

你带一个易怒的男人爬喜马拉雅山， 他只会抱怨那儿的食物。 我发现，有点怪异的是， 最好的让自己可以培养 更专注和更珍惜世界的视角的诀窍是 哪儿都不去，静止于原处即可。

And of course sitting still is how many of us get what we most crave and need in our accelerated lives, a break. But it was also the only way that I could find to sift through the slideshow of my experience and make sense of the future and the past.

当然呆在原地正是我们许多人 寻常所得到的东西， 我们都渴望在快速的生活中获得休息。 但那却是我唯一的方法， 让自己可以重历自身的经验幻灯， 理解未来与过去。

And so, to my great surprise, I found that going nowhere was at least as exciting as going to Tibet or to Cuba.

如此，我惊异地发现， 我发现无所去处 和游览西藏或古巴一样，令人兴奋。

And by going nowhere, I mean nothing more intimidating than taking a few minutes out of every day or a few days out of every season, or even, as some people do, a few years out of a life in order to sit still long enough to find out what moves you most, to recall where your truest happiness lies and to remember that sometimes making a living and making a life point in opposite directions.

无所去处，只不过意谓着 每天花几分钟， 或每季花几天， 甚至，如同有些人所做的， 在生命中花上几年 长久地静思于某处， 寻找感动你最多的一瞬， 回忆你最真实的幸福时刻， 同时记住， 有时候，谋生与生活 彼此是处于光谱线上的两端的。

And of course, this is what wise beings through the centuries from every tradition have been telling us.

当然，这是明智的众生历经几百年 从每个传统中所告诉我们的。

It's an old idea. More than 2,000 years ago, the Stoics were reminding us it's not our experience that makes our lives, it's what we do with it.

这是一个古老的概念。 早在两千多年前， 斯多葛学派提醒我们 并不是我们的经验 成就了我们的生命， 而是我们用那经验做了什么。

Imagine a hurricane suddenly sweeps through your town and reduces every last thing to rubble. One man is traumatized for life.

想象一下，一阵飓风 迅速扑向你的城市， 将所有一切化为废墟。 某个人身心遭受终身顿挫

But another, maybe even his brother, almost feels liberated, and decides this is a great chance to start his life anew. It's exactly the same event, but radically different responses. There is nothing either good or bad, as Shakespeare told us in "Hamlet," but thinking makes it so.

但另一个人，也许甚至是他的兄弟， 却几乎感觉释怀， 并认定，这是一个可以 使自己重获新生的重要机会。 这是同样的事件， 截然不同的回应。 没有什么是绝对的好坏， 正如莎士比亚 在《哈姆雷特》中所告诉我们的， 好坏由思维决定。

And this has certainly been my experience as a traveler. Twenty-four years ago I took the most mind-bending trip across North Korea. But the trip lasted a few days.

经典TED英语演讲稿范文 篇4

When I was nine years old I went off to summer camp for the first time. And my mother packed me a suitcase full of books, which to me seemed like a perfectly natural thing to do. Because in my family, reading was the primary group activity. And this might sound antisocial to you, but for us it was really just a different way of being social. You have the animal warmth of your family sitting right next to you, but you are also free to go roaming around the adventureland inside your own mind. And I had this idea that camp was going to be just like this, but better. (Laughter) I had a vision of 10 girls sitting in a cabin cozily reading books in their matching nightgowns.

当我九岁的时候 我第一次去参加夏令营 我妈妈帮我整理好了我的行李箱 里面塞满了书 这对于我来说是一件极为自然的事情 因为在我的家庭里 阅读是主要的家庭活动 听上去你们可能觉得我们是不爱交际的 但是对于我的家庭来说这真的只是接触社会的另一种途径 你们有自己家庭接触时的温暖亲情 家人静坐在你身边 但是你也可以自由地漫游 在你思维深处的冒险乐园里我有一个想法 野营会变得像这样子，当然要更好些 (笑声) 我想象到十个女孩坐在一个小屋里 都穿着合身的女式睡衣惬意地享受着读书的过程

(Laughter)

(笑声)

Camp was more like a keg party without any alcohol. And on the very first day our counselor gathered us all together and she taught us a cheer that she said we would be doing every day for the rest of the summer to instill camp spirit. And it went like this: "R-O-W-D-I-E, that's the way we spell rowdie. Rowdie, rowdie, let's get rowdie." Yeah. So I couldn't figure out for the life of me why we were supposed to be so rowdy, or why we had to spell this word incorrectly. (Laughter) But I recited a cheer. I recited a cheer along with everybody else. I did my best. And I just waited for the time that I could go off and read my books.

野营这时更像是一个不提供酒水的派对聚会 在第一天的时候呢 我们的顾问把我们都集合在一起 并且她教会了我们一种今后要用到的庆祝方式 在余下夏令营的每一天中 让“露营精神”浸润我们 之后它就像这样继续着 R-O-W-D-I-E 这是我们拼写“吵闹"的口号 我们唱着“噪音，喧闹，我们要变得吵一点” 对，就是这样 可我就是弄不明白我的生活会是什么样的 为什么我们变得这么吵闹粗暴 或者为什么我们非要把这个单词错误地拼写 (笑声) 但是我可没有忘记庆祝。我与每个人都互相欢呼庆祝了 我尽了我最大的努力 我只是想等待那一刻 我可以离开吵闹的聚会去捧起我挚爱的书

But the first time that I took my book out of my suitcase, the coolest girl in the bunk came up to me and she asked me, "Why are you being so mellow?" -- mellow, of course, being the exact opposite of R-O-W-D-I-E. And then the second time I tried it, the counselor came up to me with a concerned expression on her face and she repeated the point about camp spirit and said we should all work very hard to be outgoing.

但是当我第一次把书从行李箱中拿出来的时候 床铺中最酷的那个女孩向我走了过来 并且她问我：“为什么你要这么安静?” 安静，当然，是R-O-W-D-I-E的反义词 “喧闹”的反义词 而当我第二次拿书的时候 我们的顾问满脸忧虑的向我走了过来 接着她重复了关于“露营精神”的要点并且说我们都应当努力 去变得外向些

And so I put my books away, back in their suitcase, and I put them under my bed, and there they stayed for the rest of the summer. And I felt kind of guilty about this. I felt as if the books needed me somehow, and they were calling out to me and I was forsaking them.But I did forsake them and I didn't open that suitcase again until I was back home with my family at the end of the summer.

于是我放好我的书 放回了属于它们的行李箱中 并且我把它们放到了床底下 在那里它们度过了暑假余下的每一天 我对这样做感到很愧疚 不知为什么我感觉这些书是需要我的 它们在呼唤我，但是我却放弃了它们 我确实放下了它们，并且我再也没有打开那个箱子 直到我和我的家人一起回到家中 在夏末的时候

Now, I tell you this story about summer camp. I could have told you 50 others just like it --all the times that I got the message that somehow my quiet and introverted style of beingwas not necessarily the right way to go, that I should be trying to pass as more of an extrovert. And I always sensed deep down that this was wrong and that introverts were pretty excellent just as they were. But for years I denied this intuition, and so I became a Wall Street lawyer, of all things, instead of the writer that I had always longed to be -- partly because I needed to prove to myself that I could be bold and assertive too. And I was always going off to crowded bars when I really would have preferred to just have a nice dinner with friends. And I made these self-negating choices so reflexively, that I wasn't even aware that I was making them.

现在，我向你们讲述这个夏令营的故事 我完全可以给你们讲出其他50种版本就像这个一样的故事-- 每当我感觉到这样的时候 它告诉我出于某种原因，我的宁静和内向的风格 并不是正确道路上的必需品 我应该更多地尝试一个外向者的角色 而在我内心深处感觉得到，这是错误的内向的人们都是非常优秀的，确实是这样 但是许多年来我都否认了这种直觉 于是我首先成为了华尔街的一名律师 而不是我长久以来想要成为的一名作家 一部分原因是因为我想要证明自己 也可以变得勇敢而坚定 并且我总是去那些拥挤的酒吧 当我只是想要和朋友们吃一顿愉快的晚餐时 我做出了这些自我否认的抉择 如条件反射一般 甚至我都不清楚我做出了这些决定

经典TED英语演讲稿范文 篇5

01. Remember to say thank you

Hi. I'm 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 I'd 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.

I'm 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 he's 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. It's because he didn't know that his son needed to hear it.

So my question is, why don't we ask for the things that we need? I know a gentleman, married for 25 years, who's longing to hear his wife say, "Thank you for being the breadwinner, so I can stay home with the kids," but won't ask. I know a woman who's good at this. She, once a week, meets with her husband and says, "I'd 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 I've had since kindergarten, she thanks her children for doing their chores. And she said, "

But before I show you what’s inside,

I will tell you that’s going to do incredible things for you .

It will bring all of your family together.

You will feel loved and appreciated like never before.

And reconnect to friends and acquaintances you haven’t heard from in years.

Adoration and admiration will overwhelm you.

It will recalibrate what’s important in your life.

It will redefine your sense of spirituality and faith.

You’ll have a new understanding and trust in your body.

You’ll have unsurpassed vitality and energy.

You’ll expand your vocabulary, meet new people, and you’ll have a healthier lifestyle. And get this, you’ll have an eight-week vacation of doing absolutely nothing.

You’ll eat countless gourmet meals.

Flowers will arrive by the truck load.

People will say to you: “you look great! Have you had any work done?”

And you’ll have a life-time supply of good drugs.

You’ll be challenged, inspired, motivated and humbled.

Your life will have new meaning: peace, health, serenity, happiness, nirvana.

The price?

Fifty-five thousand dollars.

And that’s an incredible deal.

By now, I know you’re dying to know what it is and where you can get one.

Does Amazon carry it?

Dose it have the Apple logo on it?

Is there a waiting list?

Not likely.

This gift came to me about five months ago.

And looked more like this when it was all wrapped up.

Not quite so pretty.

And this.

And then this.

It was a rare jam.

A brain tumor.

Hemangioblastoma.

The gift that keeps on giving.

And while I’m ok now.

I wouldn’t wish this gift for you.

I’m not sure you’d want it.

But I would’t change my experience.

It profoundly altered my life in ways it didn’t expect.

In all the ways I just shared with you.

So the next time you are faced with something that’s unexpected, unwanted and uncertain. Consider that it just may be a gift.

经典TED英语演讲稿范文 篇6

This is Tim Ferriss circa 1979 A.D. Age two. You can tell by the power squat, I was a very confident boy -- and not without reason. I had a very charming routine at the time, which was to wait until late in the evening when my parents were decompressing from a hard day's work, doing their crossword puzzles, watching television. I would run into the living room, jump up on the couch, rip the cushions off, throw them on the floor, scream at the top of my lungs and run out because I was the Incredible Hulk. (Laughter) Obviously, you see the resemblance. And this routine went on for some time.

When I was seven I went to summer camp. My parents found it necessary for peace of mind. And at noon each day the campers would go to a pond, where they had floating docks. You could jump off the end into the deep end. I was born premature. I was always very small. My left lung had collapsed when I was born. And I've always had buoyancy problems. So water was something that scared me to begin with. But I would go in on occasion. And on one particular day, the campers were jumping through inner tubes, They were diving through inner tubes. And I thought this would be great fun. So I dove through the inner tube, and the bully of the camp grabbed my ankles. And I tried to come up for air, and my lower back hit the bottom of the inner tube. And I went wild eyed and thought I was going to die. A camp counselor fortunately came over and separated us. From that point onward I was terrified of swimming. That is something that I did not get over. My inability to swim has been one of my greatest humiliations and embarrassments. That is when I realized that I was not the Incredible Hulk.

But there is a happy ending to this story. At age 31 -- that's my age now -- in August I took two weeks to re-examine swimming, and question all the of the obvious aspects of swimming. And went from swimming one lap -- so 20 yards -- like a drowning monkey, at about 200 beats per minute heart rate -- I measured it -- to going to Montauk on Long Island, close to where I grew up, and jumping into the ocean and swimming one kilometer in open water, getting out and feeling better than when I went in. And I came out, in my Speedos, European style, feeling like the Incredible Hulk.

And that's what I want everyone in here to feel like, the Incredible Hulk, at the end of this presentation. More specifically, I want you to feel like you're capable of becoming an excellent long-distance swimmer, a world-class language learner, and a tango champion. And I would like to share my art. If I have an art, it's deconstructing things that really scare the living hell out of me. So, moving onward.

Swimming, first principles. First principles, this is very important. I find that the best results in life are often held back by false constructs and untested assumptions. And the turnaround in swimming came when a friend of mine said, "I will go a year without any stimulants" -- this is a six-double-espresso-per-day type of guy -- "if you can complete a one kilometer open water race." So the clock started ticking. I started seeking out triathletes because I found that lifelong swimmers often couldn't teach what they did. I tried kickboards. My feet would slice through the water like razors, I wouldn't even move. I would leave demoralized, staring at my feet. Hand paddles, everything. Even did lessons with Olympians -- nothing helped. And then Chris Sacca, who is now a dear friend mine, had completed an Iron Man with 103 degree temperature, said, "I have the answer to your prayers." And he introduced me to the work of a man named Terry Laughlin who is the founder of Total Immersion Swimming. That set me on the road to examining biomechanics.

So here are the new rules of swimming, if any of you are afraid of swimming, or not good at it. The first is, forget about kicking. Very counterintuitive. So it turns out that propulsion isn't really the problem. Kicking harder doesn't solve the problem because the average swimmer only transfers about three percent of their energy expenditure into forward motion. The problem is hydrodynamics. So what you want to focus on instead is allowing your lower body to draft behind your upper body, much like a small car behind a big car on the highway. And you do that by maintaining a horizontal body position. The only way you can do that is to not swim on top of the water. The body is denser than water. 95 percent of it would be, at least, submerged naturally.

So you end up, number three, not swimming, in the case of freestyle, on your stomach, as many people think, reaching on top of the water. But actually rotating from streamlined right to streamlined left, maintaining that fuselage position as long as possible. So let's look at some examples. This is Terry. And you can see that he's extending his right arm below his head and far in front. And so his entire body really is underwater. The arm is extended below the head. The head is held in line with the spine, so that you use strategic water pressure to raise your legs up -- very important, especially for people with lower body fat. Here is an example of the stroke. So you don't kick. But you do use a small flick. You can see this is the left extension. Then you see his left leg. Small flick, and the only purpose of that is to rotate his hips so he can get to the opposite side. And the entry point for his right hand -- notice this, he's not reaching in front and catching the water. Rather, he is entering the water at a 45-degree angle with his forearm, and then propelling himself by streamlining -- very important. Incorrect, above, which is what almost every swimming coach will teach you. Not their fault, honestly. And I'll get to implicit versus explicit in a moment. Below is what most swimmers will find enables them to do what I did, which is going from 21 strokes per 20-yard length to 11 strokes in two workouts with no coach, no video monitoring. And now I love swimming. I can't wait to go swimming. I'll be doing a swimming lesson later, for myself, if anyone wants to join me.

经典TED英语演讲稿范文 篇7

Do you think it's possible to control someone's attention? Even more than that, what about predicting human behavior? I think those are interesting ideas, if you could. I mean, for me, that would be the perfect superpower, actually kind of an evil way of approaching it. But for myself, in the past, I've spent the last 20 years studying human behavior from a rather unorthodox way: picking pockets. When we think of misdirection, we think of something as looking off to the side, when actually it's often the things that are right in front of us that are the hardest things to see, the things that you look at every day that you're blinded to.

For example, how many of you still have your cell phones on you right now? Great. Double-check. Make sure you still have them on you. I was doing some shopping beforehand. Now you've looked at them probably a few times today, but I'm going to ask you a question about them. Without looking at your cell phone directly yet, can you remember the icon in the bottom right corner? Bring them out, check, and see how accurate you were. How'd you do? Show of hands. Did we get it?

Now that you're done looking at those, close them down, because every phone has something in common. No matter how you organize the icons, you still have a clock on the front. So, without looking at your phone, what time was it? You just looked at your clock, right? It's an interesting idea. Now, I'll ask you to take that a step further with a game of trust. Close your eyes. I realize I'm asking you to do that while you just heard there's a pickpocket in the room, but close your eyes.

Now, you've been watching me for about 30 seconds. With your eyes closed, what am I wearing? Make your best guess. What color is my shirt? What color is my tie? Now open your eyes. By a show of hands, were you right?

It's interesting, isn't it? Some of us are a little bit more perceptive than others. It seems that way. But I have a different theory about that, that model of attention. They have fancy models of attention, Posner's trinity model of attention. For me, I like to think of it very simple, like a surveillance system. It's kind of like you have all these fancy sensors, and inside your brain is a little security guard. For me, I like to call him Frank. So Frank is sitting at a desk. He's got all sorts of cool information in front of him, high-tech equipment, he's got cameras, he's got a little phone that he can pick up, listen to the ears, all these senses, all these perceptions. But attention is what steers your perceptions, is what controls your reality. It's the gateway to the mind. If you don't attend to something, you can't be aware of it. But ironically, you can attend to something without being aware of it. That's why there's the cocktail effect: When you're in a party, you're having conversations with someone, and yet you can recognize your name and you didn't even realize you were listening to that.

Now, for my job, I have to play with techniques to exploit this, to play with your attention as a limited resource. So if I could control how you spend your attention, if I could maybe steal your attention through a distraction. Now, instead of doing it like misdirection and throwing it off to the side, instead, what I choose to focus on is Frank, to be able to play with the Frank inside your head, your little security guard, and get you, instead of focusing on your external senses, just to go internal for a second. So if I ask you to access a memory, like, what is that? What just happened? Do you have a wallet? Do you have an American Express in your wallet? And when I do that, your Frank turns around. He accesses the file. He has to rewind the tape. And what's interesting is, he can't rewind the tape at the same time that he's trying to process new data.

Now, I mean, this sounds like a good theory, but I could talk for a long time and tell you lots of things, and they may be true, a portion of them, but I think it's better if I tried to show that to you here live. So if I come down, I'm going to do a little bit of shopping. Just hold still where you are.

Hello, how are you? It's lovely to see you. You did a wonderful job onstage. You have a lovely watch that doesn't come off very well. Do you have your ring as well? Good. Just taking inventory. You're like a buffet. It's hard to tell where to start, there's so many great things.

Hi, how are you? Good to see you.

Hi, sir, could you stand up for me, please? Just right where you are. Oh, you're married. You follow directions well. That's nice to meet you, sir. You don't have a whole lot inside your pockets. Anything down by the pocket over here? Hopefully so. Have a seat. There you go. You're doing well.

经典TED英语演讲稿范文 篇8

Every kid needs a champion

每个孩子都需要一个冠军演讲稿中英对照：

I have spent my entire life either at the schoolhouse, on the way to the schoolhouse, or talking about what happens in the schoolhouse. Both my parents were educators, my maternal grandparents were educators, and for the past 40 years I've done the same thing. And so, needless to say, over those years I've had a chance to look at education reform from a lot of

perspectives. Some of those reforms have been good. Some of them have been not so good. And we know why kids drop out. We know why kids don't learn. It's either poverty, low attendance, negative peer influences. We know why. But one of the things that we never discuss or we rarely discuss is the value and importance of human connection, relationships.

我这辈子，要么是在学校，要么在去学校的路上，要么是在讨论学校里发生了什么事。我的父母都是教育家，我的外祖父母也都是搞教育的，过去40年我也在从事同样的事业。所以，很显然，过去的这些年里，我有机会从各个角度审视教育改革。一些改革是有成效的。而另一些却收效甚微。我们知道孩子们为什么掉队辍学。我们知道孩子们为什么学不下去。原因无非是贫穷，低出席率，同龄人的坏影响。我们知道为什么。但是我们从未讨论或者极少讨论的是人和人之间的那种联系的价值和重要性，这就是“关系”。

James Comer says that no significant learning can occur without a significant relationship. George Washington Carver says all learning is understanding relationships. Everyone in this room has been affected by a teacher or an adult.

For years, I have watched people teach. I have looked at the best and I've look at some of the worst.

James Comer (美国著名儿童精神科医师）说过，没有强有力的联系，学习就不会有显著的进步。 George Washington Carver（美国著名教育学家）说过，学习就是理解各种关系。在座的各位都曾经被一位老师或者一个成年人影响过。这么多年，我都在看人们怎么教学。我看过最好的也看过最差的。

A colleague said to me one time, "They don't pay me to like the kids. They pay me to teach a lesson. The kids should learn it. I should teach it. They should learn it. Case closed."

一次有个同事跟我说， “我的职责不是喜欢那些孩子们。我的职责是教书。孩子们就该去学。我管教课，他们管学习。就是这么个理儿。”

Well, I said to her, "You know, kids don't learn from people they don't like." 然后，我就跟她说， “你知道，孩子们可不跟他们讨厌的人学习。”

(Laughter) (Applause)

（笑声）（掌声）

She said, "That's just a bunch of hooey."

她接着说，“一派胡言。”

And I said to her, "Well, your year is going to be long and arduous, dear." 然后我对她说，“那么，亲爱的，你这一年会变得十分漫长和痛苦。”

Needless to say it was. Some people think that you can either have it in you to build a relationship or you don't. I think Stephen Covey had the right idea. He

said you ought to just throw in a few simple things, like seeking first to

understand as opposed to being understood, simple things like apologizing. You ever thought about thatTell a kid you're sorry, they're in shock.

事实也果真如此。有些人认为一个人或者天生可以建立一种关系或者不具有这种能力。我认为Stephen Covey（美国教育家）是对的。他说你只需要做一些简单的事情，比如试着首先理解他人，而不是想要被理解，比如道歉。你想过吗？跟一个孩子说你很对不起，他们都惊呆了。

I taught a lesson once on ratios. I'm not real good with math, but I was working on it. And I got back and looked at that teacher edition. I'd taught the whole lesson wrong. (Laughter)

我有一次讲比例。我数学不是很好，但是我当时在教数学。然后我下了课，翻看了教师用书。我完全教错了。（笑声）

So I came back to class the next day, and I said, "Look, guys, I need to apologize. I taught the whole lesson wrong. I'm so sorry."

所以我第二天回到班上说， “同学们，我要道歉。我昨天的课都教错了。我非常抱歉。”

They said, "That's okay, Ms. Pierson. You were so excited, we just let you go." (Laughter) (Applause)

他们说，“没关系，Pierson老师。你当时教得非常投入，我们就让你继续了。” （笑声）（掌声）

I have had classes that were so low, so academically deficient that I cried. I wondered, how am I going to take this group in nine months from where they

are to where they need to beAnd it was difficult. It was awfully hard. How do I raise the self-esteem of a child and his academic achievement at the same time

我曾经教过程度非常低的班级，学术素养差到我都哭了。我当时就想，我怎么能在9个月之内把这些孩子提升到他们必须具备的水平？这真的很难，太艰难了。我怎么能让一个孩子重拾自信的同时他在学术上也有进步？

One year I came up with a bright idea. I told all my students, "You were chosen to be in my class because I am the best teacher and you are the best students, they put us all together so we could show everybody else how to do it."

有一年我有了一个非常好的主意。我告诉我的学生们， “你们进了我的班级，因为我是最好的老师，而你们是最好的学生，他们把我们放在一起来给其他人做个好榜样。”

One of the students said, "Really" (Laughter)

一个学生说，“真的吗？” （笑声）

I said, "Really. We have to show the other classes how to do it, so when we walk down the hall, people will notice us, so you can't make noise. You just have to strut." And I gave them a saying to say: "I am somebody. I was

somebody when I came. I'll be a better somebody when I leave. I am powerful, and I am strong. I deserve the education that I get here. I have things to do, people to impress, and places to go."

我说，“当然是真的。我们要给其他班级做个榜样，当我们走在楼道里，因为大家都会注意到我们，我们不能吵闹。大家要昂首阔步。” 我还给了他们一个口号：“我是个人物。我来的时候是个人物。我毕业的时候会变成一个更好的人物。我

很有力，很强大。我值得在这里受教育。我有很多事情要做，我要让人们记住我，我要去很多地方。”

And they said, "Yeah!"

然后他们说：“是啊！”

You say it long enough, it starts to be a part of you.

如果你长时间的这么说，它就会开始变成事实。

And so — (Applause) I gave a quiz, 20 questions. A student missed 18. I put a "+2" on his paper and a big smiley face.

所以－（掌声）我做了一个小测验，20道题。一个孩子错了18道。我在他了卷子上写了个“＋2”和一个大的笑脸。

He said, "Ms. Pierson, is this an F"

他说，“Pierson老师，这是不及格吗？”

I said, "Yes."

我说，“是的。”

He said, "Then why'd you put a smiley face"

他接着说，“那你为什么给我一个笑脸？”

I said, "Because you're on a roll. You got two right. You didn't miss them all." I said, "And when we review this, won't you do better"

我说，“因为你正渐入佳境。你没有全错，还对了两个。” 我说，“我们复习这些题的时候，难道你不会做得更好吗？”

经典TED英语演讲稿范文 篇9

Have you ever held a question in mind for so long that it becomes part of how you think? Maybe even part of who you are as a person? Well I’ve had a question in my mind for many, many years and that is: how can you speed up learning? Now, this is an interesting question because if you speed up learning you can spend less time at school. And if you learn really fast, you probably wouldn’t have to go to school at all.

Now, when I was young, school was sort of okay but I found quite often that school got in the way of learning so I had this question in mind: how do you learn faster? And this began when I was very, very young, when I was about eleven years old I wrote a letter to researchers in the Soviet Union, asking about hypnopaedia, this is sleep learning, where you get a tape recorder, you put it beside your bed and it turns on in the middle of the night when you’re sleeping, and you’re supposed to be learning from this.

A good idea, unfortunately it doesn’t work. But, hypnopaedia did open the doors to research in other areas and we’ve had incredible discoveries about learning that began with that first question. I went on from there to become passionate about psychology and I have been involved in psychology in many ways for the rest of my life up until this point. In 1981 I took myself to China and I decided that I was going to be native level in Chinese inside two years.

Now, you need to understand that in 1981, everybody thought Chinese was really, really difficult and that a westerner could study for ten years or more and never really get very good at it. And I also went in with a different idea which was: taking all of the conclusions from psychological research up to that point and applying them to the learning process. What was really cool was that in six months I was fluent in Mandarin Chinese and took a little bit longer to get up to native. But I looked around and I saw all of these people from different countries struggling terribly with Chinese, I saw Chinese people struggling terribly to learn English and other languages, and so my question got refined down to: how can you help a normal adult learn a new language quickly, easily and effectively?

Now this a really, really important question in today’s world. We have massive challenges with environment we have massive challenges with social dislocation, with wars, all sorts of things going on and if we can’t communicate we’re really going to have difficulty solving these problems. So we need to be able to speak each other’s languages, this is really, really important.

The question then is how do you do that. Well, it’s actually really easy. You look around for people who can already do it, you look for situations where it’s already working and then you identify the principles and apply them. It’s called modelling and I’ve been looking at language learning and modelling language learning for about fifteen to twenty years now.

And my conclusion, my observation from this is that any adult can learn a second language to fluency inside six months. Now when I say this, most people think I’m crazy, this is not possible. So let me remind everybody of the history of human progress, it’s all about expanding our limits.

In 1950 everybody believed that running one mile in four minutes was impossible and then Roger Bannister did it in 1956 and from there it’s got shorter and shorter. 100 years ago everybody believed that heavy stuff doesn’t fly. Except it does and we all know this. How does heavy stuff fly? We reorganise the materials using principles that we have learned from observing nature, birds in this case. And today we’ve gone ever further, so you can fly a car. You can buy one of these for a couple hundred thousand US dollars. We now have cars in the world that can fly. And there’s a different way to fly that we’ve learned from squirrels. So all you need to do is copy what a flying squirrel does, build a suit called a wing suit and off you go, you can fly like a squirrel.

No, most people, a lot of people, I wouldn’t say everybody but a lot of people think they can’t draw. However there are some key principles, five principles that you can apply to learning to draw and you can 2 actually learn to draw in five days. So, if you draw like this, you learn these principles for five days and apply them and after five days you can draw something like this. Now I know this is true because that was my first drawing and after five days of applying these principles that was what I was able to do. And I looked at this and I went ‘wow,’ so that’s how I look like when I’m concentrating so intensely that my brain is exploding. So, anybody can learn to draw in five days and in the same way, with the same logic, anybody can learn a second language in six months.

经典TED英语演讲稿范文 篇10

When I was nine years old I went off to summer camp for the first time。 And my mother packed me a suitcase full of books， which to me seemed like a perfectly natural thing to do。 Because in my family， reading was the primary group activity。 And this might sound antisocial to you， but for us it was really just a different way of being social。 You have the animal warmth of your family sitting right next to you， but you are also free to go roaming around the adventureland inside your own mind。 And I had this idea that camp was going to be just like this， but better。 （Laughter） I had a vision of 10 girls sitting in a cabin cozily reading books in their matching nightgowns。

当我九岁的时候 我第一次去参加夏令营 我妈妈帮我整理好了我的行李箱 里面塞满了书 这对于我来说是一件极为自然的事情 因为在我的家庭里 阅读是主要的家庭活动 听上去你们可能觉得我们是不爱交际的 但是对于我的家庭来说这真的只是接触社会的另一种途径 你们有自己家庭接触时的温暖亲情 家人静坐在你身边 但是你也可以自由地漫游 在你思维深处的冒险乐园里我有一个想法 野营会变得像这样子，当然要更好些 （笑声） 我想象到十个女孩坐在一个小屋里 都穿着合身的女式睡衣惬意地享受着读书的过程

（Laughter）

（笑声）

Camp was more like a keg party without any alcohol。 And on the very first day our counselor gathered us all together and she taught us a cheer that she said we would be doing every day for the rest of the summer to instill camp spirit。 And it went like this： "R—O—W—D—I—E， that's the way we spell rowdie。 Rowdie， rowdie， let's get rowdie。" Yeah。 So I couldn't figure out for the life of me why we were supposed to be so rowdy， or why we had to spell this word incorrectly。 （Laughter） But I recited a cheer。 I recited a cheer along with everybody else。 I did my best。 And I just waited for the time that I could go off and read my books。

野营这时更像是一个不提供酒水的派对聚会 在第一天的时候呢 我们的顾问把我们都集合在一起 并且她教会了我们一种今后要用到的庆祝方式 在余下夏令营的每一天中 让“露营精神”浸润我们 之后它就像这样继续着 R—O—W—D—I—E 这是我们拼写“吵闹"的口号 我们唱着“噪音，喧闹，我们要变得吵一点” 对，就是这样 可我就是弄不明白我的生活会是什么样的 为什么我们变得这么吵闹粗暴 或者为什么我们非要把这个单词错误地拼写 （笑声） 但是我可没有忘记庆祝。我与每个人都互相欢呼庆祝了 我尽了我最大的努力 我只是想等待那一刻 我可以离开吵闹的聚会去捧起我挚爱的书

But the first time that I took my book out of my suitcase， the coolest girl in the bunk came up to me and she asked me， "Why are you being so mellow？" —— mellow， of course， being the exact opposite of R—O—W—D—I—E。 And then the second time I tried it， the counselor came up to me with a concerned expression on her face and she repeated the point about camp spirit and said we should all work very hard to be outgoing。

但是当我第一次把书从行李箱中拿出来的时候 床铺中最酷的那个女孩向我走了过来 并且她问我：“为什么你要这么安静？” 安静，当然，是R—O—W—D—I—E的反义词 “喧闹”的反义词 而当我第二次拿书的时候 我们的顾问满脸忧虑的向我走了过来 接着她重复了关于“露营精神”的要点并且说我们都应当努力 去变得外向些

And so I put my books away， back in their suitcase， and I put them under my bed， and there they stayed for the rest of the summer。 And I felt kind of guilty about this。 I felt as if the books needed me somehow， and they were calling out to me and I was forsaking them。But I did forsake them and I didn't open that suitcase again until I was back home with my family at the end of the summer。

于是我放好我的书 放回了属于它们的行李箱中 并且我把它们放到了床底下 在那里它们度过了暑假余下的每一天 我对这样做感到很愧疚 不知为什么我感觉这些书是需要我的 它们在呼唤我，但是我却放弃了它们 我确实放下了它们，并且我再也没有打开那个箱子 直到我和我的家人一起回到家中 在夏末的时候

Now， I tell you this story about summer camp。 I could have told you 50 others just like it ——all the times that I got the message that somehow my quiet and introverted style of beingwas not necessarily the right way to go， that I should be trying to pass as more of an extrovert。 And I always sensed deep down that this was wrong and that introverts were pretty excellent just as they were。 But for years I denied this intuition， and so I became a Wall Street lawyer， of all things， instead of the writer that I had always longed to be —— partly because I needed to prove to myself that I could be bold and assertive too。 And I was always going off to crowded bars when I really would have preferred to just have a nice dinner with friends。 And I made these self—negating choices so reflexively， that I wasn't even aware that I was making them。

现在，我向你们讲述这个夏令营的故事 我完全可以给你们讲出其他50种版本就像这个一样的故事—— 每当我感觉到这样的时候 它告诉我出于某种原因，我的宁静和内向的风格 并不是正确道路上的必需品 我应该更多地尝试一个外向者的角色 而在我内心深处感觉得到，这是错误的内向的人们都是非常优秀的，确实是这样 但是许多年来我都否认了这种直觉 于是我首先成为了华尔街的一名律师 而不是我长久以来想要成为的一名作家 一部分原因是因为我想要证明自己 也可以变得勇敢而坚定 并且我总是去那些拥挤的酒吧 当我只是想要和朋友们吃一顿愉快的晚餐时 我做出了这些自我否认的抉择 如条件反射一般 甚至我都不清楚我做出了这些决定

Now this is what many introverts do， and it's our loss for sure， but it is also our colleagues' loss and our communities' loss。 And at the risk of sounding grandiose， it is the world's loss。 Because when it comes to creativity and to leadership， we need introverts doing what they do best。 A third to a half of the population are introverts —— a third to a half。 So that's one out of every two or three people you know。 So even if you're an extrovert yourself， I'm talking about your coworkers and your spouses and your childrenand the person sitting next to you right now —— all of them subject to this bias that is pretty deep and real in our society。 We all internalize it from a very early age without even having a language for what we're doing。

这就是很多内向的人正在做的事情 这当然是我们的损失 但这同样也是同事们的损失 我们所在团队集体的损失 当然，冒着被指为夸大其词的风险我想说，更是世界的损失 因为当涉及创造和领导的时候 我们需要内向的人做到最好 三分之一到二分之一的人都是内向的—— 三分之一到二分之一 你要知道这可意味着每两到三个人中就有一个内向的 所以即使你自己是一个外向的人 我正在说你的同事 和你的配偶和你的孩子 还有现在正坐在你旁边的那个家伙—— 他们都要屈从于这样的偏见 一种在我们的社会中已经扎根的现实偏见 我们从很小的时候就把它藏在内心最深处 甚至都不说几句话，关于我们正在做的事情。

Now to see the bias clearly you need to understand what introversion is。 It's different from being shy。 Shyness is about fear of social judgment。 Introversion is more about， how do you respond to stimulation， including social stimulation。 So extroverts really crave large amounts of stimulation， whereas introverts feel at their most alive and their most switched—on and their most capable when they're in quieter， more low—key environments。Not all the time —— these things aren't absolute —— but a lot of the time。 So the key then to maximizing our talents is for us all to put ourselves in the zone of stimulation that is right for us。

现在让我们来清楚地看待这种偏见 我们需要真正了解“内向”到底指什么 它和害羞是不同的 害羞是对于社会评论的恐惧 内向更多的是 你怎样对于刺激作出回应 包括来自社会的刺激 其实内向的人是很渴求大量的鼓舞和激励的 反之内向者最感觉到他们的存在 这是他们精力最充足的时候，最具有能力的时候 当他们存在于更安静的，更低调的环境中 并不是所有时候——这些事情都不是绝对的—— 但是存在于很多时候 所以说，关键在于 把我们的天赋发挥到最大化 这对于我们来说就足够把我们自己 放到对于我们正确又合适的激励的区域中去

But now here's where the bias comes in。 Our most important institutions， our schools and our workplaces， they are designed mostly for extroverts and for extroverts' need for lots of stimulation。 And also we have this belief system right now that I call the new groupthink，which holds that all creativity and all productivity comes from a very oddly gregarious place。

但是现在偏见出现了 我们最重要的那些体系 我们的学校和工作单位 它们都是为性格外向者设计的 并且有适合他们需要的刺激和鼓励 当然我们现在也有这样一种信用机制 我称它为新型的“团队思考” 这是一种包含所有创造力和生产力的思考方式 从一个社交非常零散的地方产生的

So if you picture the typical classroom nowadays： When I was going to school， we sat in rows。 We sat in rows of desks like this， and we did most of our work pretty autonomously。But nowadays， your typical classroom has pods of desks —— four or five or six or seven kids all facing each other。 And kids are working in countless group assignments。 Even in subjects like math and creative writing， which you think would depend on solo flights of thought， kids are now expected to act as committee members。 And for the kids who preferto go off by themselves or just to work alone， those kids are seen as outliers often or， worse， as problem cases。 And the vast majority of teachers reports believing that the ideal student is an extrovert as opposed to an introvert， even though introverts actually get better grades and are more knowledgeable， according to research。 （Laughter）

当你描绘今天典型教室的图案时 当我还上学的时候 我们一排排地坐着 我们靠着桌子一排排坐着就像这样 并且我们大多数工作都是自觉完成的 但是在现代社会，所谓典型的教室 是些圈起来并排的桌子—— 四个或是五个或是六、七个孩子坐在一起，面对面 孩子们要完成无数个小组任务 甚至像数学和创意写作这些课程 这些你们认为需要依靠个人闪光想法的课程 孩子们现在却被期待成为小组会的成员 对于那些喜欢 独处，或者自己一个人工作的孩子来说 这些孩子常常被视为局外人 或者更糟，被视为问题孩子 并且很大一部分老师的报告中都相信 最理想的学生应该是外向的 相对于内向的学生而言 甚至说外向的学生能够取得更好的成绩 更加博学多识据研究报道 （笑声）

Okay， same thing is true in our workplaces。 Now， most of us work in open plan offices，without walls， where we are subject to the constant noise and gaze of our coworkers。 And when it comes to leadership， introverts are routinely passed over for leadership positions，even though introverts tend to be very careful， much less likely to take outsize risks ——which is something we might all favor nowadays。 And interesting research by Adam Grant at the Wharton School has found that introverted leaders often deliver better outcomes than extroverts do， because when they are managing proactive employees， they're much more likely to let those employees run with their ideas， whereas an extrovert can， quite unwittingly， get so excited about things that they're putting their own stamp on things， and other people's ideas might not as easily then bubble up to the surface。

好了。同样的事情也发生在我们工作的地方 现在呢，我们中的绝大多数都工作在宽阔没有隔间的办公室里 甚至没有墙 在这里，我们暴露 在不断的噪音和我们同事的凝视目光下工作 而当谈及领袖气质的时候 内向的人总是按照惯例从领导的位置被忽视了 尽管内向的人是非常小心仔细的 很少去冒特大的风险—— 这些风险是今天我们可能都喜欢的 宾夕法尼亚大学沃顿商学院的亚当·格兰特教授做了一项很有意思的研究 这项研究表明内向的领导们 相对于外向领导而言总是会生产更大的效益 因为当他们管理主动积极的雇员的时候 他们更倾向于让有主见的雇员去自由发挥 反之外向的领导就可能，当然是不经意的 对于事情变得十分激动 他们在事务上有了自己想法的印迹 这使其他人的想法可能就不会很容易地 在舞台上发光了

Now in fact， some of our transformative leaders in history have been introverts。 I'll give you some examples。 Eleanor Roosevelt， Rosa Parks， Gandhi —— all these peopled described themselves as quiet and soft—spoken and even shy。 And they all took the spotlight， even though every bone in their bodies was telling them not to。 And this turns out to have a special power all its own， because people could feel that these leaders were at the helm，not because they enjoyed directing others and not out of the pleasure of being looked at;they were there because they had no choice， because they were driven to do what they thought was right。

事实上，历史上一些有改革能力的领袖都是内向的人 我会举一些例子给你们 埃莉诺·罗斯福，罗沙·帕克斯，甘地 —— 所有这些人都把自己描述成 内向，说话温柔甚至是害羞的人 他们仍然站在了聚光灯下 即使他们浑身上下 都感知他们说不要 这证明是一种属于它自身的特殊的力量因为人们都会感觉这些领导者同时是掌舵者 并不是因为他们喜欢指挥别人 抑或是享受众人目光的聚焦 他们处在那个位置因为他们没有选择 因为他们行驶在他们认为正确的道路上

Now I think at this point it's important for me to say that I actually love extroverts。 I always like to say some of my best friends are extroverts， including my beloved husband。 And we all fall at different points， of course， along the introvert/extrovert spectrum。 Even Carl Jung， the psychologist who first popularized these terms， said that there's no such thing as a pure introvert or a pure extrovert。 He said that such a man would be in a lunatic asylum， if he existed at all。 And some people fall smack in the middle of the introvert/extrovert spectrum， and we call these people ambiverts。 And I often think that they have the best of all worlds。 But many of us do recognize ourselves as one type or the other。

现在我觉得对于这点我有必要说 那就是我真的喜爱外向的人 我总是喜欢说我最好的几个朋友都是外向的人 包括我亲爱的丈夫 当然了我们都会在不同点时偏向 内向者/外向者的范围 甚至是卡尔·荣格，这个让这些名词为大众所熟知的心理学家，说道 世上绝没有一个纯粹的内向的人 或者一个纯粹的外向的人 他说这样的人会在精神病院里 如果他存在的话 还有一些人处在中间的迹象 在内向与外向之间 我们称这些人为“中向性格者” 并且我总是认为他们拥有世界最美好的一切 但是我们中的大多数总是认为自己属于内向或者外向，其中一类

And what I'm saying is that culturally we need a much better balance。 We need more of a yin and yang between these two types。 This is especially important when it comes to creativity and to productivity， because when psychologists look at the lives of the most creative people， what they find are people who are very good at exchanging ideas and advancing ideas， but who also have a serious streak of introversion in them。

同时我想说从文化意义上讲我们需要一种更好的平衡 我们需要更多的阴阳的平衡 在这两种类型的人之间 这点是极为重要的 当涉及创造力和生产力的时候 因为当心理学家们看待 最有创造力的人的生命的时候 他们寻找到的 是那些擅长变换思维的人 提出想法的人 但是他们同时也有着极为显著的偏内向的痕迹

And this is because solitude is a crucial ingredient often to creativity。 So Darwin， he took long walks alone in the woods and emphatically turned down dinner party invitations。Theodor Geisel， better known as Dr。 Seuss， he dreamed up many of his amazing creations in a lonely bell tower office that he had in the back of his house in La Jolla， California。 And he was actually afraid to meet the young children who read his books for fear that they were expecting him this kind of jolly Santa Claus—like figure and would be disappointed with his more reserved persona。 Steve Wozniak invented the first Apple computer sitting alone in his cubical in Hewlett—Packard where he was working at the time。 And he says that he never would have become such an expert in the first place had he not been too introverted to leave the house when he was growing up。

这是因为独处是非常关键的因素 对于创造力来说 所以达尔文 自己一个人漫步在小树林里 并且断然拒绝了晚餐派对的邀约 西奥多·盖索，更多时候以苏索博士的名号知名 他梦想过很多的惊人的创作 在他在加利福尼亚州拉霍亚市房子的后面的 一座孤独的束层的塔形办公室中 而且其实他很害怕见面 见那些读过他的书的年轻的孩子们 害怕他们会期待他 这样一位令人愉快的，圣诞老人形象的人物 同时又会因发现他含蓄缄默的性格而失望 史蒂夫·沃兹尼亚克发明了第一台苹果电脑 一个人独自坐在他的机柜旁 在他当时工作的惠普公司 并且他说他永远不会在那方面成为一号专家 但他还没因太内向到要离开那里 那个他成长起来的地方

Now of course， this does not mean that we should all stop collaborating —— and case in point， is Steve Wozniak famously coming together with Steve Jobs to start Apple Computer —— but it does mean that solitude matters and that for some people it is the air that they breathe。 And in fact， we have known for centuries about the transcendent power of solitude。 It's only recently that we've strangely begun to forget it。 If you look at most of the world's major religions， you will find seekers —— Moses， Jesus， Buddha， Muhammad ——seekers who are going off by themselves alone to the wilderness where they then have profound epiphanies and revelations that they then bring back to the rest of the community。 So no wilderness， no revelations。

当然了 这并不意味着我们都应该停止合作—— 恰当的例子呢，是史蒂夫·沃兹尼亚克和史蒂夫·乔布斯的著名联手 创建苹果电脑公司—— 但是这并不意味着和独处有重大关系 并且对于一些人来说 这是他们赖以呼吸生存的空气 事实上，几个世纪以来我们已经非常明白 独处的卓越力量只是到了最近，非常奇怪，我们开始遗忘它了 如果你看看世界上主要的宗教 你会发现探寻者—— 摩西，耶稣，佛祖，那些独身去探寻的人们 在大自然的旷野中独处，思索 在那里，他们有了深刻的顿悟和对于奥义的揭示 之后他们把这些思想带回到社会的其他地方去没有旷原，没有启示

This is no surprise though if you look at the insights of contemporary psychology。 It turns out that we can't even be in a group of people without instinctively mirroring， mimicking their opinions。 Even about seemingly personal and visceral things like who you're attracted to， you will start aping the beliefs of the people around you without even realizing that that's what you're doing。

尽管这并不令人惊讶 如果你注意到现代心理学的思想理论 它反映出来我们甚至不能和一组人待在一起 而不去本能地模仿他们的意见与想法 甚至是看上去私人的，发自内心的事情 像是你被谁所吸引 你会开始模仿你周围的人的信仰 甚至都觉察不到你自己在做什么

And groups famously follow the opinions of the most dominant or charismatic person in the room， even though there's zero correlation between being the best talker and having the best ideas —— I mean zero。 So 。。。 （Laughter） You might be following the person with the best ideas， but you might not。 And do you really want to leave it up to chance？ Much better for everybody to go off by themselves， generate their own ideas freed from the distortions of group dynamics， and then come together as a team to talk them through in a well—managed environment and take it from there。

还曾跟随群体的意见 跟随着房间里最具有统治力的，最有领袖气质的人的思路 虽然这真的没什么关系 在成为一个卓越的演讲家还是拥有最好的主意之间—— 我的意思是“零相关” 那么。。。（笑声） 你们或许会跟随有最好头脑的人 但是你们也许不会 可你们真的想把这机会扔掉吗？如果每个人都自己行动或许好得多 发掘他们自己的想法 没有群体动力学的曲解 接着来到一起组成一个团队 在一个良好管理的环境中互相交流 并且在那里学习别的思想

Now if all this is true， then why are we getting it so wrong？ Why are we setting up our schools this way and our workplaces？ And why are we making these introverts feel so guilty about wanting to just go off by themselves some of the time？ One answer lies deep in our cultural history。 Western societies， and in particular the U。S。， have always favored the man of action over the man of contemplation and "man" of contemplation。 But in America's early days， we lived in what historians call a culture of character， where we still， at that point， valued people for their inner selves and their moral rectitude。 And if you look at the self—help books from this era， they all had titles with things like "Character， the Grandest Thing in the World。" And they featured role models like Abraham Lincoln who was praised for being modest and unassuming。 Ralph Waldo Emerson called him "A man who does not offend by superiority。"

如果说现在这一切都是真的 那么为什么我们还得到这样错误的结论？ 为什么我们要这样创立我们的学校，还有我们的工作单位？ 为什么我们要让这些内向的人觉得那么愧疚 。对于他们只是想要离开，一个人独处一段时间的事实？ 有一个答案在我们的文化史中埋藏已久 西方社会特别是在美国 总是偏爱有行动的人 而不是有深刻思考的人 有深刻思考的“人” 但是在美国早期的时候 我们生活在一个被历史学家称作“性格特征”的文化 那时我们仍然，在这点上，判断人们的价值 从人们的内涵和道义正直 而且如果你看一看这个时代关于自立的书籍的话 它们都有这样一种标题： “性格”，世界上最伟大的事物 并且它们以亚伯拉罕·林肯这样的为标榜 一个被形容为谦虚低调的男人 拉尔夫·瓦尔多·爱默生称他是 “一个以‘优越’二字形容都不为过的人”

But then we hit the 20th century and we entered a new culture that historians call the culture of personality。 What happened is we had evolved an agricultural economy to a world of big business。 And so suddenly people are moving from small towns to the cities。And instead of working alongside people they've known all their lives， now they are having to prove themselves in a crowd of strangers。 So， quite understandably， qualities like magnetism and charisma suddenly come to seem really important。 And sure enough， the self—help books change to meet these new needs and they start to have names like "How to Win Friends and Influence People。" And they feature as their role models really great salesmen。 So that's the world we're living in today。 That's our cultural inheritance。

但是接着我们来到了二十世纪 并且我们融入了一种新的文化 一种被历史学家称作“个性”的文化 所发生的改变就是我们从农业经济发展为 一个大商业经济的世界 而且人们突然开始搬迁从小的城镇搬向城市 并且一改他们之前的在生活中和所熟识的人们一起工作的方式 现在他们在一群陌生人中间有必要去证明自己 这样做是非常可以理解的 像领袖气质和个人魅力这样的品质 突然间似乎变得极为重要 那么可以肯定的是，自助自立的书的`内容变更了以适应这些新的需求 并且它们开始拥有名称 像是《如何赢得朋友和影响他人》（戴尔？卡耐基所著《人性的弱点》） 他们的特点是做自己的榜样 不得不说确实是好的推销员 所以这就是我们今天生活的世界 这是我们的文化遗产

Now none of this is to say that social skills are unimportant， and I'm also not calling for the abolishing of teamwork at all。 The same religions who send their sages off to lonely mountain tops also teach us love and trust。 And the problems that we are facing today in fields like science and in economics are so vast and so complex that we are going to need armies of people coming together to solve them working together。 But I am saying that the more freedom that we give introverts to be themselves， the more likely that they are to come up with their own unique solutions to these problems。

现在没有谁能够说 社交技能是不重要的 并且我也不是想呼吁 大家废除团队合作模式 但仍是相同的宗教，却把他们的圣人送到了孤独的山顶上 仍然教导我们爱与信任 还有我们今天所要面对的问题 像是在科学和经济领域 是如此的巨大和复杂 以至于我们需要人们强有力地团结起来 共同解决这些问题 但是我想说，越给内向者自由让他们做自己 他们就做得越好 去想出他们独特的关于问题的解决办法

So now I'd like to share with you what's in my suitcase today。 Guess what？ Books。 I have a suitcase full of books。 Here's Margaret Atwood， "Cat's Eye。" Here's a novel by Milan Kundera。 And here's "The Guide for the Perplexed" by Maimonides。 But these are not exactly my books。 I brought these books with me because they were written by my grandfather's favorite authors。

所以现在我很高兴同你们分享 我手提箱中的东西 猜猜是什么？ 书 我有一个手提箱里面装满了书 这是玛格丽特·阿特伍德的《猫的眼睛》 这是一本米兰·昆德拉的书 这是一本《迷途指津》 是迈蒙尼德写的 但这些实际上都不是我的书 我还是带着它们，陪伴着我 因为它们都是我祖父最喜爱的作家所写

My grandfather was a rabbi and he was a widower who lived alone in a small apartment in Brooklyn that was my favorite place in the world when I was growing up， partly because it was filled with his very gentle， very courtly presence and partly because it was filled with books。 I mean literally every table， every chair in this apartment had yielded its original function to now serve as a surface for swaying stacks of books。 Just like the rest of my family， my grandfather's favorite thing to do in the whole world was to read。

我的祖父是一名犹太教祭司 他独身一人 在布鲁克林的一间小公寓中居住 那里是我从小到大在这个世界上最喜爱的地方 部分原因是他有着非常温和亲切的，温文尔雅的举止 部分原因是那里充满了书 我的意思是，毫不夸张地说，公寓中的每张桌子，每张椅子 都充分应用着它原有的功能 就是现在作为承载一大堆都在摇曳的书的表面 就像我其他的家庭成员一样 我祖父在这个世界上最喜欢做的事情就是阅读

But he also loved his congregation， and you could feel this love in the sermons that he gave every week for the 62 years that he was a rabbi。 He would takes the fruits of each week's reading and he would weave these intricate tapestries of ancient and humanist thought。 And people would come from all over to hear him speak。

但是他同样也热爱他的宗教 并且你们可以从他的讲述中感觉到他这种爱 这62年来每周他都作为一名犹太教的祭司 他会从每周的阅读中汲取养分 并且他会编织这些错综复杂的古代和人文主义的思想的挂毯 并且人们会从各个地方前来 听他的讲话

But here's the thing about my grandfather。 Underneath this ceremonial role， he was really modest and really introverted —— so much so that when he delivered these sermons， he had trouble making eye contact with the very same congregation that he had been speaking to for 62 years。 And even away from the podium， when you called him to say hello， he would often end the conversation prematurely for fear that he was taking up too much of your time。 But when he died at the age of 94， the police had to close down the streets of his neighborhood to accommodate the crowd of people who came out to mourn him。 And so these days I try to learn from my grandfather's example in my own way。

但是有这么一件关于我祖父的事情 在这个正式的角色下隐藏着 他是一个非常谦虚的非常内向的人 是那么的谦虚内向以至于当他在向人们讲述的时候 他都不敢有视线上的接触 和同样的教堂会众 他已经发言有62年了 甚至都还远离领奖台 当你们让他说“你好”的时候 他总会提早结束这对话 担心他会占用你太多的时间 但是当他94岁去世的时候 警察们需要封锁他所居住的街道邻里 来容纳拥挤的人们 前来哀悼他的人们 这些天来我都试着从我祖父的事例中学习 以我自己的方式

So I just published a book about introversion， and it took me about seven years to write。And for me， that seven years was like total bliss， because I was reading， I was writing， I was thinking， I was researching。 It was my version of my grandfather's hours of the day alone in his library。 But now all of a sudden my job is very different， and my job is to be out here talking about it， talking about introversion。 （Laughter） And that's a lot harder for me，because as honored as I am to be here with all of you right now， this is not my natural milieu。

所以我就出版了一本关于内向性格的书 它花了我7年的时间完成它 而对我来说，这七年像是一种极大的喜悦 因为我在阅读，我在写作 我在思考，我在探寻 这是我的版本 对于爷爷一天中几个小时都要独自待在图书馆这件事 但是现在突然间我的工作变得很不同了 我的工作变成了站在这里讲述它 讲述内向的性格 （笑声） 而且这对于我来说是有一点困难的 因为我很荣幸 在现在被你们所有人所倾听 这可不是我自然的文化背景

So I prepared for moments like these as best I could。 I spent the last year practicing public speaking every chance I could get。 And I call this my "year of speaking dangerously。" （Laughter） And that actually helped a lot。 But I'll tell you， what helps even more is my sense， my belief， my hope that when it comes to our attitudes to introversion and to quiet and to solitude， we truly are poised on the brink on dramatic change。 I mean， we are。 And so I am going to leave you now with three calls for action for those who share this vision。

所以我准备了一会就像这样 以我所能做到的最好的方式 我花了最近一年的时间练习在公共场合发言 在我能得到的每一个机会中 我把这一年称作我的“危险地发言的一年” （笑声） 而且它的确帮了我很大的忙 但是我要告诉你们一个帮我更大的忙的事情 那就是我的感觉，我的信仰，我的希望 当谈及我们态度的时候 对于内向性格的，对于安静，对于独处的态度时 我们确实是在急剧变化的边缘上保持微妙的平衡 我的意思是，我们在保持平衡 现在我将要给你们留下一些东西 三件对于你们的行动有帮助的事情 献给那些观看我的演讲的人

Number one： Stop the madness for constant group work。 Just stop it。 （Laughter） Thank you。 （Applause） And I want to be clear about what I'm saying， because I deeply believe our offices should be encouraging casual， chatty cafe—style types of interactions —— you know， the kind where people come together and serendipitously have an exchange of ideas。That is great。 It's great for introverts and it's great for extroverts。 But we need much more privacy and much more freedom and much more autonomy at work。 School， same thing。We need to be teaching kids to work together， for sure， but we also need to be teaching them how to work on their own。 This is especially important for extroverted children too。They need to work on their own because that is where deep thought comes from in part。

第一： 停止对于经常要团队协作的执迷与疯狂 停止它就好了 （笑声） 谢谢你们 （掌声） 我想让我所说的事情变得清晰一些 因为我对于我们的办公深信不疑 应该鼓励它们 那种休闲随意的，聊天似的咖啡厅式的相互作用—— 你们知道的，道不同不相为谋，人们聚到一起 并且互相交换着宝贵的意见 这是很棒的 这对于内向者很好，同样对于外向者也好 但是我们需要更多的隐私和更多的自由 还有更多对于我们本身工作的自主权 对于学校，也是同样的。 我们当然需要教会孩子们要一起学习工作 但是我们同样需要教会孩子们怎么样独立完成任务 这对于外向的孩子们来说同样是极为重要的 他们需要独立完成工作 因为从某种程度上，这是他们深刻思考的来源

Okay， number two： Go to the wilderness。 Be like Buddha， have your own revelations。 I'm not saying that we all have to now go off and build our own cabins in the woods and never talk to each other again， but I am saying that we could all stand to unplug and get inside our own heads a little more often。

好了，第二个：去到野外（打开思维） 就像佛祖一样，拥有你们自己对于事物的揭示启迪 我并不是说 我们都要跑去小树林里建造我们自己的小屋 并且之后就永远不和别人说话了 但是我要说我们都可以坚持去去除一些障碍物 然后深入我们自己的大脑思想 时不时得再深入一点

Number three： Take a good look at what's inside your own suitcase and why you put it there。 So extroverts， maybe your suitcases are also full of books。 Or maybe they're full of champagne glasses or skydiving equipment。 Whatever it is， I hope you take these things out every chance you get and grace us with your energy and your joy。 But introverts， you being you， you probably have the impulse to guard very carefully what's inside your own suitcase。 And that's okay。 But occasionally， just occasionally， I hope you will open up your suitcases for other people to see， because the world needs you and it needs the things you carry。

第三点： 好好看一眼你的旅行箱内有什么东西 还有你为什么把它放进去 所以外向者们 也许你们的箱子内同样堆满了书 或者它们装满了香槟的玻璃酒杯 或者是跳伞运动的设备 不管它是什么，我希望每当你们有机会你们就把它拿出来 用你的能量和你的快乐让我们感受到美和享受 但是内向者们，你们作为内向者 你们很可能有仔细保护一切的冲动 在你箱子里的东西 这没有问题 但是偶尔地，只是说偶尔地 我希望你们可以打开你们的手提箱，让别人看一看 因为这个世界需要你们，同样需要你们身上所携带的你们特有的事物

So I wish you the best of all possible journeys and the courage to speak softly。

所以对于你们即将走上的所有旅程，我都给予你们我最美好的祝愿 还有温柔地说话的勇气

Thank you。 Thank you。

非常感谢你们

（掌声）

经典TED英语演讲稿范文 篇11

do you think it's possible to control someone's attention? even more than that, what about predicting human behavior? i think those are interesting ideas, if you could. i mean, for me, that would be the perfect superpower, actually kind of an evil way of approaching it. but for myself, in the past, i've spent the last 20 years studying human behavior from a rather unorthodox way: picking pockets. when we think of misdirection, we think of something as looking off to the side, when actually it's often the things that are right in front of us that are the hardest things to see, the things that you look at every day that you're blinded to.

for example, how many of you still have your cell phones on you right now? great. double-check. make sure you still have them on you. i was doing some shopping beforehand. now you've looked at them probably a few times today, but i'm going to ask you a question about them. without looking at your cell phone directly yet, can you remember the icon in the bottom right corner? bring them out, check, and see how accurate you were. how'd you do? show of hands. did we get it?

now that you're done looking at those, close them down, because every phone has something in common. no matter how you organize the icons, you still have a clock on the front. so, without looking at your phone, what time was it? you just looked at your clock, right? it's an interesting idea. now, i'll ask you to take that a step further with a game of trust. close your eyes. i realize i'm asking you to do that while you just heard there's a pickpocket in the room, but close your eyes.

now, you've been watching me for about 30 seconds. with your eyes closed, what am i wearing? make your best guess. what color is my shirt? what color is my tie? now open your eyes. by a show of hands, were you right?

it's interesting, isn't it? some of us are a little bit more perceptive than others. it seems that way. but i have a different theory about that, that model of attention. they have fancy models of attention, posner's trinity model of attention. for me, i like to think of it very simple, like a surveillance system. it's kind of like you have all these fancy sensors, and inside your brain is a little security guard. for me, i like to call him frank. so frank is sitting at a desk. he's got all sorts of cool information in front of him, high-tech equipment, he's got cameras, he's got a little phone that he can pick up, listen to the ears, all these senses, all these perceptions. but attention is what steers your perceptions, is what controls your reality. it's the gateway to the mind. if you don't attend to something, you can't be aware of it. but ironically, you can attend to something without being aware of it. that's why there's the cocktail effect: when you're in a party, you're having conversations with someone, and yet you can recognize your name and you didn't even realize you were listening to that.

now, for my job, i have to play with techniques to exploit this, to play with your attention as a limited resource. so if i could control how you spend your attention, if i could maybe steal your attention through a distraction. now, instead of doing it like misdirection and throwing it off to the side, instead, what i choose to focus on is frank, to be able to play with the frank inside your head, your little security guard, and get you, instead of focusing on your external senses, just to go internal for a second. so if i ask you to access a memory, like, what is that? what just happened? do you have a wallet? do you have an american express in your wallet? and when i do that, your frank turns around. he accesses the file. he has to rewind the tape. and what's interesting is, he can't rewind the tape at the same time that he's trying to process new data.

now, i mean, this sounds like a good theory, but i could talk for a long time and tell you lots of things, and they may be true, a portion of them, but i think it's better if i tried to show that to you here live. so if i come down, i'm going to do a little bit of shopping. just hold still where you are.

hello, how are you? it's lovely to see you. you did a wonderful job onstage. you have a lovely watch that doesn't come off very well. do you have your ring as well? good. just taking inventory. you're like a buffet. it's hard to tell where to start, there's so many great things.

hi, how are you? good to see you.

hi, sir, could you stand up for me, please? just right where you are. oh, you're married. you follow directions well. that's nice to meet you, sir. you don't have a whole lot inside your pockets. anything down by the pocket over here? hopefully so. have a seat. there you go. you're doing well.

hi, sir, how are you? good to see you, sir. you have a ring, a watch. do you have a wallet on you? joe: i don't. apollo robbins: well, we'll find one for you. come on up this way, joe. give joe a round of applause. come on up joe. let's play a game.

(applause)

pardon me.

i don't think i need this clicker anymore. you can have that. thank you very much. i appreciate that.

come on up to the stage, joe. let's play a little game now. do you have anything in your front pockets? joe: money. ar: money. all right, let's try that. can you stand right over this way for me? turn around and, let's see, if i give you something that belongs to me, this is just something i have, a poker chip. hold out your hand for me. watch it kind of closely. now this is a task for you to focus on. now you have your money in your front pocket here? joe: yup. ar: good. i'm not going to actually put my hand in your pocket. i'm not ready for that kind of commitment. one time a guy had a hole in his pocket, and that was rather traumatizing for me. i was looking for his wallet and he gave me his phone number. it was a big miscommunication.

so let's do this simply. squeeze your hand. squeeze it tight. do you feel the poker chip in your hand? joe: i do. ar: would you be surprised if i could take it out of your hand? say yes. joe: very. ar: good. open your hand. thank you very much. i'll cheat if you give me a chance. make it harder for me. just use your hand. grab my wrist, but squeeze, squeeze firm. did you see it go? joe: no. ar: no, it's not here. open your hand. see, while we're focused on the hand, it's sitting on your shoulder right now. go ahead and take it off. now, let's try that again. hold your hand out flat. open it up all the way. put your hand up a little bit higher, but watch it close there, joe. see, if i did it slowly, it'd be back on your shoulder. (laughter) joe, we're going to keep doing this till you catch it. you're going to get it eventually. i have faith in you. squeeze firm. you're human, you're not slow. it's back on your shoulder. you were focused on your hand. that's why you were distracted. while you were watching this, i couldn't quite get your watch off. it was difficult. yet you had something inside your front pocket. do you remember what it was? joe: money. ar: check your pocket. see if it's still there. is it still there? (laughter) oh, that's where it was. go ahead and put it away. we're just shopping. this trick's more about the timing, really. i'm going to try to push it inside your hand. put your other hand on top for me, would you? it's amazingly obvious now, isn't it? it looks a lot like the watch i was wearing, doesn't it?

(laughter) (applause)

joe: that's pretty good. that's pretty good. ar: oh, thanks. but it's only a start. let's try it again, a little bit differently. hold your hands together. put your other hand on top. now if you're watching this little token, this obviously has become a little target. it's like a red herring. if we watch this kind of close, it looks like it goes away. it's not back on your shoulder. it falls out of the air, lands right back in the hand. did you see it go? yeah, it's funny. we've got a little guy. he's union. he works up there all day. if i did it slowly, if it goes straightaway, it lands down by your pocket. i believe is it in this pocket, sir? no, don't reach in your pocket. that's a different show. so -- (squeaking noise) -- that's rather strange. they have shots for that. can i show them what that is? that's rather bizarre. is this yours, sir? i have no idea how that works. we'll just send that over there.

that's great. i need help with this one. step over this way for me. now don't run away. you had something down by your pants pocket. i was checking mine. i couldn't find everything, but i noticed you had something here. can i feel the outside of your pocket for a moment? down here i noticed this. is this something of yours, sir? is this? i have no idea. that's a shrimp.

joe: yeah. i'm saving it for later.

ar: you've entertained all of these people in a wonderful way, better than you know. so we'd love to give you this lovely watch as a gift. (laughter) hopefully it matches his taste. but also, we have a couple of other things, a little bit of cash, and then we have a few other things. these all belong to you, along with a big round of applause from all your friends. (applause)

oe, thank you very much.

(applause)

so, same question i asked you before, but this time you don't have to close your eyes. what am i wearing?

(laughter)

(applause)

attention is a powerful thing. like i said, it shapes your reality. so, i guess i'd like to pose that question to you. if you could control somebody's attention, what would you do with it?

thank you.

经典TED英语演讲稿范文 篇12

When you are a kid, you get asked this one particular question a lot, it really gets kind of annoying. What do you want to be when you grow up? Now, adults are hoping for answers like, I want to be an astronaut or I want to be a neurosurgeon, you’re adults in your imaginations.

Kids, they’re most likely to answer with pro-skateboarder, surfer or minecraft player. I asked my little brother, and he said, seriously dude, I’m 10, I have no idea, probably a pro-skier, let’s go get some ice cream.

See, us kids are going to answer something we’re stoked on, what we think is cool, what we have experience with, and that’s typically the opposite of what adults want to hear.

But if you ask a little kid, sometimes you’ll get the best answer, something so simple, so obvious and really profound. When I grow up, I want to be happy.

For me, when I grow up, I want to continue to be happy like I am now. I’m stoked to be here at TedEx, I mean, I’ve been watching Ted videos for as long as I can remember, but I never thought I’d make it on the stage here so soon. I mean, I just became a teenager, and like most teenage boys, I spend most of my time wondering, how did my room get so messy all on its own.

Did I take a shower today? And the most perplexing of all, how do I get girls to like me? Neurosciences say that the teenage brain is pretty weird, our prefrontal cortex is underdeveloped, but we actually have more neurons than adults, which is why we can be so creative, and impulsive and moody and get bummed out.

But what bums me out is to know that, a lot of kids today are just wishing to be happy, to be healthy, to be safe, not bullied, and be loved for who they are. So it seems to me when adults say, what do you want to be when you grow up? They just assume that you’ll automatically be happy and healthy.

Well, maybe that’s not the case, go to school, go to college, get a job, get married, boom, then you’ll be happy, right? You don’t seem to make learning how to be happy and healthy a priority in our schools, it’s separate from schools. And for some kids, it doesn’t exists at all? But what if we didn’t make it separate? What if we based education on the study and practice of being happy and healthy, because that’s what it is, a practice, and a simple practice at that?

Education is important, but why is being happy and healthy not considered education, I just don’t get it. So I’ve been studying the science of being happy and healthy. It really comes down to practicing these eight things. Exercise, diet and nutrition, time in nature, contribution, service to others, relationships, recreation, relaxation and stress management, and religious or spiritual involvement, yes, got that one.

So these eight things come from Dr. Roger Walsh, he calls them Therapeutic Lifestyle Changes or TLCs for short. He is a scientist that studies how to be happy and healthy. In researching this talk, I got a chance to ask him a few questions like; do you think that our schools today are making these eight TLCs a priority? His response was no surprise, it was essentially no. But he did say that many people do try to get this kind of education outside of the traditional arena, through reading and practices such as meditation or yoga.

But what I thought was his best response was that, much of education is oriented for better or worse towards making a living rather than making a life.

In 20__, Sir Ken Robinson gave the most popular Ted talk of all time. Schools kill creativity. His message is that creativity is as important as literacy, and we should treat it with the same status.

A lot of parents watched those videos, some of those parents like mine counted it as one of the reasons they felt confident to pull their kids from traditional school to try something different. I realized I’m part of this small, but growing revolution of kids who are going about their education differently, and you know what? It freaks a lot of people out.

Even though I was only nine, when my parents pulled me out of the school system, I can still remember my mom being in tears when some of her friends told her she was crazy and it was a stupid idea.

Looking back, I’m thankful she didn’t cave to peer pressure, and I think she is too. So, out of the 200 million people that have watched Sir Ken Robinson’s talk, why aren’t there more kids like me out there?

Shane McConkey is my hero. I loved him because he was the world’s best skier. But then, one day I realized what I really loved about Shane, he was a hacker. Not a computer hacker, he hacked skiing. His creativity and inventions made skiing what it is today, and why I love to ski. A lot of people think of hackers as geeky computer nerds who live in their parent’s basement and spread computer viruses, but I don’t see it that way.

经典TED英语演讲稿范文 篇13

人有了钱就会变坏？社会心理学家Paul Piff通过操纵大富翁游戏做了一个有趣的实验，测试人们感到富有时会如何表现。

I want you to， for a moment， think about playing a game of Monopoly， except in this game， that combination of skill， talent and luck that help earn you success in games， as in life， has been rendered irrelevant， because this game's been rigged， and you've got the upper hand。 You've got more money， more opportunities to move around the board， and more access to resources。 And as you think about that experience， I want you to ask yourself， how might that experience of being a privileged player in a rigged game change the way that you think about yourself and regard that other player？

So we ran a study on the U。C。 Berkeley campus to look at exactly that question。 We brought in more than 100 pairs of strangers into the lab， and with the flip of a coin randomly assigned one of the two to be a rich player in a rigged game。 They got two times as much money。 When they passed Go， they collected twice the salary， and they got to roll both dice instead of one， so they got to move around the board a lot more。 （Laughter） And over the course of 15 minutes， we watched through hidden cameras what happened。 And what I want to do today， for the first time， is show you a little bit of what we saw。 You're going to have to pardon the sound quality， in some cases， because again， these were hidden cameras。 So we've provided subtitles。 Rich Player： How many 500s did you have？ Poor Player： Just one。

Rich Player： Are you serious。 Poor Player： Yeah。

Rich Player： I have three。 （Laughs） I don't know why they gave me so much。

Paul Piff： Okay， so it was quickly apparent to players that something was up。 One person clearly has a lot more money than the other person， and yet， as the game unfolded， we saw very notable differences and dramatic differences begin to emerge between the two players。 The rich player started to move around the board louder， literally smacking the board with their piece as he went around。 We were more likely to see signs of dominance and nonverbal signs， displays of power and celebration among the rich players。

We had a bowl of pretzels positioned off to the side。 It's on the bottom right corner there。 That allowed us to watch participants' consummatory behavior。 So we're just tracking how many pretzels participants eat。

Rich Player： Are those pretzels a trick？

Poor Player： I don't know。

PP： Okay， so no surprises， people are onto us。 They wonder what that bowl of pretzels is doing there in the first place。 One even asks， like you just saw， is that bowl of pretzels there as a trick？ And yet， despite that， the power of the situation seems to inevitably dominate， and those rich players start to eat more pretzels。

Rich Player： I love pretzels。

（Laughter）

PP： And as the game went on， one of the really interesting and dramatic patterns that we observed begin to emerge was that the rich players actually started to become ruder toward the other person， less and less sensitive to the plight of those poor， poor players， and more and more demonstrative of their material success， more likely to showcase how well they're doing。 Rich Player： I have money for everything。 Poor Player： How much is that？ Rich Player： You owe me 24 dollars。 You're going to lose all your money soon。 I'll buy it。 I have so much money。 I have so much money， it takes me forever。 Rich Player 2： I'm going to buy out this whole board。 Rich Player 3： You're going to run out of money soon。 I'm pretty much untouchable at this point。

PP： Okay， and here's what I think was really， really interesting， is that at the end of the 15 minutes， we asked the players to talk about their experience during the game。 And when the rich players talked about why they had inevitably won in this rigged game of Monopoly —— （Laughter） — they talked about what they'd done to buy those different properties and earn their success in the game， and they became far less attuned to all those different features of the situation， including that flip of a coin that had randomly gotten them into that privileged position in the first place。 And that's a really， really incredible insight into how the mind makes sense of advantage。

Now this game of Monopoly can be used as a metaphor for understanding society and its hierarchical structure， wherein some people have a lot of wealth and a lot of status， and a lot of people don't。 They have a lot less wealth and a lot less status and a lot less access to valued resources。 And what my colleagues and I for the last seven years have been doing is studying the effects of these kinds of hierarchies。 What we've been finding across dozens of studies and thousands of participants across this country is that as a person's levels of wealth increase， their feelings of compassion and empathy go down， and their feelings of entitlement， of deservingness， and their ideology of self—interest increases。 In surveys， we found that it's actually wealthier individuals who are more likely to moralize greed being good， and that the pursuit of self—interest is favorable and moral。 Now what I want to do today is talk about some of the implications of this ideology self—interest， talk about why we should care about those implications， and end with what might be done。

经典TED英语演讲稿范文 篇14

Look, I had second thoughts, really, about whether I could talk about this to such a vital and alive audience as you guys. Then I remembered the quote from Gloria Steinem, which goes, "The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off." (Laughter) So -- (Laughter)

So with that in mind, I'm going to set about trying to do those things here, and talk about dying in the 21st century. Now the first thing that will piss you off, undoubtedly, is that all of us are, in fact, going to die in the 21st century. There will be no exceptions to that. There are, apparently, about one in eight of you who think you're immortal, on surveys, but -- (Laughter) Unfortunately, that isn't going to happen.

While I give this talk, in the next 10 minutes, a hundred million of my cells will die, and over the course of today, 2,000 of my brain cells will die and never come back, so you could argue that the dying process starts pretty early in the piece.

Anyway, the second thing I want to say about dying in the 21st century, apart from it's going to happen to everybody, is it's shaping up to be a bit of a train wreck for most of us, unless we do something to try and reclaim this process from the rather inexorable trajectory that it's currently on.

So there you go. That's the truth. No doubt that will piss you off, and now let's see whether we can set you free. I don't promise anything. Now, as you heard in the intro, I work in intensive care, and I think I've kind of lived through the heyday of intensive care. It's been a ride, man. This has been fantastic. We have machines that go ping. There's many of them up there. And we have some wizard technology which I think has worked really well, and over the course of the time I've worked in intensive care, the death rate for males in Australia has halved, and intensive care has had something to do with that. Certainly, a lot of the technologies that we use have got something to do with that.

So we have had tremendous success, and we kind of got caught up in our own success quite a bit, and we started using expressions like "lifesaving." I really apologize to everybody for doing that, because obviously, we don't. What we do is prolong people's lives, and delay death, and redirect death, but we can't, strictly speaking, save lives on any sort of permanent basis.

And what's really happened over the period of time that I've been working in intensive care is that the people whose lives we started saving back in the '70s, '80s, and '90s, are now coming to die in the 21st century of diseases that we no longer have the answers to in quite the way we did then.

So what's happening now is there's been a big shift in the way that people die, and most of what they're dying of now isn't as amenable to what we can do as what it used to be like when I was doing this in the '80s and '90s.

So we kind of got a bit caught up with this, and we haven't really squared with you guys about what's really happening now, and it's about time we did. I kind of woke up to this bit in the late '90s when I met this guy. This guy is called Jim, Jim Smith, and he looked like this. I was called down to the ward to see him. His is the little hand. I was called down to the ward to see him by a respiratory physician. He said, "Look, there's a guy down here. He's got pneumonia, and he looks like he needs intensive care. His daughter's here and she wants everything possible to be done." Which is a familiar phrase to us. So I go down to the ward and see Jim, and his skin his translucent like this. You can see his bones through the skin. He's very, very thin, and he is, indeed, very sick with pneumonia, and he's too sick to talk to me, so I talk to his daughter Kathleen, and I say to her, "Did you and Jim ever talk about what you would want done if he ended up in this kind of situation?" And she looked at me and said,

"No, of course not!" I thought, "Okay. Take this steady." And I got talking to her, and after a while, she said to me, "You know, we always thought there'd be time."

Jim was 94. (Laughter) And I realized that something wasn't happening here. There wasn't this dialogue going on that I imagined was happening. So a group of us started doing survey work, and we looked at four and a half thousand nursing home residents in Newcastle, in the Newcastle area, and discovered that only one in a hundred of them had a plan about what to do when their hearts stopped beating. One in a hundred. And only one in 500 of them had plan about what to do if they became seriously ill. And I realized, of course, this dialogue is definitely not occurring in the public at large.

经典TED英语演讲稿范文 篇15

What I'd like to do today is talk about one of my favorite subjects, and that is the neuroscience of sleep.

Now, there is a sound -- (Alarm clock) -- aah, it worked -- a sound that is desperately, desperately familiar to most of us, and of course it's the sound of the alarm clock. And what that truly ghastly, awful sound does is stop the single most important behavioral experience that we have, and that's sleep. If you're an average sort of person, 36 percent of your life will be spent asleep, which means that if you live to 90, then 32 years will have been spent entirely asleep.

Now what that 32 years is telling us is that sleep at some level is important. And yet, for most of us, we don't give sleep a second thought. We throw it away. We really just don't think about sleep. And so what I'd like to do today is change your views, change your ideas and your thoughts about sleep. And the journey that I want to take you on, we need to start by going back in time.

"Enjoy the honey-heavy dew of slumber." Any ideas who said that? Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. Yes, let me give you a few more quotes. "O sleep, O gentle sleep, nature's soft nurse, how have I frighted thee?" Shakespeare again, from -- I won't say it -- the Scottish play. [Correction: Henry IV, Part 2] (Laughter) From the same time: "Sleep is the golden chain that ties health and our bodies together." Extremely prophetic, by Thomas Dekker, another Elizabethan dramatist.

But if we jump forward 400 years, the tone about sleep changes somewhat. This is from Thomas Edison, from the beginning of the 20th century. "Sleep is a criminal waste of time and a heritage from our cave days." Bang. (Laughter) And if we also jump into the 1980s, some of you may remember that Margaret Thatcher was reported to have said, "Sleep is for wimps." And of course the infamous -- what was his name? -- the infamous Gordon Gekko from "Wall Street" said, "Money never sleeps."

What do we do in the 20th century about sleep? Well, of course, we use Thomas Edison's light bulb to invade the night, and we occupied the dark, and in the process of this occupation, we've treated sleep as an illness, almost. We've treated it as an enemy. At most now, I suppose, we tolerate the need for sleep, and at worst perhaps many of us think of sleep as an illness that needs some sort of a cure. And our ignorance about sleep is really quite profound.

Why is it? Why do we abandon sleep in our thoughts? Well, it's because you don't do anything much while you're asleep, it seems. You don't eat. You don't drink. And you don't have sex. Well, most of us anyway. And so therefore it's -- Sorry. It's a complete waste of time, right? Wrong. Actually, sleep is an incredibly important part of our biology, and neuroscientists are beginning to explain why it's so very important. So let's move to the brain.

Now, here we have a brain. This is donated by a social scientist, and they said they didn't know what it was, or indeed how to use it, so -- (Laughter) Sorry. So I borrowed it. I don't think they noticed. Okay. (Laughter)

The point I'm trying to make is that when you're asleep, this thing doesn't shut down. In fact, some areas of the brain are actually more active during the sleep state than during the wake state. The other thing that's really important about sleep is that it doesn't arise from a single structure within the brain, but is to some extent a network property, and if we flip the brain on its back -- I love this little bit of spinal cord here -- this bit here is the hypothalamus, and right under there is a whole raft of interesting structures, not least the biological clock. The biological clock tells us when it's good to be up, when it's good to be asleep, and what that structure does is interact with a whole raft of other areas within the hypothalamus, the lateral hypothalamus, the ventrolateral preoptic nuclei. All of those combine, and they send projections down to the brain stem here. The brain stem then projects forward and bathes the cortex, this wonderfully wrinkly bit over here, with neurotransmitters that keep us awake and essentially provide us with our consciousness. So sleep arises from a whole raft of different interactions within the brain, and essentially, sleep is turned on and off as a result of a range of

Okay. So where have we got to? We've said that sleep is complicated and it takes 32 years of our life. But what I haven't explained is what sleep is about. So why do we sleep? And it won't surprise any of you that, of course, the scientists, we don't have a consensus. There are dozens of different ideas about why we sleep, and I'm going to outline three of those.

The first is sort of the restoration idea, and it's somewhat intuitive. Essentially, all the stuff we've burned up during the day, we restore, we replace, we rebuild during the night. And indeed, as an explanation, it goes back to Aristotle, so that's, what, 2,300 years ago. It's gone in and out of fashion. It's fashionable at the moment because what's been shown is that within the brain, a whole raft of genes have been shown to be turned on only during sleep, and those genes are associated with restoration and metabolic pathways. So there's good evidence for the whole restoration hypothesis.

What about energy conservation? Again, perhaps intuitive. You essentially sleep to save calories. Now, when you do the sums, though, it doesn't really pan out. If you compare an individual who has slept at night, or stayed awake and hasn't moved very much, the energy saving of sleeping is about 110 calories a night. Now, that's the equivalent of a hot dog bun. Now, I would say that a hot dog bun is kind of a meager return for such a complicated and demanding behavior as sleep. So I'm less convinced by the energy conservation idea.

But the third idea I'm quite attracted to, which is brain processing and memory consolidation. What we know is that, if after you've tried to learn a task, and you sleep-deprive individuals, the ability to learn that task is smashed. It's really hugely attenuated. So sleep and memory consolidation is also very important. However, it's not just the laying down of memory and recalling it. What's turned out to be really exciting is that our ability to come up with novel solutions to complex problems is hugely enhanced by a night of sleep. In fact, it's been estimated to give us a threefold advantage. Sleeping at night enhances our creativity. And what seems to be going on is that, in the brain, those neural connections that are important, those synaptic connections that are important, are linked and strengthened, while those that are less important tend to fade away and be less important.

Okay. So we've had three explanations for why we might sleep, and I think the important thing to realize is that the details will vary, and it's probable we sleep for multiple different reasons. But sleep is not an indulgence. It's not some sort of thing that we can take on board rather casually. I think that sleep was once likened to an upgrade from economy to business class, you know, the equiavlent of. It's not even an upgrade from economy to first class. The critical thing to realize is that if you don't sleep, you don't fly. Essentially, you never get there, and what's extraordinary about much of our society these days is that we are desperately sleep-deprived.

So let's now look at sleep deprivation. Huge sectors of society are sleep-deprived, and let's look at our sleep-o-meter. So in the 1950s, good data suggests that most of us were getting around about eight hours of sleep a night. Nowadays, we sleep one and a half to two hours less every night, so we're in the six-and-a-half-hours-every-night league. For teenagers, it's worse, much worse. They need nine hours for full brain performance, and many of them, on a school night, are only getting five hours of sleep. It's simply not enough. If we think about other sectors of society, the aged, if you are aged, then your ability to sleep in a single block is somewhat disrupted, and many sleep, again, less than five hours a night. Shift work. Shift work is extraordinary, perhaps 20 percent of the working population, and the body clock does not shift to the demands of working at night. It's locked onto the same light-dark cycle as the rest of us. So when the poor old shift worker is going home to try and sleep during the day, desperately tired, the body clock is saying, "Wake up. This is the time to be awake." So the quality of sleep that you get as a night shift worker is usually very poor, again in that sort of five-hour region. And then, of course, tens of millions of people suffer from jet lag. So who here has jet lag? Well, my goodness gracious. Well, thank you very much indeed for not falling asleep, because that's what your brain is craving.

One of the things that the brain does is indulge in micro-sleeps, this involuntary falling asleep, and you have essentially no control over it. Now, micro-sleeps can be sort of somewhat embarrassing, but they can also be deadly. It's been estimated that 31 percent of drivers will fall asleep at the wheel at least once in their life, and in the U.S., the statistics are pretty good: 100,000 accidents on the freeway have been associated with tiredness, loss of vigilance, and falling asleep. A hundred thousand a year. It's extraordinary. At another level of terror, we dip into the tragic accidents at Chernobyl and indeed the space shuttle Challenger, which was so tragically lost. And in the investigations that followed those disasters, poor judgment as a result of extended shift work and loss of vigilance and tiredness was attributed to a big chunk of those disasters.

So when you're tired, and you lack sleep, you have poor memory, you have poor creativity, you have increased impulsiveness, and you have overall poor judgment. But my friends, it's so much worse than that.

(Laughter)

If you are a tired brain, the brain is craving things to wake it up. So drugs, stimulants. Caffeine represents the stimulant of choice across much of the Western world. Much of the day is fueled by caffeine, and if you're a really naughty tired brain, nicotine. And of course, you're fueling the waking state with these stimulants, and then of course it gets to 11 o'clock at night, and the brain says to itself, "Ah, well actually, I need to be asleep fairly shortly. What do we do about that when I'm feeling completely wired?" Well, of course, you then resort to alcohol. Now alcohol, short-term, you know, once or twice, to use to mildly sedate you, can be very useful. It can actually ease the sleep transition. But what you must be so aware of is that alcohol doesn't provide sleep, a biological mimic for sleep. It sedates you. So it actually harms some of the neural proccessing that's going on during memory consolidation and memory recall. So it's a short-term acute measure, but for goodness sake, don't become addicted to alcohol as a way of getting to sleep every night.

Another connection between loss of sleep is weight gain. If you sleep around about five hours or less every night, then you have a 50 percent likelihood of being obese. What's the connection here? Well, sleep loss seems to give rise to the release of the hormone ghrelin, the hunger hormone. Ghrelin is released. It gets to the brain. The brain says, "I need carbohydrates," and what it does is seek out carbohydrates and particularly sugars. So there's a link between tiredness and the metabolic predisposition for weight gain.

Stress. Tired people are massively stressed. And one of the things of stress, of course, is loss of memory, which is what I sort of just then had a little lapse of. But stress is so much more. So if you're acutely stressed, not a great problem, but it's sustained stress associated with sleep loss that's the problem. So sustained stress leads to suppressed immunity, and so tired people tend to have higher rates of overall infection, and there's some very good studies showing that shift workers, for example, have higher rates of cancer. Increased levels of stress throw glucose into the circulation. Glucose becomes a dominant part of the vasculature and essentially you become glucose intolerant. Therefore, diabetes 2. Stress increases cardiovascular disease as a result of raising blood pressure. So there's a whole raft of things associated with sleep loss that are more than just a mildly impaired brain, which is where I think most people think that sleep loss resides.

So at this point in the talk, this is a nice time to think, well, do you think on the whole I'm getting enough sleep? So a quick show of hands. Who feels that they're getting enough sleep here? Oh. Well, that's pretty impressive. Good. We'll talk more about that later, about what are your tips.

So most of us, of course, ask the question, "Well, how do I know whether I'm getting enough sleep?" Well, it's not rocket science. If you need an alarm clock to get you out of bed in the morning, if you are taking a long time to get up, if you need lots of stimulants, if you're grumpy, if you're irritable, if you're told by your work colleagues that you're looking tired and irritable, chances are you are sleep-deprived. Listen to them. Listen to yourself.

What do you do? Well -- and this is slightly offensive -- sleep for dummies: Make your bedroom a haven for sleep. The first critical thing is make it as dark as you possibly can, and also make it slightly cool. Very important. Actually, reduce your amount of light exposure at least half an hour before you go to bed. Light increases levels of alertness and will delay sleep. What's the last thing that most of us do before we go to bed? We stand in a massively lit bathroom looking into the mirror cleaning our teeth. It's the worst thing we can possibly do before we went to sleep. Turn off those mobile phones. Turn off those computers. Turn off all of those things that are also going to excite the brain. Try not to drink caffeine too late in the day, ideally not after lunch. Now, we've set about reducing light exposure before you go to bed, but light exposure in the morning is very good at setting the biological clock to the light-dark cycle. So seek out morning light. Basically, listen to yourself. Wind down. Do those sorts of things that you know are going to ease you off into the honey-heavy dew of slumber.

Okay. That's some facts. What about some myths?

Teenagers are lazy. No. Poor things. They have a biological predisposition to go to bed late and get up late, so give them a break.

We need eight hours of sleep a night. That's an average. Some people need more. Some people need less. And what you need to do is listen to your body. Do you need that much or do you need more? Simple as that.

Old people need less sleep. Not true. The sleep demands of the aged do not go down. Essentially, sleep fragments and becomes less robust, but sleep requirements do not go down.

And the fourth myth is, early to bed, early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise. Well that's wrong at so many different levels. (Laughter) There is no, no evidence that getting up early and going to bed early gives you more wealth at all. There's no difference in socioeconomic status. In my experience, the only difference between morning people and evening people is that those people that get up in the morning early are just horribly smug.

(Laughter) (Applause)

Okay. So for the last part, the last few minutes, what I want to do is change gears and talk about some really new, breaking areas of neuroscience, which is the association between mental health, mental illness and sleep disruption. We've known for 130 years that in severe mental illness, there is always, always sleep disruption, but it's been largely ignored. In the 1970s, when people started to think about this again, they said, "Yes, well, of course you have sleep disruption in schizophrenia because they're on anti-psychotics. It's the anti-psychotics causing the sleep problems," ignoring the fact that for a hundred years previously, sleep disruption had been reported before anti-psychotics.

So what's going on? Lots of groups, several groups are studying conditions like depression, schizophrenia and bipolar, and what's going on in terms of sleep disruption. We have a big study which we published last year on schizophrenia, and the data were quite extraordinary. In those individuals with schizophrenia, much of the time, they were awake during the night phase and then they were asleep during the day. Other groups showed no 24-hour patterns whatsoever. Their sleep was absolutely smashed. And some had no ability to regulate their sleep by the light-dark cycle. They were getting up later and later and later and later each night. It was smashed.

So what's going on? And the really exciting news is that mental illness and sleep are not simply associated but they are physically linked within the brain. The neural networks that predispose you to normal sleep, give you normal sleep, and those that give you normal mental health are overlapping. And what's the evidence for that? Well, genes that have been shown to be very important in the generation of normal sleep, when mutated, when changed, also predispose individuals to mental health problems. And last year, we published a study which showed that a gene that's been linked to schizophrenia, which, when mutated, also smashes the sleep. So we have evidence of a genuine mechanistic overlap between these two important systems.

Other work flowed from these studies. The first was that sleep disruption actually precedes certain types of mental illness, and we've shown that in those young individuals who are at high risk of developing bipolar disorder, they already have a sleep abnormality prior to any clinical diagnosis of bipolar. The other bit of data was that sleep disruption may actually exacerbate, make worse the mental illness state. My colleague Dan Freeman has used a range of agents which have stabilized sleep and reduced levels of paranoia in those individuals by 50 percent.

So what have we got? We've got, in these connections, some really exciting things. In terms of the neuroscience, by understanding the neuroscience of these two systems, we're really beginning to understand how both sleep and mental illness are generated and regulated within the brain. The second area is that if we can use sleep and sleep disruption as an early warning signal, then we have the chance of going in. If we know that these individuals are vulnerable, early intervention then becomes possible. And the third, which I think is the most exciting, is that we can think of the sleep centers within the brain as a new therapeutic target. Stabilize sleep in those individuals who are vulnerable, we can certainly make them healthier, but also alleviate some of the appalling symptoms of mental illness.

So let me just finish. What I started by saying is take sleep seriously. Our attitudes toward sleep are so very different from a pre-industrial age, when we were almost wrapped in a duvet. We used to understand intuitively the importance of sleep. And this isn't some sort of crystal-waving nonsense. This is a pragmatic response to good health. If you have good sleep, it increases your concentration, attention, decision-making, creativity, social skills, health. If you get sleep, it reduces your mood changes, your stress, your levels of anger, your impulsivity, and your tendency to drink and take drugs. And we finished by saying that an understanding of the neuroscience of sleep is really informing the way we think about some of the causes of mental illness, and indeed is providing us new ways to treat these incredibly debilitating conditions.

Jim Butcher, the fantasy writer, said, "Sleep is God. Go worship." And I can only recommend that you do the same.

Thank you for your attention.

(Applause)