Luis von Ahn: Massive-scale online collaboration 16min

http://www.ted.com/talks/luis_von_ahn_massive_scale_online_collaboration.html

PLEASE TRANSLATE THIS SPEECH INTO JAPANESE, THANK YOU!
どなたか訳をTEDへUPして下さいませ～

related site : http://duolingo.com/


How many of you had to fill out some sort of web form where you've been asked to read a distorted sequence of characters like this? How many of you found it really, really annoying? Okay, outstanding. So I invented that. (Laughter) Or I was one of the people who did it.

That thing is called a CAPTCHA. And the reason it is there is to make sure you, the entity filling out the form, are actually a human and not some sort of computer program that was written to submit the form millions and millions of times. The reason it works is because humans, at least non-visually-impaired humans, have no trouble reading these distorted squiggly characters, whereas computer programs simply can't do it as well yet. So for example, in the case of Ticketmaster, the reason you have to type these distorted characters is to prevent scalpers from writing a program that can buy millions of tickets, two at a time.

CAPTCHAs are used all over the Internet. And since they're used so often, a lot of times the precise sequence of random characters that is shown to the user is not so fortunate. So this is an example from the Yahoo registration page. The random characters that happened to be shown to the user were W, A, I, T, which, of course, spell a word. But the best part is the message that the Yahoo help desk got about 20 minutes later. Text: "Help! I've been waiting for over 20 minutes, and nothing happens." (Laughter) This person thought they needed to wait. This of course, is not as bad as this poor person.

(Laughter)

CAPTCHA Project is something that we did here at Carnegie Melllon over 10 years ago, and it's been used everywhere. Let me now tell you about a project that we did a few years later, which is sort of the next evolution of CAPTCHA. This is a project that we call reCAPTCHA, which is something that we started here at Carnegie Mellon, then we turned it into a startup company. And then about a year and a half ago, Google actually acquired this company.

So let me tell you what this project started. So this project started from the following realization: It turns out that approximately 200 million CAPTCHAs are typed everyday by people around the world. When I first heard this, I was quite proud of myself. I thought, look at the impact that my research has had. But then I started feeling bad. See here's the thing, each time you type a CAPTCHA, essentially you waste 10 seconds of your time. And if you multiply that by 200 million, you get that humanity as a whole is wasting about 500,000 hours every day typing these annoying CAPTCHAs. So then I started feeling bad.

(Laughter)

And then I started thinking, well, of course, we can't just get rid of CAPTCHAs, because the security of the Web sort of depends on them. But then I started thinking, is there any way we can use this effort for something that is good for humanity? So see, here's the thing. While you're typing a CAPTCHA, during those 10 seconds, your brain is doing something amazing. Your brain is doing something that computers cannot yet do. So can we get you to do useful work for those 10 seconds? Another way of putting it is, is there some humongous problem that we cannot yet get computers to solve, yet we can split into tiny 10-second chunks such that each time somebody solves a CAPTCHA they solve a little bit of this problem? And the answer to that is "yes," and this is what we're doing now.

So what you may not know is that nowadays while you're typing a CAPTCHA, not only are you authenticating yourself as a human, but in addition you're actually helping us to digitize books. So let me explain how this works. So there's a lot of projects out there trying to digitize books. Google has one. The Internet Archive has one. Amazon, now with the Kindle, is trying to digitize books. Basically the way this works is you start with an old book. You've seen those things, right? Like a book? (Laughter) So you start with a book, and then you scan it.

Now scanning a book is like taking a digital photograph of every page of the book. It gives you an image for every page of the book. This is an image with text for every page of the book. The next step in the process is that the computer needs to be able to decipher all of the words in this image. That's using a technology called OCR, for optical character recognition, which takes a picture of text and tries to figure out what text is in there. Now the problem is that OCR is not perfect. Especially for older books where the ink has faded and the pages have turned yellow, OCR cannot recognize a lot of the words. For example, for things that were written more than 50 years ago, the computer cannot recognize about 30 percent of the words. So what we're doing now is we're taking all of the words that the computer cannot recognize and we're getting people to read them for us while they're typing a CAPTCHA on the Internet.

So the next time you type a CAPTCHA, these words that you're typing are actually words that are coming from books that are being digitized that the computer could not recognize. And now the reason we have two words nowadays instead of one is because, you see, one of the words is a word that the system just got out of a book, it didn't know what it was, and it's going to present it to you. But since it doesn't know the answer for it, it cannot grade it for you. So what we do is we give you another word, one for which the system does know the answer. We don't tell you which one's which, and we say, please type both. And if you type the correct word for the one for which the system already knows the answer, it assumes you are human, and it also gets some confidence that you typed the other word correctly. And if we repeat this process to like 10 different people and all of them agree on what the new word is, then we get one more word digitized accurately.

So this is how the system works. And basically, since we released it about three or four years ago, a lot of websites have started switching from the old CAPTCHA where people wasted their time to the new CAPTCHA where people are helping to digitize books. So for example, Ticketmaster. So every time you buy tickets on Ticketmaster, you help to digitize a book. Facebook: Every time you add a friend or poke somebody, you help to digitize a book. Twitter and about 350,000 other sites are all using reCAPTCHA. And in fact, the number of sites that are using reCAPTCHA is so high that the number of words that we're digitizing per day is really, really large. It's about 100 million a day, which is the equivalent of about two and a half million books a year. And this is all being done one word at a time by just people typing CAPTCHAs on the Internet.

(Applause)

Now of course, since we're doing so many words per day, funny things can happen. And this is especially true because now we're giving people two randomly chosen English words next to each other. So funny things can happen. For example, we presented this word. It's the word "Christians"; there's nothing wrong with it. But if you present it along with another randomly chosen word, bad things can happen. So we get this. (Text: bad christians) But it's even worse, because the particular website where we showed this actually happened to be called The Embassy of the Kingdom of God. (Laughter) Oops. (Laughter) Here's another really bad one. JohnEdwards.com (Text: Damn liberal) (Laughter) So we keep on insulting people left and right everyday.

Now, of course, we're not just insulting people. See here's the thing, since we're presenting two randomly chosen words, interesting things can happen. So this actually has given rise to a really big Internet meme that tens of thousands of people have participated in, which is called CAPTCHA art. I'm sure some of you have heard about it. Here's how it works. Imagine you're using the Internet and you see a CAPTCHA that you think is somewhat peculiar, like this CAPTCHA. (Text: invisible toaster) Then what you're supposed to do is you take a screen shot of it. Then of course, you fill out the CAPTCHA because you help us digitize a book. But then, first you take a screen shot, and then you draw something that is related to it. (Laughter) That's how it works. There are tens of thousands of these. Some of them are very cute. (Text: clenched it) (Laughter) Some of them are funnier. (Text: stoned founders) (Laughter) And some of them, like paleontological shvisle, they contain Snoop Dogg.

(Laughter)

Okay, so this is my favorite number of reCAPTCHA. So this is the favorite thing that I like about this whole project. This is the number of distinct people that have helped us digitize at least one word out of a book through reCAPTCHA: 750 million, which is a little over 10 percent of the world's population, has helped us digitize human knowledge. And it is numbers like these that motivate my research agenda. So the question that motivates my research is the following: If you look at humanity's large-scale achievements, these really big things that humanity has gotten together and done historically -- like for example, building the pyramids of Egypt or the Panama Canal or putting a man on the Moon -- there is a curious fact about them, and it is that they were all done with about the same number off people. It's weird; they were all done with about 100,000 people. And the reason for that is because, before the Internet, coordinating more than 100,000 people, let alone paying them, was essentially impossible. But now with the Internet, I've just shown you a project where we've gotten 750 million people to help us digitize human knowledge. So the question that motivates my research is, if we can put a man on the Moon with 100,000, what can we do with 100 million?

So based on this question, we've had a lot of different projects that we've been working on. Let me tell you about one that I'm most excited about. This is something that we've been semi-quietly working on for the last year and a half or so. It hasn't yet been launched. It's called Duolingo. Since it hasn't been launched, shhhhh! (Laughter) Yeah, I can trust you'll do that. So this is the project. Here's how it started. It started with me posing a question to my graduate student, Severin Hacker. Okay, that's Severin Hacker. So I posed the question to my graduate student. By the way, you did hear me correctly; his last name is Hacker. So I posed this question to him: How can we get 100 million people translating the Web into every major language for free?

Okay, so there's a lot of things to say about this question. First of all, translating the Web. So right now the Web is partitioned into multiple languages. A large fraction of it is in English. If you don't know any English, you can't access it. But there's large fractions in other different languages, and if you don't know those languages, you can't access it. So I would like to translate all of the Web, or at least most of the Web, into every major language. So that's what I would like to do.

Now some of you may say, why can't we use computers to translate? Why can't we use machine translation? Machine translation nowadays is starting to translate some sentences here and there. Why can't we use it to translate the whole Web? Well the problem with that is that it's not yet good enough and it probably won't be for the next 15 to 20 years. It makes a lot of mistakes. Even when it doesn't make a mistake, since it makes so many mistakes, you don't know whether to trust it or not.

So let me show you an example of something that was translated with a machine. Actually it was a forum post. It was somebody who was trying to ask a question about JavaScript. It was translated from Japanese into English. So I'll just let you read. This person starts apologizing for the fact that it's translated with a computer. So the next sentence is is going to be the preamble to the question. So he's just explaining something. Remember, it's a question about JavaScript. (Text: At often, the goat-time install a error is vomit.) (Laughter) Then comes the first part of the question. (Text: How many times like the wind, a pole, and the dragon?) (Laughter) Then comes my favorite part of the question. (Text: This insult to father's stones?) (Laughter) And then comes the ending, which is my favorite part of the whole thing. (Text: Please apologize for your stupidity. There are a many thank you.) (Laughter) Okay, so computer translation, not yet good enough. So back to the question.

So we need people to translate the whole Web. So now the next question you may have is, well why can't we just pay people to do this? We could pay professional language translators to translate the whole Web. We could do that. Unfortunately, it would be extremely expensive. For example, translating a tiny, tiny fraction of the whole Web, Wikipedia, into one other language, Spanish. Wikipedia exists in Spanish, but it's very small compared to the size of English. It's about 20 percent of the size of English. If we wanted to translate the other 80 percent into Spanish, it would cost at least 50 million dollars -- and this is at even the most exploited, outsourcing country out there. So it would be very expensive. So what we want to do is we want to get 100 million people translating the Web into every major language for free.

Now if this is what you want to do, you pretty quickly realize you're going to run into two pretty big hurdles, two big obstacles. The first one is a lack of bilinguals. So I don't even know if there exists 100 million people out there using the Web who are bilingual enough to help us translate. That's a big problem. The other problem you're going to run into is a lack of motivation. How are we going to motivate people to actually translate the Web for free? Normally, you have to pay people to do this. So how are we going to motivate them to do it for free? Now when we were starting to think about this, we were blocked by these two things. But then we realized, there's actually a way to solve both these problems with the same solution. There's a way to kill two birds with one stone. And that is to transform language translation into something that millions of people want to do, and that also helps with the problem of lack of bilinguals, and that is language education.

So it turns out that today, there are over 1.2 billion people learning a foreign language. People really, really want to learn a foreign language. And it's not just because they're being forced to do so in school. For example, in the United States alone, there are over five million people who have paid over $500 for software to learn a new language. So people really, really want to learn a new language. So what we've been working on for the last year and a half is a new website -- it's called Duolingo -- where the basic idea is people learn a new language for free while simultaneously translating the Web. And so basically they're learning by doing.

So the way this works is whenever you're a just a beginner, we give you very, very simple sentences. There's, of course, a lot of very simple sentences on the Web. We give you very, very simple sentences along with what each word means. And as you translate them, and as you see how other people translate them, you start learning the language. And as you get more and more advanced, we give you more and more complex sentences to translate. But at all times, you're learning by doing.

Now the crazy thing about this method is that it actually really works. First of all, people are really, really learning a language. We're mostly done building it, and now we're testing it. People really can learn a language with it. And they learn it about as well as the leading language learning software. So people really do learn a language. And not only do they learn it as well, but actually it's way more interesting. Because you see with Duolingo, people are actually learning with real content. As opposed to learning with made-up sentences, people are learning with real content, which is inherently interesting. So people really do learn a language.

But perhaps more surprisingly, the translations that we get from people using the site, even though they're just beginners, the translations that we get are as accurate as those of professional language translators, which is very surprising. So let me show you one example. This is a sentence that was translated from German into English. The top is the German. The middle is an English translation that was done by somebody who was a professional English translator who we paid 20 cents a word for this translation. And the bottom is a translation by users of Duolingo, none of whom knew any German before they started using the site. You can see, it's pretty much perfect. Now of course, we play a trick here to make the translations as good as professional language translators. We combine the translations of multiple beginners to get the quality of a single professional translator.

Now even though we're combining the translations, the site actually can translate pretty fast. So let me show you, this is our estimates of how fast we could translate Wikipedia from English into Spanish. Remember, this is 50 million dollars-worth of value. So if we wanted to translate Wikipedia into Spanish, we could do it in five weeks with 100,000 active users. And we could do it in about 80 hours with a million active users. Since all the projects that my group has worked on so far have gotten millions of users, we're hopeful that we'll be able to translate extremely fast with this project.

Now the thing that I'm most excited about with Duolingo is I think this provides a fair business model for language education. So here's the thing: The current business model for language education is the student pays, and in particular, the student pays Rosetta Stone $500. (Laughter) That's the current business model. The problem with this business model is that 95 percent of the world's population doesn't have $500. So it's extremely unfair towards the poor. This is totally biased towards the rich. Now see, in Duolingo, because while you learn you're actually creating value, you're translating stuff -- which for example, we could charge somebody for translations. So this is how we could monetize this. Since people are creating value while they're learning, they don't have to pay their money, they pay with their time. But the magical thing here is that they're paying with their time, but that is time that would have had to have been spent anyways learning the language. So the nice thing about Duolingo is I think it provides a fair business model -- one that doesn't discriminate against poor people.

So here's the site. Thank you. (Applause) So here's the site. We haven't yet launched, but if you go there, you can sign up to be part of our private beta, which is probably going to start in about three or four weeks. We haven't yet launched this Duolingo.

By the way, I'm the one talking here, but actually Duolingo is the work of a really awesome team, some of whom are here. So thank you.

(Applause)

ジル・ボルト・テイラーのパワフルな洞察の発作 18min

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/ja/jill_bolte_taylor_s_powerful_stroke_of_insight.html



I grew up to study the brain because I have a brother who has been diagnosed with a brain disorder: schizophrenia. And as a sister and later, as a scientist, I wanted to understand, why is it that I can take my dreams, I can connect them to my reality, and I can make my dreams come true? What is it about my brother's brain and his schizophrenia that he cannot connect his dreams to a common and shared reality, so they instead become delusion?

So I dedicated my career to research into the severe mental illnesses. And I moved from my home state of Indiana to Boston, where I was working in the lab of Dr. Francine Benes, in the Harvard Department of Psychiatry. And in the lab, we were asking the question, "What are the biological differences between the brains of individuals who would be diagnosed as normal control, as compared with the brains of individuals diagnosed with schizophrenia, schizoaffective or bipolar disorder?"

So we were essentially mapping the microcircuitry of the brain: which cells are communicating with which cells, with which chemicals, and then in what quantities of those chemicals? So there was a lot of meaning in my life because I was performing this type of research during the day. But then in the evenings and on the weekends, I traveled as an advocate for NAMI, the National Alliance on Mental Illness. But on the morning of December 10, 1996, I woke up to discover that I had a brain disorder of my own. A blood vessel exploded in the left half of my brain. And in the course of four hours, I watched my brain completely deteriorate in its ability to process all information. On the morning of the hemorrhage, I could not walk, talk, read, write or recall any of my life. I essentially became an infant in a woman's body.

If you've ever seen a human brain, it's obvious that the two hemispheres are completely separate from one another. And I have brought for you a real human brain. So this is a real human brain.

This is the front of the brain, the back of brain with the spinal cord hanging down, and this is how it would be positioned inside of my head. And when you look at the brain, it's obvious that the two cerebral cortices are completely separate from one another. For those of you who understand computers, our right hemisphere functions like a parallel processor, while our left hemisphere functions like a serial processor. The two hemispheres do communicate with one another through the corpus collosum, which is made up of some 300 million axonal fibers. But other than that, the two hemispheres are completely separate. Because they process information differently, each of our hemispheres think about different things, they care about different things, and, dare I say, they have very different personalities.

Excuse me. Thank you. It's been a joy. Assistant: It has been.

Our right human hemisphere is all about this present moment. It's all about "right here, right now." Our right hemisphere, it thinks in pictures and it learns kinesthetically through the movement of our bodies. Information, in the form of energy, streams in simultaneously through all of our sensory systems and then it explodes into this enormous collage of what this present moment looks like, what this present moment smells like and tastes like, what it feels like and what it sounds like. I am an energy-being connected to the energy all around me through the consciousness of my right hemisphere. We are energy-beings connected to one another through the consciousness of our right hemispheres as one human family. And right here, right now, we are brothers and sisters on this planet, here to make the world a better place. And in this moment we are perfect, we are whole and we are beautiful.

My left hemisphere -- our left hemisphere -- is a very different place. Our left hemisphere thinks linearly and methodically. Our left hemisphere is all about the past and it's all about the future. Our left hemisphere is designed to take that enormous collage of the present moment and start picking out details, details and more details about those details. It then categorizes and organizes all that information, associates it with everything in the past we've ever learned, and projects into the future all of our possibilities. And our left hemisphere thinks in language. It's that ongoing brain chatter that connects me and my internal world to my external world. It's that little voice that says to me, "Hey, you gotta remember to pick up bananas on your way home. I need them in the morning."

It's that calculating intelligence that reminds me when I have to do my laundry. But perhaps most important, it's that little voice that says to me, "I am. I am." And as soon as my left hemisphere says to me "I am," I become separate. I become a single solid individual, separate from the energy flow around me and separate from you. And this was the portion of my brain that I lost on the morning of my stroke.

On the morning of the stroke, I woke up to a pounding pain behind my left eye. And it was the kind of pain -- caustic pain -- that you get when you bite into ice cream. And it just gripped me -- and then it released me. And then it just gripped me -- and then it released me. And it was very unusual for me to ever experience any kind of pain, so I thought, "OK, I'll just start my normal routine."

So I got up and I jumped onto my cardio glider, which is a full-body, full-exercise machine. And I'm jamming away on this thing, and I'm realizing that my hands look like primitive claws grasping onto the bar. And I thought, "That's very peculiar." And I looked down at my body and I thought, "Whoa, I'm a weird-looking thing." And it was as though my consciousness had shifted away from my normal perception of reality, where I'm the person on the machine having the experience, to some esoteric space where I'm witnessing myself having this experience.

And it was all very peculiar, and my headache was just getting worse. So I get off the machine, and I'm walking across my living room floor, and I realize that everything inside of my body has slowed way down. And every step is very rigid and very deliberate. There's no fluidity to my pace, and there's this constriction in my area of perceptions, so I'm just focused on internal systems. And I'm standing in my bathroom getting ready to step into the shower, and I could actually hear the dialogue inside of my body. I heard a little voice saying, "OK. You muscles, you gotta contract. You muscles, you relax."

And then I lost my balance, and I'm propped up against the wall. And I look down at my arm and I realize that I can no longer define the boundaries of my body. I can't define where I begin and where I end, because the atoms and the molecules of my arm blended with the atoms and molecules of the wall. And all I could detect was this energy -- energy.

And I'm asking myself, "What is wrong with me? What is going on?" And in that moment, my brain chatter -- my left hemisphere brain chatter -- went totally silent. Just like someone took a remote control and pushed the mute button. Total silence. And at first I was shocked to find myself inside of a silent mind. But then I was immediately captivated by the magnificence of the energy around me. And because I could no longer identify the boundaries of my body, I felt enormous and expansive. I felt at one with all the energy that was, and it was beautiful there.

Then all of a sudden my left hemisphere comes back online, and it says to me, "Hey! We got a problem! We got a problem! We gotta get some help." And I'm going, "Ahh! I got a problem. I got a problem." So it's like, "OK. OK. I got a problem."

But then I immediately drifted right back out into the consciousness -- and I affectionately refer to this space as La La Land. But it was beautiful there. Imagine what it would be like to be totally disconnected from your brain chatter that connects you to the external world.

So here I am in this space, and my job -- and any stress related to my job -- it was gone. And I felt lighter in my body. And imagine all of the relationships in the external world and any stressors related to any of those -- they were gone. And I felt this sense of peacefulness. And imagine what it would feel like to lose 37 years of emotional baggage! (Laughter) Oh! I felt euphoria -- euphoria. It was beautiful.

And then, again, my left hemisphere comes online and it says, "Hey! You've got to pay attention. We've got to get help." And I'm thinking, "I got to get help. I gotta focus." So I get out of the shower and I mechanically dress and I'm walking around my apartment, and I'm thinking, "I gotta get to work. I gotta get to work. Can I drive? Can I drive?"

And in that moment my right arm went totally paralyzed by my side. Then I realized, "Oh my gosh! I'm having a stroke! I'm having a stroke!"

And the next thing my brain says to me is, "Wow! This is so cool." (Laughter) "This is so cool! How many brain scientists have the opportunity to study their own brain from the inside out?" (Laughter)

And then it crosses my mind, "But I'm a very busy woman!" (Laughter) "I don't have time for a stroke!"

So I'm like, "OK, I can't stop the stroke from happening, so I'll do this for a week or two, and then I'll get back to my routine. OK. So I gotta call help. I gotta call work." I couldn't remember the number at work, so I remembered, in my office I had a business card with my number on it. So I go into my business room, I pull out a three-inch stack of business cards. And I'm looking at the card on top and even though I could see clearly in my mind's eye what my business card looked like, I couldn't tell if this was my card or not, because all I could see were pixels. And the pixels of the words blended with the pixels of the background and the pixels of the symbols, and I just couldn't tell. And then I would wait for what I call a wave of clarity. And in that moment, I would be able to reattach to normal reality and I could tell that's not the card ... that's not the card ... that's not the card. It took me 45 minutes to get one inch down inside of that stack of cards. In the meantime, for 45 minutes, the hemorrhage is getting bigger in my left hemisphere. I do not understand numbers, I do not understand the telephone, but it's the only plan I have. So I take the phone pad and I put it right here. I take the business card, I put it right here, and I'm matching the shape of the squiggles on the card to the shape of the squiggles on the phone pad. But then I would drift back out into La La Land, and not remember when I came back if I'd already dialed those numbers. So I had to wield my paralyzed arm like a stump and cover the numbers as I went along and pushed them, so that as I would come back to normal reality, I'd be able to tell, "Yes, I've already dialed that number."

Eventually, the whole number gets dialed and I'm listening to the phone, and my colleague picks up the phone and he says to me, "Woo woo woo woo." (Laughter) And I think to myself, "Oh my gosh, he sounds like a Golden Retriever!"

And so I say to him -- clear in my mind, I say to him: "This is Jill! I need help!" And what comes out of my voice is, "Woo woo woo woo woo." I'm thinking, "Oh my gosh, I sound like a Golden Retriever." So I couldn't know -- I didn't know that I couldn't speak or understand language until I tried. So he recognizes that I need help and he gets me help.

And a little while later, I am riding in an ambulance from one hospital across Boston to [Massachusetts] General Hospital. And I curl up into a little fetal ball. And just like a balloon with the last bit of air, just, just right out of the balloon, I just felt my energy lift and just -- I felt my spirit surrender.

And in that moment, I knew that I was no longer the choreographer of my life. And either the doctors rescue my body and give me a second chance at life, or this was perhaps my moment of transition.

When I woke later that afternoon, I was shocked to discover that I was still alive. When I felt my spirit surrender, I said goodbye to my life. And my mind was now suspended between two very opposite planes of reality. Stimulation coming in through my sensory systems felt like pure pain. Light burned my brain like wildfire, and sounds were so loud and chaotic that I could not pick a voice out from the background noise, and I just wanted to escape. Because I could not identify the position of my body in space, I felt enormous and expansive, like a genie just liberated from her bottle. And my spirit soared free, like a great whale gliding through the sea of silent euphoria. Nirvana. I found Nirvana. And I remember thinking, there's no way I would ever be able to squeeze the enormousness of myself back inside this tiny little body.

But then I realized, "But I'm still alive! I'm still alive, and I have found Nirvana. And if I have found Nirvana and I'm still alive, then everyone who is alive can find Nirvana." And I pictured a world filled with beautiful, peaceful, compassionate, loving people who knew that they could come to this space at any time. And that they could purposely choose to step to the right of their left hemispheres and find this peace. And then I realized what a tremendous gift this experience could be, what a stroke of insight this could be to how we live our lives. And it motivated me to recover.

Two and a half weeks after the hemorrhage, the surgeons went in and they removed a blood clot the size of a golf ball that was pushing on my language centers. Here I am with my mama, who is a true angel in my life. It took me eight years to completely recover.

So who are we? We are the life-force power of the universe, with manual dexterity and two cognitive minds. And we have the power to choose, moment by moment, who and how we want to be in the world. Right here, right now, I can step into the consciousness of my right hemisphere, where we are. I am the life-force power of the universe. I am the life-force power of the 50 trillion beautiful molecular geniuses that make up my form, at one with all that is. Or, I can choose to step into the consciousness of my left hemisphere, where I become a single individual, a solid. Separate from the flow, separate from you. I am Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: intellectual, neuroanatomist. These are the "we" inside of me. Which would you choose? Which do you choose? And when? I believe that the more time we spend choosing to run the deep inner-peace circuitry of our right hemispheres, the more peace we will project into the world, and the more peaceful our planet will be.

And I thought that was an idea worth spreading.