Name: 【TEDx】The Woman Who Changed Her Brain: Barbara Arrowsmith-Young at TEDxToronto
Uploaded: 2014-07-14T06:43:03.000Z
Duration: 13 min 57 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

To-infinitive

Future simple

which I hope will not be a secret by the end of the talk.

I am truly, madly, deeply passionate about the human brain.

Science has taught us that our brain shapes us,

And if we think about our brain, it has 200 billion neurons.

Think about the world's population:  that's a mere 7 billion.

And we have hundreds of trillions of connections in our brain.

If we imagine all the stars in the Milky Way Galaxy,

there are more connections in our brain, than all of those stars combined.

So, this incredibly complex organ  that we carry with us

everywhere we go,  it does shape who we are.

It is a filter,  it filters our perceptions

and our understanding of ourselves,  of others, of our world,

and you note  all the physical differences between you:

the shape of your nose,  the color of your eyes, your height,

there are more differences  between your two brains

than all of those physical differences  in combination.

And I am here today  to share with you my story,

but that we can actually shape our brain.

and in Grade 1 I was identified  as having a mental block.

And I was told I would never learn  like other children.

And really, the message at that time  was loud and clear.

I was told I needed to learn to live  with those limitations.

And this was 1957, and it was the time  of the unchangeable brain.

And childhood was  a profound struggle for me.

I couldn't tell time.  I couldn't understand the relationship

between an hour hand  and a minute hand on a clock.

I couldn't understand language.  Most of what I read, or heard,

was really as intelligible  as the 'Jabberwocky'.

If somebody said to me,  "The man is wearing a black coat",

I could paint the picture in my head,  and I could understand that.

But what I couldn't do was understand  concepts, or ideas, or relationships.

I pondered, how could my aunt also  be my mother's sister?

And what did that fraction,  1/4, really mean?

Any kind of abstract concept  was hard for me.

So, I learned to laugh  when other people did.

Cause and effect:  it did not exist in my world.

There were no reasons  behind why things happened.

My world was a series of disconnected  bits and pieces of unrelated fragments.

And eventually,  my fragmented view of the world

ended up causing  a very fragmented sense of myself.

And that wasn't all:  this whole left side of my body

was like an alien being,  unconnected to the rest of me.

I would bang and bump into things  on the left side of my body.

If I picked up anything in this left hand, I would drop it.

If I put this left hand on the hot burner, I would feel pain,

but I had no idea  where it was coming from.

My mother, she was convinced  I would be dead by the age of 5.

And then, if that wasn't enough,  I had a spatial problem.

I couldn't imagine  three-dimensional space.

I would constantly get lost, even in my friend's house.

I could not judge  how far away was that car.

I felt there was something horribly,  horribly wrong with me.

And in my child's mind,  when I'd heard that diagnosis,

of having a mental block,  I actually thought

I had a wooden cube in my head  that made learning difficult.

And I didn't have a piece of wood  in my head, but I wasn't far wrong.

I had blockages, as I was later to learn,

And I tried all the traditional approaches,  they were all about compensation,

finding a strength to support a weakness.

They were not about trying to address  the source of the problem,

and they took heroic effort,  and led to rather limited results for me.

I could not imagine  how I could go on to high school,

The only option I could see  was ending my life.

And the next morning, when I woke up  after my failed suicide attempt,

I berated myself for not even being able to get that right.

And part of what kept me going was  an attitude that I learned from my father.

He was an inventor, and he was passionate  about the creative process.

He taught me that if there's a problem, and there's no solution,

that before you can solve a problem,  you have to identify its nature.

So I continued my hunt.  I went on to study psychology,

to try to understand  what was wrong with me,

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【TEDx】The Woman Who Changed Her Brain: Barbara Arrowsmith-Young at TEDxToronto

know

brain

world

create