Translator: Krystian Aparta
So here I am, being different.
And, good afternoon, everybody.
And I would like to share with you the way I sense and make sense of this world.
But, just as the others, let me start by sharing with you
one of my earlier childhood memories.
And, I was sitting on the ground, I was about four or five years old
and I was digging in the dirt.
And next to me my grandma and her sisters were playing cards.
And I tell you this in words,
but in fact my memory mainly consists of sounds and smells.
For instance, the sound the playing cards make
and the stale smell they have.
Or, the greenish feel of each separate grain of sand,
and the metal-like smell sand has.
And they were talking about an earlier experience I had.
And I went swimming with my cousins, and I was in the water
and I turned upside down in my float.
And there was no real risk of drowning at that moment
because my uncle, he rushed in the water and he pulled me out.
And while I was hanging there upside down,
each strain of water felt like a separate leg flowing over my head.
And the entire experience was something like
old, rose-pink, gooey, dense stuff.
And I talked about it.
And my grandma and my aunties, they started laughing.
And up until now, I still don't know what they were laughing about.
But what I do know is when I talk about these experiences to others,
they go funny.
So, I keep quiet.
Real quiet.
And by the way, as you've heard, I've got Asperger's.
And I think your Google competences are well-developed,
so you can look it up for yourself.
For me, it's just the way my brain functions.
And how it functions is very overwhelming: everything happens at the same time.
I sense everything.
Even the experience I just told you about, I relive it.
And some of you may not notice, but at this moment, when I tell it,
my muscle tonicity changes.
And some of you who know me -
they even know my voice changes when I talk about it.
And some say I've got something like intense world syndrome,
because it's all overwhelming.
And then again, others say I'm hypersensitive
and you can compare it to diabetes.
Or hyposensitive.
There is a bit of truth in both those theories.
But what I say is, "I've got a leaky brain."
Just like you've got a leaky gut.
And this is a bit the way it works:
I get this sensation first, and then I need to believe what I see,
and then I need to comprehend that.
For instance, with the drowning incident, there is a hand there grabbing me,
and then I have to give meaning to the hand.
And then I can build concepts
because I see all sorts of hands before me.
And then, when I have them, then I have knowledge.
And if you compare my brain to a sponge - it's like if you pour water over it,
the water gets absorbed in it.
And the bigger the hole, the bigger the stimulus is that gets absorbed.
The smaller the hole,
the less the stimulus gets absorbed,
and the less meaning I can give to the world around me.
And sometimes, the sponge is really full.
And then the water doesn't get absorbed at all.
For instance, when somebody asks me a question,
I keep quiet,
because it doesn't get absorbed.
And then later on, maybe sometimes months later,
I hear their voice echoing through my brain like a bell.
And I think, "I should answer that question."
Of course, this gives me the perfect excuse
for sometimes not answering questions.
(Laughs)
And in all this, I think, lies the explanation
that there seems to be no fixed route for my synapses.
They go everywhere.
And in this lies an explanation for my thinking in layers,
my visual thinking, my associative thinking and my fractal thinking.
It goes everywhere and I associate around it.
In sound, in taste, in smell and in noise.
And if you see this happening,
you can get a bit of an experience of what it's like.
And sometimes I have images that arise months later.
Like for instance, when I was making coffee.
I pushed the button
and there was this Peruvian man appearing in my head.
And I'm not hallucinating.
It's just the associations that do it.
And it might be the sound of the machine,
it might be the smell of coffee -
I don't know.
And when the bubbles of water,
when they sometimes collide and come together,
I have something that is called synesthesia.
I see music. I taste ground.
And when I hear, for instance, the word "four" -
or I see the number four, I see a yellow
and it makes me go really sick.
And at this moment, each and every time this thing appears,
it makes me go sick, as well.
And it has to be a specific yellow, the one you just saw.
I think it's the one your national railroads use, right?
(Laughs)
And then again you heard the vacuum cleaner,
and what they do to me is make my brain go racy.
And you can compare it to a thunderstorm.
It has - it creates a visual noise,
and that visual noise makes me have a distort -
And even when I think about it now, I have to search for the words...
Distorts my images, so it distorts my words.
And with these tons of information,
and being so focused on all those details at once,
I have to be a bit of a sleuth to find out what it all means.
I have to be an earth explorer
and I explore the world my way.
Most of you people, they go around looking at the world
and they circumnavigate it and immediately know
what their world means.
The way I have to do it is I circumnavigate the world,
first vertically, and then again, horizontally.
But because of all the stimuli I get, I have blind spots.
So my world looks a bit like a doughnut.
But while I'm circumnavigating and being aware of having the blind spot,
I have to be aware as well of not stepping into the blind spot.
But I turn this into my advantage,
because I'm so focused on these details,
and I think in colors and images and layers,
I can have loads of playtime.
I play around with language,
and I make little black book entries
on which I compare the world to map schemes.
I can redraw the images that are in my brain.
And then again, I can focus for an enormous amount of time.
I can take a ball of wool and one needle
and sit there for eight hours and create a visual image
of the empty words most of you people throw at me.
And the other thing I do, I literally mind-map my entire world.
The globe, because I have this doughnut, I think in fragments,
so I need to mind-map my world to make it consistent
and to put everything together and give meaning to my world.
This makes me have a very high awareness of myself.
And in this awareness, I would like to ask you:
please be aware of the world that is around you.
Be a sleuth.
There is more to this world than meets the eye.
There is much more going on than you can ever imagine.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)