background preloader

TED Lectures

Facebook Twitter

Greatest Hits of TED Videos. Work life balance is an ongoing battle. Randy Pausch's Last Lecture - YouTube's 50 Best Videos. It's the rare viral phenomenon that achieves any degree of poignancy, but Randy Pausch's last lecture certainly is that exception. Pausch, a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University, was diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer and delivered a lecture in September 2007 titled "Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams. " Despite being known as his "Last Lecture," it wasn't Pausch's final speech — he was well enough to make an address at Carnegie Mellon's commencement in May 2008 before succumbing that July. But Pausch's lessons — and upbeat attitude in the face of death — made his September lecture one of the Internet's most seen videos; it's been shared more than 11 million times. Watch TIME's video "10 Questions for Dr. Next Zinedine Zidane's Head Butt.

How to Trick Your Brain for Happiness | Greater Good - StumbleUpon. This month, we feature videos of a Greater Good presentation by Rick Hanson, the best-selling author and trailblazing psychologist. In this excerpt from his talk, Dr. Hanson explains how we can take advantage of the brain’s natural “plasticity”—it’s ability to change shape over time. gobyg There’s this great line by Ani Tenzin Palmo, an English woman who spent 12 years in a cave in Tibet: “We do not know what a thought is, yet we’re thinking them all the time.” It’s true. In recent years, though, we have started to better understand the neural bases of states like happiness, gratitude, resilience, love, compassion, and so forth. Ultimately, what this can mean is that with proper practice, we can increasingly trick our neural machinery to cultivate positive states of mind.

But in order to understand how, you need to understand three important facts about the brain. Fact one: As the brain changes, the mind changes, for better or worse. Fact two: As the mind changes, the brain changes. 1. 2. 3. The communication cure.