Cross-country skier Janine Shepherd hoped for an Olympic medal — until she was hit by a truck during a training bike ride. She shares a powerful story about the human potential for recovery. Her message: you are not your body, and giving up old dreams can allow new ones to soar.
Simon Lewis: Don’t take consciousness for granted
Born in London, Simon Lewis is a film and television producer and author. After earning law degrees from Christ’s College Cambridge and Boalt Hall, Berkeley, Lewis moved to Los Angeles, where his Hollywood experience includes managing writers, directors and stars, as well as producing Look Who’s Talking, critically acclaimed films such as The Chocolate War, the Emmy-winning international co-production for HBO and ITV Central A Month of Sundays (Age Old Friends), and variety specials starring Howie Mandel.
He’s the author of Rise and Shine, a memoir that uses his personal story — of recovery from coma — to illustrate deep and universal insights about consciousness itself. An acclaimed author, speaker and commentator, Lewis uses creative visualizations that fuse cutting-edge medicine, scientific research and digital art to illustrate solutions to society’s most pressing problem: the erosion of consciousness and need for solutions to nurture and grow our minds through cognitive and other therapies.
An advocate for change in how we educate our children and ourselves, he says that we must not take our consciousness for granted, but use specific tools to screen and detect learning weaknesses and prevent academic failure. Bridge the gap from our potential mind toward our actual mind and maximize [...] continue the story
Jill Bolte Taylor’s stroke of insight
One morning, a blood vessel in Jill Bolte Taylor’s brain exploded. As a brain scientist, she realized she had a ringside seat to her own stroke. She watched as her brain functions shut down one by one: motion, speech, memory, self-awareness …
Amazed to find herself alive, Taylor spent eight years recovering her ability to think, walk and talk. She has become a spokesperson for stroke recovery and for the possibility of coming back from brain injury stronger than before. In her case, although the stroke damaged the left side of her brain, her recovery unleashed a torrent of creative energy from her right. From her home base in Indiana, she now travels the country on behalf of the Harvard Brain Bank as the “Singin’ Scientist.” “How many brain scientists have been able to study the brain from the inside out? I’ve gotten as much out of this experience of losing my left mind as I have in my entire academic career.”
Jill Bolte Taylor
The new bionics that let us run, climb and dance
Hugh Herr is building the next generation of bionic limbs, robotic prosthetics inspired by nature’s own designs. Herr lost both legs in a climbing accident 30 years ago; now, as the head of the MIT Media Lab’s Biomechatronics group, he shows his incredible technology in a talk that’s both technical and deeply personal — with the help of ballroom dancer Adrianne Haslet-Davis, who lost her left leg in the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, and performs again for the first time on the TED stage.
How Medical Screening Turns Healthy People into Patients Alan Cassels at TEDxVictoria
How Medical Screening Turns Healthy People into Patients. Alan Cassels at TEDxVictoria A drug policy researcher for the University of Victoria, Alan Cassels is a known for having a knack for finding and describing the chasm between what the market says and what science does in modern healthcare. Over the past two decades Cassels has spent much of his research energy studying clinical research and the marketing tactics of the pharmaceutical industry, turning some of that research into journalism and books, including an international best-seller.