The BEST episodes of TED Talks season 2015
Every episode of TED Talks season 2015, ranked from best to worst by thousands of votes from fans of the show. The best episodes of TED Talks season 2015!
TED is a nonprofit devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from three worlds: Technology, Entertainment, Design. TEDTalks began as a simple attempt to share what happens at TED with the world. Under the moniker "ideas worth spreading," talks were released online. They rapidly attracted a global audience in the millions. Indeed, the reaction was so enthusiastic that the entire TED website has been reengineered around TEDTalks, with the goal of giving everyone on-demand access to the world's most inspiring voices. [TED-Ed and TEDx are separate TVDB series and should NOT be listed here. Episode ordering and dates are sourced from YouTube.]
#1 - Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin: A hilarious celebration of lifelong female friendship
Season 2015 - Episode 216 - Aired 12/17/2015
Legendary duo Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin have been friends for decades. In a raw, tender and wide-ranging conversation hosted by Pat Mitchell, the three discuss longevity, feminism, the differences between male and female friendship, what it means to live well and women's role in future of our planet. "I don't even know what I would do without my women friends," Fonda says. "I exist because I have my women friends."
Watch Now:Amazon
#2 - Hannah Fry: The mathematics of love
Season 2015 - Episode 26 - Aired 2/13/2015
Finding the right mate is no cakewalk — but is it even mathematically likely? In a charming talk, mathematician Hannah Fry shows patterns in how we look for love, and gives her top three tips (verified by math!) for finding that special someone.
Watch Now:Amazon
#3 - Tom Wujec: Got a wicked problem? First, tell me how you make toast
Season 2015 - Episode 21 - Aired 2/5/2015
Making toast doesn’t sound very complicated — until someone asks you to draw the process, step by step. Tom Wujec loves asking people and teams to draw how they make toast, because the process reveals unexpected truths about how we can solve our biggest, most complicated problems at work. Learn how to run this exercise yourself, and hear Wujec’s surprising insights from watching thousands of people draw toast.
Watch Now:Amazon
#4 - Harry Baker: A love poem for lonely prime numbers
Season 2015 - Episode 39 - Aired 3/4/2015
Performance poet (and math student) Harry Baker spins a love poem about his favorite kind of numbers — the lonely, love-lorn prime. Stay on for two more lively, inspiring poems from this charming performer.
Watch Now:Amazon#5 - Robert Waldinger: What makes a good life? Lessons from the longest study on happiness
Season 2015 - Episode 220 - Aired 12/23/2015
What keeps us happy and healthy as we go through life? If you think it's fame and money, you're not alone – but, according to psychiatrist Robert Waldinger, you're mistaken. As the director of a 75-year-old study on adult development, Waldinger has unprecedented access to data on true happiness and satisfaction. In this talk, he shares three important lessons learned from the study as well as some practical, old-as-the-hills wisdom on how to build a fulfilling, long life.
#6 - Greg Gage: How to control someone else's arm with your brain
Season 2015 - Episode 77 - Aired 4/28/2015
Greg Gage is on a mission to make brain science accessible to all. In this fun, kind of creepy demo, the neuroscientist and TED Senior Fellow uses a simple, inexpensive DIY kit to take away the free will of an audience member. It’s not a parlor trick; it actually works. You have to see it to believe it.
#7 - Sarah Jones: One woman, five characters, and a sex lesson from the future
Season 2015 - Episode 104 - Aired 6/10/2015
In this performance, Sarah Jones brings you to the front row of a classroom in the future, as a teacher plugs in different personas from the year 2016 to show their varied perspectives on sex work. As she changes props, Jones embodies an elderly homemaker, a “sex work studies” major, an escort, a nun-turned-prostitute and a guy at a strip club for his bachelor party. It’s an intriguing look at a taboo topic, that flips cultural norms around sex inside out.
#8 - Andreas Ekström: The moral bias behind your search results
Season 2015 - Episode 194 - Aired 11/10/2015
Search engines have become our most trusted sources of information and arbiters of truth. But can we ever get an unbiased search result? Swedish author and journalist Andreas Ekström argues that such a thing is a philosophical impossibility. In this thoughtful talk, he calls on us to strengthen the bonds between technology and the humanities, and he reminds us that behind every algorithm is a set of personal beliefs that no code can ever completely eradicate.
#9 - Carl Safina: What are animals thinking and feeling?
Season 2015 - Episode 200 - Aired 11/19/2015
What's going on inside the brains of animals? Can we know what, or if, they're thinking and feeling? Carl Safina thinks we can. Using discoveries and anecdotes that span ecology, biology and behavioral science, he weaves together stories of whales, wolves, elephants and albatrosses to argue that just as we think, feel, use tools and express emotions, so too do the other creatures – and minds – that share the Earth with us.
#10 - Lucianne Walkowicz: Let's not use Mars as a backup planet
Season 2015 - Episode 214 - Aired 12/15/2015
Stellar astronomer and TED Senior Fellow Lucianne Walkowicz works on NASA's Kepler mission, searching for places in the universe that could support life. So it's worth a listen when she asks us to think carefully about Mars. In this short talk, she suggests that we stop dreaming of Mars as a place that we'll eventually move to when we've messed up Earth, and to start thinking of planetary exploration and preservation of the Earth as two sides of the same goal. As she says, "The more you look for planets like Earth, the more you appreciate our own planet."
#11 - Genevieve von Petzinger: Why are these 32 symbols found in ancient caves all over Europe?
Season 2015 - Episode 201 - Aired 11/20/2015
Written language, the hallmark of human civilization, didn't just suddenly appear one day. Thousands of years before the first fully developed writing systems, our ancestors scrawled geometric signs across the walls of the caves they sheltered in. Paleoanthropologist, rock art researcher and TED Senior Fellow Genevieve von Petzinger has studied and codified these ancient markings in caves across Europe. The uniformity of her findings suggest that graphic communication, and the ability to preserve and transmit messages beyond a single moment in time, may be much older than we think.
#12 - Daniel Levitin: How to stay calm when you know you'll be stressed
Season 2015 - Episode 187 - Aired 10/30/2015
You're not at your best when you're stressed. In fact, your brain has evolved over millennia to release cortisol in stressful situations, inhibiting rational, logical thinking but potentially helping you survive, say, being attacked by a lion. Neuroscientist Daniel Levitin thinks there's a way to avoid making critical mistakes in stressful situations, when your thinking becomes clouded -- the pre-mortem. "We all are going to fail now and then," he says. "The idea is to think ahead to what those failures might be."
#13 - Donald Hoffman: Do we see reality as it is?
Season 2015 - Episode 105 - Aired 6/12/2015
Cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman is trying to answer a big question: Do we experience the world as it really is ... or as we need it to be? In this ever so slightly mind-blowing talk, he ponders how our minds construct reality for us.
#14 - Nick Bostrom: What happens when our computers get smarter than we are?
Season 2015 - Episode 76 - Aired 4/27/2015
Artificial intelligence is getting smarter by leaps and bounds — within this century, research suggests, a computer AI could be as "smart" as a human being. And then, says Nick Bostrom, it will overtake us: "Machine intelligence is the last invention that humanity will ever need to make." A philosopher and technologist, Bostrom asks us to think hard about the world we're building right now, driven by thinking machines. Will our smart machines help to preserve humanity and our values — or will they have values of their own?
#15 - Alix Generous: How I learned to communicate my inner life with Asperger's
Season 2015 - Episode 138 - Aired 8/17/2015
Alix Generous is a young woman with a million and one ideas -- she's done award-winning science, helped develop new technology and tells a darn good joke (you'll see). She has Asperger's, a form of autistic spectrum disorder that can impair the basic social skills required for communication, and she's worked hard for years to learn how to share her thoughts with the world. In this funny, personal talk, she shares her story -- and her vision for tools to help more people communicate their big ideas.
#16 - Mary Robinson: Why climate change is a threat to human rights
Season 2015 - Episode 162 - Aired 9/23/2015
Climate change is unfair. While rich countries can fight against rising oceans and dying farm fields, poor people around the world are already having their lives upended — and their human rights threatened — by killer storms, starvation and the loss of their own lands. Mary Robinson asks us to join the movement for worldwide climate justice.
#17 - Manuel Lima: A visual history of human knowledge
Season 2015 - Episode 139 - Aired 8/18/2015
How does knowledge grow? Sometimes it begins with one insight and grows into many branches; other times it grows as a complex and interconnected network. Infographics expert Manuel Lima explores the thousand-year history of mapping data -- from languages to dynasties -- using trees and networks of information. It's a fascinating history of visualizations, and a look into humanity's urge to map what we know.
#18 - Tony Wyss-Coray: How young blood might help reverse aging. Yes, really
Season 2015 - Episode 140 - Aired 8/19/2015
Tony Wyss-Coray studies the impact of aging on the human body and brain. In this eye-opening talk, he shares new research from his Stanford lab and other teams which shows that a solution for some of the less great aspects of old age might actually lie within us all.
#19 - Christopher Soghoian: How to Avoid Surveillance...With Your Phone
Season 2015 - Episode 141 - Aired 9/14/2015
Who is listening in on your phone calls? On a landline, it could be anyone, says privacy activist Christopher Soghoian, because surveillance backdoors are built into the phone system by default, to allow governments to listen in. But then again, so could a foreign intelligence service ... or a criminal. Which is why, says Soghoian, some tech companies are resisting governments' call to build the same backdoors into mobile phones and new messaging systems. From this TED Fellow, learn how some tech companies are working to keep your calls and messages private.
#20 - Dustin Yellin: A journey through the mind of an artist
Season 2015 - Episode 142 - Aired 9/15/2015
Dustin Yellin makes mesmerizing artwork that tells complex, myth-inspired stories. How did he develop his style? In this disarming talk, he shares the journey of an artist -- starting from age 8 -- and his idiosyncratic way of thinking and seeing. Follow the path that leads him up to his latest major work (or two).
#21 - Jim Al-Khalili: How quantum biology might explain life’s biggest questions
Season 2015 - Episode 143 - Aired 8/24/2015
How does a robin know to fly south? The answer might be weirder than you think: Quantum physics may be involved. Jim Al-Khalili rounds up the extremely new, extremely strange world of quantum biology, where something Einstein once called “spooky action at a distance” helps birds navigate, and quantum effects might explain the origin of life itself.
#22 - Seth Berkley: The troubling reason why vaccines are made too late ... if they’re made at all
Season 2015 - Episode 144 - Aired 8/25/2015
It seems like we wait for a disastrous disease outbreak before we get serious about making a vaccine for it. Seth Berkley lays out the market realities and unbalanced risks behind why we aren't making vaccines for the world's biggest diseases.
#23 - Robin Murphy: These robots come to the rescue after a disaster
Season 2015 - Episode 145 - Aired 8/27/2015
When disaster strikes, who's first on the scene? More and more, it’s a robot. In her lab, Robin Murphy builds robots that fly, tunnel, swim and crawl through disaster scenes, helping firefighters and rescue workers save more lives safely -- and help communities return to normal up to three years faster.
#24 - Yves Morieux: How too many rules at work keep you from getting things done
Season 2015 - Episode 146 - Aired 8/28/2015
Modern work -- from waiting tables to crunching numbers to designing products -- is about solving brand-new problems every day, flexibly and collaboratively. But as Yves Morieux shows in this insightful talk, too often, an overload of rules, processes and metrics keeps us from doing our best work together. Meet the new frontier of productivity: cooperation.
#25 - Wendy Freedman: This new telescope might show us the beginning of the universe
Season 2015 - Episode 147 - Aired 8/31/2015
When and how did the universe begin? A global group of astronomers wants to answer that question by peering as far back in time as a large new telescope will let us see. Wendy Freedman headed the creation of the Giant Magellan Telescope, under construction in South America; at TEDGlobal in Rio, she shares a bold vision of the discoveries about our universe that the GMT could make possible.