TedTest

From the Ted Talk by Imogen Malpas: Can we see time? Exploring synesthesia

Unscramble the Blue Letters

adamna Zhu, Translator

Rhonda Jacobs, Reviewer

Okay. Let's start with an experiment. What color is the letter F? Some of you might have checked the silde just like I did to see if there's an F up there. There isn't. Some of you might ivinstlintecy know what color F is. What if I told you that F was the golden yellow coolr of wheat fields in summer? Would you think I'd drunk too much caffenie before ciomng on sgtae? Would you think I was just making this up? Or would you want to argue with me? Would you be thinking F isn't yellow, F is green, or F is pink? Some of you might be on the same page as me already, and if you're not, then allow me to welcome you to the wlrod of synesthesia. Synesthesia is a neurological cniooidtn, sometimes called the cross-wiring of seness, where a stimulation of one sense - touch, taste, sound, sight - causes the experience of another. And the type of synesthesia I've just been talking about, where F's are ylleow or green or pink, is called grapheme-color synesthesia, and it's the most cmmoon kind. For people with this type of synesthesia, graphemes - so leretts or nemrubs - have colors. And whilst these colors might differ between individuals, for the individuals themselves, they reamin the same throughout their life. These are my personal colors, and they don't change. Once you've got it, you've pretty much got it forever. And these are the hallmarks of synesthesia, and these need to be present in order for synesthesia of any kind to be disogenad. The synesthetic experience must be involuntary, so it happens whether you like it or not. And it must be consistent; it remains the same throughout your life. It must be unidirectional, which means that graphemes evoke cloros, but colors don't evoke graphemes. And it must be automatic, so it happens completely without effort. But today I'm not going to be talking about the most common type of synesthesia; that would be far too easy - instead, I'll be talking about synesthesia at its most rare. Some of you might have had an idea of what I was talking about when I asked you what color is F. But what if I had said, What shape is next week? Well, for one percent of you in the audience - that's about 10 lucky people - this should still make pcferet sense because this is what's known as time-space synesthesia. For people with time-space synesthesia, time itself has a form, and this form takes pyhsaicl shape around the person. And sometimes this form looks like a hula hoop or like a rleolr coaster, moving through and around the body. Sometimes it looks more like a halo, encircling the head and moving as the head moves, or not, depending on the person. And these are illustrations by time-space synesthetes themselves. The science wiertr Alison Motluk describes her synesthesia as if she herself was riding a roller coaster, starting off in January before moving down all the way through spring and smmuer, and then coming back up through autumn and winter to fiinsh again in January. And this, as we can see, is very much a vritlleacy oriented synesthesia, running parallel to her body like this. In contrast, the writer Emma ynoemas tklas about a horizontally oriented synesthesia. So, on a typical working day for her, she sits firmly in the present with her laptop whilst to her right, tea steams into her past, and to her left, papers and nteos cover her future. And this is much more of a horizontally orientated synesthesia. But we can see that in both cases, the person remains at the center of the shenisetytc form. Now, you might be thinking this is all so far from the reality of how I experience time. A visible personal calendar that goes with you wherever you go might sound like something that you have on your phone, not something that you have in your brain. But I want to suggest that actually, when we all talk about time, we use something similar - we use mtepoahr. A metaphor works like this: you have an abstract concept - let's call it X; and a concrete concept - let's call it Y. Now, in this case, time is the arctbast concept while space is the crntocee concept. It's much easier for us to get our heads around space than it is around time. Since time is too abstract for the brain to process by itself, it needs to be given a context. And by using data gathered from the adtoiury, visual, or tactile centers of the brian, we're able to judge the distance between and the location of enetvs that hppaen in time, giving these events a spiaatl context. And so time, X, is meappd onto sapce, Y. And by the way, this mapping is so prweufol, so fundamental to cognition that the act of moving in space or even thinking about moving in space alrtes how we perceive time passing. Studies have shown that just imagining mnoivg forward in a queue or taking a train journey dramatically alters how we perceive time in the real world. And this relationship, of course, is reflected in our language and this usneviarl rule that time is space. I bet you've used at least three or probably all of these in the past week. The deadline has been moved forward or pushed back; the time is coming. Everywhere we look, we run into this rule, that time is space. And it's this rule which allows us to create an internal mental timeline. So how many of you have soepkn about something you wished you'd done yeesrtady or something that you want to do tomorrow? You might have used gestures like this to emphasize that you're tnkilag about the past or about the future. All of us in this room, synesthetic or not, have a mtanel timeline, a preference to associate certain aaers of our personal space with the past and other areas of our personal space with the future. And so, I will suggest that this means time-space synesthesia, as in the enextral visual form, isn't actually a discrete entity; instead, it's part of a much longer continuum on which we all sit, where at one end, the relationship between time and space in the brain is visualized as an external form and at the other, it's experienced internally. Think about it. This is the axis on which we usually talk about our time. It runs like this, often through our body, so we say that we face the future and we put the past behind us. And we can track this internal synesthesia with the principles of synesthesia that I mentioned before. So, is it consistent? Yes, this doesn't tend to chngae throughout our lives. Is it involuntary? Yes, we can't help that we make these associations. Is it unidirectional? Yes, we need to map time onto space because it's so abstract, but we don't need to map space onto time. And it's automatic; most of us don't even know that we're doing it. So, congratulations, you all have synesthesia. But you cannot go yet, unfortunately, because this isn't where the sotry ends. Although the relationship between time and space might be universal, the ditlaes of that relationship are hghily mediated by the context and the culture in which our brains develop. Okay, second experiment. Imagine that I give you a piece of paper like this, and imagine that I ask you to draw on that piece of paper a tiniemle rnunnig from your birth to the present day. On what side of the paper would you put your birth? Now, I'm willing to bet that for most of you, your instinctive aewnsr is that you put it on the left, with the rest of your life running across the page to the right. And I'm also willing to bet that for most of you, your first language, the one you grew up speaking, runs from left to right across the page. And my fanil bet is that if I'm wrong about your first laggaune, then I'm also wnrog about the placement of your birth, since studies have swohn that those whose first language runs from right to left, like aabirc, are more likely to put the evnet of their birth on the right of the page. And this means that the mental timeline I was just talking about, running like this, isn't universal at all. It was thought to be for a long time, but it's recently been discovered that different cultures visualize time as running along axes as varied as left to right, right to left, up to down, back to front, even notrh to south and east to west. So here's an example. The ppowrrmauaan are an Indigenous argbainiol community in Australia, and if you ask a Pormpuraawan individual to order photos of a person aging in order from the youngest to the oldset, they will iilnrbavay put the oldest photos of the preosn on the west and the ynsoegut pooths to the east. And this is regardless of where they are in the room or their orientation; they know where west and east is, and they will order the photos in those directions. So for the Pormpuraawan, time itself runs from east to west. And for the Aymara of the Andes, time runs along a similar axis as it does for us, but it's rvreeesd. So the Aymara logic is, well, we've experienced the past - we know it, we've seen it - so it should lie in front, where we can look at it, whilst the future, which ranemis uonkwnn, lies behind us. So for the Aymara, future events sit here, and past events sit here. And this is reflected, as it is for us in eisnlgh, in their language. So the Aymara word for "last year" literally means front year, or side year. But I think the most fascinating example of this variation in timelines comes from the Yupno people of Papua New guniea. And the Yupno are geographically ielstaod by a very steep mountain range, so their access to lots of wtesren toeengiolchs, like clocks and calendars, as well as electricity and domestic animals, is highly limited. And the ynupo express their time according to their landscape. A team of anthropologists living with the Yupno noticed that if you ask a Yupno person about the past, they will gesture downhill towards the muoth of the river, which is so integral to their way of life; and if you ask them about the ftuure, they will gesture uphill towards the peak of the mountain, and the source of their local river. And again, this remains the same wherever they are in the landscape and even how far away they are from their local rveir. So for the Yupno, time itself and the flow of time is represented by the flow of their river. So what impanltcoiis does this have for synesthesia? Western time-space synesthete's forms, as you've seen before, look a lot like clocks or calendars; they usually run in clockwise or calendrical format around a circle. But what might these forms look like for time-space synesthetes gniorwg up among the Yupno or among the Aymara in a world without ascecs to Western technology? Well, the simple answer is we don't know, since synesthesia studies have overwhelmingly focused on the experiences of Western university students like me, but we can look at other types of synesthesia for ceuls. So there's a variation of time-space synesthesia, which is cealld sequence-based synesthesia, and it looks a bit like this. So people with the sequence-based synesthesia, instead of seeing time, they see strings of numbers as having forms and shapes. So this is a typical number form of someone with this type of synesthesia. And in our modern age in the West, the twists and the breaks that we see in these synthetic forms, they always happen in intervals of 10 - so 10, 20, 30, 40 - and this represents the fact that in the West, we all live under a very pervasive decimal culture. Everything is in decimals. But this hasn't always been the case, not even in the UK. So 150 years ago, Victorian statistician fnaircs gtlaon was doing his research, and luckily for us, he was also recording examples of sequence-space synesthesia. And this is a form that he recorded in 1881 from a btsirih person. And at first glance, this form might look pretty similar to the one I just shoewd you, and in fact, it has a long stretch here across the mlddie, which has numbers ordered in decimal order. But what's inrsetitneg here is where the breaks lie. And we can see that the breaks lie on one side at 12, and then at the other side, at 112 and 120, and this reflects the fact that in vicotairn Britain, the dominant numerical system was the duodecimal system. And what I also love about this form is that you can see a perfectly reproduced clock face just here on the right. I think it's great. But the point is that as culture changes, so does sesinsehyta. So it's cealovbicne, even probable, that ppeloe growing up in a culture without Western ienunfcle would display a completely different time-space synesthetic form to those that we see today in our research, perhaps even one that doesn't focus on the body but one that focuses on the ldnsapace, which as far as we know, has never been seen. And the likelihood is that in focusing all of our attention on Western accounts of synesthesia, we're missing out on an extraordinary ragne of cultural and synesthetic variation that is only paralleled by the earodrtirnxay range of humans on this planet. So, beyond being, I think, quite interesting, why is any of this important? Well, getting to grips with this idea of a synesthetic continuum and its amazing variety could help us to better grsap how different areas of the brain dovleep and work together. Research into brain connectivity has helped us understand so much, from sleep to addiction to memory, but we still have a lot further to go. And I think that launching a dedicated eeodixtipn to the furthest lengths of this sihnttyec continuum could help us reveal vital information about the rmnineiag mysteries of cognitive function. For example, synesthesia reveals unexpected connections between different areas of the brain, so it could eailsy be used to help uerntnadsd how cognitive decline works and maybe to even prevent it, or to help patients recover from traumatic brain injury. And moving beyond senccie to society, I believe that truly understanding how cultural difrcfenees can shape this tangible reality that we see around us, even siphnag time itself, can really help us get to grips with the concept of seeing the world from other people's points of view. If we can begin by dispensing with this outdated idea that we have rigid sensory borders and instead, come to accept that we all sit somewhere together yet at separate points on a continuum of experience, then perhaps we can take one step closer towards dispensing with unnecessary social divisions altogether. And maybe that might even mean one step further towards inhabiting a world that is extraordinarily and jfulyloy uoubnnd. Thank you. (Applause) (Cheers)

Open Cloze

______ Zhu, Translator

Rhonda Jacobs, Reviewer

Okay. Let's start with an experiment. What color is the letter F? Some of you might have checked the _____ just like I did to see if there's an F up there. There isn't. Some of you might _____________ know what color F is. What if I told you that F was the golden yellow _____ of wheat fields in summer? Would you think I'd drunk too much ________ before ______ on _____? Would you think I was just making this up? Or would you want to argue with me? Would you be thinking F isn't yellow, F is green, or F is pink? Some of you might be on the same page as me already, and if you're not, then allow me to welcome you to the _____ of synesthesia. Synesthesia is a neurological _________, sometimes called the cross-wiring of ______, where a stimulation of one sense - touch, taste, sound, sight - causes the experience of another. And the type of synesthesia I've just been talking about, where F's are ______ or green or pink, is called grapheme-color synesthesia, and it's the most ______ kind. For people with this type of synesthesia, graphemes - so _______ or _______ - have colors. And whilst these colors might differ between individuals, for the individuals themselves, they ______ the same throughout their life. These are my personal colors, and they don't change. Once you've got it, you've pretty much got it forever. And these are the hallmarks of synesthesia, and these need to be present in order for synesthesia of any kind to be _________. The synesthetic experience must be involuntary, so it happens whether you like it or not. And it must be consistent; it remains the same throughout your life. It must be unidirectional, which means that graphemes evoke ______, but colors don't evoke graphemes. And it must be automatic, so it happens completely without effort. But today I'm not going to be talking about the most common type of synesthesia; that would be far too easy - instead, I'll be talking about synesthesia at its most rare. Some of you might have had an idea of what I was talking about when I asked you what color is F. But what if I had said, What shape is next week? Well, for one percent of you in the audience - that's about 10 lucky people - this should still make _______ sense because this is what's known as time-space synesthesia. For people with time-space synesthesia, time itself has a form, and this form takes ________ shape around the person. And sometimes this form looks like a hula hoop or like a ______ coaster, moving through and around the body. Sometimes it looks more like a halo, encircling the head and moving as the head moves, or not, depending on the person. And these are illustrations by time-space synesthetes themselves. The science ______ Alison Motluk describes her synesthesia as if she herself was riding a roller coaster, starting off in January before moving down all the way through spring and ______, and then coming back up through autumn and winter to ______ again in January. And this, as we can see, is very much a __________ oriented synesthesia, running parallel to her body like this. In contrast, the writer Emma _______ _____ about a horizontally oriented synesthesia. So, on a typical working day for her, she sits firmly in the present with her laptop whilst to her right, tea steams into her past, and to her left, papers and _____ cover her future. And this is much more of a horizontally orientated synesthesia. But we can see that in both cases, the person remains at the center of the ___________ form. Now, you might be thinking this is all so far from the reality of how I experience time. A visible personal calendar that goes with you wherever you go might sound like something that you have on your phone, not something that you have in your brain. But I want to suggest that actually, when we all talk about time, we use something similar - we use ________. A metaphor works like this: you have an abstract concept - let's call it X; and a concrete concept - let's call it Y. Now, in this case, time is the ________ concept while space is the ________ concept. It's much easier for us to get our heads around space than it is around time. Since time is too abstract for the brain to process by itself, it needs to be given a context. And by using data gathered from the ________, visual, or tactile centers of the _____, we're able to judge the distance between and the location of ______ that ______ in time, giving these events a _______ context. And so time, X, is ______ onto _____, Y. And by the way, this mapping is so ________, so fundamental to cognition that the act of moving in space or even thinking about moving in space ______ how we perceive time passing. Studies have shown that just imagining ______ forward in a queue or taking a train journey dramatically alters how we perceive time in the real world. And this relationship, of course, is reflected in our language and this _________ rule that time is space. I bet you've used at least three or probably all of these in the past week. The deadline has been moved forward or pushed back; the time is coming. Everywhere we look, we run into this rule, that time is space. And it's this rule which allows us to create an internal mental timeline. So how many of you have ______ about something you wished you'd done _________ or something that you want to do tomorrow? You might have used gestures like this to emphasize that you're _______ about the past or about the future. All of us in this room, synesthetic or not, have a ______ timeline, a preference to associate certain _____ of our personal space with the past and other areas of our personal space with the future. And so, I will suggest that this means time-space synesthesia, as in the ________ visual form, isn't actually a discrete entity; instead, it's part of a much longer continuum on which we all sit, where at one end, the relationship between time and space in the brain is visualized as an external form and at the other, it's experienced internally. Think about it. This is the axis on which we usually talk about our time. It runs like this, often through our body, so we say that we face the future and we put the past behind us. And we can track this internal synesthesia with the principles of synesthesia that I mentioned before. So, is it consistent? Yes, this doesn't tend to ______ throughout our lives. Is it involuntary? Yes, we can't help that we make these associations. Is it unidirectional? Yes, we need to map time onto space because it's so abstract, but we don't need to map space onto time. And it's automatic; most of us don't even know that we're doing it. So, congratulations, you all have synesthesia. But you cannot go yet, unfortunately, because this isn't where the _____ ends. Although the relationship between time and space might be universal, the _______ of that relationship are ______ mediated by the context and the culture in which our brains develop. Okay, second experiment. Imagine that I give you a piece of paper like this, and imagine that I ask you to draw on that piece of paper a ________ _______ from your birth to the present day. On what side of the paper would you put your birth? Now, I'm willing to bet that for most of you, your instinctive ______ is that you put it on the left, with the rest of your life running across the page to the right. And I'm also willing to bet that for most of you, your first language, the one you grew up speaking, runs from left to right across the page. And my _____ bet is that if I'm wrong about your first ________, then I'm also _____ about the placement of your birth, since studies have _____ that those whose first language runs from right to left, like ______, are more likely to put the _____ of their birth on the right of the page. And this means that the mental timeline I was just talking about, running like this, isn't universal at all. It was thought to be for a long time, but it's recently been discovered that different cultures visualize time as running along axes as varied as left to right, right to left, up to down, back to front, even _____ to south and east to west. So here's an example. The ____________ are an Indigenous __________ community in Australia, and if you ask a Pormpuraawan individual to order photos of a person aging in order from the youngest to the ______, they will __________ put the oldest photos of the ______ on the west and the ________ ______ to the east. And this is regardless of where they are in the room or their orientation; they know where west and east is, and they will order the photos in those directions. So for the Pormpuraawan, time itself runs from east to west. And for the Aymara of the Andes, time runs along a similar axis as it does for us, but it's ________. So the Aymara logic is, well, we've experienced the past - we know it, we've seen it - so it should lie in front, where we can look at it, whilst the future, which _______ _______, lies behind us. So for the Aymara, future events sit here, and past events sit here. And this is reflected, as it is for us in _______, in their language. So the Aymara word for "last year" literally means front year, or side year. But I think the most fascinating example of this variation in timelines comes from the Yupno people of Papua New ______. And the Yupno are geographically ________ by a very steep mountain range, so their access to lots of _______ ____________, like clocks and calendars, as well as electricity and domestic animals, is highly limited. And the _____ express their time according to their landscape. A team of anthropologists living with the Yupno noticed that if you ask a Yupno person about the past, they will gesture downhill towards the _____ of the river, which is so integral to their way of life; and if you ask them about the ______, they will gesture uphill towards the peak of the mountain, and the source of their local river. And again, this remains the same wherever they are in the landscape and even how far away they are from their local _____. So for the Yupno, time itself and the flow of time is represented by the flow of their river. So what ____________ does this have for synesthesia? Western time-space synesthete's forms, as you've seen before, look a lot like clocks or calendars; they usually run in clockwise or calendrical format around a circle. But what might these forms look like for time-space synesthetes _______ up among the Yupno or among the Aymara in a world without ______ to Western technology? Well, the simple answer is we don't know, since synesthesia studies have overwhelmingly focused on the experiences of Western university students like me, but we can look at other types of synesthesia for _____. So there's a variation of time-space synesthesia, which is ______ sequence-based synesthesia, and it looks a bit like this. So people with the sequence-based synesthesia, instead of seeing time, they see strings of numbers as having forms and shapes. So this is a typical number form of someone with this type of synesthesia. And in our modern age in the West, the twists and the breaks that we see in these synthetic forms, they always happen in intervals of 10 - so 10, 20, 30, 40 - and this represents the fact that in the West, we all live under a very pervasive decimal culture. Everything is in decimals. But this hasn't always been the case, not even in the UK. So 150 years ago, Victorian statistician _______ ______ was doing his research, and luckily for us, he was also recording examples of sequence-space synesthesia. And this is a form that he recorded in 1881 from a _______ person. And at first glance, this form might look pretty similar to the one I just ______ you, and in fact, it has a long stretch here across the ______, which has numbers ordered in decimal order. But what's ___________ here is where the breaks lie. And we can see that the breaks lie on one side at 12, and then at the other side, at 112 and 120, and this reflects the fact that in _________ Britain, the dominant numerical system was the duodecimal system. And what I also love about this form is that you can see a perfectly reproduced clock face just here on the right. I think it's great. But the point is that as culture changes, so does ___________. So it's ___________, even probable, that ______ growing up in a culture without Western _________ would display a completely different time-space synesthetic form to those that we see today in our research, perhaps even one that doesn't focus on the body but one that focuses on the _________, which as far as we know, has never been seen. And the likelihood is that in focusing all of our attention on Western accounts of synesthesia, we're missing out on an extraordinary _____ of cultural and synesthetic variation that is only paralleled by the _____________ range of humans on this planet. So, beyond being, I think, quite interesting, why is any of this important? Well, getting to grips with this idea of a synesthetic continuum and its amazing variety could help us to better _____ how different areas of the brain _______ and work together. Research into brain connectivity has helped us understand so much, from sleep to addiction to memory, but we still have a lot further to go. And I think that launching a dedicated __________ to the furthest lengths of this _________ continuum could help us reveal vital information about the _________ mysteries of cognitive function. For example, synesthesia reveals unexpected connections between different areas of the brain, so it could ______ be used to help __________ how cognitive decline works and maybe to even prevent it, or to help patients recover from traumatic brain injury. And moving beyond _______ to society, I believe that truly understanding how cultural ___________ can shape this tangible reality that we see around us, even _______ time itself, can really help us get to grips with the concept of seeing the world from other people's points of view. If we can begin by dispensing with this outdated idea that we have rigid sensory borders and instead, come to accept that we all sit somewhere together yet at separate points on a continuum of experience, then perhaps we can take one step closer towards dispensing with unnecessary social divisions altogether. And maybe that might even mean one step further towards inhabiting a world that is extraordinarily and ________ _______. Thank you. (Applause) (Cheers)

Solution

universal
isolated
remains
details
auditory
understand
range
vertically
summer
expedition
talking
youngest
develop
interesting
abstract
senses
yeomans
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spoken
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final
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guinea
arabic
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stage
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people
mental
yupno
numbers
talks
english
physical
remain
letters
galton
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photos
wrong
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unknown
british
common
caffeine
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events
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story
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space
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color
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yellow
grasp
future
running
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easily
concrete
joyfully
invariably
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mouth
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north
amanda
shaping

Original Text

Amanda Zhu, Translator

Rhonda Jacobs, Reviewer

Okay. Let's start with an experiment. What color is the letter F? Some of you might have checked the slide just like I did to see if there's an F up there. There isn't. Some of you might instinctively know what color F is. What if I told you that F was the golden yellow color of wheat fields in summer? Would you think I'd drunk too much caffeine before coming on stage? Would you think I was just making this up? Or would you want to argue with me? Would you be thinking F isn't yellow, F is green, or F is pink? Some of you might be on the same page as me already, and if you're not, then allow me to welcome you to the world of synesthesia. Synesthesia is a neurological condition, sometimes called the cross-wiring of senses, where a stimulation of one sense - touch, taste, sound, sight - causes the experience of another. And the type of synesthesia I've just been talking about, where F's are yellow or green or pink, is called grapheme-color synesthesia, and it's the most common kind. For people with this type of synesthesia, graphemes - so letters or numbers - have colors. And whilst these colors might differ between individuals, for the individuals themselves, they remain the same throughout their life. These are my personal colors, and they don't change. Once you've got it, you've pretty much got it forever. And these are the hallmarks of synesthesia, and these need to be present in order for synesthesia of any kind to be diagnosed. The synesthetic experience must be involuntary, so it happens whether you like it or not. And it must be consistent; it remains the same throughout your life. It must be unidirectional, which means that graphemes evoke colors, but colors don't evoke graphemes. And it must be automatic, so it happens completely without effort. But today I'm not going to be talking about the most common type of synesthesia; that would be far too easy - instead, I'll be talking about synesthesia at its most rare. Some of you might have had an idea of what I was talking about when I asked you what color is F. But what if I had said, What shape is next week? Well, for one percent of you in the audience - that's about 10 lucky people - this should still make perfect sense because this is what's known as time-space synesthesia. For people with time-space synesthesia, time itself has a form, and this form takes physical shape around the person. And sometimes this form looks like a hula hoop or like a roller coaster, moving through and around the body. Sometimes it looks more like a halo, encircling the head and moving as the head moves, or not, depending on the person. And these are illustrations by time-space synesthetes themselves. The science writer Alison Motluk describes her synesthesia as if she herself was riding a roller coaster, starting off in January before moving down all the way through spring and summer, and then coming back up through autumn and winter to finish again in January. And this, as we can see, is very much a vertically oriented synesthesia, running parallel to her body like this. In contrast, the writer Emma Yeomans talks about a horizontally oriented synesthesia. So, on a typical working day for her, she sits firmly in the present with her laptop whilst to her right, tea steams into her past, and to her left, papers and notes cover her future. And this is much more of a horizontally orientated synesthesia. But we can see that in both cases, the person remains at the center of the synesthetic form. Now, you might be thinking this is all so far from the reality of how I experience time. A visible personal calendar that goes with you wherever you go might sound like something that you have on your phone, not something that you have in your brain. But I want to suggest that actually, when we all talk about time, we use something similar - we use metaphor. A metaphor works like this: you have an abstract concept - let's call it X; and a concrete concept - let's call it Y. Now, in this case, time is the abstract concept while space is the concrete concept. It's much easier for us to get our heads around space than it is around time. Since time is too abstract for the brain to process by itself, it needs to be given a context. And by using data gathered from the auditory, visual, or tactile centers of the brain, we're able to judge the distance between and the location of events that happen in time, giving these events a spatial context. And so time, X, is mapped onto space, Y. And by the way, this mapping is so powerful, so fundamental to cognition that the act of moving in space or even thinking about moving in space alters how we perceive time passing. Studies have shown that just imagining moving forward in a queue or taking a train journey dramatically alters how we perceive time in the real world. And this relationship, of course, is reflected in our language and this universal rule that time is space. I bet you've used at least three or probably all of these in the past week. The deadline has been moved forward or pushed back; the time is coming. Everywhere we look, we run into this rule, that time is space. And it's this rule which allows us to create an internal mental timeline. So how many of you have spoken about something you wished you'd done yesterday or something that you want to do tomorrow? You might have used gestures like this to emphasize that you're talking about the past or about the future. All of us in this room, synesthetic or not, have a mental timeline, a preference to associate certain areas of our personal space with the past and other areas of our personal space with the future. And so, I will suggest that this means time-space synesthesia, as in the external visual form, isn't actually a discrete entity; instead, it's part of a much longer continuum on which we all sit, where at one end, the relationship between time and space in the brain is visualized as an external form and at the other, it's experienced internally. Think about it. This is the axis on which we usually talk about our time. It runs like this, often through our body, so we say that we face the future and we put the past behind us. And we can track this internal synesthesia with the principles of synesthesia that I mentioned before. So, is it consistent? Yes, this doesn't tend to change throughout our lives. Is it involuntary? Yes, we can't help that we make these associations. Is it unidirectional? Yes, we need to map time onto space because it's so abstract, but we don't need to map space onto time. And it's automatic; most of us don't even know that we're doing it. So, congratulations, you all have synesthesia. But you cannot go yet, unfortunately, because this isn't where the story ends. Although the relationship between time and space might be universal, the details of that relationship are highly mediated by the context and the culture in which our brains develop. Okay, second experiment. Imagine that I give you a piece of paper like this, and imagine that I ask you to draw on that piece of paper a timeline running from your birth to the present day. On what side of the paper would you put your birth? Now, I'm willing to bet that for most of you, your instinctive answer is that you put it on the left, with the rest of your life running across the page to the right. And I'm also willing to bet that for most of you, your first language, the one you grew up speaking, runs from left to right across the page. And my final bet is that if I'm wrong about your first language, then I'm also wrong about the placement of your birth, since studies have shown that those whose first language runs from right to left, like Arabic, are more likely to put the event of their birth on the right of the page. And this means that the mental timeline I was just talking about, running like this, isn't universal at all. It was thought to be for a long time, but it's recently been discovered that different cultures visualize time as running along axes as varied as left to right, right to left, up to down, back to front, even north to south and east to west. So here's an example. The Pormpuraawan are an Indigenous Aboriginal community in Australia, and if you ask a Pormpuraawan individual to order photos of a person aging in order from the youngest to the oldest, they will invariably put the oldest photos of the person on the west and the youngest photos to the east. And this is regardless of where they are in the room or their orientation; they know where west and east is, and they will order the photos in those directions. So for the Pormpuraawan, time itself runs from east to west. And for the Aymara of the Andes, time runs along a similar axis as it does for us, but it's reversed. So the Aymara logic is, well, we've experienced the past - we know it, we've seen it - so it should lie in front, where we can look at it, whilst the future, which remains unknown, lies behind us. So for the Aymara, future events sit here, and past events sit here. And this is reflected, as it is for us in English, in their language. So the Aymara word for "last year" literally means front year, or side year. But I think the most fascinating example of this variation in timelines comes from the Yupno people of Papua New Guinea. And the Yupno are geographically isolated by a very steep mountain range, so their access to lots of Western technologies, like clocks and calendars, as well as electricity and domestic animals, is highly limited. And the Yupno express their time according to their landscape. A team of anthropologists living with the Yupno noticed that if you ask a Yupno person about the past, they will gesture downhill towards the mouth of the river, which is so integral to their way of life; and if you ask them about the future, they will gesture uphill towards the peak of the mountain, and the source of their local river. And again, this remains the same wherever they are in the landscape and even how far away they are from their local river. So for the Yupno, time itself and the flow of time is represented by the flow of their river. So what implications does this have for synesthesia? Western time-space synesthete's forms, as you've seen before, look a lot like clocks or calendars; they usually run in clockwise or calendrical format around a circle. But what might these forms look like for time-space synesthetes growing up among the Yupno or among the Aymara in a world without access to Western technology? Well, the simple answer is we don't know, since synesthesia studies have overwhelmingly focused on the experiences of Western university students like me, but we can look at other types of synesthesia for clues. So there's a variation of time-space synesthesia, which is called sequence-based synesthesia, and it looks a bit like this. So people with the sequence-based synesthesia, instead of seeing time, they see strings of numbers as having forms and shapes. So this is a typical number form of someone with this type of synesthesia. And in our modern age in the West, the twists and the breaks that we see in these synthetic forms, they always happen in intervals of 10 - so 10, 20, 30, 40 - and this represents the fact that in the West, we all live under a very pervasive decimal culture. Everything is in decimals. But this hasn't always been the case, not even in the UK. So 150 years ago, Victorian statistician Francis Galton was doing his research, and luckily for us, he was also recording examples of sequence-space synesthesia. And this is a form that he recorded in 1881 from a British person. And at first glance, this form might look pretty similar to the one I just showed you, and in fact, it has a long stretch here across the middle, which has numbers ordered in decimal order. But what's interesting here is where the breaks lie. And we can see that the breaks lie on one side at 12, and then at the other side, at 112 and 120, and this reflects the fact that in Victorian Britain, the dominant numerical system was the duodecimal system. And what I also love about this form is that you can see a perfectly reproduced clock face just here on the right. I think it's great. But the point is that as culture changes, so does synesthesia. So it's conceivable, even probable, that people growing up in a culture without Western influence would display a completely different time-space synesthetic form to those that we see today in our research, perhaps even one that doesn't focus on the body but one that focuses on the landscape, which as far as we know, has never been seen. And the likelihood is that in focusing all of our attention on Western accounts of synesthesia, we're missing out on an extraordinary range of cultural and synesthetic variation that is only paralleled by the extraordinary range of humans on this planet. So, beyond being, I think, quite interesting, why is any of this important? Well, getting to grips with this idea of a synesthetic continuum and its amazing variety could help us to better grasp how different areas of the brain develop and work together. Research into brain connectivity has helped us understand so much, from sleep to addiction to memory, but we still have a lot further to go. And I think that launching a dedicated expedition to the furthest lengths of this synthetic continuum could help us reveal vital information about the remaining mysteries of cognitive function. For example, synesthesia reveals unexpected connections between different areas of the brain, so it could easily be used to help understand how cognitive decline works and maybe to even prevent it, or to help patients recover from traumatic brain injury. And moving beyond science to society, I believe that truly understanding how cultural differences can shape this tangible reality that we see around us, even shaping time itself, can really help us get to grips with the concept of seeing the world from other people's points of view. If we can begin by dispensing with this outdated idea that we have rigid sensory borders and instead, come to accept that we all sit somewhere together yet at separate points on a continuum of experience, then perhaps we can take one step closer towards dispensing with unnecessary social divisions altogether. And maybe that might even mean one step further towards inhabiting a world that is extraordinarily and joyfully unbound. Thank you. (Applause) (Cheers)

Frequently Occurring Word Combinations

ngrams of length 2

collocation	frequency
synesthetic form	2
abstract concept	2
concrete concept	2
perceive time	2
mental timeline	2
personal space	2
events sit	2
local river	2
breaks lie	2
extraordinary range	2

Important Words

aboriginal
abstract
accept
access
accounts
act
addiction
age
aging
alison
alters
altogether
amanda
amazing
andes
animals
answer
anthropologists
applause
arabic
areas
argue
asked
associate
associations
attention
audience
auditory
australia
automatic
autumn
axes
axis
aymara
bet
birth
bit
body
borders
brain
brains
breaks
britain
british
caffeine
calendar
calendars
calendrical
call
called
case
cases
center
centers
change
checked
cheers
circle
clock
clocks
clockwise
closer
clues
coaster
cognition
cognitive
color
colors
coming
common
community
completely
conceivable
concept
concrete
condition
congratulations
connections
connectivity
consistent
context
continuum
contrast
cover
create
cultural
culture
cultures
data
day
deadline
decimal
decimals
decline
dedicated
depending
describes
details
develop
diagnosed
differ
differences
directions
discovered
discrete
dispensing
display
distance
divisions
domestic
dominant
downhill
dramatically
draw
drunk
duodecimal
easier
easily
east
easy
effort
electricity
emma
emphasize
encircling
ends
english
event
events
evoke
examples
expedition
experience
experienced
experiences
experiment
express
external
extraordinarily
extraordinary
face
fact
fascinating
fields
final
finish
firmly
flow
focus
focused
focuses
focusing
form
format
forms
francis
front
function
fundamental
furthest
future
galton
gathered
geographically
gesture
gestures
give
giving
glance
golden
graphemes
grasp
great
green
grew
grips
growing
guinea
hallmarks
halo
happen
head
heads
helped
highly
hoop
horizontally
hula
humans
idea
illustrations
imagine
imagining
implications
important
indigenous
individual
individuals
influence
information
inhabiting
injury
instinctive
instinctively
integral
interesting
internal
internally
intervals
invariably
involuntary
isolated
jacobs
january
journey
joyfully
judge
kind
landscape
language
laptop
launching
left
lengths
letter
letters
lie
lies
life
likelihood
limited
literally
live
lives
living
local
location
logic
long
longer
lot
lots
love
luckily
lucky
making
map
mapped
mapping
means
mediated
memory
mental
mentioned
metaphor
middle
missing
modern
motluk
mountain
mouth
moved
moves
moving
mysteries
neurological
north
notes
noticed
number
numbers
numerical
oldest
order
ordered
orientated
oriented
outdated
overwhelmingly
page
paper
papers
papua
parallel
paralleled
part
passing
patients
peak
people
perceive
percent
perfect
perfectly
person
personal
pervasive
phone
photos
physical
piece
pink
placement
planet
point
points
pormpuraawan
powerful
preference
present
pretty
prevent
principles
probable
process
pushed
put
queue
range
rare
real
reality
recorded
recording
recover
reflected
reflects
relationship
remain
remaining
remains
represented
represents
reproduced
research
rest
reveal
reveals
reversed
reviewer
rhonda
riding
rigid
river
roller
room
rule
run
running
runs
science
sense
senses
sensory
separate
shape
shapes
shaping
showed
shown
side
sight
similar
simple
sit
sits
sleep
slide
social
society
sound
source
south
space
spatial
speaking
spoken
spring
stage
start
starting
statistician
steams
steep
step
stimulation
story
stretch
strings
students
studies
suggest
summer
synesthesia
synesthetes
synesthetic
synthetic
system
tactile
takes
talk
talking
talks
tangible
taste
tea
team
technologies
technology
tend
thinking
thought
time
timeline
timelines
today
told
tomorrow
touch
track
train
translator
traumatic
twists
type
types
typical
uk
unbound
understand
understanding
unexpected
unidirectional
universal
university
unknown
unnecessary
uphill
variation
varied
variety
vertically
victorian
view
visible
visual
visualize
visualized
vital
week
west
western
wheat
winter
wished
word
work
working
works
world
writer
wrong
year
years
yellow
yeomans
yesterday
youngest
yupno
zhu