When 2+2 equals green | Olivia Warren | TEDxClaremontColleges

right now we live in a world where having a unique perspective or a key insight is highly valuable we hear a lot of words like innovation thinking outside of the box disruptive technology and all of these have enormous ly positive connotations but here's the interesting thing about having a unique perspective sometimes they don't occur as positive insights other times thicker as moments of disconnection as modes of frustration when our perspective doesn't gel with our environment or those around us today I'd like to share with you my story of learning how to adapt my perspective to situations that didn't play to my strengths I first learned that I have a very different perspective from most other people when I was in first grade I was working on math problems with a group of my classmates when a particularly interesting problem jumped out at me I turned to one of my friends and happily exclaimed look at problem five the green and blue numbers look really pretty next to each other silence followed from the looks on my classmates faces I could tell that I had just said something very wrong but I didn't know why I looked down at the page and there it was an emerald green for - an ocean blue - to yield another - but clearly my classmates were not seeing the same thing in that moment of confusion I made a quick decision if seeing coloured numbers was weird I wouldn't say anything about it to anyone and I did a pretty good job of sticking to that decision even when seeing coloured numbers began to give me trouble you see during second grade my school introduced preparation for the California standardized test into our curriculum and math classes began to emphasize speed and accuracy on arithmetic problems to prepare us for the tests my teachers started implementing timed tests like this one where the goal you can see some of you are familiar with this and as long as some of you will remember the goal is to complete as many of these problems as accurately as possible within an finite amount of time now I'd never seen problems laid out in this format before usually they were laid out line by line with physical space between each problem and this was a new what's more is that I wasn't seeing this I was seeing this and the first time that I took one of these tests I became lost and disoriented I couldn't focus my attention on problem by problem basis because I kept being distracted by numbers on the periphery of the page numbers on the problem next the problem I was working on and as a result unsurprisingly I scored low my teachers intervened and placed me in an after-school help group for kids who were scoring low on these tests and said about assessing what the problem was they were baffled when I had demonstrated solid mastery of the concepts and skills required to solve these problems and when my speed was excellent on individual flashcards no one could figure out what was going wrong and while I had an idea of the problem I had decided a year ago that I wasn't going to say anything about this to anybody it wasn't until sixth grade that I slipped up and during a conversation with one of my teachers she started to understand and how to guess at what I was seeing when I looked at a math problem and she pressed me she asked me questions and finally I relented yes I see colors for numbers and letters and instead of an in grunt incredulous look instead of silence instead of scheduling a parent-teacher conference she gave me a name for my experiences synesthesia I'd never heard this word before it sounded scary it sounded clinical and I couldn't begin to understand what that meant but I had the Internet so I took to searching online to learn everything that I could about how and why I see the world in the way that I do so you started with that term synesthesia and what I discovered is that synesthesia is a broad term encompassing multiple forms of the blending of perceptions and senses so to give you a couple examples that's a pretty abstract definition some people see color when they hear music or sounds some people have spatial representations in their mind when they look at different numbers and some people like me see colors for individual numbers and letters this is termed color graphing synesthesia how cool is that there were other people who saw what I saw I wasn't the only one that was awesome so I was excited and I wanted to learn even more I knew what I was seeing but I wanted to know why why was I seeing things differently so I looked that up and what I learned and the first idea that I found went something like this color graphene synesthetes at a young age are exposed to colored letters as magnets or maybe on blocks that they play with and they just memorize them this is a learned phenomenon okay great so if this ever became a disadvantage like it had in second grade I could hypothetically just unlearn it that was pretty cool but it turns out that's not actually the case the consensus opinion is that synesthesia is fundamentally a neurological phenomenon involving areas of the brain that process letters and numbers and the area of the brain that processes color so as a sixth grader at a stage of life when fitting in with my peers was of paramount importance I had just learned that my brain was essentially wired differently from those around me that took a little bit of time to think about and I started to worry well if this is different maybe it's bad how long is this gonna last I looked that up and the answer was says Divac is life long the Association are consistent so what that means is that I see the number four is green I will never see it as red or orange and that it will last that way throughout my life and that if I want to change it I can't okay well maybe maybe I didn't actually have true synesthesia I mean all of the websites I was looking at depicted synesthesia like this as solid filled colored numbers and letters but that's not what I saw I saw something more like this with color shadows or overlay effects not a true solid filled number or letter well maybe I didn't have true synesthesia maybe my brain was actually normal and it turns out that no this is how synesthetes experience letters and numbers that a synesthete can tell you that synesthesia is written in black font but they also experience a strong color phantom with each of the letters comprising that work so I had synesthesia I thought about this I thought about the significance of having a brain that was different but before I got too caught up with this line of thinking I entered one final search who has synesthesia now it's likely that there are one or two of you sitting in this room who have synesthesia and I want to assure you that you're in good company Synthesia alums include Richard Feynman Nobel Prize winning physicist and a lot of musicians like mary j blige report having synesthesia which is pretty cool and it wasn't like I couldn't remember times when synesthesia had given me certain advantages and activities that I was pursuing learning to type on a keyboard for example that had come quickly I had a mental representation of the colors for each of the keys in my mind and if I forgot where one of the keys was on the board I was just looked down and scanned for the corresponding color and I was good to go but where things got really interesting was during high school when I started taking more advanced math classes I distinctly remember sitting in my first calculus lecture and watching my teacher work through a problem involving multiple variables and all I could think was that's beautiful because what I was seeing that may not be a consensus opinion but what I was seeing was that there's this array of multicolored numbers and variables that were shifting combining permuting disassociating and it was so cool as high school continued I realized that I liked this math thing that I wanted to do more of it and my goal became to major in science or engineering when I attended college now to prepare for this I needed to score pretty well on the SAT math section and so I started taking practice tests the practice tests went smoothly so I was surprised that when I sat for the actual test I felt slow and sluggish on several of the problems when the proctor called the five-minute mark I felt like something wasn't right and I turned in the test deciding okay don't worry about it just wait until the score comes back and when it did I felt like I was in that second grade help group all over again I'd scored low and I didn't know why despite having solid mastery of the skills and the knowledge required to solve the problems so what was going on I thought about the differences between the practice tests and the actual tests well maybe it was test anxiety but no I didn't fit I didn't fit the description maybe his difference is in the content between the two tests but that was almost identical what was it well I remembered that when I took the practice test I solved the problems on white color printer paper that I'd taken from my house and that when I took the actual test that test was printed on filming grey paper and that I solved all and I did all of my scratch work on the test itself okay so that was definitely a difference but was that it I thought about this more and I realized that the three most common the three of the most common variables on the SAT XY and Z for me appear as slight variations of that color gray of the SAT paper now that seemed to be not just a coincidence so I took to the Internet once again to figure out what was going on and what I found was a paper from a from a prominent neuroscientist documenting that the intensity of the color that color graphene synesthetes experience for individual letters and numbers decreases significantly as the color of the background paper matches more closely with that of the letter or number that made sense but at the same time while I was excited that I had found potentially the core of the issue that I was having with the test I still didn't know what to do and I was crushed that the thing that was helping me succeed in high school math classes was now potentially going to thwart me from pursuing my dream of studying science and engineering in college but then I thought back to second grade I had solved the problem then and there was no reason that I shouldn't be able to solve it now so I started practicing I did all of my work I did all my work on gray paper so that it emulated the format that I would see when I took the test and for problems that had particularly complicated combinations of x y&z I recoded the variables I used a B and C which for me are yellow blue and red very different from the gray color that I saw for the SAT test now at the end of the day I retook the test and this time when I got my score back I felt confident enough to submit my applications to the schools of my choice I was accepted to my top choices for technical undergraduate colleges and I enjoyed spending the past four years here in Claremont at Harvey Mudd College studying science and engineering so what I want to leave you today is what is a message about adaptation on the one hand adapting our message to reach as many people as possible well being cognizant of the fact that there's a massive diversity of human perception present in the world on the other hand knowing how to adapt our own unique perspectives to challenges that don't play to our strengths understanding that these challenges are not reflections on us or our abilities and knowing that in the process of working to adapt our perspective we're expanding the the dialogue and helping the world better understand the idea that we're trying to fit our perspective - thank you so much

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 21,865

Rating: 4.9892473 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, United States, Science (hard), Achievement, Brain, Classroom, Cognitive science, Creativity, Disability, Education, Ideas, Math, Personal growth, Schools, Science, Students, Success, Visualization

Id: jdtJu_DaZEw

Length: 13min 52sec (832 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 24 2015