What if you need someone to understand an idea that's difficult to explain?
Explaining a complicated idea so that someone can understand it is one of the ways society moves forward.
Harvard psychologist Dan Gilbert came to TED with a difficult task.
In just a single short talk, he planned to explain a complicated concept called synthesized happiness and why it leads us to make incorrect predictions about our own futures.
Let's see how he goes about his task.
When you have 21 minutes to speak, two million years seems like a really long time.
But evolutionarily, two million years is nothing, and yet in two million years, the human brain has nearly tripled in mass, going from the one and a quarter pound brain of our ancestor here, habilis, to the almost three-pound meatloaf that everybody here has between their ears.
What is it about a big brain that nature was so eager for every one of us to have one?
Do you feel a little spark of curiosity?
That's the first step to a successful explanation.
