We’re back with our first TED Talk Club of the year on 20th February and we have two special guests on our expert panel – new MII President Andrea O’Neill and, all the way from the US, Michael Lang.

 The Reflective Practitioner himself, Michael Lang, is perhaps the most famous mediator in the world. If not, he’s probably in the top 1.

Registration is free on clr.ie/137293

The videos we watch and analyse in the MII TED Talk Club aren’t about mediation. They are about human behaviour and communication, so could be relevant to all sorts of situations where people interact.

Michael and the panel  (regular panellists Bob Cree-Hay and Ilona Kupp-Lieck will also be there) will be discussing “How language shapes the way we think”, a brilliant TED Talk from cognitive scientist Lera Boroditsky.
There are about 7,000 languages spoken around the world — and they all have different sounds, vocabularies and structures. But do they shape the way we think? Cognitive scientist Lera Boroditsky shares examples of language — from an Aboriginal community in Australia that uses cardinal directions instead of left and right to the multiple words for blue in Russian — that suggest the answer is a resounding yes. “The beauty of linguistic diversity is that it reveals to us just how ingenious and how flexible the human mind is,” Boroditsky says. “Human minds have invented not one cognitive universe, but 7,000.

View our previous TED Talk Club recordings on our YouTube playlist