第1篇：经典TED英语演讲稿
When Dorothy was a little girl, she wasfascinated by her goldfish. Her father explained to her that fish swim byquickly wagging their tails to propel themselves through the water. Withouthesitation, little Dorothy responded, "Yes, Daddy, and fish swim backwardsby wagging their heads."
当多萝西还是一个小女孩的时候，她被她的金鱼迷住了。她的父亲向她解释，鱼是通过快速摇尾推动自己在水中前进。毫无犹豫地，小多萝西回答道，“是的，爸爸，而且鱼会通过摇头来后退。”
In her mind, it was a fact as true as anyother. Fish swim backwards by wagging their heads. She believed it.
在她的心里，这是一个确切的事实。鱼通过摇头来后退。她坚信如此。
Our lives are full of fish swimmingbackwards. We make assumptions and faulty leaps of logic. We harbor bias. Weknow that we are right, and they are wrong. We fear the worst. We strive forunattainable perfection. We tell ourselves what we can and cannot do. In ourminds, fish swim by in reverse frantically wagging their heads and we don'teven notice them.
我们的生活中充满着倒游的鱼。我们制造假设和错误跳跃的逻辑。我们心怀偏见。我们知道我们是对的，而他们是错的。我们害怕最糟糕的。我们力求无法获得的完美。我们告诉自己什么是我们能做的和不能做的。在我们心里，鱼是通过往相反方向疯狂摇头来游泳的，而我们甚至不曾察觉过它们。
I'm going to tell you five facts aboutmyself. One fact is not true. One: I graduated from Harvard at 19 with anhonors degree in mathematics. Two: I currently run a construction company inOrlando. Three: I starred on a television sitcom. Four: I lost my sight to arare genetic eye disease. Five: I served as a law clerk to two US Supreme Courtjustices. Which fact is not true? Actually, they're all true. Yeah. They're alltrue.
我想告诉你们五件关于我的事实。其中有一件不是真的。第一：我19岁的时候以数学荣誉学士学位毕业于哈佛大学。第二：我现在在奥兰多经营着一家建筑公司。第三：我主演过一部电视情景剧。第四：我因为患上一种罕有的遗传性眼疾而失去了视力。第五：我曾经给两位美国最高法院的法官当过法律助手。哪一个不是真的呢?事实上，它们都是真的。是的，它们都是真的。
At this point, most people really only careabout the television show.
这时候，大部分人其实都只关心那部电视剧。
I know this from experience. OK, so theshow was NBC's "Saved by the Bell: The New Class." And I playedWeasel Wyzell, who was the sort of dorky, nerdy character on the show, whichmade it a very major acting challenge for me as a 13-year-old boy.
这是经验告诉我的。好吧，那部电视剧是NBC的“SavedbytheBell:TheNewClass."而我饰演了WeaselWyzell，一个在剧中带点笨拙书呆子性格的角色，对于13岁的我来说，这是一个很重大的演出挑战。
Now, did you struggle with number four, myblindness? Why is that? We make assumptions about so-called disabilities. As ablind man, I confront others' incorrect assumptions about my abilities everyday. My point today is not about my blindness, however. It's about my blind taught me to live my life eyes wide open. It taught me to spotthose backwards-swimming fish that our minds create. Going blind cast them intofocus.
现在，你是否纠结于第四个事实，我的失明?为什么会这样呢?我们对所谓的残疾做出一些假设。作为盲人，我每天都面对别人对我能力的错误假设。然而，我今天的重点不在于我的失明。而是在于我的视野。失明教会我用开阔的眼界去生活。它教会我去发现那些倒游的鱼，我们内心创造出来的鱼。失明使它们变成了焦点。
What does it feel like to see? It'simmediate and passive. You open your eyes and there's the world. Seeing isbelieving. Sight is truth. Right? Well, that's what I thought.
看得见是怎么样的一种感觉?是即时并且被动的。你睁开双眼，世界就在你眼前。看见什么相信什么。眼见为实。对吧?好吧，我当初是这么想的。
Then, from age 12 to 25, my retinasprogressively deteriorated. My sight became an increasingly bizarre carnivalfunhouse hall of mirrors and illusions. The salesperson I was relieved to spotin a store was really a mannequin. Reaching down to wash my hands, I suddenlysaw it was a urinal I was touching, not a sink, when my fingers felt its trueshape.
接着，从12岁到15岁，我的视网膜逐渐衰弱。我的视像变成了愈加奇异的嘉年华游乐场里的哈哈镜。我在商店里好不容易发现的销售员实际上是一个人体模型。俯下身去洗手，当我的手指感受到它的真实形状，我意识到我去触摸的是小便池，而不是洗手池。
A friend described the photograph in my hand, and only then I could seethe image depicted. Objects appeared, morphed and disappeared in my reality. Itwas difficult and exhausting to see. I pieced together fragmented, transitoryimages, consciously analyzed the clues, searched for some logic in my crumblingkaleidoscope, until I saw nothing at all.
一位朋友向我描述我手中的照片，只有在那时候我才能明白图像描画了些什么。物体在我的现实中出现、变形和消失。看见成为了一件困难的使我筋疲力尽的事情。我把支离破碎的、片刻的图像拼接起来，凭感觉分析线索，在我破碎的万花筒中寻找符合逻辑的对应，直到我什么都看不见。
I learned that what we see is not universaltruth. It is not objective reality. What we see is a unique, personal, virtualreality that is masterfully constructed by our brain.
我认识到我们所看到的并不即是普遍真理。并不是客观现实。我们所看到的是独一无二的虚拟现实，它是由我们的大脑巧妙地构造出来的。
Let me explain with a bit of amateurneuroscience. Your visual cortex takes up about 30 percent of your 's compared to approximately eight percent for touch and two to threepercent for hearing. Every second, your eyes can send your visual cortex as manyas two billion pieces of information. The rest of your body can send your brainonly an additional billion. So sight is one third of your brain by volume andcan claim about two thirds of your brain's processing resources. It's nosurprise then that the illusion of sight is so compelling. But make no mistakeabout it: sight is an illusion.
请让我以外行的身份解释一遍神经系统学。你的视觉皮层占据了你脑部的大概30%。相比于触觉的8%以及听觉的2-3%。每一秒钟，你的双眼能够向你的视觉皮层传达多达二十亿的信息片段。其余的身体部分加起来也仅能够传达另外的十亿。所以视觉占据了你脑部容量的三分之一并且占用了你脑部中三分之二的信息处理资源。因此意想得到的是视觉幻象是多么的令人信服。但是别误会了：我们所看到的只是一种幻象。
Here's where it gets interesting. To createthe experience of sight, your brain references your conceptual understanding ofthe world, other knowledge, your memories, opinions, emotions, mentalattention. All of these things and far more are linked in your brain to yoursight. These linkages work both ways, and usually occur subconsciously. So for example, what you see impacts how you feel, and the way you feel can literally change what you see.
这是事情变得有趣的地方。为了制造视觉经验，你的大脑参考了你对这个世界的概念性理解，其它知识、你的记忆、看法、情绪和心理关注。所有的这些东西和以及其它的都连结于你的大脑和视觉景象之间。这些连结是双向作用的，并且常常在潜意识中发生。举例子来说，你所看到的会影响到你的感觉，而你的感觉又能够直接改变你所看到的。
Numerous studies demonstrate this. If you are asked toestimate the walking speed of a man in a video, for example, your answer willbe different if you're told to think about cheetahs or turtles. A hill appearssteeper if you've just exercised, and a landmark appears farther away if you'rewearing a heavy backpack. We have arrived at a fundamental contradiction.
许多的研究证明了这一点。如果你被要求去估计视频中人物的行走速度，举例来说，在被告知去想着猎豹或者乌龟的情况下，你的答案将会不一样。如果你刚刚运动完，你会感觉山变陡峭了，如果你背着一个很重的背包，眼前的目的地看起来距离更远。我们在这里遇到了一种基本的矛盾。
What you see is a complex mental construction of your own making, but you experienceit passively as a direct representation of the world around you. You createyour own reality, and you believe it. I believed mine until it broke apart. Thedeterioration of my eyes shattered the illusion.
你肉眼所看到的东西是你自己创造的一种复杂的心智建造，但是你被动地经历着它让它作为你周遭世界的一种直接呈现。你创造了属于你自己的现实并且深信着它。我深信于我的现实直到它瓦解了。我双眼的衰退粉碎了这种幻象。
You see, sight is just one way we shape ourreality. We create our own realities in many other ways. Let's take fear asjust one example. Your fears distort your reality. Under the warped logic offear, anything is better than the uncertain. Fear fills the void at all costs,passing off what you dread for what you know, offering up the worst in place ofthe ambiguous, substituting assumption for reason. Psychologists have a greatterm for it: awfulizing.
你看，视觉只是我们认识世界的一种途径。我们可以通过许多其它的方式去创造属于我们自己的现实。让我们来举恐惧作为一个例子。你的恐惧扭曲了你的现实。在扭曲的恐惧逻辑影响下，任何事情都比未知要好。恐惧不惜一切代价填补空白，把你所惧怕的冒充成你所知道的，让最糟糕取代了不明确，使假设代替了原因。心理学家对此有一个很好的术语：往坏处想。
Right? Fear replaces the unknown with theawful. Now, fear is self-realizing. When you face the greatest need to lookoutside yourself and think critically, fear beats a retreat deep inside yourmind, shrinking and distorting your view, drowning your capacity for criticalthought with a flood of disruptive emotions. When you face a compellingopportunity to take action, fear lulls you into inaction, enticing you topassively watch its prophecies fulfill themselves.
对吧?恐惧把未知的替换成了可怕的。现在，恐惧在自我实现着。当你非常迫切的需要去客观看待自己并进行批判性思考的时候，恐惧在你的内心深处打起了退堂鼓，收缩并扭曲你的观点，以洪水般涌现的破坏性情绪淹没你批判思考的能力。当你面对一个极具吸引力的机会去采取行动时，恐惧误导你去无所作为，诱使你被动地看着它的预言一个个实现成真。
When I was diagnosed with my blindingdisease, I knew blindness would ruin my life. Blindness was a death sentencefor my independence. It was the end of achievement for me. Blindness meant Iwould live an unremarkable life, small and sad, and likely alone. I knew was a fiction born of my fears, but I believed it. It was a lie, but itwas my reality, just like those backwards-swimming fish in little Dorothy'smind. If I had not confronted the reality of my fear, I would have lived it. Iam certain of that.
当我被诊出患有致盲眼疾时，我料到失明将会毁了我的生活。失明对我的独立能力判了死刑。它是我一生成就的终点。失明意味着我将度过平凡的一生，渺小且凄惨，极有可能孤独终老。我就知道会这样。这是我因为恐惧带来的胡编乱造，但我相信了。它是一个谎言，但它曾是我的现实。就像小多萝西内心那些倒游的鱼一样。如若我不曾面对过我内心恐惧创造出来的现实，我会就那样活着。我很确定。
So how do you live your life eyes wideopen? It is a learned discipline. It can be taught. It can be practiced. I willsummarize very briefly.
所以你们如何去以开阔的眼界生活呢?这是一个需要学习的学科。它能被传授。它能被练习。我简单地总结一下。
Hold yourself accountable for every moment,every thought, every detail. See beyond your fears. Recognize your your internal strength. Silence your internal critic. Correct yourmisconceptions about luck and about success. Accept your strengths and yourweaknesses, and understand the difference. Open your hearts to your bountifulblessings.
让自己学会负责，对每一时刻，每个想法，每个细节。超越你内心的恐惧。识别出你所作的假设。展现你内在的能力。消除你内心的批判。修正你对于运气和成功的错误概念。接受自己的长处和短处，并清楚认识它们之间的区别。打开你的心扉去迎接对你满满的祝福。
Your fears, your critics, your heroes, yourvillains -- they are your excuses, rationalizations, shortcuts, justifications,your surrender. They are fictions you perceive as reality. Choose to seethrough them. Choose to let them go. You are the creator of your reality. Withthat empowerment comes complete responsibility.
你的恐惧，你的批判，你的英雄，你的敌人——他们都是你的借口、合理化作用、捷径、辩护、屈服。它们是你错认为现实的小说。尝试选择看穿它们。尝试让它们远离自己。你是自我现实的创造者。伴随这种权利而来的是你需要负起全部的责任。
I chose to step out of fear's tunnel intoterrain uncharted and undefined. I chose to build there a blessed life. Farfrom alone, I share my beautiful life with Dorothy, my beautiful wife, with ourtriplets, whom we call the Tripskys, and with the latest addition to thefamily, sweet baby Clementine.
我选择走出恐惧的隧道，步入了未知的领域。我选择在那里构建幸福的人生。远离孤单，我分享我的美好生活，与多萝西，我美丽的妻子，与我们的三胞胎，我们称之为“Tripskys”，还有新添的家庭成员，可爱的宝贝克莱蒙蒂。
What do you fear? What lies do you tellyourself? How do you embellish your truth and write your own fictions? Whatreality are you creating for yourself?
你在害怕什么?你在欺骗自己什么?你是如何修饰自己的真相，编写自己的小说?你在为自己创造着怎么样的现实?
In your career and personal life, in yourrelationships, and in your heart and soul, your backwards-swimming fish do yougreat harm. They exact a toll in missed opportunities and unrealized potential,and they engender insecurity and distrust where you seek fulfillment andconnection. I urge you to search them out.
在你的职业生涯和个人生活中，在你的人际关系中，在你的内心和灵魂中，倒游的鱼给你带来巨大的伤害。它们使你为错失的机会以及尚未实现的潜能付出代价。它们在你寻求满足与联系时引起你的不安以及不信任。我呼吁大家把它们找出来。
Helen Keller said that the only thing worsethan being blind is having sight but no vision. For me, going blind was aprofound blessing, because blindness gave me vision. I hope you can see what Isee.
海伦·凯勒曾说过，唯一比失明更糟糕的是拥有视力，却没有远见。失明对我来说是一种深深的祝福，因为失明给予了我远见。我衷心希望你们也能看见我所看见的。
Thank you.(Applause)
谢谢。(掌声)
Bruno Giussani: Isaac, before you leave thestage, just a question. This is an audience of entrepreneurs, of doers, ofinnovators. You are a CEO of a company down in Florida, and many are probablywondering, how is it to be a blind CEO? What kind of specific challenges do youhave, and how do you overcome them?
布鲁诺·朱萨尼：艾萨克，在你离开之前，我想问一个问题。在座的各位都是创业者、实干家、创新者。你是佛罗里达一家公司的执行总裁，很多人大概都会好奇，身为一名失明的执行总裁究竟是怎么样的呢?这使你面临哪些具体的挑战，而你又是怎么克服它们的呢?
Isaac Lidsky: Well, the biggest challengebecame a blessing. I don't get visual feedback from people.
艾萨克·利德斯基：好吧，最大的挑战成了一种祝福。我看不到别人的反应。
BG: What's that noise there? IL: Yeah. So,for example, in my leadership team meetings, I don't see facial expressions orgestures. I've learned to solicit a lot more verbal feedback. I basically forcepeople to tell me what they think. And in this respect, it's become, like Isaid, a real blessing for me personally and for my company, because wecommunicate at a far deeper level, we avoid ambiguities, and most important, myteam knows that what they think truly matters.
布：有什么声音在哪里吗?艾：是的。比如说在我的领导团队的会议中，我无法看到别人的表情或者手势。我学会去征求更多的言语反馈。我基本都要求人们把他们的想法告诉我。正因如此，它成为了，如我所说，对我个人还有我公司的一种真正的祝福。因为我们获得了更深层次的沟通。我们避免了歧义，还有更重要的，我的团队清楚知道他们的想法是真的要紧的。
BG: Isaac, thank you for coming to TED. IL:Thank you, Bruno.
布：艾萨克，感谢你来到了TED。艾：谢谢你，布鲁诺。
第2篇：经典TED英语演讲稿
In 20_ — not so long ago — a professor who was then at Columbia University took that case and made it [Howard] Roizen. And he gave the case out, both of them, to two groups of students. He changed exactly one word: "Heidi" to "Howard." But that one word made a really big difference. He then surveyed the students, and the good news was the students, both men and women, thought Heidi and Howard were equally competent, and that's bad news was that everyone liked Howard. He's a great guy. You want to work for him. You want to spend the day fishing with him. But Heidi? Not so sure. She's a little out for herself. She's a little 're not sure you'd want to work for her. This is the complication. We have to tell our daughters and our colleagues, we have to tell ourselves to believe we got the A, to reach for the promotion, to sit at the table, and we have to do it in a world where, for them, there are sacrifices they will make for that, even though for their brothers, there are not. The saddest thing about all of this is that it's really hard to remember this. And I'm about to tell a story which is truly embarrassing for me, but I think important.
第3篇：经典TED英语演讲稿
They know each other more in the biblical sense as well. Message number three: Don't leave before you leave. I think there's a really deep irony to the fact that actions women are taking — and I see this all the time — with the objective of staying in the workforceactually lead to their eventually leaving. Here's what happens: We're all busy. Everyone's busy. A woman's busy. And she starts thinking about having a child, and from the moment she starts thinking about having a child, she starts thinking about making room for that child. "How am I going to fit this into everything else I'm doing?" And literally from that moment, she doesn't raise her hand anymore, she doesn't look for a promotion, she doesn't take on the new project, she doesn't say, "Me. I want to do that." She starts leaning back.
第4篇：经典TED英语演讲稿
My subject today is learning. And in that spirit, I want to spring on you all a pop quiz. Ready? When does learning begin? Now as you ponder that question, maybe you're thinking about the first day of preschool or kindergarten, the first time that kids are in a classroom with a teacher. Or maybe you've called to mind the toddler phase when children are learning how to walk and talk and use a fork. Maybe you've encountered the Zero-to-Three movement, which asserts that the most important years for learning are the earliest ones. And so your answer to my question would be: Learning begins at birth.
Well today I want to present to you an idea that may be surprising and may even seem implausible, but which is supported by the latest evidence from psychology and biology. And that is that some of the most important learning we ever do happens before we're born, while we're still in the womb. Now I'm a science reporter. I write books and magazine articles. And I'm also a mother. And those two roles came together for me in a book that I wrote called "Origins." "Origins" is a report from the front lines of an exciting new field called fetal origins. Fetal origins is a scientific discipline that emerged just about two decades ago, and it's based on the theory that our health and well-being throughout our lives is crucially affected by the nine months we spend in the womb. Now this theory was of more than just intellectual interest to me. I was myself pregnant while I was doing the research for the book. And one of the most fascinating insights I took from this work is that we're all learning about the world even before we enter it.
When we hold our babies for the first time, we might imagine that they're clean slates, unmarked by life, when in fact, they've already been shaped by us and by the particular world we live in. Today I want to share with you some of the amazing things that scientists are discovering about what fetuses learn while they're still in their mothers' bellies.
First of all, they learn the sound of their mothers' voices. Because sounds from the outside world have to travel through the mother's abdominal tissue and through the amniotic fluid that surrounds the fetus, the voices fetuses hear, starting around the fourth month of gestation, are muted and muffled. One researcher says that they probably sound a lot like the the voice of Charlie Brown's teacher in the old "Peanuts" cartoon. But the pregnant woman's own voice reverberates through her body, reaching the fetus much more readily. And because the fetus is with her all the time, it hears her voice a lot. Once the baby's born, it recognizes her voice and it prefers listening to her voice over anyone else's.
How can we know this? Newborn babies can't do much, but one thing they're really good at is sucking. Researchers take advantage of this fact by rigging up two rubber nipples, so that if a baby sucks on one, it hears a recording of its mother's voice on a pair of headphones, and if it sucks on the other nipple, it hears a recording of a female stranger's voice. Babies quickly show their preference by choosing the first one. Scientists also take advantage of the fact that babies will slow down their sucking when something interests them and resume their fast sucking when they get bored. This is how researchers discovered that, after women repeatedly read aloud a section of Dr. Seuss' "The Cat in the Hat" while they were pregnant, their newborn babies recognized that passage when they hear it outside the womb. My favorite experiment of this kind is the one that showed that the babies of women who watched a certain soap opera every day during pregnancy recognized the theme song of that show once they were born. So fetuses are even learning about the particular language that's spoken in the world that they'll be born into.
A study published last year found that from birth, from the moment of birth, babies cry in the accent of their mother's native language. French babies cry on a rising note while German babies end on a falling note, imitating the melodic contours of those languages. Now why would this kind of fetal learning be useful? It may have evolved to aid the baby's survival. From the moment of birth, the baby responds most to the voice of the person who is most likely to care for it -- its mother. It even makes its cries sound like the mother's language, which may further endear the baby to the mother, and which may give the baby a head start in the critical task of learning how to understand and speak its native language.
But it's not just sounds that fetuses are learning about in utero. It's also tastes and smells. By seven months of gestation, the fetus' taste buds are fully developed, and its olfactory receptors, which allow it to smell, are functioning. The flavors of the food a pregnant woman eats find their way into the amniotic fluid, which is continuously swallowed by the fetus. Babies seem to remember and prefer these tastes once they're out in the world. In one experiment, a group of pregnant women was asked to drink a lot of carrot juice during their third trimester of pregnancy, while another group of pregnant women drank only water. Six months later, the women's infants were offered cereal mixed with carrot juice, and their facial expressions were observed while they ate it. The offspring of the carrot juice drinking women ate more carrot-flavored cereal, and from the looks of it, they seemed to enjoy it more.
A sort of French version of this experiment was carried out in Dijon, France where researchers found that mothers who consumed food and drink flavored with licorice-flavored anise during pregnancy showed a preference for anise on their first day of life, and again, when they were tested later, on their fourth day of life. Babies whose mothers did not eat anise during pregnancy showed a reaction that translated roughly as "yuck." What this means is that fetuses are effectively being taught by their mothers about what is safe and good to eat. Fetuses are also being taught about the particular culture that they'll be joining through one of culture's most powerful expressions, which is food. They're being introduced to the characteristic flavors and spices of their culture's cuisine even before birth.
Now it turns out that fetuses are learning even bigger lessons. But before I get to that, I want to address something that you may be wondering about. The notion of fetal learning may conjure up for you attempts to enrich the fetus -- like playing Mozart through headphones placed on a pregnant belly. But actually, the nine-month-long process of molding and shaping that goes on in the womb is a lot more visceral and consequential than that. Much of what a pregnant woman encounters in her daily life -- the air she breathes, the food and drink she consumes, the chemicals she's exposed to, even the emotions she feels -- are shared in some fashion with her fetus. They make up a mix of influences as individual and idiosyncratic as the woman herself. The fetus incorporates these offerings into its own body, makes them part of its flesh and blood. And often it does something more. It treats these maternal contributions as information, as what I like to call biological postcards from the world outside.
So what a fetus is learning about in utero is not Mozart's "Magic Flute" but answers to questions much more critical to its survival. Will it be born into a world of abundance or scarcity? Will it be safe and protected, or will it face constant dangers and threats? Will it live a long, fruitful life or a short, harried one? The pregnant woman's diet and stress level in particular provide important clues to prevailing conditions like a finger lifted to the wind. The resulting tuning and tweaking of a fetus' brain and other organs are part of what give us humans our enormous flexibility, our ability to thrive in a huge variety of environments, from the country to the city, from the tundra to the desert.
To conclude, I want to tell you two stories about how mothers teach their children about the world even before they're born. In the autumn of 1944, the darkest days of World War II, German troops blockaded Western Holland, turning away all shipments of food. The opening of the Nazi's siege was followed by one of the harshest winters in decades -- so cold the water in the canals froze solid. Soon food became scarce, with many Dutch surviving on just 500 calories a day -- a quarter of what they consumed before the war. As weeks of deprivation stretched into months, some resorted to eating tulip bulbs. By the beginning of May, the nation's carefully rationed food reserve was completely exhausted. The specter of mass starvation loomed. And then on May 5th, 1945, the siege came to a sudden end when Holland was liberated by the Allies.
The "Hunger Winter," as it came to be known, killed some 10,000 people and weakened thousands more. But there was another population that was affected -- the 40,000 fetuses in utero during the siege. Some of the effects of malnutrition during pregnancy were immediately apparent in higher rates of stillbirths, birth defects, low birth weights and infant mortality. But others wouldn't be discovered for many years. Decades after the "Hunger Winter," researchers documented that people whose mothers were pregnant during the siege have more obesity, more diabetes and more heart disease in later life than individuals who were gestated under normal conditions. These individuals' prenatal experience of starvation seems to have changed their bodies in myriad ways. They have higher blood pressure, poorer cholesterol profiles and reduced glucose tolerance -- a precursor of diabetes.
Why would undernutrition in the womb result in disease later? One explanation is that fetuses are making the best of a bad situation. When food is scarce, they divert nutrients towards the really critical organ, the brain, and away from other organs like the heart and liver. This keeps the fetus alive in the short-term, but the bill comes due later on in life when those other organs, deprived early on, become more susceptible to disease.
But that may not be all that's going on. It seems that fetuses are taking cues from the intrauterine environment and tailoring their physiology accordingly. They're preparing themselves for the kind of world they will encounter on the other side of the womb. The fetus adjusts its metabolism and other physiological processes in anticipation of the environment that awaits it. And the basis of the fetus' prediction is what its mother eats. The meals a pregnant woman consumes constitute a kind of story, a fairy tale of abundance or a grim chronicle of deprivation. This story imparts information that the fetus uses to organize its body and its systems -- an adaptation to prevailing circumstances that facilitates its future survival. Faced with severely limited resources, a smaller-sized child with reduced energy requirements will, in fact, have a better chance of living to adulthood.
The real trouble comes when pregnant women are, in a sense, unreliable narrators, when fetuses are led to expect a world of scarcity and are born instead into a world of plenty. This is what happened to the children of the Dutch "Hunger Winter." And their higher rates of obesity, diabetes and heart disease are the result. Bodies that were built to hang onto every calorie found themselves swimming in the superfluous calories of the post-war Western diet. The world they had learned about while in utero was not the same as the world into which they were born.
Here's another story. At 8:46 . on September 11th, 2019, there were tens of thousands of people in the vicinity of the World Trade Center in New York -- commuters spilling off trains, waitresses setting tables for the morning rush, brokers already working the phones on Wall Street. 1,700 of these people were pregnant women. When the planes struck and the towers collapsed, many of these women experienced the same horrors inflicted on other survivors of the disaster -- the overwhelming chaos and confusion, the rolling clouds of potentially toxic dust and debris, the heart-pounding fear for their lives.
About a year after 9/11, researchers examined a group of women who were pregnant when they were exposed to the World Trade Center attack. In the babies of those women who developed post-traumatic stress syndrome, or PTSD, following their ordeal, researchers discovered a biological marker of susceptibility to PTSD -- an effect that was most pronounced in infants whose mothers experienced the catastrophe in their third trimester. In other words, the mothers with post-traumatic stress syndrome had passed on a vulnerability to the condition to their children while they were still in utero.
Now consider this: post-traumatic stress syndrome appears to be a reaction to stress gone very wrong, causing its victims tremendous unnecessary suffering. But there's another way of thinking about PTSD. What looks like pathology to us may actually be a useful adaptation in some circumstances. In a particularly dangerous environment, the characteristic manifestations of PTSD -- a hyper-awareness of one's surroundings, a quick-trigger response to danger -- could save someone's life. The notion that the prenatal transmission of PTSD risk is adaptive is still speculative, but I find it rather poignant. It would mean that, even before birth, mothers are warning their children that it's a wild world out there, telling them, "Be careful."
Let me be clear. Fetal origins research is not about blaming women for what happens during pregnancy. It's about discovering how best to promote the health and well-being of the next generation. That important effort must include a focus on what fetuses learn during the nine months they spend in the womb. Learning is one of life's most essential activities, and it begins much earlier than we ever imagined.
Thank you.
第5篇：经典TED英语演讲稿
When you are a kid, you get asked this one particular question a lot, it really gets kind of annoying. What do you want to be when you grow up? Now, adults are hoping for answers like, I want to be an astronaut or I want to be a neurosurgeon, you’re adults in your imaginations.
Kids, they’re most likely to answer with pro-skateboarder, surfer or minecraft player. I asked my little brother, and he said, seriously dude, I’m 10, I have no idea, probably a pro-skier, let’s go get some ice cream.
See, us kids are going to answer something we’re stoked on, what we think is cool, what we have experience with, and that’s typically the opposite of what adults want to hear.
But if you ask a little kid, sometimes you’ll get the best answer, something so simple, so obvious and really profound. When I grow up, I want to be happy.
For me, when I grow up, I want to continue to be happy like I am now. I’m stoked to be here at TedEx, I mean, I’ve been watching Ted videos for as long as I can remember, but I never thought I’d make it on the stage here so soon. I mean, I just became a teenager, and like most teenage boys, I spend most of my time wondering, how did my room get so messy all on its own.
Did I take a shower today? And the most perplexing of all, how do I get girls to like me? Neurosciences say that the teenage brain is pretty weird, our prefrontal cortex is underdeveloped, but we actually have more neurons than adults, which is why we can be so creative, and impulsive and moody and get bummed out.
But what bums me out is to know that, a lot of kids today are just wishing to be happy, to be healthy, to be safe, not bullied, and be loved for who they are. So it seems to me when adults say, what do you want to be when you grow up? They just assume that you’ll automatically be happy and healthy.
Well, maybe that’s not the case, go to school, go to college, get a job, get married, boom, then you’ll be happy, right? You don’t seem to make learning how to be happy and healthy a priority in our schools, it’s separate from schools. And for some kids, it doesn’t exists at all? But what if we didn’t make it separate? What if we based education on the study and practice of being happy and healthy, because that’s what it is, a practice, and a simple practice at that?
Education is important, but why is being happy and healthy not considered education, I just don’t get it. So I’ve been studying the science of being happy and healthy. It really comes down to practicing these eight things. Exercise, diet and nutrition, time in nature, contribution, service to others, relationships, recreation, relaxation and stress management, and religious or spiritual involvement, yes, got that one.
So these eight things come from Dr. Roger Walsh, he calls them Therapeutic Lifestyle Changes or TLCs for short. He is a scientist that studies how to be happy and healthy. In researching this talk, I got a chance to ask him a few questions like; do you think that our schools today are making these eight TLCs a priority? His response was no surprise, it was essentially no. But he did say that many people do try to get this kind of education outside of the traditional arena, through reading and practices such as meditation or yoga.
But what I thought was his best response was that, much of education is oriented for better or worse towards making a living rather than making a life.
In 2006, Sir Ken Robinson gave the most popular Ted talk of all time. Schools kill creativity. His message is that creativity is as important as literacy, and we should treat it with the same status.
A lot of parents watched those videos, some of those parents like mine counted it as one of the reasons they felt confident to pull their kids from traditional school to try something different. I realized I’m part of this small, but growing revolution of kids who are going about their education differently, and you know what? It freaks a lot of people out.
Even though I was only nine, when my parents pulled me out of the school system, I can still remember my mom being in tears when some of her friends told her she was crazy and it was a stupid idea.
Looking back, I’m thankful she didn’t cave to peer pressure, and I think she is too. So, out of the 200 million people that have watched Sir Ken Robinson’s talk, why aren’t there more kids like me out there?
Shane McConkey is my hero. I loved him because he was the world’s best skier. But then, one day I realized what I really loved about Shane, he was a hacker. Not a computer hacker, he hacked skiing. His creativity and inventions made skiing what it is today, and why I love to ski. A lot of people think of hackers as geeky computer nerds who live in their parent’s basement and spread computer viruses, but I don’t see it that way.
第6篇：经典TED英语演讲稿
I'd like to share with you a discovery that I made a few months ago while writing an article for Italian Wired. I always keep my thesaurus handy whenever I'm writing anything, but I'd already finished editing the piece, and I realized that I had never once in my life looked up the word "disabled" to see what I'd find.
Let me read you the entry. "Disabled, adjective: crippled, helpless, useless, wrecked, stalled, maimed, wounded, mangled, lame, mutilated, run-down, worn-out, weakened, impotent, castrated, paralyzed, handicapped, senile, decrepit, laid-up, done-up, done-for, done-in cracked-up, counted-out; see also hurt, useless and weak. Antonyms, healthy, strong, capable." I was reading this list out loud to a friend and at first was laughing, it was so ludicrous, but I'd just gotten past "mangled," and my voice broke, and I had to stop and collect myself from the emotional shock and impact that the assault from these words unleashed.
You know, of course, this is my raggedy old thesaurus so I'm thinking this must be an ancient print date, right? But, in fact, the print date was the early 1980s, when I would have been starting primary school and forming an understanding of myself outside the family unit and as related to the other kids and the world around me. And, needless to say, thank God I wasn't using a thesaurus back then. I mean, from this entry, it would seem that I was born into a world that perceived someone like me to have nothing positive whatsoever going for them, when in fact, today I'm celebrated for the opportunities and adventures my life has procured.
So, I immediately went to look up the 2009 online edition, expecting to find a revision worth noting. Here's the updated version of this entry. Unfortunately, it's not much better. I find the last two words under "Near Antonyms," particularly unsettling: "whole" and "wholesome."
So, it's not just about the words. It's what we believe about people when we name them with these words. It's about the values behind the words, and how we construct those values. Our language affects our thinking and how we view the world and how we view other people. In fact, many ancient societies, including the Greeks and the Romans, believed that to utter a curse verbally was so powerful, because to say the thing out loud brought it into existence. So, what reality do we want to call into existence: a person who is limited, or a person who's empowered? By casually doing something as simple as naming a person, a child, we might be putting lids and casting shadows on their power. Wouldn't we want to open doors for them instead?
One such person who opened doors for me was my childhood doctor at the . duPont Institute in Wilmington, Delaware. His name was Dr. Pizzutillo, an Italian American, whose name, apparently, was too difficult for most Americans to pronounce, so he went by Dr. P. And Dr. P always wore really colorful bow ties and had the very perfect disposition to work with children.
I loved almost everything about my time spent at this hospital, with the exception of my physical therapy sessions. I had to do what seemed like innumerable repetitions of exercises with these thick, elastic bands -- different colors, you know -- to help build up my leg muscles, and I hated these bands more than anything -- I hated them, had names for them. I hated them. And, you know, I was already bargaining, as a five year-old child, with Dr. P to try to get out of doing these exercises, unsuccessfully, of course. And, one day, he came in to my session -- exhaustive and unforgiving, these sessions -- and he said to me, "Wow. Aimee, you are such a strong and powerful little girl, I think you're going to break one of those bands. When you do break it, I'm going to give you a hundred bucks."
Now, of course, this was a simple ploy on Dr. P's part to get me to do the exercises I didn't want to do before the prospect of being the richest five-year-old in the second floor ward, but what he effectively did for me was reshape an awful daily occurrence into a new and promising experience for me. And I have to wonder today to what extent his vision and his declaration of me as a strong and powerful little girl shaped my own view of myself as an inherently strong, powerful and athletic person well into the future.
This is an example of how adults in positions of power can ignite the power of a child. But, in the previous instances of those thesaurus entries, our language isn't allowing us to evolve into the reality that we would all want, the possibility of an individual to see themselves as capable. Our language hasn't caught up with the changes in our society, many of which have been brought about by technology. Certainly, from a medical standpoint, my legs, laser surgery for vision impairment, titanium knees and hip replacements for aging bodies that are allowing people to more fully engage with their abilities, and move beyond the limits that nature has imposed on them -- not to mention social networking platforms allow people to self-identify, to claim their own descriptions of themselves, so they can go align with global groups of their own choosing. So, perhaps technology is revealing more clearly to us now what has always been a truth: that everyone has something rare and powerful to offer our society, and that the human ability to adapt is our greatest asset.
第7篇：经典TED英语演讲稿
I think the cause is more complicated. I think, as a society, we put more pressure on our boys to succeedthan we do on our girls. I know men that stay home and work in the home to support wives with careers,and its hard. When I go to the Mommy-and-Me stuff and I see the father there, I notice that the other mommies dont play with him. And thats a problem, because we have to make it as important a job,because its the hardest job in the world to work inside the home, for people of both genders, if were going to even things out and let women stay in the workforce. Studies show that households with equal earning and equal responsibility also have half the divorce if that wasnt good enough motivation for everyone out there, they also have more — how shall I say this on this stage?