Isaac Lidsky: What reality are you creating for yourself? | TED

When Dorothy was a little girl, she was fascinated by her goldfish. Her father explained to her that fish swim by quickly wagging their tails to propel themselves through the water. Without hesitation, little Dorothy responded, yes, Daddy, and fish swim backwards by wagging their heads. In her mind, it was a fact as true as any other. Fish swim backwards by wagging their heads. She believed it. Our lives are full of fish swimming backwards. We make assumptions and faulty leaps of logic. We harbor bias. We know that we are right and they are wrong. We fear the worst. We strive for unattainable perfection. We tell ourselves what we can and cannot do. In our minds, fish swim by and reverse, frantically wagging their heads and we don't even notice them.

当多萝西还是个小女孩时，她对她的金鱼情有独钟。她的父亲向她解释说，鱼是通过快速摆动它们的尾巴来在水中前进的。小小的多萝西毫不犹豫地回应道，是的，爸爸，鱼是通过摇动它们的头部向后游泳的。在她的脑海中，这是一个与其他任何事实一样真实的事实。鱼是通过摇动它们的头部向后游泳的。她相信这一点。我们的生活中充满了鱼向后游泳。我们做出假设和错误的逻辑飞跃。我们怀有偏见。我们认为自己是对的，而他们是错的。我们害怕最坏的结果。我们追求无法实现的完美。我们告诉自己我们能做什么，不能做什么。在我们的脑海中，鱼前进和后退，疯狂地摇动它们的头，而我们甚至都没有注意到它们。

I'm going to tell you five facts about myself. One fact is not true. One, I graduated from Harvard at 19 with an honors degree in mathematics. Two, I currently run a construction company in Orlando. Three, I starred on a television sitcom. Four, I lost my sight to a rare genetic eye disease. Five, I served as a law clerk to two U.S. Supreme Court justices. Which facts not true? Actually, they are all true. Yeah, they are all true. At this point, most people really only care about the television show. I know this from experience. Okay, so the show was NBC's Saved by the Bell, the new class. And I played Weasel Weisel, who was the sort of dorky, nerdy character on the show. Which made it a very major acting challenge for me as a 13 year old boy. Now, did you struggle with number four, my blindness? Why is that? We make assumptions about so called disabilities.

我将告诉你关于我的五个事实。其中一个是假的。一，我19岁时以数学荣誉学位毕业于哈佛大学。二，我目前在奥兰多经营一家建筑公司。三，我曾在电视情景喜剧中担任主角。四，我因为罕见的遗传性眼病失去了视力。五，我曾担任两位美国最高法院大法官的法律助手。哪一个事实是假的呢？事实上，它们全都是真的。是的，它们全都是真的。此刻，大多数人真正关心的只是那个电视节目。我从经验中知道这一点。好吧，那么那个节目是NBC的《情景喜剧》的新班。我在节目中扮演魏塞尔，是一个有点书呆子的角色。这对我这个当时13岁的男孩来说是一个非常大的表演挑战。那么，你是否对我的失明这一点有困扰？为什么？我们经常对所谓的“残疾”做出假设。

As a blind man, I confront others incorrect assumptions about my abilities every day. My point today is not about my blindness, however. It's about my vision. Going blind taught me to live my life eyes wide open. It taught me to spot those backwards swimming fish that our minds create. Going blind cast them into focus. What does it feel like to see? It's immediate and passive. You open your eyes and there's the world. Seeing is believing sight is truth, right? Well, that's what I thought. Then from age 12 to 25, my retinas progressively deteriorated. My sight became an increasingly bizarre carnival funhouse hall of mirrors and illusions. The sales person I was relieved to spot in a store was really a mannequin. Reaching down to wash my hands, I suddenly saw it was a urine oil I was touching, not a sink, when my fingers felt its true shape. A friend described the photograph in my hand and only then I could see the image depicted. Objects appeared, morphed and disappeared in my reality. It was difficult and exhausting to see. I pieced together fragmented transitory images, consciously analyzed the clues, searched for some logic in my crumbling kaleidoscope. Until I saw nothing at all.

作为一个盲人，我每天都要面对别人对我的能力所持有的错误假设。然而，今天我要谈的不是我的失明，而是我的视力。失明教会了我睁大眼睛地生活。它教会了我发现那些我们头脑中创造出来的逆向游泳的鱼。失明让我看清他们。看见是什么感觉？是立即的和被动的。你打开眼睛，世界就在那里。看见就是相信，视力就是真理，对吗？那就是我以为的。然后从12岁到25岁，我的视网膜逐渐恶化。我的视力变得越来越像一个荒谬的嘉年华哈哈镜和错觉的大厅。在商店里看到的那个销售人员竟然是一个假人。伸手洗手时，我突然发现我碰到的是尿壶，而不是一个水池，当我的手指触摸到它的真实形状时。朋友描述我手里的照片，只有在那时我才能看到照片中的图像。物体在我的现实中出现、变形和消失。看起来是困难而疲惫的。我拼凑起片段化的瞬间图像，有意识地分析线索，寻找在我崩溃的万花筒中的一些逻辑。直到我什么都看不见。

I learned that what we see is not universal truth. It is not objective value. What we see is a unique, personal, virtual reality that is masterfully constructed by our brain. Let me explain with a bit of amateur neuroscience. Your visual cortex takes up about 30% of your brain. That's compared to approximately 8% for touch and 2% to 3% for hearing. Every second, your eyes can send your visual cortex as many as 2 billion pieces of information. The rest of your body can send your brain only an additional billion. So, sight is one-third of your brain by volume and can claim about two-thirds of your brain's processing resources. It's no surprise then that the illusion of sight is so compelling. But make no mistake about it, sight is an illusion. Here's where it gets interesting. To create the experience of sight, your brain references your conceptual understanding of the world, other knowledge, your memories, opinions, emotions, mental attention, all of these things, and far more are linked in your brain to your sight. These linkages work both ways and usually occur subconsciously. So, for example, what you see impacts how you feel and the way you feel can literally change what you see. Numerous studies demonstrate this. If you are asked to estimate the walking speed of a man in a video, for example, your answer will be different if you're told to think about cheetahs or turtles.

我学到了，我们所看到的并不是普世真理。它不是客观价值。我们所看到的是大脑精心构建的独特的、个人的、虚拟现实。让我用一点业余的神经科学来解释。你的视觉皮层占据了你大脑的约30%。相比之下，触觉约占8%，听觉约占2%到3%。每秒钟，你的眼睛可以向你的视觉皮层发送高达20亿条信息。而你的其他身体部位只能额外发送10亿条信息给大脑。因此，视觉在体积上占据了你大脑的三分之一，并能占据大约三分之二的大脑处理资源。因此，视觉的错觉如此引人入胜并不足为奇。但不要误解，视觉是一种错觉。接下来就变得有趣了。为了创造视觉体验，你的大脑参考了你对世界的概念理解、其他知识、你的记忆、观点、情绪、心理关注，所有这些，以及更多的东西，都与你的视觉在大脑中相关联。这些联系是双向的，通常是在潜意识中发生的。因此，例如，你看到的东西会影响你的感觉，而你的感觉方式实际上可以改变你看到的东西。许多研究证明了这一点。例如，如果让你估计视频中一个男人的步行速度，你的答案会根据被告知思考猎豹或海龟而有所不同。

A hill appears steeper if you've just exercised and a landmark appears farther away if you're wearing a heavy backpack. We have arrived at a fundamental contradiction. What you see is a complex mental construction of your own making, but you experience it passively as a direct representation of the world around you. You create your own reality and you believe it. I believe mine until it broke apart. The deterioration of my eyes shattered the illusion.

如果你刚做完运动，一个小山看起来会更陡峭，如果你背着沉重的背包，一个地标就会显得更远。我们面临着一个基本的矛盾。你所看到的是你自己创造的复杂心理建构，但你 passively 经历它，将其视为对你周围世界的直接表现。你创造了自己的现实，并且相信它。我相信我的现实，直到它破裂。我的眼睛的恶化打破了幻觉。

You see, sight is just one way we shape our reality. We create our own realities in many other ways. Let's take fear as just one example. Your fears distort your reality. Under the warped logic of fear, anything is better than the uncertain. Fear fills the void at all costs, passing off what you dread for what you know, offering up the worst in place of the ambiguous, substituting assumption for reason. Psychologists have a great term for it, awfulizing. Right? Fear replaces the unknown with the awful. Now fear is self realizing. When you face the greatest need to look outside yourself and think critically, fear beats a retreat deep inside your mind, shrinking into storting your view, drowning your capacity for critical thought with a flood of disruptive emotions.

你看，视觉只是我们塑造现实的一种方式。我们以许多其他方式创造自己的现实。让我们以恐惧为例。你的恐惧扭曲了你的现实。在恐惧扭曲的逻辑下，任何事情都比不确定性好。恐惧以任何代价填补空白，将你害怕的东西传递成你知道的东西，以最坏的代替不确定的，以假设取代理性。心理学家有个很好的术语，即“可怕化”。对吧？恐惧用可怕取代未知。现在恐惧是自我实现的。当你最需要向外界寻求批判性思考时，恐惧会在你内心深处倒退，扭曲你的视野，用一大堆破坏性情绪淹没你的批判思维能力。

When you face a compelling opportunity to take action, fear lulls you into inaction, enticing you to passively watch its prophecies fulfill themselves. When I was diagnosed with my blinding disease, I knew blindness would ruin my life. Blindness was a death sentence for my independence. It was the end of achievement for me. Blindness meant I would live an unremarkable life small and sad and likely alone. I knew it. This was a fiction born of my fears, but I believed it. It was a lie, but it was my reality, just like those backwards swimming fish in Little Dorothy's mind. If I had not confronted the reality of my fear, I would have lived it. I am certain of that.

当你面对一个引人注目的行动机会时，恐惧会让你陷入不活动的状态，诱使你袖手旁观，看着恐惧的预言实现。当我被诊断患有失明的疾病时，我知道失明会毁掉我的生活。失明对我的独立性来说是一个死刑。对我来说，这意味着成就的终结。失明意味着我将过着平凡悲伤且可能孤独的生活。我知道这是我恐惧的幻想，但我却相信了它。这是一个谎言，但这是我的现实，就像小多萝西脑海中那些向后游泳的鱼一样。如果我没有直面恐惧的现实，我会过着这种生活。我对此深信不疑。

So how do you live your life eyes wide open? It is a learned discipline. It can be taught. It can be practiced. I'll summarize very briefly. Hold yourself accountable for every moment, every thought, every detail. See beyond your fears, recognize your assumptions, harness your internal strength, silence your internal critic, correct your misconceptions about luck and about success, accept your strengths and your weaknesses and understand the difference. Open your hearts to your bountiful blessings. Your fears, your critics, your heroes, your villains, they are your excuses, rationalizations, shortcuts, justifications, your surrender. They are fictions you perceive as reality. Choose to see through them. Choose to let them go. You are the creator of your reality. With that empowerment comes complete responsibility.

所以，你如何保持睁大眼睛生活呢？这是一种学习的 discipline。它可以被教授。它可以被实践。我简要总结一下。对每一刻，每一个想法，每一个细节负责。超越你的恐惧，认识你的假设，掌握你内在的力量，让你的内心批评者安静下来，纠正关于幸运和成功的误解，接受你的优点和缺点，并理解它们之间的区别。敞开心扉，感受你丰盛的祝福。你的恐惧，你的批评者，你的英雄，你的反面人物，它们只是你的借口、辩解、捷径、理由、投降。它们只是你认为是现实的虚构品。选择透过它们看清真相，选择放下它们。你是你现实的创造者。随着这种力量的加持而来的是完全的责任。

I chose to step out of fear's tunnel into terrain uncharted and undefined. I chose to build there a blessed life. Far from alone, I share my beautiful life with Dorothy, my beautiful wife, with our triplets whom we call the Tripskis and with the latest edition of the family, Sweet Baby Clementine. What do you fear? What lies do you tell yourself? How do you embellish your truth and write your own fictions? What reality are you creating for yourself? In your career and personal life, in your relationships, and in your heart and soul, your backward swimming fish do you great harm. They exact a toll in missed opportunities and unrealized potential. And they engender in security and distrust where you seek fulfillment and connection. I urge you to search them out.

我选择走出恐惧的隧道，进入未知和未定义的领域。我选择在那里建立一个幸福的生活。远离孤独，我与我美丽的妻子多萝西分享着美好的生活，与我们称为Tripskis的三胞胎以及家庭的最新成员，可爱的小宝贝克莱门汀。你害怕什么？你对自己说了什么谎言？你如何美化自己的真相，编织自己的虚构？你为自己创造了什么现实？在你的事业和个人生活中，在你的人际关系中，在你的心灵深处，你向后游动的鱼对你造成了巨大的伤害。它们会让你错失机会，无法实现潜力。它们会在你寻求满足和联系的地方营造出不安全和不信任。我鼓励你找出这些问题。

Helen Keller said that the only thing worse than being blind is having sight but no vision. For me, going blind was a profound blessing because blindness gave me vision. I hope you can see what I see. Thank you. Hi, Zab. Before you leave the stage, just a question. This is an audience of entrepreneurs, of doers, of innovators. You are a CEO of a company down in Florida. And many are probably wondering how is it to be a blind CEO? What kind of specific challenges do you have and how do you overcome them? Well, the biggest challenge became a blessing. I don't get visual feedback from people.

Helen Keller说过，失明比有视力而无远见更糟糕。对我来说，失明是一种深刻的祝福，因为失明给了我远见。我希望你能看到我所看到的。谢谢你。嗨，Zab。在你离开舞台之前，只有一个问题。这是一群企业家、实干家、创新者的观众。你是佛罗里达某公司的CEO。许多人可能想知道作为一个失明的CEO是什么感觉？你面临什么具体挑战，你又是如何克服它们的？嗯，最大的挑战变成了一种祝福。我无法从人们那里获得视觉反馈。

Was I noise there? Yeah. So, for example, in my leadership team meetings, I don't see facial expressions or gestures. I've learned to solicit a lot more verbal feedback. I basically force people to tell me what they think. And in this respect, it's become like I said, a real blessing for me personally and for my company because we communicate at a far deeper level. We avoid ambiguities. And most important, my team knows that what they think truly matters. Isaac, thank you for coming to the panel. Thank you.

我在那里是噪音吗？是的。比如说，在我的领导团队会议上，我看不到表情或手势。我学会了更多地征求口头反馈。我基本上强迫别人告诉我他们的想法。在这方面，对我个人和我的公司来说，这变成了一种真正的祝福，因为我们在更深层次上沟通。我们避免了歧义。最重要的是，我的团队知道他们的想法真的很重要。艾萨克，感谢你来参加这个小组讨论。谢谢。