How my left brain stole my right arm

in the 20th century

i thought i was a genius

i knew a lot of things i read a lot of

books and

i developed this trick i would talk all

the time and say as many things as i

could

that’s what geniuses do it was really

important to me to show everyone how

smart i was

and it seemed to work out pretty well i

got

1550 on my sats and i applied to a bunch

of ivy league schools

and i got into none of them because it

turns out that

even when you think you’re a genius you

probably need to do your homework

and i had a c minus average so when i

finally did get to college

i thought i need a new approach

so i decided to focus on

things that people thought were

important and

i would get to class and raise my hand

and be the first one the professor would

call on

to talk about whatever book we were to

be reading that day and i would say a

thing or two and then i wouldn’t have to

say anything

for the rest of the class and it

wouldn’t look like i was trying to

monopolize the conversation

and that seemed to be working pretty

well until one of my professors

said to me you know david you could be

really good

if you actually read the books you

talked about

so once again it was time for a new

approach

i did a lot more work and it paid off

i did get into an ivy league university

for graduate school

i moved to silicon valley and i joined

startups

i had a bunch of cool tech jobs some of

them are big companies

my family lives around the corner from

here we’ve had a pretty

pretty good life here work has been

challenging but

you know it has its ups and downs in

fact in 2017

i spent the entire year looking for a

job because my latest startup had

let me go that’s how it goes with

startups

and i was

sitting in the driveway

of my house and composing a text message

when i suddenly realized

i do not know where the letter l

is on my keyboard which which really

didn’t make any sense because i knew

where the letter l

was on my keyboard and my arm felt

pretty funny

so i called my 21 year old daughter noah

and i said you know i think we should go

to urgent care

which we did and i got there and they

sat me down and they said david

you’re having a stroke you need to get

in the ambulance

so the ambulance drivers came up

these two hot looking buff paramedics

and so promptly i introduced them to my

beautiful daughter noah and that’s the

last thing i remember

next thing i knew i was in the emergency

room

surrounded by a bunch of doctors so i

opened my mouth

and i couldn’t get any words out

none they were right

i had had a stroke and another thing

my arm and my leg i couldn’t find them

they felt

they didn’t feel at all it wasn’t that

they hurt i just didn’t know where they

were

so i was in the icu for about a week and

then they sent me to rehab

and in rehab they have some rules

one of the rules is never leave your bed

without a nurse present as you may have

guessed

i’m not that good at following rules so

i did a lot of face planting

it turns out that if you don’t know

where your arm and leg are

you’re going to lose your balance and

fall down a lot and that really freaked

out the nursing staff

who are just saints the patients those

people had with me

was just amazing and

after two or three weeks of all kinds of

therapy

i was ready to go home so

i put a walker in front of me and walked

to the car

i was there for about a month at home

and gradually did a whole bunch of

different exercises but

i was really baffled i didn’t smoke

i didn’t drink in fact i’m a pretty

healthy guy i went to the gym five six

times a week

my wife’s a chef right so that’s kind of

a job requirement

all the things they said do not do

in case you might have a stroke i did

not do them

there were no signs but i had a stroke

anyway

time went on i got to about

four months in and i walked right past

this school

on the way to el camino hospital where

three different kinds of therapy and the

most intense was speech therapy

and what the speech therapist told me

was

we don’t think you have any real damage

to your cognitive abilities

look at this puzzle how many sticks

matchsticks does it take to make a cube

well i could do all those things

but there was one

thing i could not

do i could walk the walk

but i could not

talk now

i’m a high-tech marketing guy talking

and writing is basically all i do

at work and suddenly i

couldn’t talk and i couldn’t right

me mr genius yale startup

now i was mr brain damage

what the hell was i gonna do

i sat down with a neurologist and she

said

you know you have a hole in your brain

about the size of your pinky

see some blood vessels burst

and my dumb luck

in my brain the blood vessels

that affect speech we’re right next to

the part of the brain that looks after

how

you get sensations how you control your

right side

just a tough coincidence

now what so i understood that there was

something

wrong with my brain but i couldn’t could

i do anything about it

no in fact understanding

what wasn’t working in my brain

really didn’t help me understand what it

is that i

needed to do

here’s the thing about the functions in

your brain and how they map to the

functions in your body

maybe you’ve seen this this is called

the neurological

homunculus it’s kind of a sculptural

representation

of how the functions in your body

occupy the amount of power your brain

requires and as you can see

you know your hands and your mouth those

take

a lot of brain power

is that kind of weird well

that’s science scientists love brain

damage

because that’s how they know

what different parts of your brain do

something in fact

one of the most famous cases this guy

was actually actually buried here in san

francisco

at colma uh well everything but his

skull

this guy phineas gage was

working on a railroad construction site

and suddenly there was an explosion that

drove a

four-foot bar through his

skull and it went right through his

skull

and so he got on a cart and rode to the

doctor and then he passed out well

he had a few deficits for a little while

but he

mostly got back to normal as you can see

he lost the sight

in one eye and this is where they

learned

in this beginning part of in the middle

part of the 19th century

what the different parts of the brain

were responsible for but

understanding what

doesn’t work still didn’t tell you

how it worked

now i was really terrified of not being

able to talk

and it turns out fear

occupies a huge amount of your brain

power and there’s a good reason for this

imagine a bunch of humans

on the serengeti millions of years ago

and there were two groups

and one group says look here’s some

lions

they’re sleeping nothing to worry about

and the other group figured out

that they ought to get out of there now

which of these

two groups of humans do you think

evolved to contribute to the gene pool

that we

all live in

our brains are wired

to respond to fear much

more powerfully

about 150 years after phineas gage and

the explosion that

helped scientists understand what

happens when you subtract a part of the

brain

this guy daniel kahneman won the nobel

prize

for an approach that he calls thinking

fast and slow and it explains a lot

about

how our brains really

operate it turns out

that something called cognitive load

how hard your brain has to work

affects the way you draw conclusions and

make decisions

when you have to do some math or

you know some sophisticated equations or

you kind of a

reader and explain you are

loading your brain there’s one thing you

might not remember

that’s the lions and so we are

wired to respond to fear

instead of doing all this deliberation

to say well you know the lions last

thursday

i’m thinking you know i saw this lion

and the wind’s blowing this other

direction and

i think it’s on thursdays lions don’t

eat meat

nope your mind has been trained

to respond to fear and do just one

thing which is run

in fact this is how i trained my mind

i was terribly afraid that people would

not think i was

smart and so any smart thing that came

out of my head

i would put it through my mouth in no

time and to make sure no one

was misled even for a minute that i was

the smartest guy that ever seen i just

talked all the time

there’s only one problem

the wires are now cut

i can’t talk and by this stupid

coincidence

i can’t write and i still needed to find

a job

i was out of work for a year before the

stroke and then another eight months

after the stroke

so i thought maybe practice

so i talked to some of my friends

just to kind of practice explaining

myself

to prospective employers and i told them

what the speech therapist had said which

is that i

needed to talk more

slowly and they all said the same thing

they said you know david

you talk so fast two-thirds of the time

we don’t know what you’re saying anyway

really i said why didn’t you tell me

oh they said we did

now that was a surprise

or was it really a surprise turns out

that the people who i

was talking at were having exactly the

same reaction

as those people near the lions or

me trying to talk which is

all that processing was not interesting

to them

they just wanted to run and

if they were running and they were not

listening

remind myself again why was it so

important

to prove that i’m a genius

they’re not listening anyway so so

what do i do well

here was the answer since it was hard to

talk anyway

all i had to do was stop

and the strangest thing happened when i

stopped talking

people wanted to talk to me

and something i’d long suspected turned

out to be true

a lot of other people are also pretty

smart some of them are even smarter than

me

i didn’t ever really want to think about

that because i was so afraid that if i

let them

know i wasn’t smart that would be the

end so i would just

keep talking and now because i could do

nothing but stop

it changed what i thought my superpower

was

i still had this terrible fear that

people thought i was going to be stupid

but that fear i couldn’t use it to keep

talking

there was only one thing i could do with

those ideas and that was

to stop that was my new superpower

stop and listen

now it’s been

more than three years and i’ve

vanquished a lot of

these challenges i mean after all

this is a ted talk talk

but there are a couple of people who i

still struggle with

when i talk one of them

is my 16 year old daughter she could be

watching this with you right now

talking to a 16 year old let me tell you

as an adult can be

challenging and

there are no 16 year olds

who want

to hear what a genius their father is

there’s one other person that’s my wife

we’ve been married for

30 years which is more than half our

lives

and

there are a lot of strong feelings when

you’re in a relationship with someone

that long with so many things going on

those strong feelings

they translate into fear and when you’re

afraid you might

you might panic you might want to run

but now i’ve learned to do something

else it’s my new superpower

i stop and i listen

thank you

you