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You have just been subjected
to a scientific experiment.

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Ha, ha, ha!

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We are trying to pose a question
and the question here was:

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What is the best strategy
to solve this kind of problems?

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You all solved two problems,
on sheet number 1 and 3,

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but different things happened
for each of you on sheet 2.

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We offered some of you a possible strategy
to solve this kind of problems.

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We told you how you can
think this problem.

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We asked others to think
how they solved the first problem.

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To reflect: what methodology did you use?
How did you face the problem?

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To the third group among you
we asked you to just relax,

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to close your eyes, breathe,
and calm down for a while.

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And then, you all solved
the second problem.

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The question we want to answer is:

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which of these 3 groups was better
at solving the second problem?

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Which of these three possible strategies
is better to solve these problems.

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Isn't it great?

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(Laughter)

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I love this.

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(Applause)

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Imagine teachers, with all that passion,

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that energy, that wisdom, and experience,

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if we could provide them
with a scientific view

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of what works and what doesn't.

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Which things work better than others.

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And it's not that difficult,
we just did it in 10 minutes.

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It's going to take us a couple
of weeks to process all this,

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but it wasn't that long.

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We hypothesize which may be the answer.

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Our hypothesis is that perhaps

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to reflect on how we solved
the problem the first time,

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can make us better to solve
a similar problem the second time.

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But the truth is, the answer is:
we do not know.

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And that is what's great about
this type of scientific experiments.

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It let us ask questions on things
that are very important for us,

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but for which we don't know the answer.

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This is the idea of what we do.

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We call it TEDxperiments,

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it's something we started
two years ago in this same room,

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and we already did TEDxperiments
in two TEDxRíodelaPlata events.

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This is the fifth experiment we'll do,

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and within a few weeks
we're going to share the results.

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But let me show you...

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some things that happened two years ago.

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We did an experiment where we wanted
to see what was the effect

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when one person tells another one

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something that is important to the former,
and the latter doesn't care.

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I don't know if this ever happened to you.

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(Laughter)

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Then we did the following: we handed them
out envelopes like we did today.

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To the odd rows,
the note in the envelope said,

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"You are going to tell a story
that is important in your lives."

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While the even rows were instructed,

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"You will listen," but not the same way
to everyone like today.

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Some had to pay a lot of attention,

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not to take their eyes off the person.

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The others were asked
to totally ignore them,

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to check their cellphones,
to do other things, etc.

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And after that we asked questions.

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"What did you feel?"
"About your own story?"

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"How's your self-esteem?" and such things.

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And amazing things happened.

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In particular, around that row,
there was a lady sitting.

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She attended the event with her daughter
and her grandchildren.

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And she had to tell a story.

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The person in the back row
she was telling the story to,

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was a boy of 12 she didn't met before.

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And his instructions were to ignore her.

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She began her story passionately,

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she was moved by her own history,
but this kid wasn't caring at all.

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(Laughter)

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He began to feel bad about himself
because he had this contradiction,

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he was listening to the story
and beginning to be moved by it,

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but he wanted to follow the rules as well.

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The rest of the four minutes
were very uncomfortable.

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She obviously didn't know
he had to follow this instruction.

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She hated him, he hated himself,

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the 4 minutes were over
and when we revealed what had happened,

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she turned around, they hugged,
and they both started to cry.

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An interesting thing of this experiment

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is that of all the experiments
we did so far, it was the first one

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where we found something new,

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something the scientific community
didn't know about.

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This is not a game,
we are creating knowledge.

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And we sent it for publication.

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It was just accepted in a worldwide,
top notch science magazine,

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and this is the article's title
that will soon be published;

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and the TEDxperiments team published it.

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Let's give it to them because it is...

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(Applause)

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The title is a bit cryptic, right?

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It's in English, so I said, well,
what if we typed it in the browser...

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[Google Translator]
(Laughter)

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And when I typed it in the Translator,
something like this read,

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[It bothers me that you check your phone

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and don't pay me attention
when I'm talking.]

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(Laughter)
(Applause)

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Last year, when we held our event
in October, that very, very large event,

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the world's largest TEDx,

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we did another experiment,
this time, with 10,000 people.

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We asked all these 10,000 people
to play thumb wars in couples.

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Sometimes with eyes closed,
and we'd give them different instructions.

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And we wanted to test

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our capacity to cooperate vs. to compete.

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If we are able to cooperate or not,
when cooperation is the best strategy.

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And it turns out that, in many cases,

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we end up competing when it's unnecessary,

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when the best for all is to collaborate.

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And that also gave a result
that is being processed,

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and it will probably, hopefully,
become another article

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that will contribute to human knowledge.

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But here so far, we were keeping the data.

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Now we decided to launch this.

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And the TEDxperiments website
went online today.

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The idea of this site is to make public

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the results of all the experiments
we did so far.

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Of the 4 we did until yesterday,
3 were already uploaded,

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the fourth will be uploaded there soon.

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And you can see it in:
tedxriodelaplata.org/tedxperiments

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today when you come back home.

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This fills me with joy
because we believe that in these events

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is good to come and listen
to ideas and learn;

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maybe sometimes we have a new idea
when we listen to other ideas.

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But given the amazing community we are,

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why not also create new knowledge?

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Knowledge that is relevant,
in this case for education;

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for how we communicate and how we relate.

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I invite you all to have
a critical eye, to ask questions,

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and to try to validate them
in a way they become irrefutable.

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So they can help others learn
and teach in a different way.

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Thank you.

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(Applause)