[Music]
one of the most bizarre metrics that
exist to test one’s mental grit stamina
and determination is the art of
memorizing the digits of pi as the
numbers move further from the decimal
they become seemingly random and too
small for a human ever to need to know
and yet people have managed to memorize
these digits by the thousands surely
this is an impressive feat these
individuals devoted mass quantities of
time to mass memorization to reading and
reciting until they could recall numbers
for hours on end but what if they didn’t
have to what would be the implications
of a man who could recite PI without
needing to consciously recall it i have
synesthesia
it’s a condition which creates a merging
of the senses differently for different
people in such a way that certain ideas
are stimuli and evoke unusual responses
synesthetes have been documented to
taste words to see sound or even to
associate a gender or personality with
letters and numbers grapheme-color
synesthesia is a form which forces me to
see numbers and letters in my head in a
particular color and comida is a form
where music and sound present me with a
visual image in my head my mind has its
own font where anything I read appears
in their respective color and when I
hear music an explosion of clouds and
waves and pulses represent the melodies
these images are involuntary any time I
even think of a number or letter it will
appear in the right color and if I
listen to music or even think of
listening to music I will always see the
waves they’ll never change from my
entire life the color n will be pink the
number 2 will be green and if I play
music in the key of E it will carry a
tint of yellow in the clouds but perhaps
the most surprising aspect of
synesthesia is how bizarrely natural it
is most people who have it don’t even
know because they lead a life so typical
that they don’t think to ask if they
occur and experience life differently
than an average person
I didn’t even know that I had
synesthesia until the images I see came
up in a casual conversation about a year
ago most people who have it say that
it’s fairly neutral not good or bad
they’re extra senses are simply present
and they can be pleasant but people who
do have synesthesia can be shamed for
what they see or what they witness
especially in cases of the young
non-traditional methods of thinking can
be frowned upon in a traditional
learning environment but maybe they can
use these senses for good maybe they can
benefit from what they see in the
creative arts this is overwhelmingly
apparent studies have shown that people
with synesthesia are more likely to take
jobs with creative thinking in the music
industry for example there appears to be
an over saturation of synesthetes with
names like Pharrell and Billy Joel
claiming that they use the colors that
they see in sound to help them write
they would write their music in such a
way that it would produce the colors
that they wanted to see rather than the
sounds they wanted to hear in the stun
field it’s much less apparent the
benefits of synesthesia but I’ve already
seen it affect my career as a young
mathematician when I work numbers and
letters are constantly appearing in my
head interacting as I divide and
multiply and moving around when I do
calculus and number theory in a way that
makes sense to me
I can check my work based on an
intuition of which color should have
stayed and which one should go away when
I perform an operation surely I can do
math in the traditional sense but using
the images helps me understand and it’s
that understanding that makes it work I
don’t think that it’s a special gimmick
or a shortcut that I use my Center
Caesar to do math but a learning tool I
was able to learn math from two
perspectives the normal sense and the
visual sense that I can see in my head
and perspective is what helps us
understand problems and because of this
perspective I was able to learn a method
that for me worked better which brings
us back to PI when I first attempted to
recite some digits of pi I didn’t
realize that I was relying entirely on
my synesthesia as I read the numbers and
tried
recall them I wouldn’t think of the
numbers I would just look at the mental
image they came to mind when I thought
of pi and read off the colors the
letters the groupings that I saw and I
learned a few hundred letters that way
until I decided to focus on memorizing a
speech about it instead what excites me
about pie isn’t that certain synesthetes
are well-equipped to handle it it’s that
the world leaders in memorizing pie for
the most part are not synesthetes these
people apply methods such as associating
numbers with objects and then telling a
story about the objects in a way that
represents the number or associating
them with phonetics in such a way that
they’ll tell a story whose words sound
like pi their method of using sounds or
using objects to represent the numbers
and my method of using the numbers that
I already see are incredibly similar
we took a tedious and bizarre topic and
reframed it in a way that for us was
much better and who knows what else we
could learn from people with other types
with somebody who can taste a word or
somebody who can feel sound could
contribute in their ways of learning I
hope that the synesthetes stands as a
reminder different people think
differently and that doesn’t make them
wrong we’re wired to handle the world in
our own ways and that’s not a bad thing
if I told you before today that H was
orange and it had to be for me to do
math you might think that I was crazy
but most of the people in my life don’t
even know that I have synesthesia they
don’t know that when I’m sitting in a
math class this is what I’m doing and
it’s never stopped me from interacting
with them or teaching them or learning
with them if we can cultivate the
eccentric rather than shame it if we can
appreciate others methods of solving
problems and if you could try to learn
from what we don’t even understand we
just might learn that the world isn’t so
black and white maybe we think in a
whole range of colors and we can use
those colors to help us take it from the
mathematician who thinks that purple is
divisible by five thank you you
one of the most bizarre metrics that
exist to test one’s mental grit stamina
and determination is the art of
memorizing the digits of pi as the
numbers move further from the decimal
they become seemingly random and too
small for a human ever to need to know
and yet people have managed to memorize
these digits by the thousands surely
this is an impressive feat these
individuals devoted mass quantities of
time to mass memorization to reading and
reciting until they could recall numbers
for hours on end but what if they didn’t
have to what would be the implications
of a man who could recite PI without
needing to consciously recall it i have
synesthesia
it’s a condition which creates a merging
of the senses differently for different
people in such a way that certain ideas
are stimuli and evoke unusual responses
synesthetes have been documented to
taste words to see sound or even to
associate a gender or personality with
letters and numbers grapheme-color
synesthesia is a form which forces me to
see numbers and letters in my head in a
particular color and comida is a form
where music and sound present me with a
visual image in my head my mind has its
own font where anything I read appears
in their respective color and when I
hear music an explosion of clouds and
waves and pulses represent the melodies
these images are involuntary any time I
even think of a number or letter it will
appear in the right color and if I
listen to music or even think of
listening to music I will always see the
waves they’ll never change from my
entire life the color n will be pink the
number 2 will be green and if I play
music in the key of E it will carry a
tint of yellow in the clouds but perhaps
the most surprising aspect of
synesthesia is how bizarrely natural it
is most people who have it don’t even
know because they lead a life so typical
that they don’t think to ask if they
occur and experience life differently
than an average person
I didn’t even know that I had
synesthesia until the images I see came
up in a casual conversation about a year
ago most people who have it say that
it’s fairly neutral not good or bad
they’re extra senses are simply present
and they can be pleasant but people who
do have synesthesia can be shamed for
what they see or what they witness
especially in cases of the young
non-traditional methods of thinking can
be frowned upon in a traditional
learning environment but maybe they can
use these senses for good maybe they can
benefit from what they see in the
creative arts this is overwhelmingly
apparent studies have shown that people
with synesthesia are more likely to take
jobs with creative thinking in the music
industry for example there appears to be
an over saturation of synesthetes with
names like Pharrell and Billy Joel
claiming that they use the colors that
they see in sound to help them write
they would write their music in such a
way that it would produce the colors
that they wanted to see rather than the
sounds they wanted to hear in the stun
field it’s much less apparent the
benefits of synesthesia but I’ve already
seen it affect my career as a young
mathematician when I work numbers and
letters are constantly appearing in my
head interacting as I divide and
multiply and moving around when I do
calculus and number theory in a way that
makes sense to me
I can check my work based on an
intuition of which color should have
stayed and which one should go away when
I perform an operation surely I can do
math in the traditional sense but using
the images helps me understand and it’s
that understanding that makes it work I
don’t think that it’s a special gimmick
or a shortcut that I use my Center
Caesar to do math but a learning tool I
was able to learn math from two
perspectives the normal sense and the
visual sense that I can see in my head
and perspective is what helps us
understand problems and because of this
perspective I was able to learn a method
that for me worked better which brings
us back to PI when I first attempted to
recite some digits of pi I didn’t
realize that I was relying entirely on
my synesthesia as I read the numbers and
tried
recall them I wouldn’t think of the
numbers I would just look at the mental
image they came to mind when I thought
of pi and read off the colors the
letters the groupings that I saw and I
learned a few hundred letters that way
until I decided to focus on memorizing a
speech about it instead what excites me
about pie isn’t that certain synesthetes
are well-equipped to handle it it’s that
the world leaders in memorizing pie for
the most part are not synesthetes these
people apply methods such as associating
numbers with objects and then telling a
story about the objects in a way that
represents the number or associating
them with phonetics in such a way that
they’ll tell a story whose words sound
like pi their method of using sounds or
using objects to represent the numbers
and my method of using the numbers that
I already see are incredibly similar
we took a tedious and bizarre topic and
reframed it in a way that for us was
much better and who knows what else we
could learn from people with other types
with somebody who can taste a word or
somebody who can feel sound could
contribute in their ways of learning I
hope that the synesthetes stands as a
reminder different people think
differently and that doesn’t make them
wrong we’re wired to handle the world in
our own ways and that’s not a bad thing
if I told you before today that H was
orange and it had to be for me to do
math you might think that I was crazy
but most of the people in my life don’t
even know that I have synesthesia they
don’t know that when I’m sitting in a
math class this is what I’m doing and
it’s never stopped me from interacting
with them or teaching them or learning
with them if we can cultivate the
eccentric rather than shame it if we can
appreciate others methods of solving
problems and if you could try to learn
from what we don’t even understand we
just might learn that the world isn’t so
black and white maybe we think in a
whole range of colors and we can use
those colors to help us take it from the
mathematician who thinks that purple is
divisible by five thank you you
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