Conversation Agent - Valeria Maltoni

How Books can Expand our Mind

Lisa Bu was born and raised in Hunan, China. Before joining TED in 2011, she spent seven years as a talk show producer and a digital media content director at Wisconsin Public Radio. She's also a computer programmer, with a PhD in journalism and an MBA in information systems from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, as well as a BA in Chinese from Nanjing University in China. After coming to the U.S. it was a word that helped her redefine her relationships with her parents -- “honor” vs. the “obey” she knew in her culture. Bu believes we can read creatively... Read more →

A Good Story Well Told

“All writers must come to understand the relationship of story to life: Story is the metaphor for life,” says Bob McKee in Story: Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of Screenwriting: “A storyteller is a life poet, and artist who transforms day-to-day living, inner life and outer life, dream and actuality into a poem whose rhyme scheme is events rather than words -- a two-hour metaphor that says: Life is like this! Therefore, a story must abstract from life to discover its essences, but not become an abstraction that loses all sense of life-as-lived. A story must be like life,... Read more →

In Praise of Slow

In Eat, Pray, Love Elizabeth Gilbert describes a Thanksgiving meal in Italy. Like every good eating affair, it happens over the course of hours. It can be a maddening experience in business for type-A personalities, but when it comes to eating, the communal aspects of sharing transfer from the food to the conversation and company of each other. Real connections happen over a shared experience. When we are not harried through it, we have the opportunity to savor what is happening, enjoy it more, and digest it better. Looking back, we often edit time in our memories. But the truth... Read more →

How we Think About Ideas Determines What we do With Them

Much of our ability to connect with others hinges upon communication. We think about something to say, our mind encodes it, then we transmit it and someone on the other end decodes it. Understanding is based upon a common framework that determines meaning. Each culture has its reference points. Within it metaphors structure the way we think and talk. A metaphor is a figure of speech in which a term or phrase is applied to something to which it is not literally applicable in order to suggest a resemblance. In Metaphors we Live By, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson say... Read more →

Programming Our Mind for Success

What stops us from being proactive or responsive to situations we encounter at work or in our lives. Carrie Green says it could be one or a combination of fear of the unknown, logistic obstacles as in things we see in our path, and lack of motivation. “No matter the motivation, the decision first starts in our mind,” says Green. It is our self talk that stops us from doing things like volunteering when asked, for example: This experiment isn't about the money. This experiment demonstrates the power of your mind. The fact that what is going on up in... Read more →

Focusing Illusions in Decision-Making

We talk a lot about the power of focus in business and in our lives. Yet, unless we learn to pay attention to the right things, the act of focusing becomes an illusion and our decisions bear that disconnect. In Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life, Winifred Gallagher sets out to help us understand how our minds are powerful tools in sorting wheat from chaff. Providing we train ourselves to see the distinction. The chapter about decisions and focusing illusions draws on the work on decision-making of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Twersky “made the art of refined query into a... Read more →

How to Make Hard Choices

When we're faced with choosing between two or more options, we tend to make the safest bet, especially in cases when the choice has potentially large implications -- like where to live, or what job to take. It would be nice to have the ability to see how each would play into our future, have more information about the life we would form from selecting a path. Philosopher Ruth Chang explains why some choices are so hard — and what that means for the human condition. She says: Even taking two alternatives side by side with full information, a choice... Read more →

Navigating Human Biases in Predictions

In The Signal and the Noise, Nate Silver provides interesting examples of why some predictions fail but some don't. Using examples from games like chess and poker, the investment world, baseball, weather forecasting, earthquake prediction, economics, and polling Silver says predictions go bad because of biases, vested interests, and overconfidence. The chess tale about humans/computers trying to outguess each other -- how Kasparov thought he could beat Deep Blue and didn't -- includes an interesting comparison between computers and people: The father of the modern chess computer was MIT’s Claude Shannon, a mathematician regarded as the founder of information theory,... Read more →

Persuasion Master Rory Sutherland's Reading List

From being described as the worst graduate trainee that Ogilvy & Mather had ever hired, Rory Sutherland took a while to find his calling in life. From unlikely beginnings as a classics teacher to his current job as Vice Chairman of Ogilvy Group, his rise through the ranks is unconventional. Educated at Cambridge, he went on to become the Executive Creative Director and Vice-Chairman of OgilvyOne. Today, he is one of marketing's most original thinkers and influential speakers. Sutherland is a champion of behavioral economics and an early adopter of new technologies. Rory Sutherland: The Wiki Man is a collection... Read more →

When Technology Fails to Fade into the Background

My family physician's practice has been part of a bigger healthcare network for a couple of years. The promise was -- let us take care of the administrative work. But it was a half promise. Because the other part of it is not so there is more time to spend with patients. The system is still buggy and takes an enormous amount of time and cognitive load for the doctors to use -- doctors who have a grounding in coding. Why isn't the front end providing a better customer experience? Maybe the IT group doesn't see doctors as customers. Maybe... Read more →