Taking Notes Kills Your Memory

Forgetting everything you hear in classes or meetings? Your overstuffed notepad might be the culprit. Most of us take notes because we think doing so will help us remember what we’re learning. According to psychologists at Mount St. Vincent University in New York, our brains have a different view: “Hey, he’s writing this down, so no need to warehouse … Read more

Blacks in Prison by Bryan Stevenson

Well this is a really extraordinary honor for me. I spend most of my time in jails, in prisons, on death row. I spend most of my time in very low-income communities in the projects and places where there’s a great deal of hopelessness. And being here at TED and seeing the stimulation, hearing it, has been very, very energizing to me. And … Read more

Zeno’s Paradox

Though calculus represents a new sophistication in the understanding of sequences, that idea, like so many others, had already been familiar to the Greeks. In the fifth century b.c., in fact, the Greek philosopher Zeno employed a curious sequence to formulate a paradox that is still debated among college philosophy students today, especially after a … Read more

Beating the odds in a lottery

State governments tend to ignore arguments about the possible bad effects of lotteries. That’s because, for the most part, they know enough about mathematical expectation to arrange that for each ticket purchased, the expected winnings—the total prize money divided by the number of tickets sold—is less than the cost of the ticket. This generally leaves … Read more