Mark Lovett

AI, Information Networks, and Stories: Insights from Nexus, the latest book by Yuval Noah Harari

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Note: comments not attributed to the author constitute my personal opinions.

You may be familiar with Yuval Noah Harari, the author of the global bestseller, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. Yuval has a way of taking very complex subjects, such as the history of humans, and presenting important highlights, digestible summations, and tangible examples to illustrate his personal views. This time he’s examining how human history has been shaped by information networks, including its most recent incarnation as artificial intelligence (AI) in Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI.

In Nexus, Yuval leads us on a recap of human history (sounds familiar), but this time as a way to view our common journey on this planet in the context of how human networks and information networks evolved in tandem.

Information is increasingly seen by many philosophers and biologists, and even by some physicists, as the most basic building block of reality, more elementary than matter and energy.

It was interesting to consider the evolution of cultures from the perspective of how human networks evolved in parallel with information networks. With oral cultures, “…realities were created by telling a story that many people repeated with their mouths and remembered in their brains.” Before the advent of any writing system, personal storytelling was our exclusive information network.

Stone Age Conversation

Image by Franz Bachinger from Pixabay

Similar to how humans act in the modern world, prehistoric humans told each other stories on a daily basis. Many were soon forgotten, but sometimes they were committed to memory. Stories deemed to be important were retold as a way to spread their message, or shared with future generations as a way to enshrine their culture.

But we must also remember that the retelling of any story will introduce some inaccuracies, so in a sense, stories are living entities that, over time, stray from the truth. And beyond the changes that happen to stories unintentionally with retelling, at some point in time, humans figured out how to tell outright lies.

Misinformation is an honest mistake, occurring when someone tries to represent reality but gets it wrong. Disinformation is a deliberate lie, occurring when someone consciously intends to distort our view of reality.

So our information networks have never been completely accurate, but with the advent of writing systems, it was possible to capture a version of the story, such that many people could read the same words. Once again, there was no way to know if what was written was true, leaving humans left to wonder whether any written document was accurate, or was simply preserving another falsehood. Regardless, it was common for the written word to be widely adopted as true. Government decrees and religious texts being two common examples.

But whether true or false, written documents created new realities.

Writing, once performed by hand, was revolutionized by the printing press, then electrified by technology as information was transmitted on radio and television. The birth of the internet allowed us to transfer files and even send emails, while the inception of the world wide web allowed us to be publishers, and for a brief moment, it felt as though personal storytelling — the first information network — was having a renaissance of sorts. Once again, however, the powers that be — both political and corporate — came to control a large portion of the digital landscape, thus shaping the flow of information, both true and false.

All powerful information networks can do both good and ill, depending on how they are designed and used.

Thus it follows that human networks can become ill when they buy into the disinformation promoted by ill-intended information networks. Communist / fascist / marxist / stalinist governments are prime examples. And though the western world has long felt immune to such a fate, disinformation networks, increasingly powered by AI, are active at this very moment, with the intent of dismantling democracy.

We should not assume that delusional networks are doomed to failure. If we want to prevent their triumph, we will have to do the hard work ourselves.

Artificial intelligence is often seen as just another technological upgrade, but it’s fundamentally different. To date, the stories we share, whether they are true or false, or intended to do good or cause harm, were created and disseminated by humans. With AI, we must now confront the fact that “nonhuman intelligence” has that same capability. Are we ready for nonhuman wisdom?

The invention of AI is potentially more momentous than the invention of the telegraph, the printing press, or even writing, because AI is the first tool that is capable of making decisions and generating ideas by itself.

Pause for a moment and consider that concept. Rather than only consuming our information in order to paraphrase its meaning, AI creating content on its own is akin to it being a nonhuman storyteller. I’m not sure where this capability will go, but I fail to see the upside. As AI can’t experience anything in the real world, how will it craft a narrative? For example, a hurricane hitting a major city will result in a great deal of information being created — facts and figures, as well as various predictions, followed by news reports, interviews, and first hand accounts. Only humans will be able to tell those stories, right? Or will AI be able to generate its own version of what is happening? And how will we know the difference?

More than ever, the personal stories we share are of vital importance. The only way that positive change has ever occurred is by sharing our thoughts, feelings, and experiences. But with AI, is our birthright of being the sole source of stories at risk? For me, that question was top of mind after reading Nexus.

If a twenty-first-century totalitarian network succeeds in conquering the world, it may be run by nonhuman intelligence, rather than by a human dictator.

We’ve already seen cases where AI was used by humans to influence elections and stoke hatred between different cultures. What will happen if humans are removed from the equation altogether? It may be a long shot, but I’m thinking we need to create as many true, personal stories as we can for AI to consume. My hope is that in doing so, we can inject AI with a sense of human empathy, morality, compassion and respect.

Nexus by Yuval Noah Harari

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Mark Lovett

Heather Barnett: What humans can learn from semi-intelligent slime @ TEDSalon Berlin

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I had the pleasure of attending a special TED event in 2014. TEDSalon Berlin was just a one day affair, yet it featured a number of compelling talks that served as examples of impactful stories on global issues. This post is an analysis of a talk given by Heather Barnett on a most unusual character – a slime mold.

Watch Heather Barnett’s TED Talk. From what seems to be an unusual subject we come to see our human experience differently. It’s not easy to take people on a journey from something unfamiliar to something universal, but Heather does so masterfully.

Transcript

(my notes in red)

I’d like to introduce you to an organism: a slime mold, Physarum polycephalum. It’s a mold with an identity crisis, because it’s not a mold, so let’s get that straight to start with. It is one of 700 known slime molds belonging to the kingdom of the amoeba. It is a single-celled organism, a cell, that joins together with other cells to form a mass super-cell to maximize its resources. So within a slime mold you might find thousands or millions of nuclei, all sharing a cell wall, all operating as one entity. In its natural habitat, you might find the slime mold foraging in woodlands, eating rotting vegetation, but you might equally find it in research laboratories, classrooms, and even artists’ studios.

Great opening lines capture the attention of an audience, and one of the most powerful ways to do this is by way of curiosity, which is what occurs when your topic is something that the listener or reader has never heard of. And while using technical jargon can be an impediment to curiosity when left to its own devices, Heather provides us with a vivid description of what ‘Physarum polycephalum’ is all about.

From a physicality standpoint, she holds up pinched fingers when mentioning ‘single-celled organism’, then spreads her arms shoulder width when stating ‘joins together with other cells’ and spreads her arms further when using the term ‘mass super-cell’.

These are subtle gestures, yet they reinforce the visual of how this organism operates. Watch her movements and gestures throughout the telling of this story. There’s much to learn here about stage presence that is both natural and impactful.

I first came across the slime mold about five years ago. A microbiologist friend of mine gave me a petri dish with a little yellow blob in it and told me to go home and play with it. The only instructions I was given, that it likes it dark and damp and its favorite food is porridge oats. I’m an artist who’s worked for many years with biology, with scientific processes, so living material is not uncommon for me.

I’ve worked with plants, bacteria, cuttlefish, fruit flies. So I was keen to get my new collaborator home to see what it could do. So I took it home and I watched. I fed it a varied diet. I observed as it networked. It formed a connection between food sources. I watched it leave a trail behind it, indicating where it had been. And I noticed that when it was fed up with one petri dish, it would escape and find a better home.

While we might have thought that Heather was a scientist – after all, who other than a scientist would talk about slime mold – we learn that she is, in fact, an artist, which tells our brain to shift gears and be ready for a different perspective on the topic.

Audiences want to know who you are, and why you’re so interested in the topic of your story. For experience-driven stories, those answers tend to be more obvious, but for idea-driven stories, you need to weave in those details.

I captured my observations through time-lapse photography. Slime mold grows at about one centimeter an hour, so it’s not really ideal for live viewing unless there’s some form of really extreme meditation, but through the time lapse, I could observe some really interesting behaviors. For instance, having fed on a nice pile of oats, the slime mold goes off to explore new territories in different directions simultaneously. When it meets itself, it knows it’s already there, it recognizes it’s there, and instead retreats back and grows in other directions. I was quite impressed by this feat, at how what was essentially just a bag of cellular slime could somehow map its territory, know itself, and move with seeming intention.

Imagine hearing this story without the benefit of Heather’s time-lapse photography. The story can be told, but the moving images make her description much more dramatic. Her use of images in the balance of her talk serve to increase impact. They say what can’t be easily described in full. Imagine how your words and images will play out in someone’s mind.

I found countless scientific studies, research papers, journal articles, all citing incredible work with this one organism, and I’m going to share a few of those with you.

For example, a team in Hokkaido University in Japan filled a maze with slime mold. It joined together and formed a mass cell. They introduced food at two points, oats of course, and it formed a connection between the food. It retracted from empty areas and dead ends. There are four possible routes through this maze, yet time and time again, the slime mold established the shortest and the most efficient route. Quite clever. The conclusion from their experiment was that the slime mold had a primitive form of intelligence.

Another study exposed cold air at regular intervals to the slime mold. It didn’t like it. It doesn’t like it cold. It doesn’t like it dry. They did this at repeat intervals, and each time, the slime mold slowed down its growth in response. However, at the next interval, the researchers didn’t put the cold air on, yet the slime mold slowed down in anticipation of it happening. It somehow knew that it was about the time for the cold air that it didn’t like. The conclusion from their experiment was that the slime mold was able to learn.

A third experiment: the slime mold was invited to explore a territory covered in oats. It fans out in a branching pattern. As it goes, each food node it finds, it forms a network, a connection to, and keeps foraging. After 26 hours, it established quite a firm network between the different oats. Now there’s nothing remarkable in this until you learn that the center oat that it started from represents the city of Tokyo, and the surrounding oats are suburban railway stations.

The slime mold had replicated the Tokyo transport network – a complex system developed over time by community dwellings, civil engineering, urban planning. What had taken us well over 100 years took the slime mold just over a day. The conclusion from their experiment was that the slime mold can form efficient networks and solve the traveling salesman problem.

It is a biological computer. As such, it has been mathematically modeled, algorithmically analyzed. It’s been sonified, replicated, simulated. World over, teams of researchers are decoding its biological principles to understand its computational rules and applying that learning to the fields of electronics, programming and robotics.

The best way to make a scientific point, especially when you’re not a scientist, is to reference published work from scientists who are subject matter experts in regards to your subject. Not citing bona fide evidence, and simply making claims as though they are facts, will often create doubt in the minds of the audience. You’re not an expert in the field, so why should they believe you? In this case, however, Heather cites three scientific studies that illustrate a central theme of her story – intelligence.

So the question is, how does this thing work? It doesn’t have a central nervous system. It doesn’t have a brain, yet it can perform behaviors that we associate with brain function. It can learn, it can remember, it can solve problems, it can make decisions. So where does that intelligence lie? So this is a microscopy, a video I shot, and it’s about 100 times magnification, sped up about 20 times, and inside the slime mold, there is a rhythmic pulsing flow, a vein-like structure carrying cellular material, nutrients and chemical information through the cell, streaming first in one direction and then back in another. And it is this continuous, synchronous oscillation within the cell that allows it to form quite a complex understanding of its environment, but without any large-scale control center. This is where its intelligence lies.

A classic shift in idea-driven narratives is moving from the ‘what’ to the ‘how’ – ‘what happens’ to ‘how it happens’. Other shifts may involve exploring the why, when and where aspects. This process of exploration is about moving the audience to ever deeper levels of their understanding. Taking someone on a journey is often related to space or time, but also applies to knowledge. Think about how you can unfold a complex topic, doing so in such a way that the listener can follow along. Each layer is a foundation for the next.

So it’s not just academic researchers in universities that are interested in this organism. A few years ago, I set up SliMoCo, the Slime Mould Collective. It’s an online, open, democratic network for slime mold researchers and enthusiasts to share knowledge and experimentation across disciplinary divides and across academic divides. The Slime Mould Collective membership is self-selecting. People have found the collective as the slime mold finds the oats. And it comprises of scientists and computer scientists and researchers but also artists like me, architects, designers, writers, activists, you name it. It’s a very interesting, eclectic membership.

Just a few examples: an artist who paints with fluorescent Physarum; a collaborative team who are combining biological and electronic design with 3D printing technologies in a workshop; another artist who is using the slime mold as a way of engaging a community to map their area. Here, the slime mold is being used directly as a biological tool, but metaphorically as a symbol for ways of talking about social cohesion, communication and cooperation.

From talking about the slime mold, the story comes back to Heather, and a collective that she created in order to further the understanding of this subject. The narrative then expands to include other people who are part of the collective and what they’ve done. Stories of other people is a Story Block which broadens the narrative beyond the speaker’s experience.

Other public engagement activities; I run lots of slime mold workshops, a creative way of engaging with the organism. So people are invited to come and learn about what amazing things it can do, and they design their own petri dish experiment, an environment for the slime mold to navigate so they can test its properties. Everybody takes home a new pet and is invited to post their results on the Slime Mould Collective. And the collective has enabled me to form collaborations with a whole array of interesting people. I’ve been working with filmmakers on a feature-length slime mold documentary, and I stress feature-length, which is in the final stages of edit and will be hitting your cinema screens very soon.

It’s also enabled me to conduct what I think is the world’s first human slime mold experiment. This is part of an exhibition in Rotterdam last year. We invited people to become slime mold for half an hour. So we essentially tied people together so they were a giant cell, and invited them to follow slime mold rules. You have to communicate through oscillations, no speaking. You have to operate as one entity, one mass cell, no egos, and the motivation for moving and then exploring the environment is in search of food. So a chaotic shuffle ensued as this bunch of strangers tied together with yellow ropes wearing “Being Slime Mold” t-shirts wandered through the museum park.

When they met trees, they had to reshape their connections and reform as a mass cell through not speaking. This is a ludicrous experiment in many, many ways. This isn’t hypothesis-driven. We’re not trying to prove, demonstrate anything. But what it did provide us was a way of engaging a broad section of the public with ideas of intelligence, agency, autonomy, and provide a playful platform for discussions about the things that ensued.

One of the most exciting things about this experiment was the conversation that happened afterwards. An entirely spontaneous symposium happened in the park. People talked about the human psychology, of how difficult it was to let go of their individual personalities and egos. Other people talked about bacterial communication. Each person brought in their own individual interpretation, and our conclusion from this experiment was that the people of Rotterdam were highly cooperative, especially when given beer. We didn’t just give them oats. We gave them beer as well.

How your idea and passion integrates into society can be an important part of your story. Outside of the laboratory, and beyond art or science, Heather engages people to learn in a very tangible way. They were involved, had to make decisions, but also had fun doing it. Is there a similar set of experiences that you can include in your story to demonstrate how your idea can affect the way people think and act?

But they weren’t as efficient as the slime mold, and the slime mold, for me, is a fascinating subject matter. It’s biologically fascinating, it’s computationally interesting, but it’s also a symbol, a way of engaging with ideas of community, collective behavior, cooperation. A lot of my work draws on the scientific research, so this pays homage to the maze experiment but in a different way. And the slime mold is also my working material. It’s a coproducer of photographs, prints, animations, participatory events.

Whilst the slime mold doesn’t choose to work with me, exactly, it is a collaboration of sorts. I can predict certain behaviors by understanding how it operates, but I can’t control it. The slime mold has the final say in the creative process. And after all, it has its own internal aesthetics. These branching patterns that we see we see across all forms, scales of nature, from river deltas to lightning strikes, from our own blood vessels to neural networks. There’s clearly significant rules at play in this simple yet complex organism, and no matter what our disciplinary perspective or our mode of inquiry, there’s a great deal that we can learn from observing and engaging with this beautiful, brainless blob.

I give you Physarum polycephalum.

It’s a powerful story that can begin with something we feel is insignificant – slime mold – and take us to a place where we are thinking about how humans interact with each other. After seeing this talk I began to view society differently. The chaos that occurs when we act too much as individuals, and the success that we can achieve when we work together.

There’s not any direct calls to action. Instead, this is a thought provoking narrative that offers a new perspective for the audience to do with as they wish.

[Note: all comments inserted into this transcript are my opinions, not those of the speaker, the TED organization, nor anyone else on the planet. In my view, each story is unique, as is every interpretation of that story. The sole purpose of these analytical posts is to inspire a storyteller to become a storylistener, and in doing so, make their stories more impactful.]

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Sangeeta Bhatia: This tiny particle could roam your body to find tumors @ TED Talks Live

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TED Talks Live were held at The Town Hall Theater in NYC, in November of 2015. I had the pleasure of attending all six nights to hear speakers present impactful Ideas Worth Spreading. This post is an analysis of a talk by Sangeeta Bhatia that explores new and smaller solutions in the fight against cancer.

Watch Sangeeta’s TED Talk. At one level her talk is rather technical, as it involves the latest, most advanced science, but her story allows the audience to see how the concept works by way of analogy, description, and visuals. If you’re trying to convey a complex idea to a public audience, this is a great example of how that can be accomplished.

Transcript

(my notes in red)

In the space that used to house one transistor, we can now fit one billion. That made it so that a computer the size of an entire room now fits in your pocket. You might say the future is small.

One way to open a technology story is by making a statement directly related to your topic, but another technique is to offer an analogy that describes something completely different, but that shares a common feature. In this case, the feature highlighted is ‘small’, and it will remain a theme throughout her talk.

As an engineer, I’m inspired by this miniaturization revolution in computers. As a physician, I wonder whether we could use it to reduce the number of lives lost due to one of the fastest-growing diseases on Earth: cancer. Now when I say that, what most people hear me say is that we’re working on curing cancer. And we are. But it turns out that there’s an incredible opportunity to save lives through the early detection and prevention of cancer.

The focus pivots from computers to cancer, and Sangeeta lets the audience know that she’ll be exploring how miniaturization may play a role in the detection and prevention of cancer. We see that connection in another way, by saying she’s an ‘engineer’ and a ‘physician’.

If you click on the link to her bio, you’ll see that’s true, but in a short story there is rarely the time to go into any greater detail. And that’s something to remember. Two details change how we think about her, and yet it only took seconds to do so. Brief can still have impact.

Worldwide, over two-thirds of deaths due to cancer are fully preventable using methods that we already have in hand today. Things like vaccination, timely screening and of course, stopping smoking. But even with the best tools and technologies that we have today, some tumors can’t be detected until 10 years after they’ve started growing, when they are 50 million cancer cells strong. What if we had better technologies to detect some of these more deadly cancers sooner, when they could be removed, when they were just getting started?

Sangeeta uses two statistics to describe characteristics of tumors that few people outside the field of medicine would know. In this case, they point to the need for early detection. Before 10 years have passed, and before there are 50 million cancer cells. This type of framing applies to a range of scientific topics, as well as social problems. It follows the logic of, ‘the sooner we know, the better’. Consider whether this technique might apply to your story.

Let me tell you about how miniaturization might get us there. This is a microscope in a typical lab that a pathologist would use for looking at a tissue specimen, like a biopsy or a pap smear. This $7,000 microscope would be used by somebody with years of specialized training to spot cancer cells. This is an image from a colleague of mine at Rice University, Rebecca Richards-Kortum. What she and her team have done is miniaturize that whole microscope into this $10 part, and it fits on the end of an optical fiber. Now what that means is instead of taking a sample from a patient and sending it to the microscope, you can bring the microscope to the patient. And then, instead of requiring a specialist to look at the images, you can train the computer to score normal versus cancerous cells.

Sangeeta comes back to the concept of smaller (miniaturization) as a potential solution. And using a story block about someone else – one of her colleagues – she is able to highlight a solution that improves the detection of cancer. The framing of ‘instead of…’ with ‘you can…’ illustrates the notion that an existing process can be improved by implementing a new idea.

Now this is important, because what they found working in rural communities, is that even when they have a mobile screening van that can go out into the community and perform exams and collect samples and send them to the central hospital for analysis, that days later, women get a call with an abnormal test result and they’re asked to come in. Fully half of them don’t turn up because they can’t afford the trip. With the integrated microscope and computer analysis, Rebecca and her colleagues have been able to create a van that has both a diagnostic setup and a treatment setup. And what that means is that they can do a diagnosis and perform therapy on the spot, so no one is lost to follow up.

Once a new technology (or a solution of any sort) has been developed, can your story talk about how it worked? If you don’t have a story block that validates your idea, then it remains theoretical. Which is sometimes the case. Your story’s narrative can take us to the present moment with a desire to take the next step in the future. Probes have been to Mars, but humans haven’t, so your story may end with your vision of the future.

That’s just one example of how miniaturization can save lives. Now as engineers, we think of this as straight-up miniaturization. You took a big thing and you made it little. But what I told you before about computers was that they transformed our lives when they became small enough for us to take them everywhere. So what is the transformational equivalent like that in medicine? Well, what if you had a detector that was so small that it could circulate in your body, find the tumor all by itself and send a signal to the outside world? It sounds a little bit like science fiction. But actually, nanotechnology allows us to do just that. Nanotechnology allows us to shrink the parts that make up the detector from the width of a human hair, which is 100 microns, to a thousand times smaller, which is 100 nanometers. And that has profound implications.

Having taken the ‘smaller’ idea to one level, Sangeeta takes us to place that, as she admits, ‘sounds a bit like science fiction’. In this case, ‘smaller’ is not just some smaller device, but something so small that we can’t even see it. This is common for science related talks, as processes which occur at the the molecular or nano level, can only be imagined, which means the responsibility falls on the storyteller to bring their audience into that world.

It turns out that materials actually change their properties at the nanoscale. You take a common material like gold, and you grind it into dust, into gold nanoparticles, and it changes from looking gold to looking red. If you take a more exotic material like cadmium selenide — forms a big, black crystal — if you make nanocrystals out of this material and you put it in a liquid, and you shine light on it, they glow. And they glow blue, green, yellow, orange, red, depending only on their size. It’s wild! Can you imagine an object like that in the macro world? It would be like all the denim jeans in your closet are all made of cotton, but they are different colors depending only on their size.

And the way Sangeeta does that, is to compare a property that exists at such a small scale to something that everyone can relate to – their denim jeans – different size equals different color. While jeans are completely different than nanoparticles, we still get the picture.

So as a physician, what’s just as interesting to me is that it’s not just the color of materials that changes at the nanoscale; the way they travel in your body also changes. And this is the kind of observation that we’re going to use to make a better cancer detector.

So let me show you what I mean. This is a blood vessel in the body. Surrounding the blood vessel is a tumor. We’re going to inject nanoparticles into the blood vessel and watch how they travel from the bloodstream into the tumor. Now it turns out that the blood vessels of many tumors are leaky, and so nanoparticles can leak out from the bloodstream into the tumor. Whether they leak out depends on their size. So in this image, the smaller, hundred-nanometer, blue nanoparticles are leaking out, and the larger, 500-nanometer, red nanoparticles are stuck in the bloodstream. So that means as an engineer, depending on how big or small I make a material, I can change where it goes in your body.

In my lab, we recently made a cancer nano detector that is so small that it could travel into the tumor body and look for tumors. We designed it to listen for tumor invasion: the orchestra of chemical signals that tumors need to make to spread. For a tumor to break out of the tissue that it’s born in, it has to make chemicals called enzymes to chew through the scaffolding of tissues. We designed these nanoparticles to be activated by these enzymes. One enzyme can activate a thousand of these chemical reactions in an hour. Now in engineering, we call that one-to-a-thousand ratio a form of amplification, and it makes something ultrasensitive. So we’ve made an ultrasensitive cancer detector.

Once again, we have an example of how the idea becomes real, and we also come back to more of Sangeeta’s personal story, of what is happening in her laboratory. Instead of an ultra-technical description of what the tumor’s enzymes actually do, she uses a visual metaphor of how they ‘chew through’ the ’tissues’. They don’t have teeth, of course, but listeners make the connection and realize that the enzyme has a way to get through, and that’s all the audience needs to understand in order for Sangeeta to continue with the narrative.

OK, but how do I get this activated signal to the outside world, where I can act on it? For this, we’re going to use one more piece of nanoscale biology, and that has to do with the kidney. The kidney is a filter. Its job is to filter out the blood and put waste into the urine. It turns out that what the kidney filters is also dependent on size. So in this image, what you can see is that everything smaller than five nanometers is going from the blood, through the kidney, into the urine, and everything else that’s bigger is retained. OK, so if I make a 100-nanometer cancer detector, I inject it in the bloodstream, it can leak into the tumor where it’s activated by tumor enzymes to release a small signal that is small enough to be filtered out of the kidney and put into the urine, I have a signal in the outside world that I can detect.

The use of visual images is critical here, as they show, in graphic terms, what is happening. If the audience had to figure that out on their own, most of them would be lost. One of the most important uses of static or motion images is to say more than the speaker is saying.

OK, but there’s one more problem. This is a tiny little signal, so how do I detect it? Well, the signal is just a molecule. They’re molecules that we designed as engineers. They’re completely synthetic, and we can design them so they are compatible with our tool of choice. If we want to use a really sensitive, fancy instrument called a mass spectrometer, then we make a molecule with a unique mass. Or maybe we want make something that’s more inexpensive and portable. Then we make molecules that we can trap on paper, like a pregnancy test. In fact, there’s a whole world of paper tests that are becoming available in a field called paper diagnostics.

Alright, where are we going with this? What I’m going to tell you next, as a lifelong researcher, represents a dream of mine. I can’t say that’s it’s a promise; it’s a dream. But I think we all have to have dreams to keep us pushing forward, even — and maybe especially — cancer researchers.

I’m going to tell you what I hope will happen with my technology, that my team and I will put our hearts and souls into making a reality. OK, here goes. I dream that one day, instead of going into an expensive screening facility to get a colonoscopy, or a mammogram, or a pap smear, that you could get a shot, wait an hour, and do a urine test on a paper strip. I imagine that this could even happen without the need for steady electricity, or a medical professional in the room. Maybe they could be far away and connected only by the image on a smartphone.

Now I know this sounds like a dream, but in the lab we already have this working in mice, where it works better than existing methods for the detection of lung, colon and ovarian cancer. And I hope that what this means is that one day we can detect tumors in patients sooner than 10 years after they’ve started growing, in all walks of life, all around the globe, and that this would lead to earlier treatments, and that we could save more lives than we can today, with early detection.

Related to the previous comment about people going to Mars, Sangeeta takes the narrative beyond the laboratory and tells us her ‘what if’ story, which is a type of ‘better future’ story block. Anyone proposing a solution to a problem is, in effect, saying, ‘what if we implemented my solution? if we did, the world could be better for the following reasons’.

Many times speakers will conclude their story with an emphatic statement, along the lines of, ‘the world will be better’. You have to decide whether to frame your statement as a ‘could’ or a ‘will’. Just know that the audience may have their own opinion on the topic.

By using words such as ‘dream’ and ‘hope’, Sangeeta is clear on this point.

Thank you.

[Note: all comments inserted into this transcript are my opinions, not those of the speaker, the TED organization, nor anyone else on the planet. In my view, each story is unique, as is every interpretation of that story. The sole purpose of these analytical posts is to inspire a storyteller to become a storylistener, and in doing so, make their stories more impactful.]

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contact me to discuss your storytelling goals!

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Mark Lovett

Danielle Feinberg: The magic ingredient that brings Pixar movies to life @ TED Talks Live

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TED Talks Live were held at The Town Hall Theater in NYC, in November of 2015. I had the pleasure of attending all six nights to hear speakers present impactful Ideas Worth Spreading. This post is an analysis of a talk by Danielle Feinberg on the magic ability of Pixar movies to capture our imagination.

Watch Danielle’s TED Talk. She not only speaks to her personal passion, but how her experiences at Pixar create films that touch the lives of millions. By tying the innocence of animation to the physics of lighting she provides a unique behind-the-scenes view of how art is blended with science, and how the dream that we imagine can become our reality.

Transcript

(my notes in red)

When I was seven years old, some well-meaning adult asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. Proudly, I said: “An artist.” “No, you don’t,” he said, “You can’t make a living being an artist!”

For some people the life they lead as an adult began with a dream in childhood. I’ve found this to be true for a lot of artists, writers, musicians, even teachers and attorneys. It’s an opening that connects to an audience (we’ve all had dreams as children) and sets the stage for the narrative that follows.

My little seven-year-old Picasso dreams were crushed. But I gathered myself, went off in search of a new dream, eventually settling on being a scientist, perhaps something like the next Albert Einstein.

I have always loved math and science, later, coding. And so I decided to study computer programming in college. In my junior year, my computer graphics professor showed us these wonderful short films. It was the first computer animation any of us had ever seen. I watched these films in wonder, transfixed, fireworks going off in my head, thinking, “That is what I want to do with my life.” The idea that all the math, science and code I had been learning could come together to create these worlds and characters and stories I connected with, was pure magic for me.

Detours are another factor in many lives. What seems to be a change in direction ends up circling back, though often in a modified way. Danielle comes back to art, but from the perspective of computer graphics. Think about the detours in your personal story that an audience would appreciate hearing about.

Just two years later, I started working at the place that made those films, Pixar Animation Studios. It was here I learned how we actually execute those films. To create our movies, we create a three-dimensional world inside the computer. We start with a point that makes a line that makes a face that creates characters, or trees and rocks that eventually become a forest. And because it’s a three-dimensional world, we can move a camera around inside that world. I was fascinated by all of it. But then I got my first taste of lighting.

While Danielle’s personal experiences continue to be foundational to this story, there’s a shift at this point away from her and toward to topic of her talk – what brings Pixar movies to light. Using the visual on the screen behind her, the audience is pulled into the world of animation. The combination of image and words can transport people into your experience…

Lighting in practice is placing lights inside this three-dimensional world. I actually have icons of lights I move around in there. Here you can see I’ve added a light, I’m turning on the rough version of lighting in our software, turn on shadows and placing the light. As I place a light, I think about what it might look like in real life, but balance that out with what we need artistically and for the story. So it might look like this at first, but as we adjust this and move that in weeks of work, in rough form it might look like this, and in final form, like this.

…and in this story, there’s no substitute for the visual imagery. It is possible to describe how lighting works in the animation process without the accompanying visuals – and I always invite storytellers to think about how they would tell their story using only words – but in Danielle’s story the impact would only be a fraction of what she is able to achieve.

There’s this moment in lighting that made me fall utterly in love with it. It’s where we go from this to this. It’s the moment where all the pieces come together, and suddenly the world comes to life as if it’s an actual place that exists. This moment never gets old, especially for that little seven-year-old girl that wanted to be an artist.

As I learned to light, I learned about using light to help tell story, to set the time of day, to create the mood, to guide the audience’s eye, how to make a character look appealing or stand out in a busy set.

While the specific topic is lighting in animation, the revelation described applies across the creative spectrum. The ability of elements such as sound, color, texture, and perspective can tell a story of it’s own. Storytelling in general can tap into this attribute through description. Can you describe a scene in such a way as to enhance your story?

Did you see WALL-E? There he is. As you can see, we can create any world that we want inside the computer. We can make a world with monsters, with robots that fall in love, we can even make pigs fly.

While this is an incredible thing, this untethered artistic freedom, it can create chaos. It can create unbelievable worlds, unbelievable movement, things that are jarring to the audience.

So to combat this, we tether ourselves with science. We use science and the world we know as a backbone, to ground ourselves in something relatable and recognizable. “Finding Nemo” is an excellent example of this. A major portion of the movie takes place underwater. But how do you make it look underwater?

In early research and development, we took a clip of underwater footage and recreated it in the computer. Then we broke it back down to see which elements make up that underwater look. One of the most critical elements was how the light travels through the water. So we coded up a light that mimics this physics — first, the visibility of the water, and then what happens with the color. Objects close to the eye have their full, rich colors. As light travels deeper into the water, we lose the red wavelengths, then the green wavelengths, leaving us with blue at the far depths.

Danielle uses a science story block to explain how the folks at Pixar tapped into how light works to create realistic images that our eye accepts as real. Similarly, science can be used to expand up a number of other topics, from human emotions to the effects of climate change. Many times the science alone can come off as too technical, and thus, too boring, but when tied to a real life application / situation, the science comes to life.

In this clip you can see two other important elements. The first is the surge and swell, or the invisible underwater current that pushes the bits of particulate around in the water. The second is the caustics. These are the ribbons of light, like you might see on the bottom of a pool, that are created when the sun bends through the crests of the ripples and waves on the ocean’s surface. Here we have the fog beams. These give us color depth cues, but also tells which direction is up in shots where we don’t see the water surface. The other really cool thing you can see here is that we lit that particulate only with the caustics, so that as it goes in and out of those ribbons of light, it appears and disappears, lending a subtle, magical sparkle to the underwater.

You can see how we’re using the science — the physics of water, light and movement — to tether that artistic freedom. But we are not beholden to it. We considered each of these elements and which ones had to be scientifically accurate and which ones we could push and pull to suit the story and the mood.

We realized early on that color was one we had some leeway with. So here’s a traditionally colored underwater scene. But here, we can take Sydney Harbor and push it fairly green to suit the sad mood of what’s happening. In this scene, it’s really important we see deep into the underwater, so we understand what the East Australian Current is, that the turtles are diving into and going on this roller coaster ride. So we pushed the visibility of the water well past anything you would ever see in real life. Because in the end, we are not trying to recreate the scientifically correct real world, we’re trying to create a believable world, one the audience can immerse themselves in to experience the story.

It’s important to draw a distinction between the creation of a fictional story (one told in an animated movie) and the telling of a true story. While Danielle and the folks at Pixar have the ability to violate the laws of physics for artistic impact, storytelling with impact requires that only the truth be told. It will be your version of the truth, and other people may see things differently, but your story is authentic to the real world.

We use science to create something wonderful. We use story and artistic touch to get us to a place of wonder. This guy, WALL-E, is a great example of that. He finds beauty in the simplest things. But when he came in to lighting, we knew we had a big problem. We got so geeked-out on making WALL-E this convincing robot, that we made his binoculars practically optically perfect.

His binoculars are one of the most critical acting devices he has. He doesn’t have a face or even traditional dialogue, for that matter. So the animators were heavily dependent on the binoculars to sell his acting and emotions. We started lighting and we realized the triple lenses inside his binoculars were a mess of reflections. He was starting to look glassy-eyed.

Now, glassy-eyed is a fundamentally awful thing when you are trying to convince an audience that a robot has a personality and he’s capable of falling in love. So we went to work on these optically perfect binoculars, trying to find a solution that would maintain his true robot materials but solve this reflection problem.

So we started with the lenses. Here’s the flat-front lens, we have a concave lens and a convex lens. And here you see all three together, showing us all these reflections. We tried turning them down, we tried blocking them, nothing was working. You can see here, sometimes we needed something specific reflected in his eyes — usually Eve. So we couldn’t just use some faked abstract image on the lenses. So here we have Eve on the first lens, we put Eve on the second lens, it’s not working. We turn it down, it’s still not working.

And then we have our eureka moment. We add a light to WALL-E that accidentally leaks into his eyes. You can see it light up these gray aperture blades. Suddenly, those aperture blades are poking through that reflection the way nothing else has. Now we recognize WALL-E as having an eye. As humans we have the white of our eye, the colored iris and the black pupil. Now WALL-E has the black of an eye, the gray aperture blades and the black pupil. Suddenly, WALL-E feels like he has a soul, like there’s a character with emotion inside.

Later in the movie towards the end, WALL-E loses his personality, essentially going dead. This is the perfect time to bring back that glassy-eyed look. In the next scene, WALL-E comes back to life. We bring that light back to bring the aperture blades back, and he returns to that sweet, soulful robot we’ve come to love.

(Video) WALL-E: Eva?

There’s a beauty in these unexpected moments — when you find the key to unlocking a robot’s soul, the moment when you discover what you want to do with your life. The jellyfish in “Finding Nemo” was one of those moments for me.

There are scenes in every movie that struggle to come together. This was one of those scenes. The director had a vision for this scene based on some wonderful footage of jellyfish in the South Pacific. As we went along, we were floundering. The reviews with the director turned from the normal look-and-feel conversation into more and more questions about numbers and percentages. Maybe because unlike normal, we were basing it on something in real life, or maybe just because we had lost our way. But it had become about using our brain without our eyes, the science without the art. That scientific tether was strangling the scene.

But even through all the frustrations, I still believed it could be beautiful. So when it came in to lighting, I dug in. As I worked to balance the blues and the pinks, the caustics dancing on the jellyfish bells, the undulating fog beams, something promising began to appear. I came in one morning and checked the previous night’s work. And I got excited. And then I showed it to the lighting director and she got excited. Soon, I was showing to the director in a dark room full of 50 people.

In director review, you hope you might get some nice words, then you get some notes and fixes, generally. And then, hopefully, you get a final, signaling to move on to the next stage. I gave my intro, and I played the jellyfish scene. And the director was silent for an uncomfortably long amount of time. Just long enough for me to think, “Oh no, this is doomed.” And then he started clapping. And then the production designer started clapping. And then the whole room was clapping.

This is the moment that I live for in lighting. The moment where it all comes together and we get a world that we can believe in.

As consumers we only get to see the finished product, which in the case of Pixar feels flawless, but Danielle has taken us on a journey of challenges. The problems that had to be addressed in order to achieve that flawless feel. That expression, ‘This is the moment that I live for…’ is one that is contained in so many impactful personal stories, regardless of topic. You had a dream, but along the way got lost, or things didn’t work as planned, but with perseverance those issues were overcome.

We use math, science and code to create these amazing worlds. We use storytelling and art to bring them to life. It’s this interweaving of art and science that elevates the world to a place of wonder, a place with soul, a place we can believe in, a place where the things you imagine can become real — and a world where a girl suddenly realizes not only is she a scientist, but also an artist.

We come back to the beginning of Danielle’s story with a beautiful feeling of magic, of imagination, that all things are possible. In many cases the message within the story is revealed along the way, often at the midway point or just beyond, but that message can also appear in the final words of a story, as we see here.

Thank you.

[Note: all comments inserted into this transcript are my opinions, not those of the speaker, the TED organization, nor anyone else on the planet. In my view, each story is unique, as is every interpretation of that story. The sole purpose of these analytical posts is to inspire a storyteller to become a storylistener, and in doing so, make their stories more impactful.]

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Mark Lovett

Latif Nasser: You have no idea where camels really come from @ TED Talks Live

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TED Talks Live were held at The Town Hall Theater in NYC, in November of 2015. I had the pleasure of attending all six nights to hear speakers present impactful Ideas Worth Spreading. This post is an analysis of a talk by Latif Nasser about a journey of scientific discovery that can help us to see the world anew.

Watch Latif’s TED Talk. You can feel his enthusiasm throughout the story. His vocal variation, facial expressions and body movements convey emphasis at every turn. This is an unusual presentation, structured as an interview, but there’s much you can learn about how to create and tell an impactful story.

Transcript

(my notes in red)

So, this is a story about how we know what we know. It’s a story about this woman, Natalia Rybczynski. She’s a paleobiologist, which means she specializes in digging up really old dead stuff.

I always tell storytellers not to open their narrative with the phrase ‘this is a story about’, as it’s usually better to let that information come out in the talk. But in the vein of ‘rules are meant to be broken’, the practice can be successful when there’s mystery attached to the statement. Latif’s opening line is simply stated, yet contains that sense of mystery and therefore it quickly grabs our attention.

(Audio) Natalia Rybczynski: Yeah, I had someone call me “Dr. Dead Things.”

Using audio clips within a story is unusual, but it can add impact when it allows someone else to speak – we hear the story in their own words – or adds information best delivered by that person. But the main reason Latif has chosen to use audio within his talk is that he works in radio, so it makes perfect sense to simulate his natural environment.

And I think she’s particularly interesting because of where she digs that stuff up, way above the Arctic Circle in the remote Canadian tundra. Now, one summer day in 2006, she was at a dig site called the Fyles Leaf Bed, which is less than 10 degrees latitude away from the magnetic north pole.

Latif not only tells us who the main character is in his story (Natalia) but takes us to a specific year (2006), a time of year (summer), a general area (Arctic Circle / remote Canadian tundra), and a specific place (dig site). In just 40 seconds.

(Audio) NR: Really, it’s not going to sound very exciting, because it was a day of walking with your backpack and your GPS and notebook and just picking up anything that might be a fossil.

And at some point, she noticed something.

(Audio) NR: Rusty, kind of rust-colored, about the size of the palm of my hand. It was just lying on the surface.

And at first she thought it was just a splinter of wood, because that’s the sort of thing people had found at the Fyles Leaf Bed before — prehistoric plant parts. But that night, back at camp …

(Audio) NR: … I get out the hand lens, I’m looking a little bit more closely and realizing it doesn’t quite look like this has tree rings. Maybe it’s a preservation thing, but it looks really like … bone.

Huh. So over the next four years, she went to that spot over and over, and eventually collected 30 fragments of that exact same bone, most of them really tiny.

(Audio) NR: It’s not a whole lot. It fits in a small Ziploc bag.

And she tried to piece them together like a jigsaw puzzle. But it was challenging.

The mystery continues, as it’s not clear what Natalia has found. Too often storytellers unravel a mystery too quickly, but in this story, the audience is moved along step by step.

(Audio) NR: It’s broken up into so many little tiny pieces, I’m trying to use sand and putty, and it’s not looking good. So finally, we had a 3D surface scanner.

Ooh! NR: Yeah, right?

It turns out it was way easier to do it virtually.

(Audio) NR: It’s kind of magical when it all fits together.

How certain were you that you had it right, that you had put it together in the right way? Was there a potential that you’d put it together a different way and have, like, a parakeet or something?

(Audio) NR: (Laughs) Um, no. No, we got this.

What she had, she discovered, was a tibia, a leg bone, and specifically, one that belonged to a cloven-hoofed mammal, so something like a cow or a sheep. But it couldn’t have been either of those. It was just too big.

(Audio) NR: The size of this thing, it was huge. It’s a really big animal.

So what animal could it be? Having hit a wall, she showed one of the fragments to some colleagues of hers in Colorado, and they had an idea.

(Audio) NR: We took a saw, and we nicked just the edge of it, and there was this really interesting smell that comes from it.

By this point the addition of Natalia’s narrative almost has her on stage, as though the interview is happening in front of the audience.

It smelled kind of like singed flesh. It was a smell that Natalia recognized from cutting up skulls in her gross anatomy lab: collagen. Collagen is what gives structure to our bones. And usually, after so many years, it breaks down. But in this case, the Arctic had acted like a natural freezer and preserved it.

Then a year or two later, Natalia was at a conference in Bristol, and she saw that a colleague of hers named Mike Buckley was demoing this new process that he called “collagen fingerprinting.” It turns out that different species have slightly different structures of collagen, so if you get a collagen profile of an unknown bone, you can compare it to those of known species, and, who knows, maybe you get a match.

Departing from Natalia’s journey, Latif includes a science story block that describes a revolutionary process which provides a turning point in the story.

So she shipped him one of the fragments, FedEx.

(Audio) NR: Yeah, you want to track it. It’s kind of important.

And he processed it, and compared it to 37 known and modern-day mammal species. And he found a match. It turns out that the 3.5 million-year-old bone that Natalia had dug out of the High Arctic belonged to … a camel.

(Audio) NR: And I’m thinking, what? That’s amazing — if it’s true.

So they tested a bunch of the fragments, and they got the same result for each one. However, based on the size of the bone that they found, it meant that this camel was 30 percent larger than modern-day camels. So this camel would have been about nine feet tall, weighed around a ton.

Yeah. Natalia had found a Giant Arctic camel.

The mystery is solved, and Latif delivers the line emphatically, which results in laughter. Had the sentence been delivered in a monotone fashion it would have been received as another bit of data. Revelations within a story are often presented in this dramatic fashion. So much has been revealed in his story, but we’re less than half way through. We wonder what’s next.

Now, when you hear the word “camel,” what may come to mind is one of these, the Bactrian camel of East and Central Asia. But chances are the postcard image you have in your brain is one of these, the dromedary, quintessential desert creature — hangs out in sandy, hot places like the Middle East and the Sahara, has a big old hump on its back for storing water for those long desert treks, has big, broad feet to help it tromp over sand dunes. So how on earth would one of these guys end up in the High Arctic?

Well, scientists have known for a long time, turns out, even before Natalia’s discovery, that camels are actually originally American. They started here. For nearly 40 of the 45 million years that camels have been around, you could only find them in North America, around 20 different species, maybe more.

(Audio) LN: If I put them all in a lineup, would they look different?

NR: Yeah, you’re going to have different body sizes. You’ll have some with really long necks, so they’re actually functionally like giraffes.

Some had snouts, like crocodiles.

(Audio) NR: The really primitive, early ones would have been really small, almost like rabbits.

What? Rabbit-sized camels?

(Audio) NR: The earliest ones. So those ones you probably would not recognize.

Oh my God, I want a pet rabbit-camel.

(Audio) NR: I know, wouldn’t that be great?

Within the science, we have a historical story block that continues below. Taking us back in time allows us to imagine the evolution that occurred. This could apply to many topics and gives the listener a frame of reference that extends beyond the current moment.

And then about three to seven million years ago, one branch of camels went down to South America, where they became llamas and alpacas, and another branch crossed over the Bering Land Bridge into Asia and Africa. And then around the end of the last ice age, North American camels went extinct.

So, scientists knew all of that already, but it still doesn’t fully explain how Natalia found one so far north. This is, temperature-wise, the polar opposite of the Sahara. Now to be fair, three and a half million years ago, it was on average 22 degrees Celsius warmer than it is now. So it would have been boreal forest, so more like the Yukon or Siberia today. But still, they would have six-month-long winters where the ponds would freeze over. You’d have blizzards. You’d have 24 hours a day of straight darkness. How is it that one of these Saharan superstars could ever have survived those arctic conditions?

We’re now on to mystery number two. It’s not uncommon for the solving of one question to raise a subsequent question. By stating that question implicitly, the narrative shift is clear.

Natalia and her colleagues think they have an answer. And it’s kind of brilliant. What if the very features that we imagine make the camel so well-suited to places like the Sahara, actually evolved to help it get through the winter? What if those broad feet were meant to tromp not over sand, but over snow, like a pair of snowshoes? What if that hump — which, huge news to me, does not contain water, it contains fat — was there to help the camel get through that six-month-long winter, when food was scarce?

And then, only later, long after it crossed over the land bridge did it retrofit those winter features for a hot desert environment? For instance, the hump may be helpful to camels in hotter climes because having all your fat in one place, like a fat backpack, means that you don’t have to have that insulation all over the rest of your body. So it helps heat dissipate easier. It’s this crazy idea, that what seems like proof of the camel’s quintessential desert nature could actually be proof of its High Arctic past.

Now, I’m not the first person to tell this story. Others have told it as a way to marvel at evolutionary biology or as a keyhole into the future of climate change. But I love it for a totally different reason. For me, it’s a story about us, about how we see the world and about how that changes. So I was trained as a historian. And I’ve learned that, actually, a lot of scientists are historians, too. They make sense of the past. They tell the history of our universe, of our planet, of life on this planet. And as a historian, you start with an idea in your mind of how the story goes.

While Latif does not go into any detail, just the mention that he was trained as a historian gives us a sense of who he is and why he’s interested in the topic to begin with. And he also makes the connection between history and story, which is something we naturally do has humans.

(Audio) NR: We make up stories and we stick with it, like the camel in the desert, right? That’s a great story! It’s totally adapted for that. Clearly, it always lived there.

But at any moment, you could uncover some tiny bit of evidence. You could learn some tiny thing that forces you to reframe everything you thought you knew. In this case, this one scientist finds this one shard of what she thought was wood, and because of that, science has a totally new and totally counterintuitive theory about why this absurd Dr. Seuss-looking creature looks the way it does. And for me, it completely upended the way I think of the camel. It went from being this ridiculously niche creature suited only to this one specific environment, to being this world traveler that just happens to be in the Sahara, and could end up virtually anywhere.

At this point we hear the true reason for Latif telling this story. In this case it’s about scientific discovery, but in the larger perspective, it’s about all of us. That our lives can be different based on the smallest bit of wisdom. It says that we don’t know where life will take us, but maybe, just maybe, it will take us on an amazing journey of discovery.

This is Azuri. Azuri, hi, how are you doing? OK, here, I’ve got one of these for you here.

So Azuri is on a break from her regular gig at the Radio City Music Hall.

That’s not even a joke. Anyway —

But really, Azuri is here as a living reminder that the story of our world is a dynamic one. It requires our willingness to readjust, to reimagine.

Right, Azuri?

And, really, that we’re all just one shard of bone away from seeing the world anew.

Bringing a camel on stage is not something that many of us could pull off, and it’s done for dramatic and humorous effect in Latif’s story, but he uses the visual of a live camel to bring home his message once again – that we can see the world anew.

Thank you very much.

Note Latif’s facial expressions, use of his hands and sound of his voice. All are expressive, which adds emphasis when he’s being serious, as well as when he’s being humorous. You can also see his head turn from side to side in order to address the entire audience. He doesn’t need to move about the stage, or even across the red circle. His connection to the audience is brilliant.

[Note: all comments inserted into this transcript are my opinions, not those of the speaker, the TED organization, nor anyone else on the planet. In my view, each story is unique, as is every interpretation of that story. The sole purpose of these analytical posts is to inspire a storyteller to become a storylistener, and in doing so, make their stories more impactful.]

Learn more about the coaching process or
contact me to discuss your storytelling goals!

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Subscribe to our newsletter for the latest updates!

Copyright Storytelling with Impact – All rights reserved