Speech: Tomislav Perko - How to travel the world with almost no money

Many people daydream about traveling the world, but all of them have the same excuse - lack of money. Tomislav, after traveling the world for years with almost no money, shows how it is possible for everyone to do the same, if they really want to.

Tomislav Perko, 29, is a travel writer from Croatia. After a career of a stockbroker, broke because of the financial crisis, he hits the road and turns it into his home. He uses alternative ways of traveling – hitchhiking, couchsurfing, working/volunteering, and manages to wander around the world with just a little bit of money in his pocket, meeting the most amazing people on the way.

Five years later, he publishes a book “1000 Days of Spring” and goes around giving lectures about what it means to live on the road. Find out more on his website: http://tomislavperko.com/en/.

Video: Reasons to Remain Single

The pressure to be in a relationship, and the suggestion that anyone who isn’t in one is weird and pitiable, has very bad consequences for us all, forcing people into choices they shouldn’t necessarily have to make. 

http://www.theschooloflife.com/

Video: Carl Sagan - Who speaks for Earth?

Video: Hans Rosling - The Overpopulation Myth

Hans Rosling is a Swedish medical doctor, academic, statistician and public speaker. He is Professor of International Health at Karolinska Institute and co-founder and chairman of the Gapminder Foundation, which developed the Trendalyzer software system.

In this talk 'Don't Panic - The Truth About Population' he comprehensively dispels the Human overpopulation myth which has been introduced into the subconscious mind of viewers of mainstream broadcasted media communications over the past thirty years.

Whilst the information in this video is credible, remain vigilant with respect to individuals because other viewpoints held by them might not be.

Hans Rosling:

Wiki - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Ro...
Gapminder - http://www.gapminder.org/
Twitter - https://twitter.com/HansRosling
LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/pub/hans-ros...
IMDb - http://www.imdb.com/name/nm2617375/
Amazon - http://alturl.com/ept6w

Speech: Paul Gilding - The Earth is full

Have we used up all our resources? Have we filled up all the livable space on Earth? Paul Gilding suggests we have, and the possibility of devastating consequences, in a talk that's equal parts terrifying and, oddly, hopeful.

Speech: Stuart Firestein - The pursuit of ignorance

What does real scientific work look like? As neuroscientist Stuart Firestein jokes: It looks a lot less like the scientific method and a lot more like "farting around ... in the dark." In this witty talk, Firestein gets to the heart of science as it is really practiced and suggests that we should value what we don't know -- or "high-quality ignorance" -- just as much as what we know.

Article: Optimistic People All Have One Thing In Common, They’re Always Late

Original Article by John Haltiwanger for Elite Daily - Sunday 19, September 2010

I woke up at 6 am this morning, three hours before I’m supposed to be in the office, and was still 10 minutes late to work.

This is pretty standard for me. I’m almost always a few minutes late. I don’t mean anything by it, and I certainly don’t think I deserve a different set of rules than everyone else — it’s just the way I am.

I wake up early and try to fill the time before I leave for the office with as many activities as possible: a short workout, breakfast, catching up on the news, daydreaming while struggling to put my socks on, etc.

I’ll look at the clock and think, “Oh, I still have plenty of time.” One or two tasks later, I’ve only got 40 minutes to get to work and a 45 minute commute.

This has been the case with every single job I’ve ever had and is typically true when it comes to social meetings as well. I’m habitually unpunctual, and apparently I’m not alone.

As management consultant Diana DeLonzor states:

Most late people have been late all their life, and they are late for every type of activity — good or bad.
Surprisingly little scientific research has been done on tardiness, but some experts subscribe to the theory that certain people are hardwired to be late and that part of the problem may be embedded deep in the lobes of the brain.

So if you’re chronically late, I feel for you and sympathize with the onslaught of criticism you likely receive on a consistent basis.

I know you’re not a lazy, unproductive, inconsiderate or entitled person. I know you’re not attempting to insult anyone by your tardiness.

Your lateness is simply a consequence of your psychology and personality — nothing more, nothing less.

With that said, while those of us who are continuously tardy should work to overcome this trait, there are also hidden benefits.

Speech: Christopher Ryan - Are we designed to be sexual omnivores?

An idea permeates our modern view of relationships: that men and women have always paired off in sexually exclusive relationships. But before the dawn of agriculture, humans may actually have been quite promiscuous. Author Christopher Ryan walks us through the controversial evidence that human beings are sexual omnivores by nature, in hopes that a more nuanced understanding may put an end to discrimination, shame and the kind of unrealistic expectations that kill relationships.

Interview: Jean Leidloff - The Continuum Concept

Speech: Alan Watts - Q&A Session

Interview: Edward Snowden - The New Yorker Festival

The New Yorker Festival presents Edward Snowden in conversation with Jane Mayer.

Speech: Glenn Greenwald - Why privacy matters

Glenn Greenwald was one of the first reporters to see — and write about — the Edward Snowden files, with their revelations about the United States' extensive surveillance of private citizens. In this searing talk, Greenwald makes the case for why you need to care about privacy, even if you’re “not doing anything you need to hide."

Speech: Peter Lovatt - Dance, thinking, hormones

Dr Peter Lovatt is an academic Psychologist and a Dancer.

Dr Peter Lovatt is a Reader in Psychology and a Principal lecturer at the University of Hertfordshire, where he heads the Dance Psychology Lab. Before starting on an academic career Peter was a professional dancer.

Peter studied Theatre and Creative Arts at East Herts College before training in dance and musical theatre at the Guildford School of Acting. Peter was trained in Cecchetti ballet (Angela Hardcastle) and National dance and Pas de Deux (Robert Harold). Peter also studied jazz, tap, historical and contemporary dance. After graduating Peter worked in most of the UK's number 1 theatres and on the international dance circuit. He was a member of George Mitchell's Minstrel Show, worked with choreographer Ray Cornell, and performed in panto at Richmond Theatre.

Peter left full time theatre to study Psychology and English at Roehampton Institute, and graduated from the University of Surrey. He then took an MSc in Neural Computation from the Centre for Cognitive and Computational Neurosciences at the University of Stirling (funded by a SERC scholarship), and did his doctoral research in the department of Psychology at Essex University (funded by a University Teaching Fellowship). In 1998 Peter joined the Research Centre for English and Applied Linguistics, at Cambridge University, as a Senior Research Psychologist. After a spell in industry, as a Principal Research Scientist for a speech-based R&D company, he joined Kingston University, where he was the co-ordinator of the Psychology Research Unit and Deputy Head of the School of Social Sciences. Peter joined the School of Psychology at Hertfordshire in September 2004.

Speech: Dan Gilbert - The psychology of your future self

"Human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they're finished." Dan Gilbert shares recent research on a phenomenon he calls the "end of history illusion," where we somehow imagine that the person we are right now is the person we'll be for the rest of time. Hint: that's not the case.

Speech: Brené Brown - Listening to shame

Shame is an unspoken epidemic, the secret behind many forms of broken behavior. Brené Brown, whose earlier talk on vulnerability became a viral hit, explores what can happen when people confront their shame head-on. Her own humor, humanity and vulnerability shine through every word. (TED)

A truly inspiring, touching talk!

Article: The Creative Space of Play (D.W. Winnicott)

Original Article for On Luminous Grounds - Sunday 19, September 2010



The great British psychologist D.W. Winnicott believed playing serves as the basis for creativity and the discovery of the self. All human culture, including not only the arts, but science and religion as well, are not diminished but more fruitfully understood and cherished and cultivated when understood as what they are: highly developed forms of playing.

What is playing? Playing, says Winnicott, is first of all something that happens in the interface between our inner world and external reality. Taking place neither strictly in our imagination, nor in the truly external world (ie. all that is out of our control), playing happens in that space where our imagination is able to shape the external world without the experience of compliance, climax, or too much anxiety. (He points out how a high degree of anxiety can accompany play and yet it will remain “essentially satisfying”: however, “there is a degree of anxiety that is unbearable and this destroys playing” [Playing and Reality, 70].)

Examples of what playing is not:

Playing is not compliant. Playing cannot happen when a person feels acute pressure to perform in some mandated way, or to live up to any standard, or to be consistent, or to make sense, or anything else. (Playing by definition allows for the bringing out of the self into the outside world some “sample” of inner or personal reality, in order to shape portions of external reality set according to these “samples”.)

Playing has nothing to do with any climax of instinctual arousal. Rather, “playing can be said to reach its own saturation point, which refers to the capacity to contain experience” (70). Playing is not the climactic satisfaction of any instinctual drive, but a freely creative activity within which the one playing has the capacity to remain in this state of freedom.

Playing cannot involve too much anxiety – ie. fear. Playing can be very frightening, and contain a great deal of anxiety, but at a certain point the level of fear/anxiety destroys the playing.

Speech: Iain McGilchrist - What Happened to the Soul? (RSA)

Part of RSA's series on spirituality in the 21st century, psychiatrist and writer Iain McGilchrist considers the status of the soul. Once considered the most important part, indeed the whole purpose, of a human life - has science now rendered the idea of the soul irretrievably redundant? If so, what have we lost?

For more information about the event go to the RSA event page.

Speech/Article: Shawn Achor - The happy secret to better work (and why are some people stuck in their ways)

“We think we have to be successful, then we’ll be happier. But the real problem is our brains work in the opposite order,” said Shawn Achor in his charming, immensely popular TED Talk from TEDxBloomington, “The happy secret to better work.” Achor is the CEO of consulting firm Good Think, which conducts research on positive psychology and helps people apply it to be happier and more effective at work.

His 2011 talk drew on the research from his bestselling book on positive psychology, The Happiness Advantage, and since then he’s had a new question on his mind: Why are some people able to make positive changes in their lives, while others remain stuck in their ways? His latest book, Before Happiness, published last week by Random House, addresses just this question. In it, Achor describes the five essential elements that are needed to develop a positive mindset for change. We caught up with Achor recently to find out more.

What inspired you to write Before Happiness?

Before somebody can make a change to their health and their happiness, their brain has already constructed a picture of reality in which change is possible or not. Basically, this predicts whether or not they’ll be able to make that change. Some people see a world in which they’re only their genes and their environment; so they can watch a ton of TED Talks, they can read a ton of books, but they won’t actually incorporate any of those new changes into their lives. So the book started out with: “How do we get people to change the way that they view their world?”

You argue that if you think positively you can be more productive. Is there a danger of trying to speed too quickly toward an end goal of perceived success?

Yes. A lot of frustration comes from us being irrationally optimistic about either the goal that we’re creating or the speed and the time it will take to get there. I have a great little cartoon that someone sent me on Twitter: A rhinoceros is on a treadmill, and it’s sweating and running as fast as it possibly can, and it’s looking up at this poster of this beautiful unicorn. So it’s trying to run as fast as it can to be a unicorn, and inherently it’s creating greater levels of frustration, because it’s not a unicorn, it’s a rhinoceros, and it should be the best rhinoceros that it can be.

In Before Happiness I tell the story of how I talked to the CEO of a software company in California, and I got into the car with him, and he drove me to the airport to talk about how we could change his company. He didn’t put on a seatbelt, and I asked him why. He said he was an optimist. Which is crazy! Optimism, while it’s good for a lot of things, doesn’t stop cars from hitting us. It won’t stop reality from hitting us. We don’t want to turn a blind eye to the negative. If we sugarcoat the present, we make bad decisions in the future.

So is there a wrong way to set goals for yourself? 

Speech: Pam Warhurst - How we can eat our landscapes

What should a community do with its unused land? Plant food, of course. With energy and humor, Pam Warhurst tells at the TEDSalon the story of how she and a growing team of volunteers came together to turn plots of unused land into communal vegetable gardens, and to change the narrative of food in their community.

Speech: Michael Pollan - How Cooking Can Change Your Life

Renowned activist and author Michael Pollan argues that cooking is one of the simplest and most important steps people can take to improve their family's health, build communities, fix our broken food system, and break our growing dependence on corporations. The event was chaired by Tim Lang, professor of Food Policy at City University London.

To find out more about this talk, visit the event page on the RSA website: 

http://www.thersa.org/events/audio-an...

Listen to the podcast of the full event including audience Q&A: 

http://www.thersa.org/__data/assets/f...