Anne Quito tells us that she discovered a Warhol – a signed screen print – which she’d walked past in her office for seven years without noticing it. Discovering this for her was subtle, but epic. She works in an office with an art collection spread throughout the building, uncurated and largely undiscovered. It’s everywhere and nowhere, and sometimes in the way.

The cow she shows us is a fragment of wallpaper, part of a Warhol exhibition. What a great metaphor for how art disappears in her office. Ever since her moment of eye contact with Warhol’s cow, she’s spent her Monday lunch hours walking the building with coworkers, discovering the art. They’ve discovered a David Hockney and two Rauschenbergs hidden in a corner. They also found a white board penholder, which looked like art.

There are many things to discover when you look closer and even more when you look together.

Eben Bayer (@ebenbayer) of ecovative design makes packaging out of seed hulls and mushroom roots. He asks us to think about synthetic materials like plastics. They use a huge amount of energy and take a long time to decompose, which means they’re polluting our environment.

Bayer suggests we think of Styrofoam as “toxic white stuff”. The material that protected your computer contains about the energy of 1.5 gallons of petrol. It will be used for only a few weeks. And by volume, it occupies about 25% of our landfills. It takes thousands of years to decompose. If it finds itself in the ocean, it floats perpetually, until it’s broken into small particles in the Great Plastic Gyre.

To make better materials, we need to think about three things:

Feedstocks – we use the same material for our feedstock as we for transportation, which is insane

Energy – we need to use far less energy and CO2 for these materials

Recycling – we need to think about materials that can return to the earth without preprocessing, like human bodies do.

When trees are done with their leaves – those amazing photon processors – it drops them and they’re “upcycled” into next year’s topsoil. And mushrooms are nature’s recyclers.

Bayer looks specifically at mycelium, which is the mushroom’s root system. It’s able to turn woody waste into a chitinous substance that’s useful as a glue. They’re grown from natural products and are completely compostable with no preprocessing.

He walks us through the future of packaging. We choose a locally available feedstock, put in into a mold, then add mycelium. When we remove the mold, we’ve locally manufactured a plastic-like, biodegradable product. In China, you might use rice husks – in the US, oat hulls. A video makes clear that it’s a bit more complex – the hulls (cotton husks) are cleaned, washed and injected with the mycelium. They fill the molds, and we see packaging corner blocks grow in a dark room for five days. It’s very strange – the manufacturing facility is, basically, a room for growing chitinous polymer matrix… mushrooms.

A major Fortune 500 company is now using these corner blocks to protect tables that they ship. Customers can discard these blocks and they’ll improve the local soil.

Multiple feedstocks is important – we don’t want to see the age of peak rice hulls. Self assembly is critical, because it’s a very low-energy manufacturing process. The yield rates are very high, because the materials not converted become part of the polymer. And the outcome is completely disposeable and will disappear in the foreseeable future.

Vietnamese/Australian entrepreneur Tan Le tells us that our communications with machines have always involved explicit commands. Human communication is much more subtle – we communicate expressively, through our faces, bodies, etc. Her project – and her company, Emotiv – is intended to let computers respond to our facial expressions and emotional experiences by interpreting the signals from our brains.

We can measure brain signals by mapping electrical impulses on the brain. But brain structure can be very different based on how the brain folds – even in identical twins, signals might come from different places. So the first breakthrough is to build a map that can unfold the brain and identify where a signal is coming from.

The second challenge is building sensors that can interpret signals from the brain. Generally, this requires a “hairnet” of sensors that’s expensive ($10,000+) and awkard to wear, involving conductive gel.

A preselected (bald) volunteer puts on a headset designed to interpret his brain signals. Tan Le creates a new user in her system – the EPOC headset – and starts training based on a “neutral signal”, the normal state of his relaxed brain. Then he thinks about a movement, and the system trains on that data. Before Tan Le can tell us that he’s now going to try to move the cube with his mind, the cube is pulled forward to him, getting applause from the audience.

Now, she asks him to imagine the cube slowly fading out. Again, he’s able to dim it and bring it back with nothing but his thoughts. At first, he’s only able to do it for a few seconds – after about a minute, he makes it disappear completely and the crowd cheers.

We see a demo of how this technology might interface with robots – a helicopter that lifts off, a robot that moves around based on facial expressions. We see someone opening and closing the curtains in her smart house with her mind (it looks like more work than getting up and closing them, to be frank), but other applications make much more sense – using the interface to control an electric wheelchair, which could be profoundly useful for someone who is seriously disabled.

The final session of day 2 at TEDGlobal 2010, Different by Design, starts with a strange, ethereal multimedia performance by Miwa Matreyek. Using animations, music, and her body, we move through a world that looks like a child’s picturebook come to fluid life. Matreyek, in shadow against a screen of animation, interacts with the figures, buildings and birds projected before her. Her arms, stretched wide, become a highway for a toy car, then they open a window on her heart, which drains out milk, filling the screen. Watching on simulcast, as I am, I can’t tell what’s being performed live and what’s on video, but I get the sense the essense of the piece is about the interplay of the physically present and the virtual, the real and the imagined. It’s extremely beautiful.

Neil Gershenfeld, the director of the center for bits and atoms at MIT’s Media Lab, offers us Neo’s choice from the Matrix – whether to take the red or the blue bill. He tells us that Oakridge has a computer that takes the power of a city – you can power the city or the computer. There’s another planned computer in Japan that costs a billion dollars – you could buy the city or the computer.

We tend to pretend that software works in a virtual world, not a real one, and this distinction is breaking down. Gershenfeld blames Alan Turing and John von Neumann, and specifically the split between storage and processing of information. This isn’t a deep truth of nature, or of information – it’s what had to happen in the 1940s to build a computer. Once computer science and technology split in the 1940s, we got stuck with this old architecture.

Gershenfeld explains asynchronous logic automata, a form of computing that takes advantage of moving tokens, and the distances between those tokens carry weights and values. The program is a spacial structure. It runs at the speed of nature. It doesn’t occupy power when it’s not working. It can run in molecular systems. It promises a future where we buy computing by the pound as a pure commodity, a raw material.

At this point, a program isn’t a thing – it’s a spatial structure. Buildings waste a third of their energy because they’re stupid – what if we treated them like programs, programs that were structures. This might also give us insight for how brains work, because processing isn’t islated – it happens everywhere. (I confess I didn’t get this set of points at all.)

Gershenfeld shows us a visualization of one of these shaped programs. This is a step towards growing constructions of inorganic materials. This gives us the potential of following a path that looks like this:
- We can overcome the disconnect between computers and the physical world
- Then we build programs that are things can make other programs that are things
- Then we put data into the raw materials
- In the future, we grow technology

The goal at the end: the Star Trek replicator. The goal is not to build what you can buy at the store – it’s the ultimate tool for personal expression. The experiments Gershenfeld has done – fab labs, machines that make machines are steps towards this ultimate goal.

Gershenfeld admits that his first couple of experiments in the field were designed to satisfy the NSF, and that he was concerned about parachuting in technology. “You can’t wake up in Cambridge, MA and decide that rural Afghanistan needs precision engineering.” But it’s been extremely useful to build antennas to build bottom-up wireless networks to bring information into these rural communities, including MIT’s Open Courseware.

A team in Barcelona started using portable fabricators to continue Antonio Gaudi’s work. The tools have now turned into prototyping tools to build solar powered cars.

Gershenfeld tells us that kids in rural Africa and in the Arctic are mastering these tools so much faster than conventional engineers that it’s becoming a problem to keep this talent in local communities. Rather than having smart kids take their knowledge and leaving communities, they’re building the Fab Academy, a virtual school to help teach the kids playing with these tools. His hope, ultimately, is that schools like this – nonphysical, decentralized – can unseat institutions like MIT.

At the turn of the last century, books were for elites. But Andrew Carnegie believed that making libraries accessable to the general public, and they had a huge impact on creating literacy. Literacy now is about how a description becomes a thing and a thing becomes a description.

Industry has historically been about controlling means of production. But if we send data to local factories, we no longer have control over means of productions. You can’t sue the planet for infringement of your patents, he tells us – it’s too leaky.

In the world Gershenfeld predicts, we won’t necessarily have huge national labs – we’ll have community labs that share their information, processes, tools and things.

The research agenda is working, he tells us. In twenty years, we’ll show off the Star Trek replicator at TED. But it’s not too early to think about the implications – how do we live, work, educate and play in a world where anyone can make anything? He challenges us to take on this challenge, presumably because he’s got producing a replicator taken care of.

John Hardy tells us he grew up in a small village in Canada as an undiagnosed dyslexic. He was the little kid in the village who cried each day on the way to school.

At 25, he ran away to Bali and met his wife, with whom he built a jewerly business. They retired, and life looked beautiful. But then his wife took him to see a film that ruined his life: An Inconvenient Truth. “I have four kids. And even if part of what he says is true, they’re not going to have the life that I had.”

Hardy decided to focus on “giving back locally” and building a project for Bali, the Green School. It’s an ambitious project to build a school that’s off the grid, based on principles of green design. He shows us bamboo blackboards, classrooms lit with natural light, cooling shades built with cotton. There’s a new power generation system coming in based on a hole dug in a riverbed to create a vortex – it should be able to generate 8000 watts based on water falling only a few feet. He’s integrating pigs and cows into the space, asking them to take care of waste and to trim grass. There’s composting toilets and gas free cooking stoves that run on sawdust. The building is built of sustainable bamboo and may be one of the largest bamboo structures in the world.

He admits that not everything has worked – the original, recycled skylights failed. And teachers hated the blackboards and tried to bring in their own whiteboards. So Hardy is now trying to make whiteboards from recycled windshields and white paper.

Hardy’s vision is for the school to be the center of a community of green houses, green industries and restaurants. In the meantime, it’s a small community – 160 children, with a commitment that 20% of the children will be Balinese supported by a scholarship fund. Hardy feels strongly that the programs he supports should be local and sees the commitment to 20% local students as a essential part of that commitment.

Chef Arthur Potts Dawson describes himself as “a London boy with country roots” who’s fascinated by urban sustainable food. He wants to make food that doesn’t impact on sustainability today or in the future. But this is a challenge, because he tells us that restaurants are some of the most wasteful industries in the world. The food we eat there is drenched in oil, and generally ten calories are wasted for each one you eat.

Dawson asks us to consider preparing a potato. It requires energy to plant it, grow it, harvest. It requires huge amounts to distribute it, to sell, purchase and deliver to him. And there’s a huge impact that comes from waste in the restaurant.

Waste within the restaurant has been the focus of his crusade the past five years. He tells us he’s trying to keep the potato’s impact as low as possible, seeing himself as a conduit for food, someone who allows food to come in and go out, and reduces the impact of the potato you have. He lists for types of waste – of time, space, energy, waste – he’s trying to lower the waste of each element.

We tour his restaurants, observing the recycled floor, recyclable chairs, reused cushions. One restaurant is powered by wind, another by water. All compost their waste, bottle their own tap water, and grow plants inside, including an orange tree growing in a tire. The menus allow diners to select their own portion size to reduce food wastage. And in the back, there’s a “waste room” – the necessary. We tour the compost bins, the wormeries (he admits killing off a set of worms by trying to feed them dried veggies.) We see water filtration over a stone bed, using waste water to grow a garden.

One of the restaurants is carbon neutral – it’s heated and cooled by canal water. He got rid of air conditioning and is now doing heat exchange using canal water outside. “I have no idea how it works, but I paid a lot of money for it.”

Beyond his five restaurants, named after five elements in Chinese alchemy, he’s working on a new project, the People’s Supermarket. Using recycled tills, carts and materials, he’s building a space that’s designed to address disconnects between local growers and food shoppers. It’s in early stages and far from profitable, but it’s a step towards making food more sustainable.

Annie Lennox explains why, in her excellent set at TED Global last night – she was wearing a shirt that says “HIV Positive”. Indeed, she’s wearing the same shirt today. She tells us it’s a sign that she is “in solidarity with people living with HIV” and that “we can talk about this issue, it doesn’t have to be in the closet.”

She was introduced to the issue through Nelson Mandela’s 46664 Foundation. The number refers to Mandela’s prison number during his incarceration on Robben Island. Mandela took a group of artists some years back to Robben Island to talk about HIV/AIDS, which he described as a “virtual genocide” taking place in his country.

Lennox tells us, “I’m a woman and I’m a mother, and I realized this was an issue that affected women and mothers”. And since then, she’s become an active campaigner, giving concerts to support the work of the Treatment Action Campaign, and speaking in the Scottish Parliament about HIV.

Her goal is the UN’s goal – the elimination of mother/child transmission by 2015. She shows us the photo of a smiling South African mother who is HIV positive – the woman is smiling because she knows she’s getting treatment so she can live and support her child and because the baby will go on medication to combat HIV from birth.

Mitchell Besser starts his talk with a profound image – a field of graves. He asks us to see these as a field of graves of the recent victims of HIV in an African community.

Besser observes that, of the 35 million people living with HIV, 2/3rds live in Africa. 90% of the HIV positive pregnant women are in Sub-Saharan Africa. This means that, while 8,000 mothers with HIV give birth in a year in Rwanda, a single hospital in Johannesburg sees 8,000 mothers with HIV in a year. Across the country, 300,000 HIV positive mothers give birth in a year.

There’s no reason an HIV positive mother needs to pass the disease onto her child. In resource rich countries, the infection rate for children of HIV positive mothers is 2% – it’s 40% in resource poor countries. There are drugs that are quite effective in preventing mother to child transmission, and if doctors can help women survive longer, they can raise their children.

One of the major problems in South Africa isn’t just access to drugs – it’s access to medical care. Nurses see 50 to 100 patients a day, which means they have little time to connect with their patients and listen to their needs. Besser tells us that, as a doctor, he expects people to take his advice, to have safer sex, to take their medicines. But if a woman isn’t in power in a relationship, how can she get her husband to use a condom? If no one in her family knows her HIV status, will she take her medicines? She probably won’t.

Besser tells us that the problem is that mothers are often told their HIV status, and let out of the office with the impression that their lives are shattered. How much better if one leaves the appointment and goes into a room full of HIV+ mothers – Mothers to Mothers – who reassure her that she can survive the disease and have a healthy baby?

Mothers to Mothers helps women support and educate each other about how to take the medicines, take care of themselves and take care of their babies. Patients are the experts on their own experiences – they can share this expertise, especially since Mothers to Mothers treats them and pays them like the healthcare professionals that they are. They go through weeks of rigorous, up to date training, and Besser tells us that, through their annual training programs, they’re often more up to date than doctors and nurses.

The goal is beyond education – it’s about empowering women. Mothers to Mothers opens bank accounts for their counselors and pays the women directly, keeping money out of the hands of men. In Rwanda, HIV treatment requires the men to attend, to be part of the pregnancy of an HIV+ mother. Disclosure is critically important for the success of HIV care, he tells us. And sometimes these forced disclosures lead to family members disclosing to each other that they’re HIV+, and all afraid of being thrown out of their families, due to the stigma of the disease.

The issue of doctor and nurse shortages might be addressed through “task-shifting”. This usually means moving jobs from doctors to nurses… but there aren’t enough nurses in South Africa either. So tasks shift from nurses to the mentor mothers, who explain side effects of the drugs, how women need to care for themselves and eat while on the drugs.

We need to change attitudes about the disease, Besser tells us. And we need to change a broken medical system. By redefining medical teams with mentor mothers, we can address both these problems. The program now works in 9 countries, seeing 230,000 women per month, and employing 1,600 mentor mothers. It’s a simple solution, he tells us – mothers caring for mothers, caring for babies.

Inge Missmahl is a Jungian analyst who’s worked in Afghanistan since 2004. She’s working on an important, but sometimes unexplored, aspect of reconstruction – recovery from trauma.

Afghanistan is one of the poorest countries in the world, she tells us, with massive illiteracy. The average age of Afghan citizens in 17. These young people are growing up in the face of ongoing conflict, which leads to an accumulation of traumatic experiences. That, combined with the basic hardships of life in the country – 54% of children under age of 5 suffer from malnutrition. The attempts to build peace through building schools and roads are worthwhile, but “people’s depression stays intact” because “people don’t have tools to get over it.”

The family is central to Afghan social systems. If someone feels worthless and ashamed from depression, they tend to fall into social isolation. This can later manifest as husbands beating wives, parents beating children. And “if we can’t cut this circle of violence, it will be transfered to the next generation.”

The goal is to allow people to address their traumas, saying, “this happened to me, it did this to me, but I’m able to cope with it and learn from it.” And, she says, she hopes some will also say, “And I won’t marry off my 13 year old daughter” as a reaction to our family problems. The message is that something can be done, even in an environment as challenging as Afghanistan.

Missmahl’s plan was to train counselors to open counseling centers in Afghanistan. She met a German funder who was able to help her bring the work to fruition, and she’s opened 50 counseling centers in Kabul. They’ve worked with 11,000 patients, “70% of whom regained their lives.” To spread the work further, she’s helped build training manuals and a structure to expand the program further.

She shows data that demonstrates that symptoms of depression have been better controlled by talking cures than by drugs. This isn’t a surprise, she tells us – doctors have on average 6 minutes to talk with a patient and, in many cases, what patients need to recover from depression is to be listened to. They need a way to find solutions to their problems and family conflicts, and she tells us it’s critical to build systems that allow people to listen.

Jamil Abu-Wardeh is a comedy impressario taking on a tricky task – bringing standup comedy to the Middle East. He tells us that humor is a great way to bridge our differences – we need to take our responsibilities seriously, but not ourselves. We need to laugh at ourselves before others can laugh with us.

Abu-Wardeh was working in television in London. The best talent comes from the standup comedy circuit, where if you do well, you “kill” and do poorly, you “bomb”. No wonder George W. Bush is such a hero to standup comics.

The Axis of Evil comedy troupe involves three comedians from the Middle East. Abu-Wardeh’s goal was to bring these guys to the Middle East and help recruit and train local talent in Dubai. But the management he was working with just didn’t get it. Fortunately, “good things happen to those who procrastinate”, and two years later, a new French CEO was more receptive. And now there’s a Korean who speaks Arabic who complements the tour, Voho.

There are three things to stay away from – working blue, beliefs and “bolitics”. So what’s there left to work with? The tour was so successful that the King of Jordan came to one of the shows. Each of the shows features local talent, and that talent is getting better with each show.

Dubai is a had that can make anything happen. Twenty years ago, no one had heard of it. You can think of the Burj Khalifa as a giant middle finger to everyone who doubted the ambitions and talents of the UAE.

The tour is about the positive image of the Middle East – getting beyond bombers and billionaires, towards a more reasonable picture of the region.

To test the truthiness of coverage of the Middle East, check whether:
- the portrayals are contemporary and accurate (i.e, not Sex in the City 2)
- the people portrayed smile and laugh
- they’re portrayed actually by people from the Middle East.

For a glimpse into the tour, we meet Maz Jobrani, one of the founder members of the Axis of Evil tour, along with an Egyptian American and a Palestinian American. He’s the Iranian American of the group, and notes that Iranian Americans have a lot of inner conflict: part of him thinks he should have a nuclear program, part thinks he can’t be trusted with it.

Traveling on an Iranian passport is sort of limiting – you can go to Syria, North Korea and Venezuela. But he’s a US citizen now. The passport says “born in Iran”, though, and he says, “Oh man, I finally wanted to get around.” The problem happens mostly in the Arab countries where evidently the Arabs and Iranians don’t always get along too well.

Iranian Americans tend to suffer from certain casting problems. “The director says, ‘Can you say – ‘I kidnap you in the name of Allah’? Well, I could, but I could also say, ‘Hi, I’m your doctor.’ And he says, ‘That’s great. And then you hijack the hospital!’”

Jobrani tells us that he was in Times Square the night of the failed car bombing, and in Austin the day a man flew a plane into a federal building. “After a while, you start wondering, ‘Was I involved with this plot? I didn’t get the memo.’”

We explore the logic of claiming credit for a failed bombing – “It’s the thought that counts
– and the enthusiasm every American Muslim had that the Texas bomber turned out to be named Jack.

The goal of Jobrani’s comedy is to break stereotypes. But he admits he’s guilty too. In Dubai, he assumes that Indians are all laborers. Waiting for the driver to pick him up at a hotel, he asks a badly dressed Indian guy if he’s the driver. “No, I’m the owner of the hotel.” So he asked why the man was staring at him. “I thought you were my driver.”

Until we’ve got a Middle Eastern James Bond – Jamal Bond – he promises to keep telling jokes and keeping us laughing.

Lewis Pugh‘s job is tougher than yours. He swims in very, very cold water – three years ago, he swam across the North Pole. The water is -1.5 degrees Celsius, and “if it all goes pear shaped, how long will it take my body to fall the four kilometers”. The swim – accompanied by music on an iPod – took a bit more than 18 minutes, and was enough to freeze his fingers into the shape of sausages.

His thought when he got out of the water: never again.

But last year, Pugh decided to highlight the problems of melting glaciers in the Himalayas. One out of three people in the world rely on that glacial meltwater for their drinking water – if that water is unavailable, we have some real problems. So Pugh walked up Mt. Everest so he could take a “symbolic swim”.

The challenge was to swim at 5300 meters, a height where people often get altitude sickness. But that wasn’t the real problem – the problem was that this was the year of the Everest cleanup operation, removing dozens of bodies from the peak. As Pugh and his team walked up, groups walked down with corpses.

The secret to his swims, Pugh tells us, in controlled aggression – he tried to attack the water. A hundred meters into the swim, Pugh found himself choking and vomiting, and nearly drowned. “People say drowning is the most peaceful form of death. I have never heard such utter bollocks.”

As he and his team debriefed, they gave him the hard news – everything you think you know about swimming, everything you learned about speed and agression serving in the British army, put it aside. Instead of swimming fast, swim as slowly as possible. “And never, ever swim with aggression – this is the time to swim with real humility.”

“Just because something has worked in the past so well doesn’t mean it’s going to work in the future. And now before I do anything, I ask myself what sort of mindset to I require to achieve a task.”

Climate change is the Mt. Everest of human challenges. He urges us to consider what radical, tactical shift we can each take on to tackle the problem.

Yale professor Laurie Santos tells us that homo sapiens are extremely smart and extremely vain. Despite the fact that we’re really smart, we can be incredibly dumb about some aspects of our decisionmaking. Think of our recent financial crisis.

We’d like to believe these bad decisions are the result of a few bad apples. But the mistakes we make are predictable, and we tend to make them over and over, even if we are corrected. How is a species as smart as we are capable of such presistent errors?

One possibility is that it’s not our fault – we can create super-complicated environments, some so complex we can’t understand them. If this were the case, we’d just figure out what we can’t deal with and stop building them. The other, more worrying possibility – maybe our minds are designed badly.

People tend to keep making errors the same way, over and over. It seems like we might be built to make certain errors. If it’s us that’s messed up, it’s harder to know how to deal with it.

How do we tell the difference between these two hypotheses? We’d like to make these decisions independent of technological and cultural influences. So Santos works with capuchin monkeys, an evolutionary relative, but a fairly distant one.

So Santos decided to study monkeys economic decisions. Unfortunately, monkeys rarely use money. So she taught monkeys to use money. Monkeys at Yale now can use tokens to buy food from humans. Monkeys initially ignored the new, shiny objects, but quickly monkeys got good at trading money for food.

Is this anything like human money, or is this just a simple, trained behavior? We might expect to see monkeys track their spending, hoard their currency, etc. So they created The Monkey Marketplace. Monkeys were given wallets full of money, and could purchase food for a token. Some experimenters offered a better deal than others. Monkeys very quickly learn to maximize their grapes per token.

Monkey behavior closely matches how humans behave in a market. So Santos believes she’s got a good testbed.

Just as with humans, the monkeys tend not to save. And there is, embarrasingly, lots of evidence of monkey larceny – theft of tokens from other monkeys and from the experimenters.

Santos offers us an experiment – she’ll give us $1000 and and offer – if we take a risk, we have a 50% chance of getting $1000 more… or a guarantee of $500 more. The choice seems pretty much even. So here’s a different one. She gives us $2000 and now we get to choose whether to lose $500 with certainty, or take a risk and lose either $0 or $1000. People’s decision on risk makes – they make riskier decisions when it’s about losing money.

We have a very hard time thinking in absolute terms – instead, we think in relative terms. And loss aversion – our unhapiness at losing money – may make us make risky decisions. This is why investors hold on to bad stocks longer and why people refuse to sell houses at a loss.

So how do monkeys handle this? Human salespeople now became risky – some salesmen give a safe bonus, while others give random, larger bonuses. Monkeys play it safe, too. When Santos ran the experiment with losses – a salesmen who offers 3 grapes and gives you only 2, versus one who offers three and gives either 3 or 1. And like humans, monkeys do the same irrational thing that people do.

What does this show us? Monkeys can use currency in much of the same way we do. And they’ve got some of the same biases we do. The takeaway – don’t hire a capuchin as your financial advisor, as they’re roughly as bad for humans.

These biases might be a deep part of us, part of our evolutionary history. Perhaps we’re dumb all the way back 35 million years to New World monkeys. As such, these strategies are really hard to overcome. We can’t just shut off certain behaviors – our desire to eat sugary, fatty things. And we may have a very hard time watching stocks fall and overcoming our deep instincts.

So what’s the good news? We’re not just smart – we’re good at overcoming our biological limitations. We don’t need wings to fly, or perfect eyesight to see long distances. But to solve these limitations, we first have to acknowledge them. We need to think about our limitations to recognize, accept them and design our way around them.