So I came across this idea the other day,
I think it was Aristotle who put it out there,
but it was this notion that human beings
don't care about spectacle.
What they care about is ecstatic understanding.
Understanding, comprehension.
In other words, cognitive ecstasy
defined as an exhilarating neuro storm
of intense intellectual pleasure.
The book "The Ravenous Brain" talks about this idea,
that consciousness is obsessed with pattern.
Pattern is structure, structure amidst
the chaos, a signal in the noise.
And when we find patterns, when we connect the dots,
we experience this cognitive ecstasy, this exhilarating
neuro storm.
And we get children, they're young,
they're learning all the time, they're
creating new synaptic connections.
They experience this cognitive ecstasy, this curiosity.
This insatiable drive to understand is on fire,
is fervor, is [? feral ?] in little kids.
Imagine the first time you look at a microscope.
You see that cosmos-- revealed for the first time--
of the microscopic.
When you look through a telescope,
and you all of a sudden see the cosmos of the macroscopic.
Perhaps the best line was Ross Anderson's description
of the ontological awakening provided by the Hubble Space
telescope's images of the deep field.
He said, "Through the sheer aesthetic force
of its discoveries, the Hubble distilled
the complex abstractions of astrophysics
into singular expressions of color and light,"
vindicating Keats' famous couplet,
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty."
The sad part, as Sir Kenneth Robinson says,
is that we lose this as we grow up.
Our educational institutions are failing us,
they're not providing the context for this curiosity
to explode, to continue to emerge indefinitely.
Instead we slowly die.
And I think our goal is to create media,
to create content, to create spaces
that allow us to stay curious, to stay alive,
to awaken the wonder junkie in all of us,
to unleash the brave, reckless gods within us all.
That is my goal.
That is why we make [? Shots of All ?], that
is why I love the TED conference, that
is why we're here, that is what we live for.
Ahhhhh.
Moves me every day.