Jason Santa Maria: Saying No

Jason Santa Maria, at Creative Mornings, speaks on finding the strength to set your own priorities for what you want.

In his own words: “It might be saying no to a project or job, or even something that you think you can’t say no to, but finding the strength to set your own priorities for what you want is one of the most crucial things you can do in life. Saying no used to make me uncomfortable, and despite making many mistakes on my way there, I’ve learned to feel good about saying it. The talk is just a short 20 minutes, but sums up most everything I’ve learned about the topic in all my years working and living.”

Simon Sinek: Understanding The Game We’re Playing

Simon Sinek, talks about technology, millennials, and the importance of practicing empathy during a Creative Mornings talk in San Diego. 

So You Think You're Creative?

Studio 360 revisits an episode that explores the source of creativity: 

We're always talking about creativity, but what do we mean? Can we find creativity, can we measure it, can we encourage it? Kurt talks with Gary Marcus, a psychology professor about what science tells us about creativity. A researcher puts jazz musicians into an fMRI machine and has them improvise; an intrepid reporter gets her creativity tested and scored; and a little girl introduces us to her imaginary friends (all of them).

Talking With Your Hands Makes You Learn Faster

Drake Baer for The Science of Us: 

The University of Chicago psychologist Susan Goldin-Meadow has spent much of her career trying to grasp (yes, pun intended) what’s happening when people talk with their hands. As Goldin-Meadow defines it, “co-speech gesture” is different from action, like grabbing a cup of coffee or combing your hair, and it’s different from movement for movement’s sake, like in dance, ritual, or exercise. The gestures that hearing people make are also quite different from sign language; in signing, Goldin-Meadow says, there are distinct units of expression, and signs only relate to other signs. But with gesture, hand movements blur together, and they only really make sense relative to what someone’s saying. “Gesticulation isn’t divorced from speech. It’s completely tied to your speech,” Goldin-Meadow tells Science of Us. “It’s part of your cognition. It’s not just mindless hand-waving.” Researchers haven’t yet pinned down exactly how this connection works, but Goldin-Meadow believes part of it is that gestures reduce what psychologists call “cognitive load,” or the amount of mental energy you’re expending to keep things in your working memory.

All those times I've said that I'm thinking with my hands turn out to be true. 

Ada Lovelace, the First Tech Visionary

Betsy Morais, The New Yorker:

Augusta Ada Lovelace is known as the first computer programmer, and, since 2009, she has been recognized annually on October 15th to highlight the often overlooked contributions of women to math and science. The main event is being held today at Imperial College London, with the début of an anthology of essays, “A Passion for Science: Stories of Discovery and Invention.” “I started to think that one of the biggest parts of the problem was that women in tech are often invisible,” Suw Charman-Anderson, the founder of Ada Lovelace Day, told me. After reading a study in 2006 by the psychologist Penelope Lockwood, who researched the dearth of female role models in the sciences, Charman-Anderson thought that a fête for Lovelace could raise awareness of her noteworthy successors. This year, dozens of celebrations will be thrown around the world, including an “Ada Lovelace Edit-a-thon” at Brown University, where volunteers will ramp up Wikipedia entries for female scientists.