TED Talk Analysis - Reisa Sperling

     In this TED Talk presented at a special 2012 TEDMED conference focusing on health and medicine, neurologist Reisa Sperling presents her ideas on AD (Alzheimer's disease) dementia. The exact location was unfortunately not available. Sperling discusses how Alzheimer's disease is often looked at the wrong way, and that is part of why so many people are affected by it so intensely. She discusses the beginning signs of AD dementia and how patients can, and in fact should be, identified much earlier than they are currently.

     Sperling uses a picture of an iceberg to explain the pervasiveness of AD dementia — by the time it has been diagnosed in a patient, their brain had been affected for 10-20 years already. Hence, the diagnosis is "just the tip of the iceberg."

     Sperling appeals specifically to the audience's experiences from that day at the TEDMED conference by referencing previous talks from other speakers and explaining how her ideas build upon previous statistics presented about Alzheimer's. She then offers a series of slides to substantiate her claims on the positives of early dementia diagnosis. 

One of a multitude of slides pertaining to
AD dementia prevention.

     An example is the slide on the right. She uses this graph to explain how secondary prevention is the best option for AD dementia treatment at the moment. She gets her point across with a confident speaking approach. You can tell that Sperling had indeed studied the topic for a long time, and is passionate about preventing the most exacting effects of Alzheimer's earlier on in people's lives.

     What sets her apart from some of the other speakers at TEDMED 2012 is that she appears to have a lot of experience speaking in front of large groups. She knows that her audience is a healthcare-oriented crowd, and uses that to her advantage. They expected her to build upon the previous talks headed by renowned biologists such as E. O. Wilson, and she did just that. Sperling utilized tools to engage the audience, effectively keeping the talk from turning into a boring lecture.

Reisa Sperling exudes confidence, employing effective
 hand gestures to communicate her points effectively.

     One such tool was a small test done on the audience. She shows slides of faces with names underneath in rapid succession, to see how many people remember the names correctly afterward. She compares the approximate results (through hands raised in the crowd) with a graph showing performance levels of the hippocampus in the human populace. This graph is later used to explain that many people, even in their 40s-50s, have formations in their brain similar to those diagnosed with AD dementia. She does this by showing a picture of brain scans in normal and AD dementia-diagnosed older individuals.

Slide used by Sperling to help show the audience how
everyday individuals can develop Alzheimer's.

     The only thing that really stands out as possibly needing improvement is the actual length of the TED talk. Sperling's talk is on the outer edge of usual TED talk running time, at a little over 16 minutes. This would be fine, but the material is rather dense and can be hard to focus on for long periods of time. Even with a health-care oriented audience in mind, it might have helped if she shortened her explanations of some of the slides and graphs.