Seven members of the Tufts community, including students, a professor and an alumnus, delivered short presentations on their unique ideas as part of the fifth edition of the Tufts Idea Exchange .
TEX, which is part of the Institute for Global Leadership's Synaptic Scholars Program, is based off of the popular Technology, Entertainment, Design conferences. This year's presentations consisted of a vast array of ideas, ranging from the role coffee shops play in our daily lives to the importance of hip-hop sampling and the possibilities of synthetic biology.
The evening began with a lecture from Maryanne Wolf, a professor in the Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Development, who spoke about her efforts to increase literacy rates among children around the world.
"Most of you take it completely for granted -- you think that reading is a natural thing," Wolf said. "It could not be unnatural ... It is a platform for releasing the potential of children to learn beyond whatever their backgrounds are ... Yet 72 million children in this world are not only not literate, they will never ever have an opportunity [to learn to read]."
Wolf explained that she and her team at the Center for Reading and Language Research are working to develop a digital learning program that enables children to learn to read on their own and without a human teacher.
"What we want to do is begin to make templates for people in different languages and use it as a way not just to share knowledge ... but also break down barriers about who is 'other,'" she said. "One of the most important things we want to do is use this open platform for other people to contribute to other forms of literacy."
After Wolf concluded her talk, senior Noha Ahmed followed with her presentation, titled "Demystifying the Bean," during which she spoke about the prevalence of coffee and coffee shops in everyday life. Calling coffee a "liquid cup of motivation," Ahmed explained that it is a gateway to adulthood and gives people a much needed, albeit false, sense of productivity.
"For college students, coffee shops are an escape, an escape from sterile and often ill-vented library environment that is Tisch, and a place for us to get away from campus, get away from our friends without it being weird, and sit down and just do some work," Ahmed said. "What's more is that coffee shops harness creativity ... Research has found that the ambient sound of coffee shops, the sounds of coffee grinding, orders being taken and people chatting is just the perfect level of noise to provide a productive distraction."
Junior Scott Delisle spoke next about the connection between mental illness and artistic talent. He discussed how suicide rates among artistic groups are more than 18 times higher than those for non-artists, and that the most productive artists were those who didn't treat their illnesses. Delisle, however, said that people should not be left to suffer simply because it may increase their creativity and suggested that art can and should be used as a cure for mental illness.
"Art is all about taking something that, on its own, is totally unremarkable ... and making the audience feeling something new or something familiar in a new way through experiencing it," he said. "We all have our own aspirations, our own stories to tell and our own paintings to paint."
Senior Anna Troein spoke after Delisle about the need for Tufts to step back and reexamine the activities in their seemingly always-busy lives. Troein explained that being busy should not be a competition, and people should only participate in activities in which they are genuinely interested.
"When you commit yourself, commit yourself 100 percent," she said. "When you're not willing to do that anymore, let everyone else know."
For graduate student Dylan Portelance, hip-hop is a fantastic mode of self-expression because of its endless sampling possibilities. Adding onto the idea of open-sourcing material, Portelance explained how this process provides artists with a limitless palette.
"If we sample each other rather than rely on our isolated abilities and resources, we have the power to not only create a vastly greater range of contributions to the world, [but] we also could draw from a vastly greater range of artistic resources," he said. "Creativity could be our culture."
Petar Todorov added that for him, this sense of creativity lies in the field of synthetic biology. Todorov, a senior, explained that recent science now allows humans to use DNA as a building block to alter life forms and potentially create new ones. He addressed concerns that genetically modified organisms are unethical, unhealthy or potentially dangerous, but said that most people who use synthetic biology want to use it to help, not hurt, society.
"It's going to revolutionize our health, our industry and our everyday life, so get ready," he said.
Senior Gavin Murphy followed Todorov with a presentation titled "What If I Told You Just a Story" in which he spoke about the power of storytelling. According to Murphy, listening to someone's story can help others connect with that person more deeply.
"What's most captivating for me about stories is the transfer of truth that happens," he said. "The way you end up extending that moment is through the connection that you build while you're there. You can just tell a story, and then you can leave, or you can think about how you're building the story."
