We might all have knowledge without conscious learning
[Music]
can you all tell me what flag this is
yeah don’t be shy just shout it out
easy right
i mean it’s the country we’re all in
right now
what about this one
yeah
not quite as easy as a czech republic is
it this is the bhutanese flag
all right i’ll go back to another easy
one then
yeah it seems like most of us got that
one
and how about this one
anyone
this is south sudan’s flag
and finally what about these three
these three almost identical flags are
the polish indonesian and monogask flags
most of you struggled with some of those
but ever since i was small
i’ve known every single one of those
i can name any of the 195 national flags
of the world and i could also tell you
their capital cities
i’m not kidding here let me show you
some
andorran
paraguay
the central african republic tonga
kyrgyzstan
and siege barbuda
i could go on and name any national flag
ever since i was five or six i’ve had
all this knowledge memorized
but the thing is
i never learned
it i never searched up any world flags i
never studied them
i never looked at them
and honestly i never even thought about
them
that was until i turned six
and ever since then i’ve been a huge
geography nerd
and it all spawned out of that
spontaneous emergence of those flags in
my memory
out of nowhere i had access to an
entirely new door to knowledge
one which wasn’t there before
or was it
you’ve all probably heard the saying
that children soak up new things like
sponges
whether that be languages or any new
skills
as it turns out the notion that children
are better learners than adults
is actually true
and that is because as children our
brains have heightened plasticity
meaning they are much more flexible
and because as children we are much more
receptive to new information
as we grow older mature though the
brain’s capacity for change decreases
with time our brains settle into the
lives that we’ve made for ourselves
this process of decreasing the brain’s
plasticity is controlled by inhibitory
neurons
which regulate the creation of new
connections in the brain
they decide what to rewire in the brain
in response to any experience
so they essentially regulate what the
brain learns
not to bore you to death with this
lecture about neuroplasticity and
inhibition
but these inhibitory neurons will
essentially allow most information to
enter the brain when they’re young
as the neurons grow older they become
much more like us judgmental
but there is that critical period during
which they will allow most information
to enter the brain and create new
connections
that critical period is when i must
memorize the
flags i may sound a bit uncertain about
this to you and that is because
truth be told
i am
i have no idea how i know all those
flags and neither do my parents or
anyone else close to me
they seem to have just appeared out of
nowhere
which is why i claim to have never
learned them
at least not in the traditional sense
that strange phenomenon which has made
me so obnoxious to play against in flag
memory games has no obvious logical
explanation
and with that flag game annoyance i’m
being completely serious
for my seventh grade christmas my
grandmother gave me a game named flag
spectrum which revolves around naming
the flags of the world
the first time we played
i won
even against my parents and grandparents
the next time i was alone while everyone
else was in teams
i won again this time by an even greater
margin
as you can imagine we haven’t played it
to me played it too many times since
but this game is what truly made me
aware of my flag knowledge
for some reason a seven-year-old me
beating my adult parents and
grandparents in a knowledge-based game
didn’t shock me at first
i could confidently surprise anyone who
witnessed me naming the flags of the
world as if those flags were ingrained
inside my brain
my knowledge of flags felt so natural so
unforced that it was as if i was born
with it
but i wasn’t born with that knowledge
it’s not as if my memory came as a
preloaded hard drive with the flags of
the world stored on it
and like i already said
i never searched up in your old flies
when i was five
i never tried to memorize the flags of
central america
but somehow they’re in my brain now
and now i have the special ability to
point out the only two flags in the
world which have the color purple on
them
which are nicaragua and dominica by the
way
based on my reading on brain development
i believe that my knowledge of flags
comes from me playing with some flags in
my preschool
but surely i can’t have subconsciously
memorized 195 flags that way
or so i thought
because realistically there was no other
place where i possibly could have been
exposed to and memorize those flags
so even though i have no strong memories
of me playing with any flags in my
preschool that is most likely where i
learned them
having settled on the origins of my flag
knowledge being me playing with some
flags or looking at a poster with the
flags of the world in my warsaw
preschool
let’s move on to the next piece of this
knowledge puzzle
i have the knowledge in my brain
but how do i access it
i’d like to imagine that on my 6th
birthday i woke up and could suddenly
name every single flag in the world
but life is not like a movie and that is
certainly not what happened
it was a more gradual process
at first i would mess up on some of the
similar flags like the polish indonesian
and monogask flags asked you all about
earlier
but relatively quickly my brain ironed
out those errors and i could soon
differentiate all the flags of the world
my access to this knowledge are still
extremely sudden though as i had no idea
i knew any flags before that one day
of course my learning the flags at such
a young age helped because of the
heightened plasticity and inhibitory
balance
but that still does not explain how i
could access that knowledge
so i continued my search for an answer
until i reached my memory
now my memory is certainly not
exceptional
but it is relatively strong
i can remember many things after reading
them just once
i can remember my speeches
and well i can name any of the 195
national flags of the world
perhaps the strength of my memory is we
made that door to knowledge inside my
brain accessible
but what about other doors
what about a door to the ditto pie
what about a door to chest openings
and what about the doors in your brains
we’ve all been children at some point so
we’ve all lived through that critical
period we’ve all had high brain
plasticity and the optimal inhibitory
balance and we all put unknown things
during that period
so where is that knowledge now
we might all have this knowledge in our
memories and our brains
the challenge
is finding a way to access it
there are almost endless possibilities
for the knowledge that might be hidden
inside your brains that you are yet to
discover
whether that knowledge is one of flags
like mine
or art theory
or even physics concepts
so when you go home today start
searching for that potentially hidden
knowledge it could be anywhere
as i’m doing this tedx talking to school
i find it only thing that i give you all
a small test don’t worry though it’s
nothing too difficult
actually i just spoke about these three
flags a couple minutes ago
remember these
i’ll tell you this these are the flags
of poland indonesia and monaco but can
you tell me which is which
if you said that flag a was monaco’s b
poland’s and c the indonesian flag you’d
be right
if you got all three of those correct
you might just have that same hidden
knowledge of flags that i have
and if you didn’t
don’t worry
your head knowledge may just be in
another area
i’m not saying that we can all become
the next chess grandmasters and you
should definitely not expect to become
the next einstein who bang your head
against the wall enough
but we might all have a layer of
knowledge in our brains that we never
learned
we just need to learn to tap into that
knowledge
[Applause]
you