Daniel Pink TED Talk

Daniel Pink's TED talk threw out some very interesting ideas about the reality of science and how we have been thinking wrong. One of his very main ideas was about motivation. He did a lot of research and figured out that the motivation of money only works for very easy low level thinking problems, while when it comes to higher level ideas and puzzles, rewards actually stressed the thinker out. When a reward was given the person was motivated in a very logical small pathed way. This doesn't open up the window of thinking that you need to figure out harder puzzles for thinking outside the box. In fact, a reward is bad a in a puzzle problem circumstance because it narrows the persons focus when thinking about the problem. A very simple problem that he used as the example was the candle problem. Here is a picture of the problem unsolved.

The objective of this problem is to get the candle wax not to drip on the table. There are many ways to go about this but there is only one right answer. Here is a picture of the solved problem.

This is very easy if you think of the box that was holding the tacks a part of the equation. The point that he was trying to make is that a reward definitely makes us a lot faster at small focused tasks but when it came to the higher level thinking and problem solving problems, a reward was the worst because it narrowed the thinkers "vision" of how to solve the problem. David's speaking techniques were very effective because I was watching the video the whole entire time. Never once did my vision stray from the screen. His talking was constantly backed up by the screen behind him and he never looked back once. Also, his presentation style was very formal. He seemed to have the whole entire speech memorized word by word but he also had a little fun with it. I do think that Daniel's ideas are very legit and he backed each one of them up very well. I sincerely enjoyed his presentation and I am looking forward to more of these TED talks.