TED Talk Favourites

I stumbled across this list of favourite TED talks crowdsourced through Twitter. Now I am working my way through them. I have seen a few but it’s always good to get some recommendations. TED talks are usually short (10-20 minutes) and work quite well for my aging atention span and often provide much needed jolts of inspiration!

Dan Gilbert’s Why are we happy? (21:20)

Sir Ken Robinson, Changing education paradigms (11 minutes)

Chimamanda Adichie: The danger of a single story (18:49 minutes)

Aimee Mullins and her 12 pairs of legs (10:02 minutes)

David Blaine: How I held my breath for 17 min ()

Philip Zimbardo shows how people become monsters … or heroes (23:14 minutes)

Richard Dawkins on militant atheism (29 minutes)

Richard Dawkins on our ‘queer’ universe (22 minutes)

Neil Gershenfeld talk about fab lab (17:22 minutes)

Sir Ken Robinson says schools kill creativity (19:29 minutes)

Shashi Tharoor on Soft Power (17:54 minutes)

Dennis Hong: Making a car for blind drivers (9:09 minutes)

David McCandless “The beauty of data visualization” (18:17 minutes)

Stefan Sagmeister’s “Power of Time Off“ (17:40 minutes)

Sarah Kay, If I should have a daughter … (18:29 minutes)

Helen Fisher, tells us why we love + cheat (23:31 minutes)

Elif Shafak, The Politics of Fiction (19:46 minutes)

Jill Bolte Taylor‘s stroke of insight talk (18:42 minutes)

Hans Rosling shows the best stats you’ve ever seen (19:53 minutes)

Hans Rosling: Let my dataset change your mindset (19:56 minutes)

Hans Rosling’s new insights on poverty (19 minutes)

Alexis Ohanian: How to make a splash in social media (4:27 minutes)

Cameron Herold, Let’s raise kids to be entrepreneurs (19:36 minutes)

Roger Ebert: Remaking my voice (19:30 minutes)

If you’re ever stuck in a hotel room with free wireless then these beat the endless CNN loop.

Also, many TED videos make great conversation starters for staff meetings, brown baggers, or conferences.

Stephen