Video 1

Memory
It's a common saying that elephants never forget,
but these magnificent animals are more than giant walking hard drives.
The more we learn about elephants,
the more it appears that their impressive memory
is only one aspect of an incredible intelligence
that makes them some of the most social, creative,
and benevolent creatures on Earth.
Unlike many proverbs, the one about elephant memory
is scientifically accurate.
Elephants know every member in their herd,
able to recognize as many as 30 companions by sight or smell.
This is a great help when migrating
or encountering other potentially hostile elephants.
They also remember and distinguish particular cues that signal danger
and can recall important locations long after their last visit.

Recognition
But it's the memories unrelated to survival that are the most fascinating.
Elephants remember not only their herd companions
but other creatures who have made a strong impression on them.
In one case, two circus elephants that had briefly performed together
rejoiced when crossing paths 23 years later.
This recognition isn't limited to others of their species.
Elephants have also recognized humans they've bonded with after decades apart.
All of this shows that elephant memory goes beyond responses to stimuli.

Brain
Looking inside their heads, we can see why.
The elephant boasts the largest brain of any land mammal,
as well as an impressive encephalization quotient.
This is the size of the brain relative to what we'd expect
for an animal's body size,
and the elephant's EQ is nearly as high as a chimpanzee's.
And despite the distant relation,
convergent evolution has made it remarkably similar to the human brain,
with as many neurons and synapses
and a highly developed hippocampus and cerebral cortex.

Elephant memory
It is the hippocampus, strongly associated with emotion, that aids recollection
by encoding important experiences into long-term memories.
The ability to distinguish this importance makes elephant memory
a complex and adaptable faculty beyond rote memorization.
It's what allows elephants who survived a drought in their youth
to recognize its warning signs in adulthood,
which is why clans with older matriarchs have higher survival rates.
Unfortunately, it's also what makes elephants one of the few non-human animals
to suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder.
The cerebral cortex, on the other hand, enables problem solving,
which elephants display in many creative ways.
They also tackle problems cooperatively,
sometimes even outwitting the researchers and manipulating their partners.

Elephant communication
And they've grasped basic arithmetic, keeping track of the relative amounts
of fruit in two baskets after multiple changes.
The rare combination of memory and problem solving
can explain some of elephants' most clever behaviors,
but it doesn't explain some of the things we're just beginning to learn
about their mental lives.
Elephants communicate using everything from body signals and vocalizations,
to infrasound rumbles that can be heard kilometers away.
And their understanding of syntax suggests that they have their own language and
grammar.
This sense of language may even go beyond simple communication.

Elephant art
Elephants create art by carefully choosing and combining
different colors and elements.
They can also recognize twelve distinct tones of music and recreate melodies.
And yes, there is an elephant band.
But perhaps the most amazing thing about elephants
is a capacity even more important than cleverness:
their sense of empathy, altruism, and justice.
Elephants are the only non-human animals to mourn their dead,
performing burial rituals and returning to visit graves.

Empathy
They have shown concern for other species, as well.
One working elephant refused to set a log down into a hole
where a dog was sleeping,
while elephants encountering injured humans have sometimes stood guard
and gently comforted them with their trunk.
On the other hand, elephant attacks on human villages
have usually occurred right after massive poachings or cullings,
suggesting deliberate revenge.
When we consider all this evidence,
along with the fact that elephants are one of the few species
who can recognize themselves in a mirror,
it's hard to escape the conclusion
that they are conscious, intelligent, and emotional beings.

Outro
Unfortunately, humanity's treatment of elephants does not reflect this,
as they continue to suffer from habitat destruction in Asia,
ivory poaching in Africa, and mistreatment in captivity worldwide.
Given what we now know about elephants
and what they continue to teach us about animal intelligence,
it is more important than ever to ensure
that what the English poet John Donne described as "nature's great masterpiece"
does not vanish from the world's canvas.

Video 2

Transcriber: Joseph Geni Reviewer: Morton Bast

When I was 27 years old,
I left a very demanding job in management consulting
for a job that was even more demanding: teaching.
I went to teach seventh graders math
in the New York City public schools.
And like any teacher, I made quizzes and tests.
I gave out homework assignments.
When the work came back, I calculated grades.
What struck me was that IQ was not the only difference
between my best and my worst students.
Some of my strongest performers did not have stratospheric IQ scores.
Some of my smartest kids weren't doing so well.
And that got me thinking.
The kinds of things you need to learn in seventh grade math,
sure, they're hard: ratios, decimals, the area of a parallelogram.
But these concepts are not impossible,
and I was firmly convinced that every one of my students
could learn the material
if they worked hard and long enough.
After several more years of teaching,
I came to the conclusion that what we need in education
is a much better understanding of students and learning
from a motivational perspective,
from a psychological perspective.
In education, the one thing we know how to measure best is IQ.
But what if doing well in school and in life
depends on much more
than your ability to learn quickly and easily?
So I left the classroom,
and I went to graduate school to become a psychologist.
I started studying kids and adults
in all kinds of super challenging settings,
and in every study my question was,
who is successful here and why?
My research team and I went to West Point Military Academy.
We tried to predict which cadets
would stay in military training and which would drop out.
We went to the National Spelling Bee
and tried to predict which children would advance farthest in competition.
We studied rookie teachers working in really tough neighborhoods,
asking which teachers are still going to be here in teaching
by the end of the school year,
and of those, who will be the most effective
at improving learning outcomes for their students?
We partnered with private companies, asking,
which of these salespeople is going to keep their jobs?
And who's going to earn the most money?
In all those very different contexts,
one characteristic emerged as a significant predictor of success.
And it wasn't social intelligence.
It wasn't good looks, physical health,
and it wasn't IQ.
It was grit.
Grit is passion and perseverance for very long-term goals.
Grit is having stamina.
Grit is sticking with your future, day in, day out,
not just for the week, not just for the month,
but for years,
and working really hard to make that future a reality.
Grit is living life like it's a marathon, not a sprint.
A few years ago,
I started studying grit in the Chicago public schools.
I asked thousands of high school juniors
to take grit questionnaires,
and then waited around more than a year
to see who would graduate.
Turns out that grittier kids
were significantly more likely to graduate,
even when I matched them on every characteristic I could measure,
things like family income,
standardized achievement test scores,
even how safe kids felt when they were at school.
So it's not just at West Point or the National Spelling Bee
that grit matters.
It's also in school,
especially for kids at risk for dropping out.
To me, the most shocking thing about grit
is how little we know,
how little science knows, about building it.
Every day, parents and teachers ask me,
"How do I build grit in kids?
What do I do to teach kids a solid work ethic?
How do I keep them motivated for the long run?"
The honest answer is,
I don't know.
(Laughter)
What I do know is that talent doesn't make you gritty.
Our data show very clearly
that there are many talented individuals
who simply do not follow through on their commitments.
In fact, in our data, grit is usually unrelated
or even inversely related to measures of talent.
So far, the best idea I've heard about building grit in kids
is something called "growth mindset."
This is an idea developed at Stanford University by Carol Dweck,
and it is the belief that the ability to learn is not fixed,
that it can change with your effort.
Dr. Dweck has shown
that when kids read and learn about the brain
and how it changes and grows in response to challenge,
they're much more likely to persevere when they fail,
because they don't believe that failure is a permanent condition.
So growth mindset is a great idea for building grit.
But we need more.
And that's where I'm going to end my remarks,
because that's where we are.
That's the work that stands before us.
We need to take our best ideas, our strongest intuitions,
and we need to test them.
We need to measure whether we've been successful,
and we have to be willing to fail, to be wrong,
to start over again with lessons learned.
In other words, we need to be gritty
about getting our kids grittier.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Video 3

With social media sites being used by ⅓ of the entire world, they’ve clearly had
an major influence on society. But what about our bodies? Here are 5 crazy ways
that social
media and the internet are affecting your brain right now!
Can’t log off? Surprisingly, 5-10% of internet users are actually unable to control how
much
time they spend online. Though it’s a psychological addiction as opposed to a
substance addiction,
brain scans of these people actually show a similar impairment of regions that those
with drug dependence have. Specifically, there is a clear degradation of white matter
in
the regions that control emotional p
rocessing, attention and decision making. Because social
media provides immediate rewards with very little effort required, your brain begins
to rewire itself, making you desire these stimulations. And you begin to crave more
of this neurological excitement after each interaction. Sounds a little like a drug,
right?
We also see a shift when looking at multi-tasking. You might think that those who
use social
media or constantly switch between work and websites are better at multitasking, but
studies
have found that when comparing heavy media users to others, they perform much
worse during
task switching tests. Increased multi-tasking online reduces your brains ability to filter
out interferences, and can even make it harder for your brain to commit information
to memory.
Like when your phone buzzes in the middle of productive work. Or wait...did it even
buzz? Phantom Vibration Syndrome is a relatively new psychological phenomenon
where you think
you felt your phone go off, but it didn’t. In one study, 89% of test subjects said they
experienced this at least once every two weeks. It would seem that our brains now
perceive
an itch as an actual vibration from our phone. As crazy as it seems, technology has
begun
to rewire our nervous systems - and our brains are being triggered in a way they
never have
been before in history.
Social Media also triggers a release of dopamine - the feel good chemical. Using
MRI scans,
scientist found that the reward centres in people’s brains are much more active when
they are talking about their own views, as opposed to listening to others. Not so
surprising
- we all love talking about ourselves right? But it turns out that while 30-40% of face-
to-face
conversations involve communicating our own experiences, around 80% of social
media communication
is self involved. The same part of your brain related to orgasms, motivation and love
are
stimulated by your social media use - and even more so when you know you have
an audience.
Our body is physiologically rewarding us for talking about ourselves online!
But it’s not all so self involved. In fact, studies on relationships have found that
partners
tend to like each other more if they meet for the first time online rather than with
a face to face interaction. Whether it’s because people are more anonymous or
perhaps
more clear about their future goals, there is a statistical increase in successful
partnerships
that started online. So while the internet has changed our verbal communication with
increased physical separation, perhaps the ones that matter most end up even
closer.
Speaking of social media, we had you ask us questions on twitter, instagram,
facebook,
tumblr, google+ and every other social platform we could find and did a Q&A Video
over on
AsapTHOUGHT! So if you feel getting some insider info on AsapSCIENCE and
behind the scenes,
check it out with the link in the description!
Got a burning question you want answered? Ask it in the comments or on Facebook
and Twitter.
We also finally got a PO Box, for all of you amazing science lovers who have
requested
to send us mail or other stuff over the years. And we’d love to hear from all of you!
So
feel free use the address on the screen or in the description box.
And subscribe for more weekly science videos!