[Music]
well good afternoon everyone hello so my
question is how do you see yourself how
do you see yourself and actually most of
you I think these days from the selfie
generation see yourselves like that in
your own image in your own device but as
a neuroscientist the way we see the
world is driven by a lot of things of
which you’re not aware when I was
sitting up there earlier with Stephan
and we were looking down at the red spot
on the stage
on his camera it looked yellow which is
kind of weird and in fact even color is
a construction it’s something that you
make up in your own mind so I’m going to
tell you a card trick now that you can
do on yourself and you probably
shouldn’t do it here because it would
sort of spoil the flow of my talk but
take this away from here back home
there’s a card trick you can do on
yourself you pick a card any card but
you don’t show it to yourself and then
you hold it out to the side of you like
this and you keep your eyes front
what you do is you gradually wiggle the
card and bring it towards the front of
you towards the front of you and towards
the front of you and the question is
when do you see whether it’s a red card
or a black card okay and the answer is
if you try this at home you’ll find that
even though you can see something
wiggling even when it’s here when it’s
here when it’s here you don’t see if
it’s a red or a black card until it’s
about there and you don’t see what
number it is until it’s about here and
that’s because your vision in the
periphery around the edge of your eye is
black and white not color but when you
look around this room you see color
everywhere okay and the question is how
do you do that and the answer is you
project you invent the colors that you
see from inside your own head and you
project them out into the world
so the prejudices and the expectations
that you bring to the world make your
reality and that’s not just a political
statement although it is also a
political statement that’s a statement
about how the visual system works that
is how your brain constructs things
everything we see is a story that we’re
telling ourselves and there are three
tiny vignettes I want to give you today
about seeing and the first one is about
a woman from Birmingham in fact some of
you might know this woman her name is
Jenny Kalia
she is a woman who has sickle cell
disease she’s also a performer and a
writer from Birmingham and sickle cell
disease is an inherited condition that
particularly affects people from Africa
African origin and the reason why it
probably hasn’t been selected out is
because it gives you some kind of
immunity against malaria which as you
know is an incredibly serious disease
that you can catch from mosquitoes but
also because your blood cells in this
condition of sickle shaped shaped like a
sickle not round they get stuck all over
your body and they produced these things
called crises and the crisis has been
described to me by people with sickle
cell as the worst pain you can ever
imagine but from the inside of your body
and all over it can start in the arm and
it can spread round and these people get
record-breaking doses of morphine
because the pain is so severe and the
question I want to ask you is what does
the reality of that condition look like
to Jinnah Kalia and I’ll tell you the
answer and this experience happened to
me last week only where that Science
Gallery London we commissioned tough
blood you can see Stephen Rutter at the
back there to make a dance performance
about sickle cell which to Nika
introduced now there’s been some
interesting research on this and the
question is what do you call yourself if
you’ve got a condition so some people
would say I’m a patient on a sufferer or
I’m a victim or on a survivor and what
I’ve told you as a neuroscientist in the
last couple of minutes and what you’ve
heard all afternoon you already know
this all day what you call yourself
changes how you see yourself and how you
see yourself changes how other people
see you so the term you use changes who
you are and again that’s a biological
fact not of just a political statement
and Janica Lea introduces herself not as
a sickle-cell survivor but as a sickle
cell warrior okay she’s a sickle cell
warrior she is fighting for the disease
and she’s fighting for the people with
the disease from the black population
who are suffering with it but who are
turning their own lives around and she’s
generating information and sharing
content now what were we doing with her
in Peckham in South London the Science
Gallery last week
the answer is we were generating
collisions between science and art and
we were doing that because we believe
it’s important for the future of the
planet and we were doing it with the
help of young people and performers who
were making the work for us so this is
the performance that she had just
introduced
Stephen rudder produced it he shot
documentary video as you can see on the
left of the screen of people from the
Peckham area who disproportionately have
the disease and other people in the UK
and had choreographed a dance
performance which showed the body of a
black man acting out the suffering the
physical suffering that he was feeling
and also asking is this a racist disease
is this a disease of race and the answer
is genetically it’s correlated with the
color of your skin but the way the eye
disease is identified it was the first
genetically identified disease ever
discovered in history but it was seen as
disease of black people and so arguably
the treatment of it the way that people
who have it the Warriors are treated is
depend on how they look as well now this
event took place in Peckham because our
gallery in London Bridge hasn’t yet
opened and the people who came to it a
lot of them from the sickle cell society
we’re not people who would necessarily
now I’ve already seen from a previous
speaker I’m not going to do a show of
hands because it’s probably not going to
go the way I’m expecting but the way a
lot of these people had not seen the
video arts dance performance before and
after that they had to talk about the
genetics of sickle cell and there was a
conjunction of bringing together of
those two things of science and art
which allowed this particular population
to see themselves differently to get the
facts in a different way and to see
themselves as political beings and as
warriors as well now if we’re talking
about courage I want to make a plea from
the science side for a particular kind
of courage if you ask how do you see
yourself I’m going to give you an answer
a picture that was taken about a month
ago and you know the you are here arrow
that you often get in pictures which
would right now be pointing at the
Hippodrome in Birmingham the little
arrow in the bottom right of that
picture is us that’s a picture taken by
Cassini Huygens which is a spacecraft
that heroically crashed itself into the
surface of Saturn last week ending a
20-year voyage in which they discovered
the first liquid world water off the
Earth’s surface anywhere in the solar
system and it traveled over a billion
miles to rendezvous with Saturn fly
through the Rings and orbit the moons
cassini-huygens is an act of courage by
the scientists who designed it and it
was launched just over 20 years ago
before many of you were born now some of
you will have seen the film hidden
figures that was about the calculators
that launched
the space program in the US now a
calculator by the way in those days was
a human not a computer and a lot of the
calculators that were doing the moon
shot trajectories were black women from
southern states in the US who couldn’t
even use the same toilets as the white
flight engineers in the National
Laboratories but they were the ones who
were calculating the trajectories and in
fact there were a lot of women behind
the Cassini probe who had sort of just
stated had given birth as it were to
this spacecraft and then watched it fly
to Saturn and from a scientific
perspective it seems to me that if you
can dream enough to take tiny tiny steps
the infinitesimally small calculations
that allow you to predict what this
spacecraft was going to do 20 years
later as it crashed in flames into the
surface of Saturn that’s a projection
that’s how you can see yourself if you
can imagine yourself as the person who
designed a small part of that spycrab
spacecraft or the communications
equipment that is sending signals back
to an earth which it couldn’t have
dreamed of when it was launched that’s
the kind of courage that we’re
interested in now at Science Gallery the
big risk that we’re taking and that’s
why we’re here today is to allow young
people to shape the program that we
build we do seasons of activity and the
one that we did last before the current
one was called mouthy and I’ll tell you
about a proposal that we got from a
young artist called in as camera
Laurette and she wrote to us through our
open call and you can see online if you
search for Science Gallery about a
particular thing that she’d been doing
in the comfort of her own home in the
run-up to this to the right of the
picture you can see an image of a
month’s worth of Inez’s saliva E&S had
been spitting into a bucket for a month
and collecting her own saliva
and in the way that artists do and
that’s the reason why I enjoy working
with artists she had become obsessed
with a single thing and any of you who
are artists or who know artists will
understand what this is like
it didn’t matter where she was or what
she was doing she was obsessed with the
idea of crystallizing saliva and she
found a process by which she was able to
make what she called a spit crystal and
this is the crystal which he constructed
from a month’s worth of her own saliva
and when we heard about this we thought
that this would be a good symbolic
opening for the gallery now I don’t know
how many of you have done any kind of
performance in continental Europe but
downstairs I have to say it
a really weird situation going on in the
dressing rooms down there just for those
of you that haven’t been backstage but
there’s a performance of hairspray going
on in the Hippodrome and so we keep
bumping into people in tights walking up
and down and hearing their two-minute
call but and in the UK before you go
onstage you say break a leg in Europe
what you say is toy toy toy it’s a
phrase that they use in Europe toy toy
toy again from a different religious
tradition you might have heard of this
is a spitting sound to ward off the evil
eye okay so it’s for luck you say toy
toy toy Jewish for luck
so when we built the Science Gallery
proposal we decided to have a launch
party and we got everybody who came to
the party to spit in a bucket
collectively so we had a bucket of spit
from everybody who’d attempt attended a
launch party and then we got in there to
build as a crystal of all of the spit
now this isn’t being recorded is it but
I mean we don’t actually have ethics for
this but as a matter of fact we’ve got
the DNA of everybody who came to the
launch party in crystalline form and in
a sense that was a way of symbolizing
people’s participation in this youth-led
program and here’s the interesting thing
he nurses the young artist from Spain
working in London while these things are
still possible and through the program
she met a professor called Brian Sutton
now some of you will have heard a woman
called rosalind Franklin who helped to
discover DNA and she wrote to King’s
Brian had worked under her professor as
well and he’s an expert in x-ray
crystallography when he heard about in
as this project he said no what she’s
doing isn’t a spit crystal it’s a
crystal with spit in it because he
looked at the reaction that she’d done
and he put her spit crystal into a
electron microscope and looked at the
structures of it and he then worked with
her for six months to make a crystal
that was genuinely made out of spit and
what you can see here at the opening of
mouth II is a visualization of a crystal
where if everybody in the world were to
spit once into a massive bucket and then
in theirs were to run the process that
would be a piece of spit that would
contain the DNA of everyone on the
planet that’s how small the DNA is that
makes us all human that unites us and
divides us now it turns out that Brian
who is a world expert in x-ray
crystallography could not have come up
with the idea of crystallizing out spit
as a protein were it not for it is so
although you might think that art is
there to beautify science that it’s
there in the service of science that the
hard
stuff is done by scientists and the
artists just make it comprehensible what
we believe that Science Gallery is that
the progress that we need to make to
make the world what it needs to be is
about the conjunctions between people
from different places who can interact
on their own terms and not just find new
knowledge but share ignorant because in
the end if you’re going to work with
people who aren’t like you and there I’m
talking about culture about race about
art about science you’ve got to be
prepared to tolerate people who talk a
language you don’t understand and if
you’re prepared to make spaces where
ignorant is allowed where people can
communicate what they’re doing without
fear of being misunderstood where it’s
being shared then you can build great
structures now our current show and I
was going to do material on this is
called blood and in it we have a lot of
menstruation and it’s so rare who could
have thought except at TEDx youth Brum
that I would have had my menstrual blood
gags taken by a previous speaker but so
it is but if you find yourself in South
London or online look up the blood life
uncut series where we’ve got lots of
incredible material about gay blood so
still if you’re an extra so if you’re
homosexual man who’s sexually active
you’re not allowed to donate blood in
this country so we’ve got a project
about blood equality got some very
interesting projects about menstruation
which I can’t tell you about and some
interesting things about white blood
cells but the final point I want to make
how you see yourself is driven by the
language that you use the people you
associate and the places that you find
yourselves TEDx Eva Braun is a good
starting point I encourage you to build
your structures and to engage with
people not like you and if you use that
diversity there’s no telling what you
can achieve thank you very much
[Music]
well good afternoon everyone hello so my
question is how do you see yourself how
do you see yourself and actually most of
you I think these days from the selfie
generation see yourselves like that in
your own image in your own device but as
a neuroscientist the way we see the
world is driven by a lot of things of
which you’re not aware when I was
sitting up there earlier with Stephan
and we were looking down at the red spot
on the stage
on his camera it looked yellow which is
kind of weird and in fact even color is
a construction it’s something that you
make up in your own mind so I’m going to
tell you a card trick now that you can
do on yourself and you probably
shouldn’t do it here because it would
sort of spoil the flow of my talk but
take this away from here back home
there’s a card trick you can do on
yourself you pick a card any card but
you don’t show it to yourself and then
you hold it out to the side of you like
this and you keep your eyes front
what you do is you gradually wiggle the
card and bring it towards the front of
you towards the front of you and towards
the front of you and the question is
when do you see whether it’s a red card
or a black card okay and the answer is
if you try this at home you’ll find that
even though you can see something
wiggling even when it’s here when it’s
here when it’s here you don’t see if
it’s a red or a black card until it’s
about there and you don’t see what
number it is until it’s about here and
that’s because your vision in the
periphery around the edge of your eye is
black and white not color but when you
look around this room you see color
everywhere okay and the question is how
do you do that and the answer is you
project you invent the colors that you
see from inside your own head and you
project them out into the world
so the prejudices and the expectations
that you bring to the world make your
reality and that’s not just a political
statement although it is also a
political statement that’s a statement
about how the visual system works that
is how your brain constructs things
everything we see is a story that we’re
telling ourselves and there are three
tiny vignettes I want to give you today
about seeing and the first one is about
a woman from Birmingham in fact some of
you might know this woman her name is
Jenny Kalia
she is a woman who has sickle cell
disease she’s also a performer and a
writer from Birmingham and sickle cell
disease is an inherited condition that
particularly affects people from Africa
African origin and the reason why it
probably hasn’t been selected out is
because it gives you some kind of
immunity against malaria which as you
know is an incredibly serious disease
that you can catch from mosquitoes but
also because your blood cells in this
condition of sickle shaped shaped like a
sickle not round they get stuck all over
your body and they produced these things
called crises and the crisis has been
described to me by people with sickle
cell as the worst pain you can ever
imagine but from the inside of your body
and all over it can start in the arm and
it can spread round and these people get
record-breaking doses of morphine
because the pain is so severe and the
question I want to ask you is what does
the reality of that condition look like
to Jinnah Kalia and I’ll tell you the
answer and this experience happened to
me last week only where that Science
Gallery London we commissioned tough
blood you can see Stephen Rutter at the
back there to make a dance performance
about sickle cell which to Nika
introduced now there’s been some
interesting research on this and the
question is what do you call yourself if
you’ve got a condition so some people
would say I’m a patient on a sufferer or
I’m a victim or on a survivor and what
I’ve told you as a neuroscientist in the
last couple of minutes and what you’ve
heard all afternoon you already know
this all day what you call yourself
changes how you see yourself and how you
see yourself changes how other people
see you so the term you use changes who
you are and again that’s a biological
fact not of just a political statement
and Janica Lea introduces herself not as
a sickle-cell survivor but as a sickle
cell warrior okay she’s a sickle cell
warrior she is fighting for the disease
and she’s fighting for the people with
the disease from the black population
who are suffering with it but who are
turning their own lives around and she’s
generating information and sharing
content now what were we doing with her
in Peckham in South London the Science
Gallery last week
the answer is we were generating
collisions between science and art and
we were doing that because we believe
it’s important for the future of the
planet and we were doing it with the
help of young people and performers who
were making the work for us so this is
the performance that she had just
introduced
Stephen rudder produced it he shot
documentary video as you can see on the
left of the screen of people from the
Peckham area who disproportionately have
the disease and other people in the UK
and had choreographed a dance
performance which showed the body of a
black man acting out the suffering the
physical suffering that he was feeling
and also asking is this a racist disease
is this a disease of race and the answer
is genetically it’s correlated with the
color of your skin but the way the eye
disease is identified it was the first
genetically identified disease ever
discovered in history but it was seen as
disease of black people and so arguably
the treatment of it the way that people
who have it the Warriors are treated is
depend on how they look as well now this
event took place in Peckham because our
gallery in London Bridge hasn’t yet
opened and the people who came to it a
lot of them from the sickle cell society
we’re not people who would necessarily
now I’ve already seen from a previous
speaker I’m not going to do a show of
hands because it’s probably not going to
go the way I’m expecting but the way a
lot of these people had not seen the
video arts dance performance before and
after that they had to talk about the
genetics of sickle cell and there was a
conjunction of bringing together of
those two things of science and art
which allowed this particular population
to see themselves differently to get the
facts in a different way and to see
themselves as political beings and as
warriors as well now if we’re talking
about courage I want to make a plea from
the science side for a particular kind
of courage if you ask how do you see
yourself I’m going to give you an answer
a picture that was taken about a month
ago and you know the you are here arrow
that you often get in pictures which
would right now be pointing at the
Hippodrome in Birmingham the little
arrow in the bottom right of that
picture is us that’s a picture taken by
Cassini Huygens which is a spacecraft
that heroically crashed itself into the
surface of Saturn last week ending a
20-year voyage in which they discovered
the first liquid world water off the
Earth’s surface anywhere in the solar
system and it traveled over a billion
miles to rendezvous with Saturn fly
through the Rings and orbit the moons
cassini-huygens is an act of courage by
the scientists who designed it and it
was launched just over 20 years ago
before many of you were born now some of
you will have seen the film hidden
figures that was about the calculators
that launched
the space program in the US now a
calculator by the way in those days was
a human not a computer and a lot of the
calculators that were doing the moon
shot trajectories were black women from
southern states in the US who couldn’t
even use the same toilets as the white
flight engineers in the National
Laboratories but they were the ones who
were calculating the trajectories and in
fact there were a lot of women behind
the Cassini probe who had sort of just
stated had given birth as it were to
this spacecraft and then watched it fly
to Saturn and from a scientific
perspective it seems to me that if you
can dream enough to take tiny tiny steps
the infinitesimally small calculations
that allow you to predict what this
spacecraft was going to do 20 years
later as it crashed in flames into the
surface of Saturn that’s a projection
that’s how you can see yourself if you
can imagine yourself as the person who
designed a small part of that spycrab
spacecraft or the communications
equipment that is sending signals back
to an earth which it couldn’t have
dreamed of when it was launched that’s
the kind of courage that we’re
interested in now at Science Gallery the
big risk that we’re taking and that’s
why we’re here today is to allow young
people to shape the program that we
build we do seasons of activity and the
one that we did last before the current
one was called mouthy and I’ll tell you
about a proposal that we got from a
young artist called in as camera
Laurette and she wrote to us through our
open call and you can see online if you
search for Science Gallery about a
particular thing that she’d been doing
in the comfort of her own home in the
run-up to this to the right of the
picture you can see an image of a
month’s worth of Inez’s saliva E&S had
been spitting into a bucket for a month
and collecting her own saliva
and in the way that artists do and
that’s the reason why I enjoy working
with artists she had become obsessed
with a single thing and any of you who
are artists or who know artists will
understand what this is like
it didn’t matter where she was or what
she was doing she was obsessed with the
idea of crystallizing saliva and she
found a process by which she was able to
make what she called a spit crystal and
this is the crystal which he constructed
from a month’s worth of her own saliva
and when we heard about this we thought
that this would be a good symbolic
opening for the gallery now I don’t know
how many of you have done any kind of
performance in continental Europe but
downstairs I have to say it
a really weird situation going on in the
dressing rooms down there just for those
of you that haven’t been backstage but
there’s a performance of hairspray going
on in the Hippodrome and so we keep
bumping into people in tights walking up
and down and hearing their two-minute
call but and in the UK before you go
onstage you say break a leg in Europe
what you say is toy toy toy it’s a
phrase that they use in Europe toy toy
toy again from a different religious
tradition you might have heard of this
is a spitting sound to ward off the evil
eye okay so it’s for luck you say toy
toy toy Jewish for luck
so when we built the Science Gallery
proposal we decided to have a launch
party and we got everybody who came to
the party to spit in a bucket
collectively so we had a bucket of spit
from everybody who’d attempt attended a
launch party and then we got in there to
build as a crystal of all of the spit
now this isn’t being recorded is it but
I mean we don’t actually have ethics for
this but as a matter of fact we’ve got
the DNA of everybody who came to the
launch party in crystalline form and in
a sense that was a way of symbolizing
people’s participation in this youth-led
program and here’s the interesting thing
he nurses the young artist from Spain
working in London while these things are
still possible and through the program
she met a professor called Brian Sutton
now some of you will have heard a woman
called rosalind Franklin who helped to
discover DNA and she wrote to King’s
Brian had worked under her professor as
well and he’s an expert in x-ray
crystallography when he heard about in
as this project he said no what she’s
doing isn’t a spit crystal it’s a
crystal with spit in it because he
looked at the reaction that she’d done
and he put her spit crystal into a
electron microscope and looked at the
structures of it and he then worked with
her for six months to make a crystal
that was genuinely made out of spit and
what you can see here at the opening of
mouth II is a visualization of a crystal
where if everybody in the world were to
spit once into a massive bucket and then
in theirs were to run the process that
would be a piece of spit that would
contain the DNA of everyone on the
planet that’s how small the DNA is that
makes us all human that unites us and
divides us now it turns out that Brian
who is a world expert in x-ray
crystallography could not have come up
with the idea of crystallizing out spit
as a protein were it not for it is so
although you might think that art is
there to beautify science that it’s
there in the service of science that the
hard
stuff is done by scientists and the
artists just make it comprehensible what
we believe that Science Gallery is that
the progress that we need to make to
make the world what it needs to be is
about the conjunctions between people
from different places who can interact
on their own terms and not just find new
knowledge but share ignorant because in
the end if you’re going to work with
people who aren’t like you and there I’m
talking about culture about race about
art about science you’ve got to be
prepared to tolerate people who talk a
language you don’t understand and if
you’re prepared to make spaces where
ignorant is allowed where people can
communicate what they’re doing without
fear of being misunderstood where it’s
being shared then you can build great
structures now our current show and I
was going to do material on this is
called blood and in it we have a lot of
menstruation and it’s so rare who could
have thought except at TEDx youth Brum
that I would have had my menstrual blood
gags taken by a previous speaker but so
it is but if you find yourself in South
London or online look up the blood life
uncut series where we’ve got lots of
incredible material about gay blood so
still if you’re an extra so if you’re
homosexual man who’s sexually active
you’re not allowed to donate blood in
this country so we’ve got a project
about blood equality got some very
interesting projects about menstruation
which I can’t tell you about and some
interesting things about white blood
cells but the final point I want to make
how you see yourself is driven by the
language that you use the people you
associate and the places that you find
yourselves TEDx Eva Braun is a good
starting point I encourage you to build
your structures and to engage with
people not like you and if you use that
diversity there’s no telling what you
can achieve thank you very much
[Music]
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