TED Talk: What We Learn Before We're Born

          In 2011, Annie Murphy Paul, a science author, gave a TED talk discussing what we learn before we’re born to discuss how new technologies in the fields of psychology and biology are leading us to discover that learning begins at conception, NOT birth.

         Pregnancy is a topic that not many people know about medically, but on the other hand, almost everyone knows about on a personal level. I have experienced pregnancy on a more personal level this year by working with my service learning organization, Step By Step. Pregnancy is a topic than can be discussed with an audience of average intelligence because it is such a “average” experience; one of the purposes of being a human is to create offspring. Yet, at the same time, there are still many aspects related to pregnancy that even the most advanced specialists are unaware of. I believe the audience expected this TED talk to be a repeat of the information that is often published to the general public: a baby can learn different sounds from inside the womb, sucking is an innate function, and so on. Personally, I expected this TED talk to be about more physiological topics such as how a baby knows to suck (when hungry) for food and cry to breathe, and how a baby knows it’s mothers voice the moment it enters the world. To my pleasant surprise, a few of these topics were addressed in this TED talk.

          Giving a TED talk does not seem like an easy thing to do. To me, giving the talk and sharing your idea is the first really big step in making a TED talk speech effective. Specifically, in this speech, I thought the way that Annie Murphy Paul stood and the way that she thought through her ideas before saying them made this speech highly effective. I trusted her because I could feel how she controlled the room through her confident body language. It made me respect her and want to listen to her ideas more. I also liked watching her think through her ideas as she spoke about them; I could almost see the wheels moving in her head, and it made me start thinking more deeply about her topic too. I also liked how she included humorous comments throughout her presentation, like when she compared the voices that a baby hears while in the womb from the outside world to being “much like the voice of Charlie Brown’s teacher in the old Peanut’s cartoon”, and how she hooked her audience at the very beginning of the speech with the question “When does learning begin?”

          Although this was a wonderful example of a TED talk, there were a few things that I would have changed if I were giving this presentation, starting with Annie Murphy Paul’s outfit. I think the fact that she was wearing jeans made me lose a little bit of respect and trust for her, which are two vital factors for her to obtain from the audience during this presentation since she is presenting such an unknown, drastic idea. Secondly, I did not like how Paul often referred to a large stack of papers on a random table in the middle of the presentation floor. I found it distracting, and it made me feel like she didn’t fully know what she was talking about. Lastly, I think that Paul should have spread the two stories she told at the very end of the presentation out. It was strange hearing a really captivating story and then having that mood broken by “Okay, here is my second story…” For me, that comment made the effect she was trying to portray to the audience go away. 

It was distracting for me to watch Paul read off of her notes during her presentation.