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Like Kasia said, I'll start with an experiment.
I have my volunteer, Monika.
Let's switch this off.
All right.
On the screen...
Monika, look sharp, for I shall test you.
I'll indicate two points on the screen,
and draw my finger between them along a line.
I will do this twice.
Your job will be to judge if on the second go,
I drew my finger along the same line.
Monika: OK.
Krystian Aparta: This is point one.
Point two.
The first time.
And the second time.
Was it the same line the second time?
Monika: No.
K.A.: One more question. What is this?
Well?
What is this?
Monika: It's a sheet.
K.A.: Thanks. So it's not a line?
Monika: No.
K.A.: Again, thanks a lot.
(Applause)
This experiment had, on the one hand,
something abstract,
the memory of my finger's motion,
and on the other, something physical, concrete, non-abstract,
meaning, a sheet of some fabric.
Our imagination blended those two things,
and created a new part of reality.
It created the "lines" that Monika saw.
These lines were real to us.
For example, we were able to compare them against each other.
What happened here can be explained by conceptual blending theory,
created by Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner.
They use a lot of these cool diagrams.
When we say, "He's imagining it,"
we often mean to say, "It's unreal, it's not true."
But Fauconnier and Turner discovered it's actually the opposite,
because our imagination,
the powerful ability of the human brain to create mental images,
creates reality, by merging various things in our minds.
This process of creating reality
through blending an abstract concept with something physical
is not some odd, rare phenomenon,
but it's happening all the time, and it's beyond our control.
This is a Kanizsa triangle.
The instant we see the corners,
our mind dredges up the abstract concept of a triangle from our memory.
Our imagination blends it with what we see on the screen,
and creates a new part of reality,
this triangle.
We can prove that we created that triangle,
using a simple animation.
You see how the smiley face slides out from under the triangle,
and then slinks back under its edge.
That edge is obvious to us, we can see it, it is real.
But it was made only by our imagination.
But what I'd like to talk about today is the way that,
by making reality through conceptual blending,
our imagination also creates our ideas of other people.
Look at this face, for example.
How many of you think this is a guy?
Put your hands up.
About 30%. The rest thinks it's a female face.
And in fact, it is a female face.
Wait, sorry, a male face!
But, in fact, this face was computer-generated
at the University of Aberdeen's Face Research Lab.
It's an androgynous face.
Meaning, it has features of both sexes, but is actually neither male nor female.
But when I say words like "guy" or "girl,"
your mind instantly brings up
the abstract concept of gender from your memory,
imagination blends it with what you see,
and it creates a new thing in reality,
like, we start to see "hard" features.
But this also changes our idea of that person,
what we think of them, our attitude towards them,
what we expect of them.
For example, if this obviously male face
spoke with a voice that we perceive as female,
some of us would probably giggle.
Or if this unquestionably female face
spoke out with a voice that we consider male,
that would also probably seem funny.
You can see examples of this all the time in your daily life.
James Tiptree, Jr.
He was a well-known science fiction writer,
also fascinating as a person.
The fans all knew that "Tiptree" was a pen name.
His letters gave a lot away.
He started out as a painter,
and served in the army during World War II.
Later, he was drafted by American intelligence.
After he left the CIA,
he got his PhD, basically starting from scratch,
and only then became a writer.
He loved traveling the world,
hunting, and risk-taking,
like many of his characters.
Eventually, the name hidden behind the pseudonym came out.
Alice Sheldon.
Later, she commented:
"Everything but the signature is me."
In the introduction to Tiptree's story collection
titled "Warm Worlds and Otherwise",
published just a few months before the secret was revealed,
another science-fiction writer, Robert Silverberg,
said that just like Jane Austen's novels couldn't have been written by a man,
and a woman couldn't write Hemingway,
the author of James Tiptree stories is obviously male.
On the other hand, in her Tiptree biography,
Julie Phillips says that after the secret got out,
some feminist critics found obvious evidence in Tiptree's stories
that showed the author was a woman.
In this way, based on the abstract concept of gender,
imagination made these stories into very different ones.
We have all been witness to
how imagination creates our idea of another person.
For example, I'm sure that at school, you've all experienced
what psychologists call "the halo effect."
It is based on the fact that our idea of the other person
also determines the way we see and judge their behavior.
Here's an example.
Someone who the teacher thinks is a good student
gets a 75% score in a test.
Reading the test, the teacher thinks,
"Maybe he was just tired.
"But he's a good student, I can see he tried.
"I'll give him a C+."
Now, someone who the teacher has pegged as a bad student
gets exactly the same score.
The teacher looks at the test and thinks,
"She obviously blew it off. Such a bad student.
"I'm sure she cheated, too. 75%? That's a C, no more."
You can see how powerful this effect is in the "Oak School" experiment,
conducted by Robert Rosenthal.
First, the children in an elementary school were given an IQ test.
20% of them with different scores were later chosen randomly.
Unbeknown to the schoolchildren, the teachers were told
that this 20% had tremendous intellectual potential,
but it just hadn't "bloomed" yet.
One year later, they did the IQ tests again,
and it turned out that,
simply because the teachers' attitudes had changed,
the intellectual potential of those kids really did bloom.
For example, the IQ scores of 80% of first-graders
grew by 12 points over that year,
but in the randomly chosen 20%, it grew by 27.
So, more than twice as much.
These results reveal something really important.
OK, our imagination creates our ideas of other people.
But very often, those people take that idea in,
and make it their own, real idea of who they are,
and then behave in a way to fit in with how it defines them.
And the consequences of that can be horrible.
The day after Martin Luther King was killed,
Jane Elliott, a schoolteacher,
decided to help her students understand what discrimination is like.
She told the kids that it was common knowledge
that compared to blue-eyed children,
brown-eyed children do worse in class,
are ruder, less intelligent, and generally worse people.
The brown-eyes weren't allowed to use the playground equipment,
or drink from the same water fountain as the blue-eyed kids.
They got 5 minutes less recess.
She had the blue-eyes put brown arm-bands on the brown-eyes,
so they could tell from afar what their eye color was.
The kids' behavior changed completely in just 15 minutes.
The blue-eyes started to bully and mistreat the brown-eyes,
even if they had been friends before.
The brown-eyes became shy and passive,
even those that used to be dominant.
Compared to test results from before the exercise,
after just one day of this experiment,
the brown-eyes' scores dropped by 50%.
The next day, Jane Elliott told the kids that she had made a mistake,
and that it was in fact the blue-eyes who were inferior.
The tables were turned.
The results were the same.
What's important is that this exercise,
which she later repeated many times, also with adults,
shows how our imagination, when it shapes our idea of others,
also defines how we judge them,
and later, this person, or a whole group of people,
can begin to judge themselves in that same way.
In 1972, psychologist David Rosenhan
sent 8 impostors to psychiatric hospitals.
They were supposed to say they had been hearing voices,
but then behave normally after being admitted,
and tell the doctors that the voices were gone.
However, they were all forced to stay in the hospitals
for up to two months, because the doctors and staff
saw symptoms of mental illness in their normal behavior.
For example, when a nurse saw one of them making notes,
she described it in his chart as a symptom, saying:
"Patient engages in writing behavior."
Talking about the doctors' "diagnoses,"
Rosenhan pointed out that, often,
when there's something we don't know but we're embarrassed to face it,
we create, perhaps unconsciously, a kind of "pseudo-knowledge."
And the social psychology experiments that I talked about,
and the conceptual blending research, all point to one thing.
In situations like that,
our imagination makes that pseudo-knowledge
into reality.
Into what's real for us,
and for other people.
All the time, you hear different labels,
labels for people, or for whole groups,
things like, "She's white, rich,
he's a thief, mentally ill, mean, a guy, a go-getter," and so on.
With any label like that,
our imagination immediately transforms our idea of that person.
This is conceptual blending at work,
and it's unconscious, and you can't stop it.
But when something like that happens,
I'd like you to recall what happened to you
during the experiment that I started with.
"My mind was able to create a line!"
"But is this here a line, is it a piece of fabric?"
"Is this really a 'mean' person,
"or did my imagination create something new here?"
I hope that, thinking back to this talk,
you'll look at the person in front of you
and instead of the pseudo-knowledge
that your mind has built out of abstract labels,
you'll open up to what imagination can bring to life
in dialog with another human being
out of what's concrete.
Thank you.
(Applause)