Translator: Gisela Giardino Reviewer: Elia Gasparolo
You have just been subjected to a scientific experiment.
Ha, ha, ha!
We are trying to pose a question and the question here was:
What is the best strategy to solve this kind of problems?
You all solved two problems, on sheet number 1 and 3,
but different things happened for each of you on sheet 2.
We offered some of you a possible strategy to solve this kind of problems.
We told you how you can think this problem.
We asked others to think how they solved the first problem.
To reflect: what methodology did you use? How did you face the problem?
To the third group among you we asked you to just relax,
to close your eyes, breathe, and calm down for a while.
And then, you all solved the second problem.
The question we want to answer is:
which of these 3 groups was better at solving the second problem?
Which of these three possible strategies is better to solve these problems.
Isn't it great?
(Laughter)
I love this.
(Applause)
Imagine teachers, with all that passion,
that energy, that wisdom, and experience,
if we could provide them with a scientific view
of what works and what doesn't.
Which things work better than others.
And it's not that difficult, we just did it in 10 minutes.
It's going to take us a couple of weeks to process all this,
but it wasn't that long.
We hypothesize which may be the answer.
Our hypothesis is that perhaps
to reflect on how we solved the problem the first time,
can make us better to solve a similar problem the second time.
But the truth is, the answer is: we do not know.
And that is what's great about this type of scientific experiments.
It let us ask questions on things that are very important for us,
but for which we don't know the answer.
This is the idea of what we do.
We call it TEDxperiments,
it's something we started two years ago in this same room,
and we already did TEDxperiments in two TEDxRíodelaPlata events.
This is the fifth experiment we'll do,
and within a few weeks we're going to share the results.
But let me show you...
some things that happened two years ago.
We did an experiment where we wanted to see what was the effect
when one person tells another one
something that is important to the former, and the latter doesn't care.
I don't know if this ever happened to you.
(Laughter)
Then we did the following: we handed them out envelopes like we did today.
To the odd rows, the note in the envelope said,
"You are going to tell a story that is important in your lives."
While the even rows were instructed,
"You will listen," but not the same way to everyone like today.
Some had to pay a lot of attention,
not to take their eyes off the person.
The others were asked to totally ignore them,
to check their cellphones, to do other things, etc.
And after that we asked questions.
"What did you feel?" "About your own story?"
"How's your self-esteem?" and such things.
And amazing things happened.
In particular, around that row, there was a lady sitting.
She attended the event with her daughter and her grandchildren.
And she had to tell a story.
The person in the back row she was telling the story to,
was a boy of 12 she didn't met before.
And his instructions were to ignore her.
She began her story passionately,
she was moved by her own history, but this kid wasn't caring at all.
(Laughter)
He began to feel bad about himself because he had this contradiction,
he was listening to the story and beginning to be moved by it,
but he wanted to follow the rules as well.
The rest of the four minutes were very uncomfortable.
She obviously didn't know he had to follow this instruction.
She hated him, he hated himself,
the 4 minutes were over and when we revealed what had happened,
she turned around, they hugged, and they both started to cry.
An interesting thing of this experiment
is that of all the experiments we did so far, it was the first one
where we found something new,
something the scientific community didn't know about.
This is not a game, we are creating knowledge.
And we sent it for publication.
It was just accepted in a worldwide, top notch science magazine,
and this is the article's title that will soon be published;
and the TEDxperiments team published it.
Let's give it to them because it is...
(Applause)
The title is a bit cryptic, right?
It's in English, so I said, well, what if we typed it in the browser...
[Google Translator] (Laughter)
And when I typed it in the Translator, something like this read,
[It bothers me that you check your phone
and don't pay me attention when I'm talking.]
(Laughter) (Applause)
Last year, when we held our event in October, that very, very large event,
the world's largest TEDx,
we did another experiment, this time, with 10,000 people.
We asked all these 10,000 people to play thumb wars in couples.
Sometimes with eyes closed, and we'd give them different instructions.
And we wanted to test
our capacity to cooperate vs. to compete.
If we are able to cooperate or not, when cooperation is the best strategy.
And it turns out that, in many cases,
we end up competing when it's unnecessary,
when the best for all is to collaborate.
And that also gave a result that is being processed,
and it will probably, hopefully, become another article
that will contribute to human knowledge.
But here so far, we were keeping the data.
Now we decided to launch this.
And the TEDxperiments website went online today.
The idea of this site is to make public
the results of all the experiments we did so far.
Of the 4 we did until yesterday, 3 were already uploaded,
the fourth will be uploaded there soon.
And you can see it in: tedxriodelaplata.org/tedxperiments
today when you come back home.
This fills me with joy because we believe that in these events
is good to come and listen to ideas and learn;
maybe sometimes we have a new idea when we listen to other ideas.
But given the amazing community we are,
why not also create new knowledge?
Knowledge that is relevant, in this case for education;
for how we communicate and how we relate.
I invite you all to have a critical eye, to ask questions,
and to try to validate them in a way they become irrefutable.
So they can help others learn and teach in a different way.
Thank you.
(Applause)