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From: TEDtalksDirector
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  • Turn on closed captioning.

    At 4:07, you see, "the sketches, I'm black and whites here, but in my mind, they have CONDOMS?!?"

  • errhemm...

    1:58

    "Every time I read jack-off, oops, sorry, thats Chekov, my bad"

  • @insanic1 He's gay anyway. He could always donate sperm Robert Graham style.

  • i like daniel. i loved his books but i disagree with his idea about language. if he learned an asian language he'd see that the sounds words make have nothing to do with our intuitive feelings as a species. there is no universally happy or sad sounds for example. maybe among europeans that is true but only because the languages or cultures might have common descent. cases outside of that i suspect are just examples of a confirmation bias. been learning japanese for 10 years.

  • I wonder what the mathmatical sum of Jackson Pollack's "Blue Poles is?

  • I don't see that he is presenting anything that any college grad couldn't. 

  • @gabsylv seriously he learned to speak good icelandic in just seven days. Could you do that?

  • @chinchillalovers1 Based only on the video's content.. I don't deny he's a genius or whatever, I just don't see anything that knocks my socks off here. Sorry if I gave an overly negative impression

  • @gabsylv That´s ok. :)

  • @gabsylv

    Well, the college graduates didn't.

  • "some people say it is happy" lol

  • 68 "dislikes"??? Are there so many negative and envious people relative to the "likes"?? Astounding!

  • the sad thing is, he probably wont have children and wont pass on his unique genes to the next generation

  • @insanic1 Even if he did it wouldn't matter, his gift is a once in a lifetime thing.

  • @insanic1 his "ability" apparently wasn't cause by genes but from brain damage which u cant pass through sperms.

  • MY EARS!!

  • That's actually not easier then the way I used in school. That's exactly how'd I'd do it.

    Times by 100 then divide by 4 and times by 3. Not hard.

  • He sounds like Jemaine Clement in Gentlemen Broncos...

  • Theres a Daniel Tammet fan Group on facebook chek it out.

  • I'm going to share a party trick. When a stranger finds out I study actuarial science and finance they often reply "so you are some sort of genius?" I absolutely am not a genius so I humour them. I ask "what is your birthday?" When they answer I immediately follow with "that's a Saturday." There's a 1/7 chance I'm right in which case they are amazed. And a 6/7 chance I'm wrong and simply explain I was taking a shot in the dark which most people find fairly amusing anyway.

  • I loved it, suddenly arithmetic makes sense. I think it depends how you best understand things. I can read a sentence a million times and it makes no sense, but turn it into a picture and I never forget. Brilliant TED talk. Words have shapes, so do sentences, and the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. The words are like ingredients in a cake, they don't retain their integrity when you make a sentence with them. They turn into something new, either delicious cake or a nauseating flop.

  • I did not like it

  • for his second question about the icelandic word "hnuggin"; i thought happy , and so did the audience. i think because it is somewhat similar to our american word "hug". maybe the "majority" who say the word is sad are not english speaking?

  • @KnasiTaket i was just about to say that, respect.

  • hares are an archetype for the MOON which is that celestial body connected to the unconscious right brain .... the conscious unaware left brain blinded by the light of the day/sun ... can only relpy ...

    duh "what's up doc"?

    Hey Elmer do you hear those voices too?

    namaste

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  • jack off

  • Hares are white

  • Thumbs up if you're not ashamned to admit you didn't understand the calculation with the blocks.

  • Amazing Daniel I encourage you to look into Dr. Emoto's research. I think that you may match up with it....

  • Personally, I have come across that too many people presume the case of words containing feelings and understanding that are objective and universal to everyone. Otherwise people presume the person is wrong(Such as arguments on love, good, bad, etc). Truly.. It seems like everyone thinks each word contains the same information to everyone, when each words birth in another mind has its own unique story. How did you learn "apple", "red", "1", etc? Not being open to this is debilitating.

  • The first question.. I thought of two block of 3 units, you connect em. Then make another pair. Then another. Each block stands for 5 by 5. Then it is 8 x 600. The second question.. I visualized it as a wave. It seemed to go up, then down. So.. I figured "let down", so it was down. Our word "sad", "depressed", "hate" seem to feel the same. I giant thud like feeling. Last, I had imagined the hare attempting a leap and it's leg trembled as it fell. It then trudged through the bloody, icy, grass.

  • is it just me or does he actually sound like Ali G? thumbs up if u agree

  • @KnasiTaket wesst side is da best . Respec .

  • @KnasiTaket How trivialised an obervation, haha. :P

  • @KnasiTaket

    he also LOOKS like Ali G! thumb this up!

  • @KnasiTaket HAHA Just what I thought of!

  • Numbers have always had genders to me.

  • I wonder who the "majority" he was referring to said this word was sad. I think it must be a different lang. group than Eng. b/c with the Eng. speaking audience, I also thought "happy". The reason I thought happy was I saw "hug" in the spelling that gave me the impression it must be happy. Perhaps other Eng. speakers saw the same and made the same conclusion but another language would not see that.

  • i used to assign genders to letters of the alphabet, when i was a kid. most of them were "bisexuals" but then i grew up and now i know that they are hermaphrodites.

    :D

  • I love  him.

  • This is one of the things that isn't taught thoroughly enough in schools: intuition. It's what the world needs right now, we rely too much on outside things to think for us.

  • i didnt get it =(

  • idol daniellllllllllllll...the great living mathematician

  • So basically intuition exists...

  • everytime i read checkov, i have to masturbate immediately

  • not a very enlightning talk. but i'm very impressed by the way he does not make any mistakes when he speaks. no "um"'s and he doesn't have correct himself at any point.

  • @xybersurfer he says there's no number bigger than pi.. i would disagree, surely 4 is bigger than pi

  • he sounds like ali g tho innit

  • Ha! As a full blown Synesthete myself, listening to someone else list the colors of the numbers when I "know" the colors myself is like nails on a chalkboard...

    But what an amazing talk!!!!! I've been waiting for a talk on Synesthesia... it's what prompted me to start my NPO. God bless, Tammet!

  • Fabulous!

  • the way he speaks is perfect in voice, tone and rythm.

  • PEACE!

  • @ratm2112 Why so rude?

  • For Hnuginn, see P Is for Happiness, N Is for Sadness: Universals in Sound Iconicity to Detect Emotions in Poetry.

  • 1) My gut instinct for 64x75 is "a really big number."

    2) "hnugginn" reminds me of Buddy the Elf. I have no idea why, but there is nothing else I can think of when I see that word.

    3) Reminds me of the sentence (something about a quick brown fox and a lazy dog) that has every letter of the alphabet. Except, this one doesn't.

  • this guy is brilliant, the way he sees world is mindblowing, we complicate things and he simplifies it naturally. just awesome :o

  • wow this talk was disappointing... he could have told stuff that's much more interesting... he talked about his personal synaesthesia and the results of its mixture with wasting too much time on random lines of text, but that's it, he didn't say why it's worth having that or anything like that, just pointed out his differences from "normal" even though he said he didn't want to concentrate on that...

  • @theANSWERisXLII WELL, isn't it at least interesting to take note that everyone experiences a completely different reality, even if we're looking at the same "stuff"? Still... I sort of agree with you lol. He kind of built up some high expectations with his intro, but I still found the talk interesting, if not profound. Not every talk will change your life you know, and some people probably have never heard of synesthesia.

  • @LocustaVampa

    "and some people probably have never heard of synesthesia" yes but you'll have hard time finding them among ted audience :) ...agree with you on everything else

  • @theANSWERisXLII lol true. I sort of felt the expectation from the audience; awaiting the punchline, but no dice! I can't help but be a little awed by his linguistic accomplishments, since I only know one language.... but I feel maybe he's missed out on certain things that I know well. This talk served mostly to reinforce my respect for the variety of human experience. Oddballs we are!

  • But do different people with synesthesia see the same numbers as similar colors/shapes, or is it all arbitrary to the individual? Is he suggesting there are pictures for each number we can all learn?

  • Bruno!!!

  • Daniel Tammet is the most fascinating person on the planet. I wish we heard from him more often.

  • I'm sorry but hnugginn sounds like a very happy word to me.

  • @LocustaVampa yea hnuggin souns like a very warm n cosy word like huggin, haha

  • @popitypop ya! :3 Nyuuuuuuuuu-ggnnnn mmm! honk!

  • He really shouldn't of asked. :x

  • i could not understand the 640 with 75 fitted in there and occupying 3/4. Maybe i missed a word or explanation or maybe i'm stupid. :(

  • @biakuya 75 = (3/4)*100, so 64*75 = 64 *100* (3/4),

    hence = 6400 * 3/4, so if u visually caculated tt, its 3 boxes of 16 squares * 100, or {3* 16 *100}, or 4800

    haha hope tt helps

  • @popitypop Thanks, that helped!

  • Anyone else notice his unique accent? It's more of a collection of accents. It's always wonderful to listen to someone speak in English...when you KNOW they can speak 8 other languages.

  • Im also going to start ignorin the messages from this thread now, so make sure you give me your best backstab now when im not going to reply. goodbye.

  • He knows 10 languages fluently.

  • He's an autistic Ben Stein.

  • The tone of his voice sounds very sad, melancholy, and lonesome. Very interesting talk.

  • so what number do you think his shirt is ?

  • I guessed the word was sad...but that's only because I assume any word in Icelandic is sad.

  • I hate to say it, because i loved the TED talks, but nothing about this seems profound.

  • @ReasonNLogic well, it sorta gives u some insight into a savann's thought process

  • @popitypop Yeah, but is it an idea worth spreading? How can you even spread a genetically abhorrent thought process? I don't intend to diminish him or his work, I wish my brain could work that way. I just think this topic is is inappropriate to the purpose of TED talks.

  • @divinityboy /watch?v=xHWtXSKSQSY

    Enjoy!

  • @divinityboy Thanks! : )

  • How do I gain this incredible power? I think I used to have a bit of it when I was a kid, but now I perceive things just like a normal person.

  • @JohnWoo Read his book! Embracing the Wide Sky. That's a good start.

  • Arguing on the internet is like running in the Special Olympics. Even if you win, you're still retarded

  • I have no idea of what he's talking about. I think i just developed ADD...

  • i wonder if he has read james joyce.

  • they just need to tone down the intro music volume a bit......I am running for my volume knob every time I open a video....just to find tat the speaker's voice is way too low at such volumes........

    and the outro music? fucking crazy jet sound! tone it down for fucks sake.

  • @vasish3688 I so agree with your comment! ...with the exception of the 'f' descripters in the last sentence I have found your experience of the outrageously contrasting volumes to be similar to my experience

    I am hoping that someone within the TED organization will soon see the comments regarding excessive volume and make appropriate adjustments

    thanks for sharing

  • Watch: "The boy with the incredible brain". Available on youtube. It's a documentary about Daniel Temmet's incredible mental prowess and more about the Synaesthesia phenomenon.

  • The number 8 has always been purple to me. 5 is more blue.

    But maybe that's just the repressed memory of some Sesame Street video I saw when I was a kid? 

  • @spacecowboy95 its not its not! read the Tell Tale Brain by VS Ramachandran in which he talks about synesthesia. Or just look up his videos. Its amazing. Different number color synesthetes have their own number/color scale...

  • is synaesthesia a condition or a better function of the brain?? because if you are able to plug and unplug this way of percieving the world I bet you are over average genius even mozart was tolld maybe on having this. you al must know that the brain is not a linear system at all, training to it is almost antinatural let's sat. almost because it needs a structure but not at all based on linear commands, that is becoming dumb and not letting the brain function at it's potential. high structures.

  • @beastbubblegum

    Well, synesthesia can't be turned off. It can be dulled by medication or depression, but not completely turned off.

    For example, throughout this entire talk, Tammet's voice really bothers me because it feels like its pressing on both sides of the back of my neck. But yes, the brain is very complex, and it shouldn't be surprising that synesthesia exists at all.

  • @beastbubblegum Synaesthesia is defined as being involuntary. For instance, I've got 'grapheme --> colour" synaesthesia, seeing letters and numbers in colour. I only realised I had it this year, and upon reflection and trawling through memories I realised that I had perceived letters/numbers this way since I was little. So it is involuntary certainly, so involuntary that one can go 18 years without realising what one is doing!

  • I wondered if he remembered his entire presentation, or did he need cue cards??

  • I also wanna be a superhuman :/

  • When he asked if hnugginn is a happy word or a sad word most of the audience said happy (like I did), was I the only one who heard that?

  • my red is most definitely your red.

  • @system3142 the colour might be the same......the qualia may not be.

  • @Interactivesystems qualia is a bullshit concept.

  • @richardcadbury how so? what are the atoms/particles of your perception called? or what is your theory of the mechanics of perception?

  • @Interactivesystems I can't really summarise everything i believe about perception in 500 characters. But my rejection of qualia as essentially a hopeless idea comes from largely agreeing with Dan Dennett, and also a bit from Paul Churchland. Their views are summarised nicely on the wiki entry on qualia. :)

  • @richardcadbury churchland is good... you mean bayesian inference?

  • Interesting but IMHO it's like seeing the world through television: he was born with an 4k, someone smart has an HD, the vast majority of people have SD and hardware-upgrade is not an option...

  • Doesn't everyone calculate 64 X 75 like that? That's how they teach you in school right?

  • Words are musical.Series of words can be rhythmic.Rhythm is music. Poetry=music.

  • In a weird way he reminds me of Sacha Baron Cohen. :)

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  • 16 16 16 48 4800 wtf???

  • Lately I have been experiencing one coincidence after another...I use the word coincidence because I don't believe in superstition or any other nonsense like that. For example, I just discovered what a savant is by watching a documentary about Daniel Tammet YESTERDAY and now he's on TED :) My favorite thing to watch :)

  • This guy's got it all wrong. 1 is gray, 2 is yellow, 3 is green, 4 is black, 5 is red, 6 is light blue, 7 is blue, 8 is white and 9 is black.

  • @TheMessianicManic How do you reason that? I wish I could perceive my reality as vibrantly as he can.

  • @enriqueDFTL I was kind of kidding. I'm a synesthete as well and those are just the colors I associate with those numbers.

  • @TheMessianicManic That's awesome. I very much wish I could experience synesthesia.

  • @enriqueDFTL you do look up boobo and kiki, synaesthesia is the basis of human language

  • Most people said "happy".

  • @AlgerianTree That's why everyone laughed when he said "everyone said sad" that was the joke

    DURPTY DURP!

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  • This guy is a fraud. He is no savant. He is a mnemonic.

  • I'd like to ask him if he has a friend named Bigus Dikus and enjoys having people 'twown to the fwoow.' =D

  • i'm just a moron.

  • I would want to have a cup of coffee with him now and then, and talk about subjects as this. I find him fascinating.

  • Bruno?

  • Hare, rather than Wabbit?

    xD

    God i'm horrible...

  • Liked it until he started talking about poetry.

  • @rawssremix -_-

  • @Neylonx It may have been what the author intended to evoke (or not), but I didn't get any more sense of vulnerability from 'hare' than I did 'rabbit'. Or if I did, it was unconscious, lowering the impact somewhat. Don't get me wrong, I'm a fan of poetry, but I just didn't like this talk's part on it.

  • @rawssremix oh ok, sorry it sounded like you were on of those people who think 'raedin buks is 4 nerds' :) my bad ha

  • @Neylonx No worries. Probably should have explained better anyway, I see its ambiguity now.

  • hnugginn actualy seems a bit like "huggin" with some aditional N's so i would see it as a happy word, the sound of it had no meaning in the decision making contrary to the theory of the speaker i think people use knowledge to determine meaning of words by asociacion and similarities to theyre known vocabulary, not by emotions because you can say thesame word with oposite emotional charge and hte meaning prevails thesame. so first the meaning then the emotional charge not other way arround imho

  • @86Corvus

    hnuggin was actually a bad example by him. the phenomenon he tried to show is well documented.

    babies, children and adults were tasked with recognizing the name of certain shapes only by watching them.

    99.99999% of the people, regardless of ethnic background or culture gave the name KIKI to a jagged pointy shape and 99.99999% of people gabe the soft rounder shape the name BUBBA, out of the only 2 possible names (KIKI AND BUBBA). nobody names the pointy thing bubba

  • @mazdaplz Read about this in the book "Mind Hacks". The idea is that our language and our sense of touch is cross-wired, and in fact, that the phenomenon of language itself owes its existence to a type of synaesthesia, which is itself the result of crossed wiring in the brain. Neat stuff.

  • @86Corvus I think in this case the audience was influenced my being in public, and in stead of thinking about it and give it a negative answer they went for the positive one.

  • @86Corvus i agree that we all have a framework, but if you imitate the way he says it, you might feel that it's more of a sad word. I think it has to do with the facial muscles and the position of the tongue. some things are indeed universal.

  • Once you know its a sad word you can get a confirmation bias. The meanings of words are by asiciation not by the sound of it realy. in diferent languages there are similar looking and sounding words, it is so because all languages branched off one that oryginated in in africa.

    the longer time ago the branching ocurred the less similarities. you can have 2 words in 2 diferent languages meaning thesame, written similar, and sounding similar one has a heavy and other light pronounciation.

  • @86Corvus Etymology is an incredibly complicated field. I have little knowledge of it, but I'm pretty sure there are 5 known roots of language. I agree with you that there is a confirmation bias, but there are also vowels and sounds that evoke things universally, on a very basic level. For example, 'ee' sounds usually evoke happiness and liveliness, while 'aaw' / o sounds sadness. you're also right in pointing out that pronunciation is key, just as non-verbal cues are key in providing meaning =)

  • @MouseMaiden in my language "e" sounds like either " what the fuck do you want eh?" or i dont care "meh..." and o means suprise or being of note of something. so its much less reliable than vocabulary. we all evolved from africa and thats where all language started

  • @86Corvus i mean ee like wheeeeeeeee! =)

  • well i cant tell you than "wheeeeeee" doesnt exist in my language , the reason i get it is becasue i get english and its so popular that everyone now gets it but if you were to listen an native african be happy it might be something diferent like clicking or beating your thighs with open hand.

  • Laughter is universal but the reliability of the emotion transferred by sounds is very low. mainly because you can make anny sound sound in manny emotional ways so emotional conotation of hte word is an addon to the word not realy haveing to do with meaning.

  • the guy in the video obviously thinks its more important because he has an abnormal brain which confuses things like shapes and colours with sounds so in his perception the things he calls emotion colour numerical value of a word etc are added to the word and exposed in percieving it. thats why theyre more notable to him. however that has no bearing on how reliable following those instead of deductive comparision of wording is.

  • its like you got a contour of a duck in your mind and he has a fully painted colorful a bit van goghish and a bit deformed contour of a duck that makes a weird sound. he sees the colour with his shape a sound with his shape etc etc. but that aditional information adds nothing to the meaning of the shape which is - a duck. id say that other people with his condition would see the duck deformed in a bit diferent way or entirely diferent way. so he has more information noise added

  • If you were to guess by sounding you would have then to say one word is a positive the other a negative word with. meanwhile hteyre both have thesame meaning and lets say its a happy meaning. you would propably have luck decoding the unknown word knowing the other and using similarity than trying to blind guess on mere pronounciation. pronounciation might be the last thing to hang to when others fail when the languages are very dissimilar branched long ago.

  • but for europeyan languages? catze, kate, kot, cat, chat, gato, kass, kissa, gata etc...

  • @86Corvus ahhh i don't really know about that. maybe when i'm thinking in the same language, i might approach it in the way you mentioned - through association. that isn't the case when i'm dealing with completely foreign ones, though. i feel where the speaker is coming from.

  • @86Corvus I mostly agree with you, but certain words carry an onomatopoetic charge. If you know a language branch (set of closely related languages) you can often tell a lot from compositions of words by wovels, consonants, and how they combine. For "Hnugginn" the "hnu" beginning of the word carries a sad tone, like "aww". The "ginn" is a more general ending of a word in icelandic.

    Can you guess what the Norwegian synonymous words hva / hæ (hae) / hø (hö) means? (last two are oral versions)

  • @86Corvus The word sounds a lot different from "huggin". That may be related to you seeing how it's spelt.

  • @86Corvus : Just a bad example I guess. Mainly because he showed the word in alphabets. Had he played an audio clip of the word, perhaps he would have illustrated it better.

  • @86Corvus Actually, I glanced at the first sentence of yours while watching the video so I was a little biased, until I heard him say the word which I then immediately understood as being sad...I think he has a point.

  • @chichigord whiwhc point, that words are at a very basic level oryginated from some simple moans and sounds that didnt even have alphabet atatched to them? or that his aditional information noise has lots of bearing on it. as i said laughter is universal, so are moans groans etc. ( altho not all as some of them developed from already formed language to suport them thus eskimos touch noses to express love and some african natives spit water in the face of other to express a hearthy welcome),

  • @86Corvus His point that sounds translate emotions

  • @86Corvus maybe the Inuit touch noses to express fear...fear of loss...fear of death...at a deeper level that is, which becomes understood as love...which could in fact be fear. And maybe the Africans you speak of spit in the face as a territorial gesture...Welcome, but don't forget who the man is around here.

  • it is much more reliable to asociate words with already known vocabulary to derrive meaning than to listen to the tone of voice. THe guys theory is ok (btw its not His theory per se) on a very basic primal level some sounds are universal, they are primitive to the highest degree they canot be used to determin meaning of words or sentences. words have meaning on theyre own and trying to determine theyre meaning basing off the type of sound they perform isnt reliable.

  • @86Corvus:Site reference or is this your theory?

  • @113Doctor thats what you learn at a 5 year university magisterial pedagogics studies on social animation and prevention arround semester 6 if i remember corectly.

  • @86Corvus:You repeat, Tammet Teaches.

    SHH!

    We Know Tammet IS GENIUS!

    86Corvus=???

    You remind me of a salesperson trying to sell something worthless making you try harder to sell/talk to justify your paper degree.

    Now the Hole World OVERstands.

  • @113Doctor you asked i told you. i dont realy care what i remind you off because im not here for your amusement. also after spending 5 years on something i hope someone pays you back deeming it uterly useless too. i guess im just so bad that i dont think those 5 years ive spent were totaly useless. also its not a paper degree, if you have anny knowledge of what a paper degree is, its something having no value given because its given by illegitimate source.

  • @86Corvus:Correct I ask but Keep it Short or I lose interest.

    So far you spew forth a lot of words that seem more to do with the emotions behind the paper culture almost like you have to justify it to everyone esp yourself.

    So far you have wrote pages, and I wonder why you first felt the need.

  • @113Doctor i guess i have that ood habbit of speaking my mind. I love how you try to excercise some armchair psychology its cute. But whats more interesting is why are you are feeling the need to speak here, as of yet you started off by saying im incorect because this guy is a savant, which is the most basic logical falacy. its called argumentum ad verecundiam. also most people on the audience said HAPPY which also supports what i said.

  • @86Corvus:Tamment OVERstand that which Paper Culture struggles to understand.

    Tamment brings a smile to my face, he creates peace, he brings color and beauty to numbers.

    I come off as the Stephen Tyrone Colbert of Timelords but really I'm plugged in and my box is proof.

  • @113Doctor University of Łódź is a polish secular national university. one of the best in the europe, 4th best of poland the page is uni.lodz.pl so it would be nice if you didnt call papers from there worthless its not cration research university or some other shit, its legitimate university. I also never said i have a degree yet what i have is an absolutory and i curently am landing finishing touches to my magisterial paper to be peer reviewed. absolutory means i have finished all the courses

  • @113Doctor passed all the exams and tests.

  • @113Doctor you know tamet is a genious but you forget he also has a abnormal distorted perceptiion. he said it himself.