Memory and Mindfulness | Nima Veiseh | TEDxRhodes

you [Music] this talk is unique in two ways first it's among the first TED Talks ever to be filmed in 360 virtual reality so in case you get tired of looking at my face you're more than welcome to look around the studio I'm in and the paintings and the other artifacts in the room and just listen to my voice the second way that this talk is unique is that I've been asked to go beyond the standard Ted motto of ideas worth sharing and instead focus on a value with sharing today the value I'd like to share with you is a concept I call tuning and how we can live more productive happier lives by learning how to manage our own memories and experiences so what is tuning tuning is a way of managing your mouth as we get older our memories accumulate and ultimately help to form the core of our identity and how we relate to the world if you can actively manage those memories and learn how they shape you then you can start to maximize your harmony that you feel inside you around you and Beyond you but before we dive into that let me please introduce myself my name is Nemo Vasa and I'm an academic researcher focusing on sustainability and systems I'm also a professional artist and a socially conscious clothing designer I have a rare condition called hyperthymesia or h sam also known as highly superior autobiographical memory it means I can recall every moment of every day of my life as if it were film now people study this condition have confirmed only about 50 cases worldwide so there aren't too many of us I've had this condition for over 15 years but if I only started talking publicly about it this year that's because I realized that just like for everyone my memory and my experiences helped to shape Who I am and how I see the world and how I create my art today I hope to share my challenges as lessons for you in navigating your memory one interesting aspect of hyperthymesia is that everyone with the condition seems to have a trigger something that sparks this ability scientists haven't exactly been able to figure out why it happens but it seems that some sort of important moment or event in people's live sets it off like perhaps the Deaf in the family or the first day of school my memory started on December 5th mm and it was just happen to be the day I met my very first girlfriend or I guess when love and interpersonal harmony became a focus of my life living with hyperthymesia means that remember life not like photographs or flash frames but in terms of film or VHS with all the sights sounds smells joys and pains that go with every moment here's the different biggest demonstrate in my memory and yours think about the clothes that you're wearing right now how the fabric feels against your skin the color what was going through your mind when you picked them out any anxiety or anticipation for the day do you remember though what you wore yesterday how about last week how about six years ago on the same day I do and not only do remember what I wore but if you're with me I would remember what you wore to and where we were what we talked about and you know all the other times that you'd won that sweater before and what you're doing and how we felt and so on this means also that I won't forget you either now having a near perfect memory isn't all funny games in fact forgetting is something that scientists are finding may have developed as an evolutionary advantage most of the information we take in is distracted and largely not useful for survival now the typically with a more important something is to you and the more quickly you can you can you can recall it and things that aren't as important either get buried or forgotten while your memory has a garbage bin - not I just keep storing and the challenge of manually sorting through and managing all this information is what has taught me tuning it's easy for most people to recall important or traumatic events in their lives for example think about where you were in 9/11 where were you the first time you heard the news who told you what was the weather like that day were you running late that morning most people don't remember September 10th with that level of detail but September 11th absolutely so for me to put it bluntly every day of my life it has the same impact on my memory as 9/11 had for other people every moment experience is a blunt force trauma that imprints itself in my memory I don't have the luxury of mental shortcuts or heuristics to help tell me that one data point is more important than another I can recall every moment in my life equally the important memories don't surface faster than the benign ones I can recall and re-experience waiting in line at the grocery store just as easily as I can ruin a marriage counselor migraines filing system doesn't prioritize my memories for me so I'm forced to teach myself how to manage overwhelming amounts of information and thoughts and feelings because while your emotions and feelings fade over time mine don't but we all go through overwhelming situations and things that are important to us and poor members from a breakup to a passing of someone close and being forced to deal with these moments in real ways has given me the tools to live happily and productively through this concept and practice that I call tuning and if I can teach myself how to deal with this information overload and manage the distractions that come with it and to try to be present in each moment I really believe I can teach anyone the best example of how I'm forced attune because of my condition is through the age-old saying forgive and forget now because I can't forget I must learn to genuinely forgive not just other people but myself as well which is often harder now practicing tuning is what has helped me to adapt and ultimately forgiveness is the reestablishing the connection a way of finding growth and harmony through that connection now my memories are subject the same biases as anyone elses and can obviously distort how I remember things but because I retain more data about myself and the things that happen around me than the average person I do get to see a bigger picture than most other people and can hold a mirror albeit perhaps some oddly distorted one up to the world around me I want to be your mirror to help you reflect - so tuning is the act of embracing the connections within and around us managing our blind spots and finding the resonance of it within everything around us so there are three specific ways in which I use my memories and experiences to help me to myself to the world these are intrapersonal interpersonal and extra personal interpersonal is the relationship you have with yourself interpersonal is the connection with your friends families co-workers and other people in your lives extra personal is the tuning and connection and empathy share with those you haven't even met yet each of these ways of tuning and these ways of Management memory about the ways that I use to help me adapt and shortcutting these connections and filling in these blanks can accidentally rob us of the growth opportunity or to be able the ability to see the situation holistically it will hurt your ability to tune so let's think about intra personal connections your connection to yourself and your own value system now your own value system or about your way of prioritizing your memories and experiences whether it was imparted to you by your parents community or other social pressures you've still the way to tune into yourself and the most common way this manifests is through your work and the passion with which you pursue it we followed up tune intra personally when we haven't aligned ourselves externally with our internal values one example of how I've refined my tuning is working as an academic because I enjoy breaking down the world in terms of data and systems and through my research I like discovering the harmony in these external systems it helps me find harmony ultimately within myself and we often do things that were quote unquote good at but we actually tend to think of life backwards the reality is that the things we love and the things that we're good at are actually things that we remember better than others our passions reveal themselves to us this way we just have to listen I became an academic researcher precisely because my memory my memory gives me a unique relatively large raw data set that I can use when looking at design and sustainability of the natural and economic systems around me if you love making cakes for example it's something you'll happily obsess over until it becomes your primary preoccupation and then perhaps your eventually your real occupations the important thing to realize is that you are enough your passions and the way that your memory shapes your world is part of who you are and you should never make yourself think otherwise now while my career started as an academic researcher as a way of discovering my passions and find a way to to an intro personally and find my into a personal harmony there are two major ways that we are connected world both interpersonally and extra personal and the same way we all are and I went about exploring also how I can practice tuning myself to those interpersonal connections are those you have with the people in your life this tuning is about reconciling yourself with the energy of those around you and the memories that tell us that we should feel happy about this person or sad about this person and the shortcuts we make in our judgments toward people we fall out of tune interpersonally because our memory is filled with extremes someone did us a big favor here or they broke a promise there and we over rely on those moments in order to tune ourselves to those relationships I didn't even pick up a paintbrush until after college and now I'm a professional painter I've been very fortunate to have my work featured in the BBC and NPR and to be able to talk about my unique painting method basically what I do is I take a memory moment or natural phenomenon maybe that I love for a person listening to someone play guitar or watching a sunset and distilling that into a single point in space in time and then exploding it as a real-world artifact on canvas since my memory allows me to remember nearly every dimension of a moment or connection a relationship I'm able to break that memory up into many little parts and layers and then delicately translate it onto canvas as it beautifully and completely tuned harmony extra personal tuning is the connection and empathy you share with those you haven't met yet that the thing you feel towards Syrian refugees you see on the news and the connection you may feel as someone you admire like Einstein or LeBron James we fall out of to an extra personally because again we have a lot of distractive data that keeps us from harmonizing with the world around us we have the news telling us what's important textbooks telling us what to think each giving us one angle to a story or system that has more moving parts than we could ever keep track of to help with our own extra personal tuning I recently founded a socially conscious clothing line called dress abstract which is built on my experience and tuning as both academic and as artists I've been fortunate enough to have travel to 40 something countries so far in my life and during those trips I noticed brilliant women and men in each of these places who were experts in fabrics and art and you too may have seen clothing items and shops and gifts made by talented locals during your own travels I saw a chance to harmonize art fashion and sustainability through an innovative way of thinking about clothing I didn't want to approach clothing as just fabric but rather as Hayat as you may say here I wanted to give clothing a chance it deserves to be enriching and intelligent and also for the creation process to be a harmonious sustainable system from start to finish so to start we use technology to translate the work of artists in canvas to fabric because after all clothing is just another canvas at the same time we're socially conscious and that our products either handmade or assembled with the help of refugees or displaced peoples who were fabric experts in their home countries but otherwise wouldn't have their opportunity to practice their own intrapersonal passions when you force yourself or are forced as I bet to confront the reality of the harmony or discord around us we start to automatically tune to the world around us and then you can't deny the suffering that they must feel and you feel compelled to take action your own way like volunteering your time for a cause and that's what helps you to to an extra personal so why does tuning seem to get harder as we get older and what does it have to do with memory and what can we do about it I'll try to answer this with a metaphor for memory aging and tuning a perspective I'd like to share with you that I know you can take you with you wherever you go now imagine you're alone treading water in an ocean of your memories there's no land in sight nothing to grab on to so you're forced to continue to sweat every drop of water is a memory experience that you've had and as your life rains down experience upon you it accumulates in that ocean beneath you and whether we like it or not those traumatic experiences and memories create waves and currents most of the time that are unnoticeable that push us this way or that way while we're treading water for example let's say we're in elementary school and I get a bad grade on an exam as a ten year old I feel ashamed there's this public pressure to perform and a sickening reaction to my gut I like ah I can't believe it happened because it's terrible grade but then ten years later in college I get a bad grade on exam I get that same sickening reaction and I'm like man where did that come from and I realize that it's actually referencing back to my childhood and of course it sounds like a cliche right you know the doctor's office and the shrink says oh it's going back to childhood and that's what you're referencing and in a large part it's true everything that's faded deep into the past gets put into that ocean of the subconscious and ultimately we are the average of our most recent memories and this is what makes up the upper layers of that ocean and the distant memories are we make up the deeper parts the problem is that tuning requires us to be able to see the entire ocean not just across the waves which the ocean floor as well now how does she get to be there and how did I get to be this way so let's take a step back to our childhood or even further back to when we were babies when I look at my baby cousin's eyes I see someone who's just absorbing the whole world and all this data completely unabashedly fearlessly and there's no ocean there they're just absorbing they're seeing the rain and the light come in from the sky from all these new memories and experiences they're just absorbing it raining down on them then by the time we had childhood we start developing friendships and insecurities and there's been enough rain and memory accumulation that we feel like were kind of treading in 10 feet of water in the subconscious now let's fast-forward to adulthood now there's a always dark water undress and you can't possibly see at the bottom there all these accumulated lost memories and ultimately what does this mean for us we overthink it and the more water we have to tread on the more of a loan we feel but the important question proposing is this how much more energy does it take to tread in a thousand feet of water than in just 10 feet of water and the answer is zero it's the exact same amount of energy because all we should ever be focusing on is the top layer or first few inches of what the problem is that we psych ourselves out and we get in our own way and we have all these subconscious memories and all these social pressures and all this angst that gets accumulated deep in our ocean and as the sea level rises we spend more energy panicking as we get older trying to keep our heads above water now this is not to say that as adults we don't have accumulated responsibilities and the growing responsibility of caring for ourselves or perhaps a family but in the end the process is the same will always focus down in the dark water under us and what we what might be lurking there the memories that we can't access that still affect us and cause us to not hear the right to me so ultimately what we need do to become better at tuning is to be mindful and aware of the incomplete distractive data in our own head those currents and waves in the ocean below us that push us along so what I'd like to leave you with is the following instead of treading water worrying about the rain that keeps falling down and making the ocean deeper the waves that might crash against us stop fighting the depth and bring awareness back to the surface of the ocean where you are by turning around and facing the sky and ignoring the dark water under you and that's how you can best manage your memory from getting in your own way and getting in the way of your tuning because ultimately if you let the superfluous the data distract you it's going to prevent you from tuning intrapersonal e interpersonally and extra personal and that will get in the way of you achieving your harmony with the world around you and you hear this countless times in movies books songs and every media that exists across cultures and religions carpe diem be present be mindful life is precious life is short be present so what I can tell you is when I look into my own ocean and look back at my memories and my struggle with how to tune myself in the end the most important thing is to always bring yourself back to time zero bring yourself back to now to that top inch of the ocean water at the ocean's surface the water actually floating on in order to align yourself better with the future everything below that is the past and everything above is the future so if you stop worrying about treading water and fighting the past and you just turn over and look over the sky and face the new memories that comes with it it doesn't matter how much water is under you then you'll be able to easily tune yourself in the three major ways and find yourself more productive and prosperous because you won't be exhausting yourself focusing on past memories and issues that distract you from resonating with the world around you and becoming your best self so go out there and create you can't stop the flood you can only rise above it thank you so much for listening I look forward to meeting you soon and have a wonderful day you [Music]

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 67,352

Rating: 4.1574378 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, United States, Life, 3D Technology, Achievement, Art, Behavior, Behavorial economics, Big Data, Data, Economics, Emotions, Empathy, Fashion, Friendship, Hack, Happiness, Identity, Innovation, Life Hack, Meditation, Memory, Mindfulness, Motivation, Pain, Painting, Personal growth, Positive Thinking, Self, Self improvement, Self-help, Social Interaction, Sustainability, Technology, Value, Youth

Id: 9rR0VHBUY0A

Length: 19min 7sec (1147 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 09 2016