This is the story of how our minds are
connected, and I'm not going to go into
like a kind of mystical woo woo territory
about ESP and all that sort of
thing. Other speakers can talk about that
and that's totally fine, but instead I'm going to
talk about very concretely how all of
our thoughts and minds are connected and
I'm going to do it through the story of
this instrument - piano. Anybody who's
seen somebody who's really great play
the piano, you just know that this is a
magical thing. Basically, people can
create joy. They can express
pain. They can express so much complexity
and emotion. They can do with
force. They can do it with subtlety.
This instrument is a powerful powerful
instrument and the people that play
piano, whether their concert
pianist or professional
musicians or musicians of any stripe. If you
were to kind of scan their brains and
kind of see what's going on,
you'd actually see a good chunk of their
their brains when they're doing this
stuff is being dedicated to how
to play the piano. So there's
structures that are related to
the movement of the fingers across
the keys. There are structures that are
related to music theory and how to
relate that to what the piano is capable
of doing. The motion of the pedal and
so on and so forth. But one thing that you
may not have thought of,
so of course, if you do this
sort of thing, if you play the
piano, you have these structures in your
brain and all the people that play the
piano have these kind of
parallel structures in their brain that
allow them to play the piano.
But a thing that you may not
have thought about about this process is
that before the year 1700 this was a
set of patterns of the brain that was
just not possible. Because in the year
1700 the piano was invented.
Literally, this type of beauty was not
possible until the year 1700. And it
took a bunch of centuries after that for
people to develop all the different
styles of piano playing for us to
achieve the level of beauty that we have
arrived at with the piano.
What does this mean for us? Well,
number one, it means that there's a set
of people that invented it and their
patterns of thoughts propagated forward
and opened up the bound for many other
people to go play around with this
instrument. And that propagated forward
for many other people to develop
interesting styles and be able to teach
other folks that then studied piano.
And really, this piece of work
allowed us to open up entirely new
vistas of human experience and
possibility. And those thoughts were
directly connected in a chain of
possibility. In the larger scope, I
call this phenomenon 'The Palette of Being'.
Because what happens is every single one
of us is born into a world where
particular things are possible.
So you might be born into a
world where it's possible to become a
pianist or a musician. It's possible to
become a computer scientist. It's
possible to become a dancer. It's
possible to become all these things.
There's colors in the palette that you
can go dabble in and paint from in
order to create the masterpiece that is
your life. The thing beyond that
which I think is way more profound is
that the colors don't stay stable. The
way that you live your life you can add
colors. The people that got
together and took their mechanical
engineering prowess and invented the
piano,
they added a color. It meant that every
bit of civilization afterwards now has a
new color to work with. Outside of people
that have invented things, just
sometimes your way of being adds a new
color.
I remember when Lady Gaga was coming up. I was
like that so Madonna what she's doing
and it's because like Madonna came
in here and she just was a
particular way. And then a generation
later somebody could look at that and
it's like "I like that". And she's not
an exact copy. Nobody will ever be.
But she decided to use some of those
colors that did not exist before in
order to go paint with and do something
phenomenal. And this is actually the
opportunity
of all of our lives to be able to
not only deeply embrace and play with
all the colors in the palette of being
but through what we create in this life,
through our relationships and through
our basic way of being to
add colors to this so that future
generations are able to invent, live,
be in a different way with each other.