Scott Barry Kaufman: Creative Brains

“Depending on what you are creating — the stimulus, the content — and what stage of the creative process you are in, different brain areas are recruited to help solve the task.” Cognitive psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman unravels some of creativity’s mysterious origins with the help of brain scanning equipment.

Ellen Langer: Mindfulness over matter

illustration by Peter Durand

“We have many, many studies that suggest that the limits we assume are real are artificial, and that we don’t have to accept them at all.” Harvard psychology professor Ellen Langer discusses the surprising power of being present during everyday activities. www.ellenlanger.com

Kevin Slavin: Debunking Luck

“That’s amazing, the idea that anything that seems to be built out of chance or instinct or luck can yield to a computational assault.” Pioneering gamer Kevin Slavin takes the PopTech audience on a colorful tour of the history of luck in America, games of chance, gambling and mathematical formulas.

Laurie Leitch and Loree Sutton: Tapping social resilience

Retired Army Brig. Gen. Loree Sutton, MD and clinical trainer Laurie Leitch, Ph.D., founded Threshold GlobalWorks to explore a neurobiological approach to social resilience. “We are all wired with it, in case you did not know that,” says Leitch. “We are born neurologically wired for resilience because our system is survival-based.”

George Bonanno: Measuring human resilience

e	George Bonanno, a professor of clinical psychology, mines massive data sets for surprising revelations about how human beings cope with loss, trauma and other forms of extreme adversity. “There isn’t one thing that predicts resilience. It’s not two things. It is not necessarily in us.”

Simonetta Carbonaro: Liquid societies

Simonetta Carbonaro, a consumer psychologist, encourages us to think differently about consumption. She reminds us that a consumer-hungry outlook for cheaper and faster is outdated, and that we now know that consuming and producing less, in fact, creates more jobs, more free time, and more happiness.

Hot or not? Dan Ariely on attractiveness, pain, and adaptation

Adaptation is the basic idea that we get used to stuff and interpret signals. Behavioral economist Dan Ariely explores how these types of signals relate to pain and social adaptation. How does our previous exposure to pain alter how we experience it now? How is it that we all appreciate the pinnacle of beauty in the same way, but we’re drawn to partners with a level of attractiveness similar to our own?

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Kathryn Schulz: Being Wrong

Kathryn Schulz is an expert on being wrong. The journalist and author of “Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margins of Error,” says we make mistakes all the time. The trouble is that often times being wrong feels like being right. What’s more, we’re usually wrong about what it even means to make mistakes—and how it can lead to better ideas.

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Elizabeth Dunn: Happiness and Money

Elizabeth Dunn conducts experimental research on self-knowledge and happiness with a focus on how people can use their money more effectively to increase well-being. Dunn determined that by rethinking how we spend our money, we can “change the world, increase our happiness, or win a game of dodgeball.”

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David Eagleman on Possibilianism

Neuroscientist and best-selling author David Eagleman introduces the concept of Possibilianism, a new philosophy that simultaneously embraces a scientific toolbox while exploring new, unconsidered uncertainties about the world around us.

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Dan Ariely: Predictably Irrational

Updated on Monday, June 7, 2010 at 9:08AM by Alphachimp

Updated on Tuesday, June 8, 2010 at 10:15AM by Alphachimp

Dan Ariely, the author of Predictably Irrational, referenced the foolishness of certain actions (e.g. texting while driving), what he calls “small irrationalities” that we do every day. These can lead up to big problems. With our current model of labor, for instance, we reward people with rest. This doesn’t really capture what it is that engages people, what causes them to want to work.

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