(Laughter)
Now that was cheating, because there was nothing in the world my sister would want more than not to be Amy the hurt five year-old little sister, but Amy the special unicorn. Of course, this was an option that was open to her brain at no point in the past. And you could see how my poor, manipulated sister faced conflict, as her little brain attempted to devote resources to feeling the pain and suffering and surprise she just experienced, or contemplating her new-found identity as a unicorn. And the latter won out. Instead of crying, instead of ceasing our play, instead of waking my parents, with all the negative consequences that would have ensued for me, instead a smile spread across her face and she scrambled right back up onto the bunk bed with all the grace of a baby unicorn ... (Laughter) ... with one broken leg.
What we stumbled across at this tender age of just five and seven -- we had no idea at the time -- was something that was going be at the vanguard of a scientific revolution occurring two decades later in the way that we look at the human brain. What we had stumbled across is something called positive psychology, which is the reason that I'm here today and the reason that I wake up every morning.
When I first started talking about this research outside of academia, out with companies and schools, the very first thing they said to never do is to start your talk with a graph. The very first thing I want to do is start my talk with a graph. This graph looks boring, but this graph is the reason I get excited and wake up every morning. And this graph doesn't even mean anything; it's fake data. What we found is --
(Laughter)
If I got this data back studying you here in the room, I would be thrilled, because