how many of you consider yourselves left
brained and how many consider yourselves
right brained how many of you don’t
really fit let feel like it fit in one
or the other it’s hard right so it’s as
commonly accepted neuroscience concept
that left brain people are logical and
organized and right brain people are
creative and expressive but the left
right thing never really worked for me
and looks like it doesn’t work for most
of you either well it turns out this
split between left and right brains
between logic and creativity it’s an
idea that’s actually a false dichotomy
I’m not supported by science because the
truth of it is you can be no more left
brained than you can be left lung or
left kidney
we’ll get to the research bit in a
second first I want to talk about how
incredibly limiting this idea can be
even though it’s not true see humans
like to organize the world into neat
little groups for one it’s cognitively
efficient once you understand something
about what group they fit in you don’t
have to look at individual
characteristics about those things it
also helps us predict and understand the
world and it makes us feel better about
ourselves because groups were in are
obviously better than groups we’re not
but trying to fit things into group that
don’t fit us is incredibly limiting I
understand this problem innately I often
describe myself as fluent in three
languages English math and music I
started all three around the same age
and I don’t really remember my life
without any one of them math just made
sense to me it was so clear and logical
music made me feel whole it also had
this internal consistency but it gave me
a language to express myself an English
it gave me the medium of storytelling
using grammar and syntax to weave
threads of exotic worlds and daring
adventures and feelings that I often
first experience through care
actors on a page the symmetry between
them was so obvious to me is that it
seemed like they were just three
languages describing one world
now I also had a faint understanding
around the stage that I was not what
most people considered a normal kid
whether is cuz I was a girl who excelled
in math or a kid who’d rather read than
go out for recess I was regularly
reminded by kids and adults alike that I
was different what exactly do you think
you’re gonna be when you grow up they
would ask confounded by my refusal to
define a career path they could
understand by age 10 sound familiar
I ignored them and kept doing my same in
high school I attended a School for the
Performing Arts where in addition to
studying piano and cello I got to learn
math and science through the language of
the Arts I learned
Tork through arabesques experience sound
waves by building African finger piano
and understood permutation groups
through chord inversions in figured base
it all made sense to me but the
questions kept coming you have so many
interests which will you choose next
year I chose not to choose in college I
majored in math and theatre with
additional concentrations and music
physics and political science
I used trigonometry to build sets
learned entrepreneurship by producing
plays I split my days between
cryptography chamber music colloidal
particles in stage combat researching
telling stories creating something from
nothing and then as graduation came near
the questions came back what kind of
career path are you going to build it’s
time you got serious and focused they’d
say why did I have to focus
Leonardo da Vinci never had to focus in
the 15th century the ideal of the
polymath Renaissance man came into being
defined as one with unquenchable
curiosity
no one embodied this ideal better than
da Vinci he was an artist who is also
inventor a poet a botanist cartographer
mathematician and a whole
of other things this polymath ideal grew
out of the notion of a universal
education which sadly did not mean
education for all but rather education
across a broad array of subjects
including science languages theology
philosophy and more
rather than specializing in just one
area it’s the basis of what we call a
liberal arts education today so how did
we get from there a world that embraced
well-rounded interdisciplinary thinking
and supported the development of
polymaths to here a world where
teenagers are expected to pick a
specialty that they’re gonna follow for
the next 60 years well for one thing the
Industrial Revolution happened it was
the end of the artisan and agrarian
economies and the beginning of the
efficiency economy and as the economy
changed we need people to develop these
narrowly defined expertise we needed to
put them in boxes so let’s get back to
that research that somehow morphed into
this pop culture doctrine of left and
right brained people in the 1960s a
doctoral student named Michael Gazzaniga
teamed up with neurobiologist Roger’s
ferry on a series of experiments with
epilepsy patients whose corpus callosum
that bundle of nerve fibers that
connects the two hemispheres of your
brain it was surgically severed to
prevent seizures from spreading across
the brain one patient that Gazzaniga
worked with was shown a square – just
the left hemisphere of his brain but
showing it to his right eye and the
patient said he could see a box but when
the image was shown only to the right
hemisphere even though he could still
see it and point to it he was unable to
name it so Gaza Nina theorized that
while both sides of the brain are
involved in processing an image only the
left side was responsible for
articulating what it was in this
patient’s case without communication
from the left side the right side
couldn’t find the word for box now the
main result of Gaza Nina’s research was
about how much the two sides of the
brain have to work together to perform
basic cognitive tasks but in 1973 New
York Times article missing
and instead described it as two
astonishingly different persons
inhabiting our brain this notion of left
and right brain people that
neuroscientists have been trying to
dispel it for 40 years but it still
so why is this such a problem beyond the
fact that it’s just not true it’s
because it forces people into boxes that
don’t fit them I can’t tell you how many
times I was told I was weird
for liking math and theater as though I
was a freak of nature and I can imagine
that a kid who was more interested in
fitting in than I was would be less
inclined to cross that chasm if it meant
they were singled out as strange what
happens to a child who’s branded as
brilliant at chess but secretly has a
desire to try out for the school play or
the adult who’s developed an identity as
a creative but actually has an interest
in technology in computer science
how much are we missing out on by
forcing ourselves into these artificial
categories two years ago a friend sent
me this youtube video called how I do
math it was created by this actress who
also started a non-profit focused on
helping girls to love math her name was
Kate Scott Campbell and she was tall and
a redhead and let’s split her time
between these worlds of math in theater
just like I had 15 years ago and I
decided I had to meet her so I flew out
to Los Angeles and we spent the day
together I showed her my tattoo of a
Fibonacci spiral overlaid with a
Kandinsky inspired geometric print and
she showed me her web series that she
created and produced about being a math
tutor we realized that we were not alone
in our weird interdisciplinary nests and
we suspected there might be more of us
out there so we started a podcast called
the limit does not exist it celebrates
all these people who refuse to focus and
instead embrace their curiosity and
follow it down rabbit holes of their own
choosing
we interviewed a computer scientist who
became a filmmaker using algorithms to
build animations a painter who followed
her curiosity into a Natural History
Museum and became an online science
storyteller a filmmaker and venture
capitalist who simultaneously building
the technology of virtual reality
while creating a new form of
storytelling within that technology like
Kristensen defined this way of thinking
and working across the disciplines as
the power of associating which forms the
backbone of his innovators DNA Mill
affirmed merchant Francis as each
person’s own leanness that unique thing
that they can harness to embrace their
power for good that the limit does not
exist we call these people human Venn
diagrams people who live at the
intersection of multiple interests and
create their own inspiration out of
connecting seemingly disconnected ideas
questions and fields but the name is
doesn’t really matter what matters is
this is what’s going to power the future
the Industrial Revolution is long gone
and these narrowly defined jobs that
were predicated on the efficient
utilization of land labour and capital
are disappearing and in their place are
jobs that are using people’s creativity
and innovation to add value we are at
the beginning of the next Renaissance so
if you feel like you don’t fit in a box
this is your permission to say screw it
and define your own interdisciplinary
path and if you find yourself trying to
put other people in boxes your kids your
colleagues strangers you meet on tinder
stop it it’s preventing you from
embracing the full expression of their
humanity oh and me what did I grow up to
be an entrepreneur a writer public
speaker who writes computer code and
sings Gregorian chant you know just a classic human Venn diagram thank you