TED2008 Day 3, Session 4: What stirs us?

We had a few 3-minute talks here in Aspen before this session which I missed most of, but one I caught a bit of was about Zero Footprint, an online calculator and information tool.

--------------------------
Helen Fisher
author, Why We Love

Have you ever been rejected by someone you really loved?
Have you ever rejected someone who really loved you?

95% of people asked say yes to one or both.

The most romantic poem she's read:

Fires run through my body -- the pain of loving you. Pain runs through my body with the fires of my love for you. Sickness wanders my body with my love for you. Pain like a boil about to burst with my love for you. Consumed by fire with my love for you. I remember what you said to me. I am thinking of your love for me. I am torn by your love for me. Pain and more pain. Where are you going with my love? I'm told you will go from here. I am told you will leave me here. My body is numb with grief. Remember what I've said, my love. Goodbye, my love, goodbye.
-anonymous Kwakiutl Indian poem

Brain activity in people who had just been dumped - the area associated with love (you love them harder even though you want to move on), the region calculating gains and losses, and the region associated to deep attachment to others. No wonder people suffer and there are so many crimes of passion - you are engulfed with love, feeling very attached and intensely motivated to take big risks.

The less my hope, the hotter my love. - Terence, Roman poet

The god of love lives in the state of need. -Plato

Romantic love is an addiction - you focus on it, think about them obsessively, crave them, distort reality, tolerate more and more of the subject, suffer withdrawal...

The question she is working on now is why do people fall for one person rather than another?

Women get intimacy face to face, looking at each other and talking. Men gain it working side-by-side.

Love is in us, deeply embedded in the brain. Our challenge is to understand each other.

------------------------------------
David Griffin
National Geographic

Flashbulb memory - when all the elements of a scene combine to not just give us what it looked like, but what our emotional connection to the event is.

The pictures were nice and I liked the way he showed how the photographers created a story, but it didn't wow me.

-----------------------------------
Chris Abani

He did exactly what Fred does - when he came out and greeted people and when he didn't have the greeting returned, he asked again.

"My search is always to find ways to chronicle, share and document stories about everyday people that offer transformation and transcendence that are not sentimental or look away from the darkness and ugliness in us."

"The world is never saved in grand gestures but in the accumulated acts of simple acts of compassion." (I missed words there.)

When his mother cried after a stranger gave her some clothing when she was in need, she said, "You can steel your heart against any kind of horror, but the simple act of kindness of a stranger can unstitch."

In Uganda for a long time, the words for marriage and rape were the same.

Lucille Clifton
Libation - I need to find the words for this poem because it's great, but my quick and dirty google didn't turn them up on the first page.
-----------------------------------
Benjamin Zander
author and conductor of Boston Philharmonic

I love the story he usually tells about the 2 shoe salesmen who go to a remote area and both telegram back about the prospects:
One said "Prospects grim, they never wear shoes here."
The other said, "Prospects are incredible, they don't have shoes yet!"

"I'm a one-buttock player" - the music moves his body around. (@missrogue and I went to Twitter this at the same time and we've finally worked it out so we'll take turns instead of double tweeting the good stuff)

People aren't tone deaf. Everybody has a fantastic ear. If so many people were really tone deaf, they'd never know when to shift a manual transmission car.

He played a Chopin prelude in different ways, finally telling a story of the longing in the piece and how the notes reflect the feelings and they need to be treated as a whole, not as each individual note to be plunked out on the keyboard.

"For me to join the B to E, I have to stop thinking about every note along the way. This is about vision, the long line, like the bird who flies over the fields and doesn't care about the fences below."

"The conductor's power depends on his ability to make other people powerful. My job is to awaken possibility in other people. If the eyes are shining, you know you are doing it. If they aren't shining, I must ask, "Who am I being that my players aren't shining?"

Possibility to live into -- we might not be able to achieve perfection or a very lofty goal, but we can work into it, live into it.

Please consider reading his and his marriage partner's (Rosamund Stone Zander) book The Art of Possibility. It's a short and easy read, but very inspiring.

He told a story about some of his students not showing up to watch a performance and how disappointed and mad he was and Rosamund told him to apologize. "If people don't do what you want them to do, you can always apologize because you didn't enroll them."

He went way over, but I don't think anyone cared at all. We ended with everyone singing the Ode to Joy from Beethoven's Symphony No. 9 - he put the words up on the screen in German (sort of phonetically spelled) and worked us through it and each time we'd all start singing and he'd stop us and encourage us to put more into it. He told a story about a musician who was practicing a piece for an interview to be the associate (2nd chair?) cellist? (sorry, can't remember) in a Barcelona orchestra. Zander thought the guy was holding back - he kept working with him until the guy was giving it all he had and the guy went away to Spain for the interview. He came back and said he hadn't gotten the job because he played the first way, holding back. But then he said, "oh, fuck it" and went to Madrid, auditioned for 1st chair in their orchestra and got it. So Zander says that you have to get BTFI - Beyond the "fuck it" point.

That's the long way of saying that we got BTFI and it was incredible for that many people to be singing together one of the most joyous and magnificent pieces of choral composition ever created at the end of day 3 of one of the most stimulating thinking experiences imaginable.
-------------------------------

After the session ended, we all loaded up on shuttles, went into town and hopped on gondolas to go up the mountain. I had the pleasure of sitting and talking with Scott Belsky of Behance, a company that makes beautifully designed productivity tools for creative people. If you are in need of something to help you manage your work in a way that isn't too rigid,if you're into productivity, Getting Things Done, or  if you just love cool paper products and office supplies, you have to check out their stuff.

 

The other great part about the gondola ride was the night sky. I have never seen so many stars as I did this evening. The altitude, the lower level of light pollution in the area and the winter sky combined in the most spectacular way.

Comments

[Shelley]

Singing is breath. You have to inhabit it, and it has to inhabit you. Keep singing.

[Mike Zillion]

Getting beyond the "fuck it" point is like having an orgasm. Waiting can make it more intense as the frustration builds, but if you wait too long, you can lose the impulse.

[onepinktee]

Shelley - beautifully put!

Mike - that's certainly one way to look at it ;)

[John L]

that we would live life BTFI always.

[Lilly Evans]

Thank you for your notes - and did Zander mention Rule no.5?

[onepinktee]

Lilly, Zander didn't mention his rule this time, but I've heard him speak before and I love it. :) When I last heard him speak, he told this story in relation to the rule:

Legendary conductor Herbert von Karajan jumped into his limo and yelled to the driver: “Quick, drive, go, go, go!” The driver responded “Yes sir, where would you like to go?” Karajan said “Doesn’t matter, they need me everywhere!”