I'm a savant, or more precisely, a high-functioning autistic savant. It's a rare condition. And rarer still when accompanied, as in my case, by self-awareness and a mastery of language. Very often when I meet someone and they learn this about me, there's a certain kind of awkwardness. I can see it in their eyes. They want to ask me something. And in the end, quite often, the urge is stronger than they are and they blurt it out: "If I give you my date of birth, can you tell me what day of the week I was born on?" (Laughter) Or they mention cube roots or ask me to recite a long number or long text. I hope you'll forgive me if I don't perform a kind of one-man savant show for you today. I'm going to talk instead about something far more interesting than dates of birth or cube roots -- a little deeper and a lot closer, to my mind, than work.
我有學者症候群(一種認知障礙), 更確切地說 我是具超智商的 自閉症認知障礙者。 有學者症的人是很稀少的。 而我的情況更是罕見, 因為我還具有 自我認知和 能掌握語言的能力。 常常當很多人與我初次相遇, 當他們知道我的行情時, 場面就會變得有些尷尬。 我從他們的眼神中可讀到 他們有問題要問我。 通常到最後 他們不法再忍耐下去, 於是就會脫口而出的問到: "假如我告訴你-我的出生日期, 你能告訴我-我是星期幾出生的嗎?” (笑) 或者跟我討論數學立方根, 或要求我背誦很長的數字或文章。 我希望你們能原諒我, 如果我今天沒有表演 這種學者症獨角戲給你們欣賞。 我將要談 的話題是比 出生年月日 或立方根更有趣- 帶你們更深入更接近我的內在世界; 而不是只看我超智商的表面相。
I want to talk to you briefly about perception. When he was writing the plays and the short stories that would make his name, Anton Chekhov kept a notebook in which he noted down his observations of the world around him -- little details that other people seem to miss. Every time I read Chekhov and his unique vision of human life, I'm reminded of why I too became a writer. In my books, I explore the nature of perception and how different kinds of perceiving create different kinds of knowing and understanding.
我想和你們簡短的談談 什麼是認知。 安東契訶夫是以他寫的戲劇和 短篇小說而聞名, 他總是在隨身 攜帶的筆記本中 記下所觀察到的 周遭世界- 一些其他人 似乎沒注意到的小細節。 每次當我讀到契訶夫的書, 與他的獨特眼光來品味人生, 就再次提醒我自己這也是 為什麼我也成了一名作家的原因。 在我的書中, 我探索認知的本質, 經由各種不同類型的察覺 進而創造不同的知識 和理解。
Here are three questions drawn from my work. Rather than try to figure them out, I'm going to ask you to consider for a moment the intuitions and the gut instincts that are going through your head and your heart as you look at them. For example, the calculation: can you feel where on the number line the solution is likely to fall? Or look at the foreign word and the sounds: can you get a sense of the range of meanings that it's pointing you towards? And in terms of the line of poetry, why does the poet use the word hare rather than rabbit? I'm asking you to do this because I believe our personal perceptions, you see, are at the heart of how we acquire knowledge. Aesthetic judgments, rather than abstract reasoning, guide and shape the process by which we all come to know what we know. I'm an extreme example of this.
我準備了三個問題 告訴您們我的世界, 與其要你們試著去解答, 我要你們考慮片刻,利用你們的 立即直覺 和本能的反應, 就是那種當一入眼簾後,通過你的頭跟心(身體) 之後的直覺來回答問題。 舉例來說,這個計算題, 是否你可以大約推測出它 最可能的數字? 或是看到這些外國語或聽到它的發音。 你能感覺到它們所要表達出 的意義嗎? 在這首詩的章節中, 為什麼詩人用"野兔" 而不用"兔子"這個詞呢? 我要求你們這樣做, 是因為我認為我們個人對事務的認知 是我們如何獲取 知識的主要方式。 用對感觀上的感受(審美觀), 取代依靠抽象推理, 引導和塑造的過程來 認識學習知識。然後 瞭解事務。 而我個人就是一個極佳的例子。
My worlds of words and numbers blur with color, emotion and personality. As Juan said, it's the condition that scientists call synesthesia, an unusual cross-talk between the senses. Here are the numbers one to 12 as I see them -- every number with its own shape and character. One is a flash of white light. Six is a tiny and very sad black hole. The sketches are in black and white here, but in my mind they have colors. Three is green. Four is blue. Five is yellow.
在我的世界裡,文字和數字 是混雜帶有顏色,有情感 和個性的。 就像關(Juan)所說的 是科學家們稱之的"聯覺"症狀, 也就是一種感覺和另一種感覺之間 不尋常的交際。 這是數字1至12的圖, 但我看它們是- 每一個數字有專屬的形狀和特色。 1是閃爍的白光。 6是一個憂傷微小的黑洞。 呈現你們眼前的這圖只有黑色和白色, 但在我心中,他們有顏色。 3是綠色。 4是藍色的。 5是黃色的。
I paint as well. And here is one of my paintings. It's a multiplication of two prime numbers. Three-dimensional shapes and the space they create in the middle creates a new shape, the answer to the sum. What about bigger numbers? Well you can't get much bigger than Pi, the mathematical constant. It's an infinite number -- literally goes on forever. In this painting that I made of the first 20 decimals of Pi, I take the colors and the emotions and the textures and I pull them all together into a kind of rolling numerical landscape.
我也畫畫。 這是我的其中一個作品。 顯示兩個質數的乘法。 呈三次空間的形狀, 而在兩個質數中間的空間中有 另一個新的形狀, 也就是解答。 那麼如果是較大的數字呢? 沒有任何數字比Pi(π,圓周率)更無限, π是數學常數。 是一個無限的數字- 理論上是永無止境的延伸。 在此畫中我畫出的π是 直到小數點後的第20位為止, 我用了許多色彩, 情緒和質感 一同來顯現出一種 滾動的數字景觀。
But it's not only numbers that I see in colors. Words too, for me, have colors and emotions and textures. And this is an opening phrase from the novel "Lolita." And Nabokov was himself synesthetic. And you can see here how my perception of the sound L helps the alliteration to jump right out. Another example: a little bit more mathematical. And I wonder if some of you will notice the construction of the sentence from "The Great Gatsby." There is a procession of syllables -- wheat, one; prairies, two; lost Swede towns, three -- one, two, three. And this effect is very pleasant on the mind, and it helps the sentence to feel right.
對我而言,不是只有數字具有顏色。 對我來說,字也一樣 有顏色,情感 和質感紋路. 納博科夫知名小說 "洛麗塔"的開場白。 大量利用聯感詞(用某種感覺的字眼表達另一種感覺)。 你可以看到, 在這裡因我對 L發音的感覺 有助於我瞭解 句中的字頭押韻, 另一例子: 牽扯到一點數學。 我很好奇想知道是否在此有些人 會注意到"大亨小傳" 中句法的結構? 一連串有組織的音節-- 麥,1個音節; 草原,2個音節; 失城記(消失的瑞典城鎮),3個音節- 1,2,3。 很有節奏,讀起來心情非常愉快, 所以句子 很通暢恰好。
Let's go back to the questions I posed you a moment ago. 64 multiplied by 75. If some of you play chess, you'll know that 64 is a square number, and that's why chessboards, eight by eight, have 64 squares. So that gives us a form that we can picture, that we can perceive. What about 75? Well if 100, if we think of 100 as being like a square, 75 would look like this. So what we need to do now is put those two pictures together in our mind -- something like this. 64 becomes 6,400. And in the right-hand corner, you don't have to calculate anything. Four across, four up and down -- it's 16. So what the sum is actually asking you to do is 16, 16, 16. That's a lot easier than the way that the school taught you to do math, I'm sure. It's 16, 16, 16, 48, 4,800 -- 4,800, the answer to the sum. Easy when you know how.
讓我們回到我 剛才提出的問題上。 64乘以75。 如果你下國際象棋, 你就會知道, 64是一個平方數, 這就是為什麼棋盤, 八乘八, 有64個方格。 這給了我們一個 們可以想像的模型, 那75呢? 就用100來想像, 如果我們認為100是廣場, 75就是這樣的的大小。 所以我們現在 只要把那兩張照片 在我們的腦海中併在一起 - 像這樣。 64變為6400。 而在右下角, 你不須要計算。 4個格子,上下四個格子- 所以是16。 那麼真正須要計算的總和 是16, 16,16(3個16)。 很簡單吧! 我相信比學校教的計算方法容易多了。 那16,16,16,48(3個16), 4800(48x100) - 4800, 就是正確答案。 當你知道方法就很簡單!
(Laughter)
(笑)
The second question was an Icelandic word. I'm assuming there are not many people here who speak Icelandic. So let me narrow the choices down to two. Hnugginn: is it a happy word, or a sad word? What do you say? Okay. Some people say it's happy. Most people, a majority of people, say sad. And it actually means sad. (Laughter) Why do, statistically, a majority of people say that a word is sad, in this case, heavy in other cases? In my theory, language evolves in such a way that sounds match, correspond with, the subjective, with the personal, intuitive experience of the listener.
第二個問題是有關冰島文字。 我推測在座沒有多少人 會說冰島話。 因此,讓我縮小你們的選擇範圍到兩個。 Hnugginn: 這是一個表示高興的字, 或悲傷的字? 你怎麼想? 好! 有人說是快樂的字。 但很多人,大多數的人說是 悲傷的詞字。 它實際上意味著悲哀。 (笑) 在統計學上為什麼 大多數人說這一個字 ,在此例,是悲傷的意思, 別的例子可能指強勢? 我的理論是:語言的發展是 與聲音相襯的方式進行, 加上相對應的主觀感覺, 及聽者個人的 直覺經驗 來演化。
Let's have a look at the third question. It's a line from a poem by John Keats. Words, like numbers, express fundamental relationships between objects and events and forces that constitute our world. It stands to reason that we, existing in this world, should in the course of our lives absorb intuitively those relationships. And poets, like other artists, play with those intuitive understandings. In the case of hare, it's an ambiguous sound in English. It can also mean the fibers that grow from a head. And if we think of that -- let me put the picture up -- the fibers represent vulnerability. They yield to the slightest movement or motion or emotion. So what you have is an atmosphere of vulnerability and tension. The hare itself, the animal -- not a cat, not a dog, a hare -- why a hare? Because think of the picture -- not the word, the picture. The overlong ears, the overlarge feet, helps us to picture, to feel intuitively, what it means to limp and to tremble.
讓我們來看第三個問題。 這是約翰濟慈詩中的一句。 文字就像數字一樣, 呈現對於目標,事件之間 的根本互動關係, 驅動組成 我們的世界。 這也為什麼生存在這世界的我們, 理所當然的會在此過程中 直覺地承接這些關係。 詩人們,像其他的藝術家一樣, 細細把玩著對直覺的理解。 像這例子為什麼用野兔這詞, 野兔在英語的用法有另一個含糊不清的意義。 也可指長在頭上的毫毛。 那麼如果我們想像一下- -讓我用圖像來告訴您們- 毫毛代表脆弱。 它們會被任何輕微的風吹草動 或情緒所影響。 所以可以創造出 脆弱和緊張氣氛。 野兔本身- 不是貓,不是狗,而是野兔 - 為什麼用野兔這個詞? 想像 這個情景的圖片 而不是字,想像圖片。 過長的耳朵, 超大的腳, 幫助我們去想像,直觀地去感受, 這意味著什麼: 跛腳,顫抖。
So in these few minutes, I hope I've been able to share a little bit of my vision of things and to show you that words can have colors and emotions, numbers, shapes and personalities. The world is richer, vaster than it too often seems to be. I hope that I've given you the desire to learn to see the world with new eyes.
我希望在這幾分鐘裡 我已經跟您們分享 一些些我視野中的世界, 並且讓你們知道 文字有色彩和情感, 數字,形狀和個性。 這世界是比我們 常以為的 更富麗的,更遼闊的。 我希望我已經挑起你們 用新的眼光學習看世界的動機。
Thank you.
謝謝。
(Applause)
(鼓掌)