Translator: Theresa Ranft
Reviewer: Peter van de Ven Hello, Tedsters. OK, this is going to start out
on a negative note, but it's going to get better. And what a hard act to follow, right? It's not easy to be me
on this stage right now. So be kind. Let me be the first to tell you
things have gotten too complicated. The other day, I had somebody
try to explain to me the economics behind
a national healthcare program. And I thought my head
was going to explode. I should understand
how we're going to pay for it. So I went to Alan Dershowitz,
Bill Richardson, and some smart people
that should know this stuff. And they said,
"We don't understand it either." Yikes! But it's not just that. You know, I'm driving here in my car
and I'm trying to load my CD player, and I'm trying to put the address in,
the nav system and all that. And I realize, "Yeah, that's why
they made a log and it's texting" because I can't figure out,
like there's a limit to what I can do. I'm too stupid, so they got to say,
"You can't drive and put your CD in and fiddle with your nav system, and text. What are you thinking?" So, I got to thinking, "What's going on? Why can't we solve our problems?" Maybe there's a connection between
why we can't solve our problems anymore and the complexity of the issues we face, whether it's climate change - we still have 65% of the people
in the United States that don't believe
that global warming is happening. Now, can I balance that against
the 1.5 billion with a "b" measurements of the Earth's surface temperature
that we've taken since 1880. Now, if that isn't enough data, I don't know what it's going to take. OK, 1.5 billion measurements
since 1880 - it's not theoretical anymore, OK. It's gotten really complicated. So, what I'm going to do here
in the next ten minutes is I'm going to try to show you why our problems
are not political anymore, they're biological. We're up against an evolutionary limit. Now, one way to think
about this is two clocks. One clock is the clock of evolution, discovered by Charles Darwin
152 years ago. And every time the hand moves,
it's a million years. I need a new appendage
to do all the stuff in my car, I'm not getting one. Neither are you. Can't drink my coffee,
drive, and work my nav system. We're not getting one
for many millions of years. It doesn't matter what you need,
you're not getting it, because we're all
in the same biological spacesuit, and this spacesuit can only adapt
in million-year increments, it's very, very slow. Now, with the second clock
is human progress. And every time that hand moves,
it's a picosecond, right? Apple's already come out
with a new version of the gadget
you've just bought last week. (Laughter) Guess what? While we're sitting here,
there's ten more free apps you can get. I don't want any more free apps! Let me be the first one to say,
"I don't want any more gadgets, I don't want all the free stuff
that came on my PC and I'm scared to take off
because it might ruin my work. I don't want any of that." What happens when complexity races ahead of the brain's ability to understand it? Well, we know by looking
over ancient civilizations, we become gridlocked. We can't solve our problems. One of the earliest signs
is we begin passing them off from one generation to another, and we know they're getting worse. The world I am passing off to my children is significantly worse than the one
I inherited from my parents. An uneven rate of change
between biology and human progress causes a lag, causes a gap to occur. All of humankind,
every government, Mr. Obama, you and I have hit a limit. When we've broken down the human genome
between our nearest ancestor, the bonobo monkey, in ourselves. I don't know if you know this, there is only a 1.7% genetic difference
between the bonobos. I think we're leveraged
the hell out of that! (Laughter) While I'm talking to you, the men are not trying
to have sex with their chairs. You're not throwing food at each other. If you've ever studied bonobos,
that 2% difference is massive! (Laughter) We stay in our lane, we ... my God! So, I'm really impressed. But folks, there's a limit to this. If you took a Neanderthal,
you dropped him into Times Square today, he wouldn't function very well. And if you put us in a time machine
and jet us into some million years ahead, we'd look like a Neanderthal. We are a work in progress,
and there is a limit to it. And we can argue whether we hit
that cognitive threshold today, or 50 years from now, 100 years from now. But eventually, if you're logical, if you've got
one logical cell in your body, you know those two clocks have to hit. When complexity makes knowledge
very difficult to attain, like the global recession,
like global warming, like picking out milk, right? How many of you think
cow's milk is good for you? Raise your hand. Nobody? Nobody drinks cow's milk? Well, it's amazing, because there's 22 types
of milk at Safeway. 1%, 2%, non-fat, I don't really know
all the differences there. Acidophilus, lactose intolerant,
soymilk - which is really soy juice, there's no milk coming from soy. But you wouldn't put juice on your cereal. Almond milk - interesting concept. OK, we are an organism - when facts drop off,
we switch over to beliefs. We just have this automatic governor. Think about the human organism
as having two baskets. One basket is facts, gravity is a fact. The speed of light, a fact. I drop my keys - every time they fall to the ground,
never once in suspended animation. But when we don't have facts,
or we can't grasp the facts, we switch over to unproven beliefs. Does anybody know who this is? (Laughter) All those people that handed
their money to Bernie Madoff, they were very sophisticated investors. Make no mistake,
they weren't people like me that have 100 bucks in the bank. These were very sophisticated investors, and they said, "The financial market's
just gotten too complicated. I don't know how to invest my money. Here it all is. Here's the dump truck, you take it." And we all know what happened,
we follow false prophets. Public policy becomes shaped
by irrational beliefs. When you're not developing
public policy based on facts, what are you basing them on? You're basing them on beliefs. And so you hear politicians
say things like, "I don't believe in global warming." Or "I don't believe
the deficit is that dangerous." "I don't believe social security
is going broke." Let me give you an example, one example going back
to ancient history, the Mayan civilization. You think early period
of the Mayan civilization, when they were thriving,
they nurtured both beliefs and facts, they were building massive reservoirs
and underground cisterns. Because, for 3,000 years, they'd had
a tenuous relationship with rainfall, and they knew that would do them in. So, they practiced crop rotation,
water conservation. They stored food
in the underground cisterns so that they'd have food
during times of drought. But as the drought got worse and they couldn't understand
climate change - the facts weren't available and they might not have
understood them even if they were - what did they wind up doing? They wound up abandoning
man-made rational methods and relying exclusively on fetishism. So, what did they do? At first, they were sacrificing
captured slaves to get rid of the drought. That didn't work so well.
They said, "We'll get our own people." So they started sacrificing
their own people. And when the drought was at its worst,
there's evidence for 1,000 years they were building no more
rational reservoirs, cisterns, and so on. They were relying exclusively
on murdering newborn, unspoiled infants as a solution to their drought. If you live here in California,
you know we have a similar situation. With all the resources,
technology, data, and will, we have failed to put
a meaninful decel program together. Do you think that we might have
something in common with the Mayans? What happens is we become gridlocked, we can't understand the problem, and the second thing that happens to us is we begin substituting
facts with beliefs, and we don't know the difference. So how do we break the cycle? Here's the fun part. Now it gets good! OK, neuroscientists are discovering
a third form of problem solving that is evolving in the human brain. They're calling it "insight." Every one of you has had an insight. Think about this, this is amazing! For the first time in human history, we could put a skull cap on your head and administer increasingly
difficult problems and watch what your brain's
doing - it's really fun! I go up to UCS, I'm kind of a brain junky, I like to look at pictures and see
what parts of the brain are lighting up. And we've discovered
that every now and again, your brain starts shutting down
a variety of functions as though it's storing up ... and bam! you have an insight; it's spontaneous,
it comes on like a freight train, and you can't trace it
to any series of steps. And it's always right, it's a process by which you've connected
two pieces of data that were floating around
in your head somewhere, and you came up
with a very elegant solution. There is a lot I could say about insights, but I'm going to tell you
the most important thing about an insight: We have discovered
that about 300 milliseconds before you're ready to have an insight, a small part of the brain
lights up, called the ASTG. And if you know anything about science, you know when you get to a point
where you can predict an event, you are on to something. So, what am I doing? I'm trying to get
as many insights as I can. I get up every morning,
and I do all the things I can to arm my brain, because when you don't arm
your brain, you fall into beliefs, and you follow false prophets
like maybe some of the candidates - I don't want to name any names for 2012 because they might be listening. I love you all, please come
on my radio program. (Laughter) So, to sum up, what am I saying? A thriving society
has left and right brain. Solving problems - that's what we've evolved,
that's what we've perfected. Eventually, we hit a cognitive threshold, we go into gridlock, our problems persist, and eventually we collapse
and we regenerate. But there is a way out,
evolution's gift: insight. And neuroscience is a way to get us there. So now I want to talk
to you about mitigation. Normally I give this talk,
it's two hours long. The big challenge at [TEDx]
is to get it down into 12 minutes, and I'm already two over. So, the next thing is the big hook comes, and you'll be kind. Remember? You'll be kind. While we're waiting around
and using brain fitness, what can we do? I'm going to tell you one thing
before we get to mitigation. I am a big believer in brain fitness by a fellow by the name
of Dr. Michael Merzenich, who should be here at [TEDx] next year
and you should hear what he has to say. He's a neuroscientist,
and he's developed a series of programs that helps warm the brain up
before it has to make a critical decision or load content or data. In our particular case, we did a study
of 23,000 schoolchildren. We gave them 10-15 minutes
of brain fitness videos and games to play, to warm their brain up
just before they started school. Now, four years later, those children
have twice the academic achievement as kids who didn't warm their brain up
before the beginning of school. If you think about it,
you wouldn't run a marathon without stretching, hydrating,
and preparing yourself. Anything short of giving children
brain fitness before they go to school is, in my opinion, child abuse. If you and I are having a hard time keeping up with stuff and learning stuff
and getting to the bottom of things, imagine what it's like
for a child in school right now. And if we didn't raise teacher's salaries,
if we didn't make classrooms smaller, if we did nothing else
but gave them brain fitness, we would have a massive
improvement in education. And I feel very bad
that that is not on the docket for any educational reformer right now. And it should be
because it's physically demonstrable. OK. So while we're waiting
for our brains to catch up, we could arm it with brain fitness,
we can eat better, we can exercise. By the way, blood flow is idea flow. I hate to get back to exercise,
because I hate exercise. I hate it and we keep getting back
to food and exercise. And, you know, I can't get away from it, I got to get back into the gym. OK, so what can we do
in the interim? Mitigation. Mitigation is the key to buy time,
it's not a solution. We need to be sure we understand that when we evoke mitigation,
we are not solving the problem. So, when people ask me
what we can do in the interim, one of the definitions of complexity is that there are more wrong solutions
than there are right ones, and the number of wrong ones
are exponentially growing. So we become bad pickers of the solution. But thankfully, we have fantastic models
for high-failure rates. Everybody aware of venture capital? You might think
that they're great success stories, but they're actually experts at failure. For every 100 companies
that they do diligence on and invest, they're only expecting
maybe 15 to do well. But those successes
will dwarf the failures. When we come up against a problem
like the Gulf oil spill, we have to go at it
like a venture capitalist. We're bad pickers. But instead, what did we do? First, we got
all the smart people together and we dropped a concrete box on the hole. Does everybody remember this? Then every night we watched
the oil spewing out, and we said, "That's not working!" And 30 days later they said,
"Yep, that didn't work, alright. Our next plan, plan two,
is we're going to drill from the side and we're going relieve
some of the pressure." And 30 days later,
"Nah! That's not working!" Fortunately for us,
solution number three was "static kill." But imagine for a moment
if that had been solution number 87. We would still be watching those horrific scenes
on the Gulf Coast now. So, the gap between evolution
and complexity can be bridged, that's good news. For the first time in human history, for the first time since man
has walked the planet, we can mitigate to buy time
by using high failure rate models, and we can develop insight. What we need now is an agency like NASA,
that was developed to explore outer space, we need an agency to explore inner space. Thank you so much for your time today. (Applause)
