The Future of Human Health TED-Style

This week the 2009 TED Con­fer­ence is kick­ing into full gear, and it’s get­ting live blogged by Boing­Bo­ing through­out the week. See for exam­ple here, here and here. If you’re famil­iar with the TED for­mat, you’ll know that the goal is to take influ­en­tial thinkers and have them deliv­er the “talk of their lives” in 18 crisp min­utes or less. It’s a good mod­el, and it’s one that Stan­ford used dur­ing the fall when it deliv­ered a short course called: “The Future of Human Health: Sev­en Very Short Talks That Will Blow Your Mind.” In the lec­ture post­ed above, Jen­nifer Ray­mond talks about what changes in our brains when we learn and remem­ber, and how our under­stand­ing of these process­es (and of specif­i­cal­ly neur­al cir­cuits) can even­tu­al­ly lead to treat­ments for learn­ing dis­abil­i­ties, demen­tia and Alzheimer’s. You can find the com­plete list of short talks on YouTube and iTunes as well.