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