Name: 【TED】Karen Thompson Walker: What fear can teach us (What fear can teach us | Karen Thompson Walker)
Uploaded: 2015-07-26T22:00:00.000Z
Duration: 11 min 31 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Translator: Morton Bast Reviewer: Thu-Huong Ha

in one of the most remote regions of the Pacific Ocean,

20 American sailors watched their ship flood with seawater.

They'd been struck by a sperm whale, which had ripped

As their ship began to sink beneath the swells,

the men huddled together in three small whaleboats.

more than 1,000 miles from the nearest scrap of land.

These were the men of the whaleship Essex,

whose story would later inspire parts of "Moby Dick."

Even in today's world, their situation would be really dire,

but think about how much worse it would have been then.

No one on land had any idea that anything had gone wrong.

No search party was coming to look for these men.

So most of us have never experienced a situation

as frightening as the one in which these sailors found themselves,

but we all know what it's like to be afraid.

but I'm not sure we spend enough time thinking about

As we grow up, we're often encouraged to think of fear

as a weakness, just another childish thing to discard

And I think it's no accident that we think this way.

Neuroscientists have actually shown that human beings

So maybe that's why we think of fear, sometimes,

"Don't worry," we like to say to one another. "Don't panic."

In English, fear is something we conquer.

It's something we fight. It's something we overcome.

But what if we looked at fear in a fresh way?

What if we thought of fear as an amazing act of the imagination,

something that can be as profound and insightful

It's easiest to see this link between fear and the imagination

in young children, whose fears are often extraordinarily vivid.

When I was a child, I lived in California,

which is, you know, mostly a very nice place to live,

but for me as a child, California could also be a little scary.

I remember how frightening it was to see the chandelier

that hung above our dining table swing back and forth

and I sometimes couldn't sleep at night, terrified

that the Big One might strike while we were sleeping.

And what we say about kids who have fears like that

to leave these kinds of visions behind and grow up.

We learn that there are no monsters hiding under the bed,

and not every earthquake brings buildings down.

But maybe it's no coincidence that some of our most creative minds

fail to leave these kinds of fears behind as adults.

The same incredible imaginations that produced "The Origin of Species,"

"Jane Eyre" and "The Remembrance of Things Past,"

also generated intense worries that haunted the adult lives

of Charles Darwin, Charlotte BrontĂŤ and Marcel Proust.

So the question is, what can the rest of us learn about fear

Well let's return to the year 1819 for a moment,

to the situation facing the crew of the whaleship Essex.

Let's take a look at the fears that their imaginations

were generating as they drifted in the middle of the Pacific.

Twenty-four hours had now passed since the capsizing of the ship.

The time had come for the men to make a plan,

In his fascinating account of the disaster,

Nathaniel Philbrick wrote that these men were just about

as far from land as it was possible to be anywhere on Earth.

The men knew that the nearest islands they could reach

were the Marquesas Islands, 1,200 miles away.

But they'd heard some frightening rumors.

and several others nearby, were populated by cannibals.

So the men pictured coming ashore only to be murdered

but given the season, the captain was afraid

Now the last option was the longest, and the most difficult:

to sail 1,500 miles due south in hopes of reaching

a certain band of winds that could eventually

push them toward the coast of South America.

But they knew that the sheer length of this journey

would stretch their supplies of food and water.

To be eaten by cannibals, to be battered by storms,

These were the fears that danced in the imaginations of these poor men,

and as it turned out, the fear they chose to listen to

Now we might just as easily call these fears by a different name.

Because that's really what fear is, if you think about it.

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【TED】Karen Thompson Walker: What fear can teach us (What fear can teach us | Karen Thompson Walker)

fear

human

future

story