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Tali Sharot
Author and Professor, Cognitive Neuroscience
University College London and MIT
Speaker Bio
Tali Sharot is a professor of cognitive neuroscience at University College London and MIT. She is the founder and director of the Affective Brain Lab. She has written for outlets including The New York Times, Time, The Washington Post, has been a repeated guest on CNN, NBC, MSNBC, a presenter on the BBC, and served as an advisor for global companies and government projects. Her work has won her prestigious fellowships and prizes from the Wellcome Trust, American Psychological Society, British Psychological Society and others. Her popular TED talks have accumulated more than a dozen million views. She is the author of award-winning books: The Optimism Bias and The Influential Mind.
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Session
Monday, 14 September, 2026 05:15 PM - 06:00 PM BST
Guest Keynote: Look Again — How to Notice and Change
Tali Sharot,
Author and Professor, Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London and MIT
Even stimulating jobs, breathtaking works of art, an exciting new gadget, lose their sparkle after a while. We desensitize to what is wonderful around us. We also stop noticing what is not-so-great: cracks in a relationship, a culture of fraud that developed slowly within a company or the gradual rise of misinformation. It is not that we are lazy or stupid. It is simply that our brain evolved to respond to what is new and different, not to things that are constant or change gradually. As a result, we stop noticing what is suboptimal and so fail to try and make changes. We also stop noticing what is good in our lives and so we don’t feel the joy. But what if we could ‘dishabituate’? Based on her new book Look Again, Sharot shares what psychology and biology tell us about why we stop noticing both the great and not-so-great things around us and how to regain sensitivity in the office, at home, online, and at the store, so we can enjoy what is good and change what’s not.
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