The extravaganza which is TED began with a blast of Hamlet, out of the darkness on stage as delivered by Michael Stuhlbarg, a Tony award nominee actor of Shakespeare in the Park. Not just ANY soliloquy, of course... "To be or not to be."
This year's conference is about questions. BIG questions.
Chris Anderson, TED curator extraordinaire, then asks the audience to take a moment of silence to shift into the spirit of curiosity and intrigue and wit and soul-searching that is TED.
Minutes later, third generation paleoanthropoligist Louise Leakey is telling us "we're the only walking upright Ape that exists in the world today." Does that not seem to raise a big question? Well, consider this: many if not most species on the planet co-exist with many other related species, and in fact through three generations of research her family, as it happens, has demonstrated that there were multiple species of hominids at any one time, long ago in history.
Indeed, in 2001 Leaky and her mother, Meave, found a previously unknown hominid, 3.5 million year old Kenyan-thropus platyops at Lake Turkana in East Africa. This was found not far from where her grandparents, Louise and Mary Leaky discovered the bones of Homo habilis, one of at least three species who co-existed as recently as 90 generations ago - or roughly 1.8 million years.
That 2001 find, Leaky said, included "one of the most very special things you can do with your mother," as she showed the two of them brushing off the bones in making their discovery.
As much of the first session, there was plenty to entertain, shock and awe - including the actual human brain Harvard Neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor shared from the stage, complete with spinal cord.
Near the end of the first session, "Who are we?" Anderson introduced astrophysicist Stephen Hawking, who made a presentation recorded a couple of hours previously from his home in Cambridge, England.
"We believe that life arose spontaneously on Earth," so it is naturally possible if not likely that it has arisen elsewhere in the universe. "Life appeared on earth within half a billion years of it being possible."
"We don't happen to have been visited by aliens...," he added, discounting observers of UFOs and the like as quacks. However, in answering Anderson, in a matter of seven minutes using his onscreen editing system,
"I think it quite likely we are the only civilization within several light years, otherwise we would have heard radio waves..."
But no one, including the marvelous and wide-ranging images of perennial TEDster and anthropologist Wade Davis or the nearly unfathonable graphics and factoids of artist Chris Jordan {we use 2 million plastic bottles every five minutes - do we?} could prepare anyone for the closing of Jill Bolte Taylor, as she described how she had been overtaken by a stroke on the morning of December 10, 1996.
The scientist described how she'd awakened with a throbbing sensation behind her eye akin in sharpness to eating a big bite of really cold ice cream, and that only after she'd worked out on an exercise machine and taken a shower did she realize the stroke was spreading.
At that moment, she had the actual forethought of mind [literally] to not only realize she was undergoing the stroke, at her home, but to ponder how rare it must be for a brain scientist to actually go through a stroke herself!
Then, no sooner had she thought that thought than "it crosses my mind that I'm a busy woman. I don't have time for a stroke."
She manages to reach a co-worker, after feeling an arm become paralyzed, and as she's being shifted from one Boston hospital to Mass General, she feels as a balloon letting out air that her energy was lifting from her body, and her spirit surrender.
"In that moment I knew that I was no longer the choreographer of my life," she said.
In vivid language, Taylor describes how she felt her spirit "like a great whale gliding through a sea of silent euphoria," surrendering to the notion either her physicians would save her, or not, and yet wondering if she would ever be able to fit that enormous feeling of euphoria back into her body.
Then, she enraptures the hall with the realization that she was indeed still alive, and the realization that though she could not at that time walk, read, speak properly or recall anything of her life, she would come to realize that since she was still alive, and could feel this nirvana, then logically others could do so.
Bolte Tayllor had described how the left brain is responsible for action and memory, while the right brain was the processor of the "here and now." Within her stroke-disabled body, she described feeling only a world of peaceful compassion in which she envisioned living people could control and dismiss left-brain calculations, to step to the right of their controlling left brain hemisphere to embrace a positive, humane world.
She described this particular stroke of insight into how we could lead our lives as what motivated her to recover...a process which took the work of eight long years to complete.
"Who are we? We are the light force power of the universe," she said, lauding the cognitive ability, humanity and manual dexterity she attributed to "50 trillion molecular geniuses" at work.
Little doubt, that was one of the grandest, most intense and most powerful beginnings of any TED conference, and, as Jill Bolte Taylor said of her own revelation, certainly worthy of TED's focus on "Ideas worth spreading."
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