Have you ever visited Ted.com? If not, total fail. It’s an expansive site with a monstrous archive of talks, speeches and performances by all sorts of public figures and organizations. Some are hilarious, some are sociologically powerful, and some are straight up jaw-dropping.

To lure you into checking it out from time to time (new videos are added every week!), I’ve compiled links to three interesting talks you can both enjoy and learn from at once.

1) Hans Rosling on Poverty.

In this talk, Swedish researcher, professor and doctor Hans Rosling takes a sociological approach on the declining rates of poverty in so-called ‘Third-World’ countries. He argues that, in fact, impoverished countries are creeping steadily forward along the same path to health and prosperity that Western, industrialized countries did - but at even faster rates. Additionally, Rosling utilizes animated data graphs - called ‘Gapminders’ - to supplement his talks; and trust me, you’ve never seen data presented as enthralling as this. Normally such data would put you to sleep; Rosling’s data illustrations bring the data to life.

(Hey! You can even make your own data map, pulling whatever data you could dream of comparing. It’s surprisingly enjoyable. http://www.gapminder.org/)

2) Dan Dennett on Consciousness

In this talk, Dan Dennett, a cognitive scientists and philosopher, claims we’re made of, approximately, “100 trillion little cellular robots,” and then asks: how is it possible that those cells can all come together, creating a human, and allow for consciousness? To Dennett, they can’t. Instead, he argues that our cellular make-up, especially that of our brain, whose computational circuitry has evolved to make us thing we know more about our surroundings then we really do. Unlike many traditional philosophers, Dennett believes that Free Will is thus actually a result of physical processes in the brain. In this talk, he utilizes a few ‘brain teasers’, if you will, to get his point across - so play along!

3) Pilobolus on Symbiosis

In this performance, two members of an uncannily innovative dance company, called Pilobolus, ‘dance’ their way through the ‘Symbiosis’ - which, as viewers themselves can choose, either imitates the birth of a relationship in general or details the interaction between two independent species, co-evolving together. In a word, it’s amazing. The way the dancers move is gracefully astounding, and it’s clear from their poses and movements that they’re influenced greatly by biology. In a sense, this performance evokes the pairing of arts and science. Make sure you catch the whole thing - the best moves are scattered throughout.