This TED Talk features TED curator Chris Anderson, recorded at TED studio in 2016.

Some people think that there's a TED Talk formula.

Give a talk on a round red rug.

Share a childhood story, divulge a personal secret, end with an inspiring core to action.

No. That's not how to think of a TED Talk.

In fact, if you overuse those devices, you're just going to come across as cliched or emotionally manipulative.

But there is one thing that all great TED Talks have in common, and I would like to share that thing with you.

Because over the past 12 years, I've had a ringside seat listening to many hundreds of amazing TED speakers like these.

I've helped them prepare their talks for prime time and learn directly from them

their secrets of what makes for a great talk.

And even though these speakers and their topics all seem completely different,

they actually do have one key

common ingredient. And it's this. Your number one task as a speaker is to transfer into your

listeners' minds an extraordinary gift, a strange and beautiful object that we call an idea. Let me show you what I mean. Here's Haley.

She is about to give a TED Talk and frankly, she's terrified.

Over the course of 18 minutes, 1,200 people, many of whom have never seen each other before,

are finding that their brains are starting to sink with Haley's brain and with each other.

They're literally beginning to exhibit the same brainwave patterns.

And I don't just mean that they're feeling the same emotions.

There's something even more startling happening. And let's take a look inside Haley's brain for a

moment. There are billions of interconnected neurons in an impossible tangle. But look, here,

right here, a few million of them are linked to each other in a way which represents a single idea.

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