Deep ocean mysteries and wonders: Another amazement from TED-Ed

Throughout today, we’ll be sharing incredible video from our new TED-Ed channel.

In the deepest, darkest parts of the oceans are ecosystems with more diversity than a tropical rainforest. Taking us on a voyage into the ocean — from the deepest trenches to the remains of Titanic — marine biologist David Gallo explores the wonder and beauty of marine life. Length: 8:27.

This video is part of a TED-Ed series called Awesome Nature. Find more series on the TED-Ed channel on YouTube: youtube.com/TEDEd

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A treasure hunt for the mysteries of mind and brain

I’ve published a couple of free ebooks recently: Explore your blind spot shows you how to reveal the gap we all have in our visual experience of the world, and discusses what it means about consciousness that this gap is kept hidden from us most of the time. Control Your Dreams, co-written with Cathryn Bardsley and illustrated beautifully by Harriet Cameron, tells you how to have lucid dreams, those dreams where you realise you are dreaming and can take control over reality.

Both books are written as treasure hunts – travel guides, but for exploring inner space. When you start reading you will be told about the journey ahead, what you’ll need and how long it will take. Next we tell you about the treasure – some surprising or interesting feature of the mind and brain which is the core experience of the book. We tell you how to generate this experience for yourself, and the things to look out for, and what that experience might mean for our understanding of ourselves. We finish with “travellers’ tales”, which are reports from others who’ve experimented with the phenomenon and links to the scientific literature on the topic.

The core of psychology is experiences. Psychologists think about those experiences, turn them into theories, and try to settle arguments between themselves by generating new experiences – in the form of experiments. But the joy of psychological science is that everybody has access to the raw material. The books are a way of sharing that, an attempt to give away the raw material of psychological science, packaged as experiences for the reader.

The books are creative commons licensed, which means you download them, copy them, even modify them if you want to produced an improved version, and both are fully referenced so you can check up on any claims made in them. Science is naturally an open-source phenomenon, so it feels good to be doing some open source science writing.

Link: Explore Your Blindspot by Tom Stafford
Link: Control Your Dreams by Tom Stafford & Cathryn Bardsley, Illustrated by Harriet Cameron

Update 22 Jan: It looks like people are having problems downloading Control Your Dreams. This is something to do with the Smashwords site. Hopefully the issue will be fixed soon

Update 24 Jan: Fixed

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