Alex Tran / alextranphotography.com

The third annual TEDxMcGill Conference took place on Sunday Nov. 13, and included talks from 15 inspiring speakers including world-renowned neuroscientist Brenda Milner, Olympic figure skater-turned-McGill MBA student Craig Buntin, and Alain Tascan, co-founder of Ubisoft Montreal. Themed “Redefining Reality,” and broken into three sequential “acts” of five talks each, the event aimed to enlighten viewers by taking them through the process of generating new, influential ideas and bringing them into reality.

The event was independently organized, but operates under the TED brand like hundreds of other TEDx events. Though run almost entirely by McGill students, TedxMcGill is open to the greater community and has been one of the most influential TEDx events in Canada in recent years.  TED, an acronym for “Technology, Education and Design,” is a non-profit organization that hosts global conferences and is committed to spreading world-changing ideas. Some of the world’s biggest figures in politics, science, and business have appeared on the main global TED stage, including Microsoft founder Bill Gates, former U.S. President Bill Clinton, and conservationist Jane Goodall.

The speakers at Sunday’s event, though unified by a desire to reshape the world around them, came from a diverse range of fields and backgrounds. Roughly half were McGill students with varied experiences in philanthropy, entrepreneurship, and social justice.

Alex Pritz, U2 environment, talked about a project he started that connects high school students from Montreal to those in the Philippines to discuss pressing environmental issues in their local communities. He travelled to the Philippines, where he taught students video-journalism to help them tell stories and draw attention to issues that matter to them.

Alain Tascan, who founded the Montreal divisions of both Electronic Arts and Ubisoft, recounted his experience from the world of game design and noted that society’s increasing desire for casual social games reflects a changing attitude towards shared social entertainment. He drew parallels between the recent explosion of simple mobile games and the rise of television in the 1950s.

Brenda Milner, one of McGill’s most prominent neuroscientists, discussed the importance of bilingualism to cognition.

“I really believe in languages as a builder of bridges, and as a great joy to oneself,” Milner said. “But what do great scientists have to say about [bilingualism]? They say it’s very good for the brain to do this kind of switching. Multilingualism is not going to protect you from Alzheimer’s, but if you have a multilingual brain … your inevitable decline with Alzheimer’s will be slowed.”

Audience input and interaction are a big part of the TEDx experience. Panel discussions welcome questions from the crowd, and TEDx attendees were encouraged to mingle with each other during breaks and change seats between acts.

June Lam, the event’s curator and director of the speakers team, spoke about the challenges of finding the right speakers, balancing the program between students and other community speakers, and finding a unifying theme to match the talks.

“It was never [about] going for the big names. We never said yes to anybody initially, [not] even the big speakers,”  Lam said.  “We always just said we wanted to develop a talk … and we would work with them to see what their passions were, what ideas they had, and where we could go. If there was a really great speaker, we weren’t going to say no to them just because they were, or weren’t, a student.”

“Once we had ideas of what speakers were interested, we started creating a story, which is …  act one, inspire new ideas; act two, connecting them; and act three, turning those ideas into action,” he explained.

Lam also discussed the addition of spoken word and a short improvised performance in two of the talks. TED talks are typically traditional, evocative speeches.

“As of recent times they’ve had more spoken word—they’ve had more performances,” he said. “It’s become more a culture, and I really embrace that, because I think there’s so much power in performance, and there’s a depth to the words and the performance that and you don’t necessarily get from just a talk.”