Correction: This episode has some mistakes in our on-screen credits. The Writer is Tom Rivlin, the script Script Editor is JD Voyek, and the Fact Checker is Angela Reed.



Have you ever listened to someone speaking a foreign...

If you’ve ever wondered how you can give a TED Talk, you’re not alone. TED believes that ideas change everything — and that they can come from unexpected places. So, we issued an open call to anyone in the UK in search of the biggest,...

The option to work from home means that work truly works for everyone, says Avani Prabhakar, chief people officer of a large tech company. She explains how flexibility and asynchronous collaboration in a distributed workplace can unlock...

When anxiety rears its head, we often just want it to go away. Clinical psychologist David H. Rosmarin asks us to consider instead the positive role anxiety can play in our lives, sharing four practical steps to transform it from your...

Seventy-two percent of the world's population lives under some sort of autocratic rule, says freedom fighter Leopoldo Lopez. In a rousing call to defend democracy worldwide, he shares the story of his imprisonment and exile for leading...

In a universe not unlike ours, a tech-environmentalist group claims to have created an AI that is the direct “voice of the earth,” a computer connected via electrodes to the mycelium network under an ancient forest named S.A.N. (Sentient...

What if you could code just by talking out loud? GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke shows how, thanks to AI, the barrier to entry to coding is rapidly disappearing — and creating software is becoming as simple (and joyful) as building LEGO. In a...

Conceptual artist Tavares Strachan creates the kinds of projects that make you stop in your tracks, like a 4.5-ton block of Arctic ice he brought back to his birthplace in the Bahamas or a gold, Egyptian-inspired sculpture he launched...

With levity and profound insight, artist Maira Kalman reflects on life, death, dinner parties, not knowing the right answers, the joys of eating a hot dog from a street vendor and more. This talk, interwoven with her delightful...

The evolution of our ability to speak is its own epic saga and it’s worth pausing to appreciate that. It’s taken several million years to get to this moment where we can tell you about how it took several million years for us to get here.

Hank talks about astrobiology - the study of and search for life in the universe off Earth. Right now, the field has more questions than answers, but all they all seek to answer that one fundamental query: are we alone in the universe?

Being caught talking to yourself can feel embarrassing, and some people even stigmatize this behavior as a sign of mental instability. But decades of research show that talking to yourself is completely normal; most if not all of us...

Lawyers are advocates for their clients -- and, in court, they're usually the ones who do the talking. Should that always be the case? In an effort to shift this power dynamic, TED Fellow and legal aid activist Lam Ho shares how lawyers...

What's the best way to make a good point? Organizational psychologist Niro Sivanathan offers a fascinating lesson on the "dilution effect," a cognitive quirk that weakens our strongest cases -- and reveals why brevity is the true soul of...

How do you turn a memory, especially one of a traumatic event, into hard evidence of a crime? Julia Shaw is working on this challenge, combining tools from memory science and artificial intelligence to change how we report workplace...

How many different verb tenses are there in a language like English? At first, the answer seems obvious - there's past, present, and future. But it isn't quite that simple. Anna Ananichuk explains how thanks to something called...

So, today we're talking about African Pantheons. Now, you might say, that's ridiculous. Africa isn't a single place with a single pantheon, and we'd be fools to try and cover all that in an eleven minute video. You'd be right. Instead...

Patricia Kuhl shares astonishing findings about how babies learn one language over another -- by listening to the humans around them and "taking statistics" on the sounds they need to know. Clever lab experiments (and brain scans) show...

Today we’re going to talk about how computers understand speech and speak themselves. As computers play an increasing role in our daily lives there has been an growing demand for voice user interfaces, but speech is also terribly...

The clash of ideas is fundamental to creativity and progress, but it can also be deeply destructive and create divisions within companies, communities and families. How do you foster productive debate while protecting against harmful...

At age 81, actor and activist Jane Fonda is putting herself on the line for the planet -- literally. In a video interview with TEDWomen curator Pat Mitchell, Fonda speaks about getting arrested multiple times during Fire Drill Fridays,...

What can't Candace Parker do? A two-time NCAA champion, two-time Olympic gold medalist and two-time WNBA champion, Parker knows what it takes to fight for your dreams. In this inspiring talk, she shares what she's learned during a career...

Esha Alwani began writing songs when she was six years old, shortly after being diagnosed with Tourette syndrome. And she noticed something amazing: whenever she played music, her involuntary tics suddenly went away. Listen along as...

Thousands of languages thrive across the globe, yet modern speech technology -- with all of its benefits -- supports just over a hundred. Computational linguist Kalika Bali dreams of a day when technology acts as a bridge instead of a...