Speakers at TED Global on Thursday waxed lyrical about the creativity of toddlers, the role of grandmothers in spreading solar power in Sierra Leone, and bankers' brains
Can babies do maths?
They can, says Alison Gopnik, a developmental psychologist. Not only that, they can do really quite difficult maths: statistics, probability, Bayesian theory ... Gopnik has devised experiments showing that when it comes to designing and testing hypotheses, 18-month-old toddlers are better at it than adults.
Children, she says, are the "R&D department" of the human race. "They're the blue sky guys, and we are production and marketing." They're creative, open-minded, imaginative. Their brains are flooded with neurotransmitters that promote neuroplasticity. The closest you can come as an adult to achieving the flexible open-mindedness of a child, says Gopnik, is to fall in love, or go to a new place, while coffee can mimic the effect of those neurotransmitters.
"What's it like being a baby? It's like being in love in Paris after three double espressos."
Why do bankers who get huge bonuses sometimes behave badly?
Because they can't help it, says the neuroscientist Paul Zak. Or at least they can help it, but the chemicals released in their brains make it more difficult for them than other people. Zak has studied the effects of oxytocin and what he calls "the biology of trustworthiness". Increased oxytocin in the body increases empathy. "And it's empathy which makes us moral."
Giving money away, hugging, praying can all increase oxytocin. But testosterone inhibits it. And higher levels of social status are associated with higher levels of testosterone. Hence the problem of the bankers' bonuses. What's more, some people are simply wired differently. "Five per cent of the population don't release oxytocin on stimulus. We have a technical term for them in our lab," says Zak. "We call them 'bastards'."
Who make the best solar engineers? Men, women or grandmothers?
According to Bunker Roy, the founder of the Barefoot College in India, it's the grandmothers. "One lesson we learned," he told the TED audience on Thursday, "is that men are untrainable. Men are restless, they're ambitious, they're compulsively mobile and they want a certificate."
Roy's great belief is that the poor have all the skills they need to help themselves, and his organisation has had huge success in bringing education and services to the rural poor around the world. The problem with training men, he says, is that they tend to want to leave the villages, and take their skills with them.
His solution has been to train the grandmothers. In Sierra Leone right now, 150 grandmothers are being trained as solar engineers, who will be able to go and electrify theirs and others' villages. In a few months, he says, "they will know more about solar engineering than a graduate after five years."
What's the most underrated virtue?
Politeness. Or so says Alain de Botton. The latest subject to come under his scrutiny is religion. De Botton is proposing a "pick 'n' mix" approach to the world's religions: take the rituals, ignore the doctrine.
He proposes a strategy of "harmonious disagreement". "If somebody said that they prayed the other day, simply politely move on."
The problem with secularism, he says, is that it's badly organised. Artists, writers, thinkers, poets, psychotherapists ... they tend to work alone "and get a bit depressed". What they need is to learn the lessons of organised religion. "The Catholic church is collaborative, multinational, branded and highly disciplined ... whereas books written by lone individuals will not change anything."
How do you get children to like carrots?
Tell them they're from McDonalds. Paul Bloom, a psychologist from Yale who studies the pleasures of everyday life, says that humans "are natural born essentialists". We don't just respond to what we see, but also to what we think things really are. If we think a wine is expensive we enjoy it so much more than if we think it's cheap.
The brains of people were scanned while drinking what they thought was costly wine "and the pleasure and reward centres of their brains lit up like a Christmas tree".
The good news is that if you like something, it looks better to you. "Which is why people in happy marriages think their spouses are much better looking than other people think".
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/blog/2011/jul/15/ted-global-2011-ingenious-babies
No comments:
Post a Comment