01b. Daniel Tammet: Different ways of knowing. Part 2.
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 sentencefrom "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.
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.
(Laughter)
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.
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 limpand to tremble.
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. Thank you.
(Applause)
