Name: 【TED】Isaac Lidsky: What reality are you creating for yourself? (What reality are you creating for yourself? | Isaac Lidsky)
Uploaded: 2016-12-05T03:26:17.000Z
Duration: 11 min 47 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...

Basic passive voice

Adverbs of manner

Her father explained to her that fish swim by quickly wagging their tails

Without hesitation, little Dorothy responded,

"Yes, Daddy, and fish swim backwards by wagging their heads."

In her mind, it was a fact as true as any other.

Fish swim backwards by wagging their heads.

Our lives are full of fish swimming backwards.

We make assumptions and faulty leaps of logic.

We know that we are right, and they are wrong.

We tell ourselves what we can and cannot do.

In our minds, fish swim by in reverse frantically wagging their heads

I'm going to tell you five facts about myself.

One: I graduated from Harvard at 19 with an honors degree in mathematics.

Two: I currently run a construction company in Orlando.

Four: I lost my sight to a rare genetic eye disease.

Five: I served as a law clerk to two US Supreme Court justices.

At this point, most people really only care about the television show.

OK, so the show was NBC's "Saved by the Bell: The New Class."

who was the sort of dorky, nerdy character on the show,

which made it a very major acting challenge

Now, did you struggle with number four, my blindness?

We make assumptions about so-called disabilities.

As a blind man, I confront others' incorrect assumptions

My point today is not about my blindness, however.

Going blind taught me to live my life eyes wide open.

It taught me to spot those backwards-swimming fish

You open your eyes and there's the world.

Then, from age 12 to 25, my retinas progressively deteriorated.

carnival funhouse hall of mirrors and illusions.

The salesperson I was relieved to spot in a store

I suddenly saw it was a urinal I was touching, not a sink,

A friend described the photograph in my hand,

and only then I could see the image depicted.

Objects appeared, morphed and disappeared in my reality.

I pieced together fragmented, transitory images,

searched for some logic in my crumbling kaleidoscope,

What we see is a unique, personal, virtual reality

that is masterfully constructed by our brain.

Let me explain with a bit of amateur neuroscience.

Your visual cortex takes up about 30 percent of your brain.

That's compared to approximately eight percent for touch

Every second, your eyes can send your visual cortex

as many as two billion pieces of information.

The rest of your body can send your brain only an additional billion.

So sight is one third of your brain by volume

and can claim about two thirds of your brain's processing resources.

that the illusion of sight is so compelling.

But make no mistake about it: sight is an illusion.

your brain references your conceptual understanding of the world,

other knowledge, your memories, opinions, emotions, mental attention.

All of these things and far more are linked in your brain to your sight.

These linkages work both ways, and usually occur subconsciously.

and the way you feel can literally change what you see.

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【TED】Isaac Lidsky: What reality are you creating for yourself? (What reality are you creating for yourself? | Isaac Lidsky)

mental

illusion

applause

compelling