Translator: Cèlia Ventura Reviewer: Leonardo Silva
Meet person A and person B.
Person A is a scientist.
Maybe a mathematician, an engineer, it doesn’t matter.
What matters is that it has a linear thinking,
it believes in logic and facts to prove its point.
Person B is an artist.
Maybe a painter, maybe a writer.
It has big dreams, it follows its intuition and creativity.
So I want to ask you a question.
Do you consider yourselves more like person A or like person B?
Come on, the ones that think they're more like person A, raise your hands.
A: scientists - Okay, okay.
B: artists -
Okay, interesting.
So, I’ve seen that many of you haven’t raised your hand.
I hope it’s not because you are shy,
but maybe because you don’t feel represented by those stereotypes,
or maybe by both.
Welcome to my life!
Person C,
someone who swings between both science and arts.
This is me when I was five years old.
I was reading an amazingly interesting book
called "The supermarket."
Now I’m 19 years old, but nothing has really changed.
So, I could also show you a picture of me playing with Lego constructions,
or maybe doing little experiments,
or drawing.
What I want to show you is that these are not phases.
I have been into science -
into maths, into biology -
and I’ve been into arts -
into writing, into reading, into drawing,
through all my life.
And as I grew up I realized,
"Maybe there's something wrong with me."
Because I saw the other kids
and they seemed so sure about themselves!
There was this boy who was so creative. He draw super funny comic strips.
And this girl who was really smart. She was so good at maths.
Why did they fit in one slot? Where did I belong to?
So, what I want to [do] is I want to ask you a question.
Where do you think that this question comes from?
Why do you think that there is this big wall between science and arts?
I want that, by the end of this speech, more of you will think,
"Oh, maybe I am not a person A, Maybe I’m not a person B.
Maybe I’m a person C!"
Okay, so I’ve realized that there are three assumptions that people make,
three assumptions why people say,
“Oh, that’s why the world is divided into scientists and artists.”
Number one.
Our brain is separated into logic and creativity.
We have our scientist side,
and then we have our artistic side, right?
Number two.
We all have a dominant side of the brain.
You are a scientist or you are an artist,
but you can’t go for both,
and that’s where our third [comes in].
Arts and science are not compatible.
OK. That’s what people were telling me, too.
So, I made a list with all the degrees when I had to choose a career.
See, this is one of the pages.
There were three pages, actually.
I can tell what’s in there: all of the degrees that you can think of.
Well, not all. I did not put medicine. I can not handle blood, I’m sorry.
(Laughter)
So I started to painfully cross one after the other one.
(Sound of crossing items off a list)
And I ended up going for Human Biology. That’s what I’m doing now.
I’m a second-year student at University Pompeu Fabra.
This is a brain.
And this is where our first assumption goes to.
We said we have a left hemisphere, that it’s about logic, about science.
And we said there's this right hemisphere, that it’s about creativity, about arts.
Can you see I’m smiling while I’m saying it?
That arts is so happy and science is so boring?
(Laughter)
This red thing, it's called the corpus callosum.
In the 1970s, a man named Roger Wolcott Sperry studied it.
Why? Why is it important?
Well, because -
our brain is definitely divided into different areas,
because it needs to be productive.
We cannot have all the brain doing the same thing.
We have different areas doing different jobs.
But we need them to be connected,
we need them to talk to each other so they're working as a whole.
And that is where the corpus callosum comes into play.
We need it to be so well connected
that what Dr. Sperry found out
was that when people had it cut, when they had no corpus callosum,
they were not able to do some activities.
And he traced them and he realized,
“Oh, in the left part of our brain, we have calculation and language."
Together, calculation and language.
"And on the right side of our brain, we have spatial reasoning."
Right there started the myth.
Even though he said,
"Be careful,
what I’ve just said is very easy to run wild with, be careful,"
it had all just started. Why?
Well, a couple of days later, the New York Times published this article
called “Two astonishingly different persons inhabit our head.”
Boom! Civil war! Movie title! Amazing!
No, guys. This is us, all of it.
We don’t have two people [fighting] for control,
"Let me take over!" "No, let me take over!"
But then, the article continued,
“We are left-brained or right-brained.”
And then, they said, "The left part of your brain is about logic.
The right side of your brain is about creativity."
See what they did?
They did a small simplification.
Yet, by doing that, they made a huge mistake.
It’s not so simple.
We cannot just say that our brain is divided into science and arts.
And that is where our first assumption goes to the trashcan.
We can not believe in that.
Let’s go for our second assumption.
We said, "I’m sorry, you are left-brained or right-brained,
just like this article is saying it.
You've probably seen tests online,
tests that will tell you, "Are you left or right-brained?"
I took it, and it said, "Sixty percent left-brained, 40% right-brained."
Great! Yes!
Well, not so simple,
because this had never really been scientifically proven,
until 2013,
when a group in Utah studied over 1,000 brains for two years.
And what they found out
is that there was actually no basal predominance for one side,
which means that we do not have a dominant side.
We cannot use it as an excuse anymore.
If you're a scientist, you cannot just say
I’m sorry my left brain is more dominant. I cannot draw."
No. This is not true.
Our second assumption is not true.
So let’s go for our third assumption.
We said they cannot be combined; science and arts are different worlds.
Well, I think that that’s exactly, that’s exactly what they have in common:
the world.
The world is gorgeous, life is amazing, it’s beautiful,
yet it holds so many mysteries
that we, humans, we cannot just sit there and watch.
We have to communicate it, to express it, to show it, to understand it.
If you do it through a brush,
if you do a poem about it
or if you take the numbers to try to understand it, it doesn’t matter.
I can take a flower
and I can paint you a beautiful "natura morta" out of it.
Or I can take the flower and do the Fibonacci number,
which is a sequence of numbers that [create] the patterns found in nature.
It doesn’t matter, we're all trying to understand the world.
And you will say, "OK, Cèlia. See, I see what you did there."
You just said it, they are different worlds.
Like, there's different ways of expressing it.
Well, no. Can you hear this song?
(Background music)
This is the Pi number.
Yes, 3,1415 -
A YouTuber called aSongScout took some of the numbers,
put each one to a music note,
then arranged something for the other hand.
This is what came out of it.
Is this science? Is this art?
What about this?
This is not an abstract painting. This is our retina.
This is what we are looking through.
Though, it’s beautiful.
So can you see that maybe
science and arts are more connected than we think?
Maybe they're not so different, after all.
Our third assumption was, "They cannot be combined," right?
So what I want to tell is that not only can they be combined,
but by doing this,
we actually get even greater results.
I want to give you three examples.
Number one.
Meet Isaac Asimov.
He had some really cool beard. Yeah, you can laugh about it.
It’s really cool.
But he was actually one of the greatest science fiction writers ever.
If you haven’t read anything about him, you definitely should.
Maybe you have seen “I, Robot,” the movie.
Well, it was inspired by a book he wrote.
"Star Wars," inspired by his work.
What I’m trying to tell you is that he even got a prize
for a trilogy that he worked on,
"Foundation."
And that prize was created just to show how good he was.
You've heard me.
And they said, "This trilogy is so good,
we have to make a prize just to show how good it is."
That's amazing.
You said, "OK, great artist, yes, great writer."
And I said, "Well, he was a biochemistry teacher."
How does that work?
Well, because it was just that what made him great.
He was able to imagine a future using his scientific tools.
He was able to imagine and say, "Oh, if this works now,
maybe in a few years let’s see what could happen."
And then through his artistic skills, he was able to express it,
and that’s what made him so great,
that he took both science and arts
and fused them.
Let’s go for our second example:
Maria Sibylla Merian.
Now we are talking about the 17th century,
and this was a woman who was mind-blown.
She was amazed by insects,
especially by caterpillars,
and now, we're talking about a time
when caterpillars were seen like the "devil’s creature."
Why was she amazed by them?
Because she looked and said,
"How can something like that become such a beautiful butterfly?"
So she sat there
and she draw, she draw all the processes.
She just draw and draw.
That was what Monnet did too.
I mean, Monnet was just looking at flowers and he was painting them.
Exactly, because that's what it's all about.
But by doing this,
she was doing a science work,
she was actually becoming a botanist,
she was setting the bases for the entomology of insects.
See, what she did, once again, was combine both arts and science.
That’s what made her an important figure.
Let’s go for our third example. You probably know him.
We're talking about Antoni Gaudí.
This is "la Sagrada Família."
Gaudí is a scientist or is he an artist?
Well, he is both
because what he did is be amazed by nature once again.
He actually said it, "I'm not original. I just go back to the origins."
Because he was being amazed by nature,
and then with his scientific tools,
he expressed it.
You can see columns in here.
What I see is a forest.
It's a forest of trees made of stone.
That’s what made him great.
Once again, is combining both science and arts.
Can you see it?
Maybe there's not such a huge difference.
And you will tell me, "Okay."
But do you see what the problem is?
Education is telling us more than ever that we have to choose: science or arts.
I started talking about myself.
I said how I ended up going for science.
I went for Human Biology.
Well that’s not entirely true.
See, I’m still this five-year-old who still reads books.
Not "The supermarket." I read more interesting books now.
But on my free time, I go to the theater, I read, I write.
I even have a small YouTube channel
where I talk about the two things that interest me the most:
science "and" arts.
And now if you told me,
"Cèlia, if you were given the option to go back and choose a degree again,
what would you do?
I wouldn’t change anything,
because my greatest decision was not to choose.
You can choose and be good at something,
or you can not choose,
take everything you like, combine it, and be great.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)