MICHIO KAKU:
WHAT'S THE FATE OF THE UNIVERSE?
IT'S IN THE
DARK MATTER | BIG THINK
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Michio Kaku:
What's the Fate of the Universe? It's in the Dark Matter
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Michio Kaku
on what makes a supergenius.
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MICHIO KAKU:
Dr. Michio
Kaku is the co-founder of string field theory, and is one of the most widely
recognized scientists in the world today. He has written 4 New York Times Best
Sellers, is the science correspondent for CBS This Morning and has hosted
numerous science specials for BBC-TV, the Discovery/Science Channel. His radio
show broadcasts to 100 radio stations every week. Dr. Kaku holds the Henry
Semat Chair and Professorship in theoretical physics at the City College of New
York (CUNY), where he has taught for over 25 years. He has also been a visiting
professor at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, as well as New York
University (NYU).
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TRANSCRIPT:
Michio Kaku:
If you watch the "Big Bang Theory" on CBS television you see these
clueless nerds who are doormats when it comes to the opposite sex, right. And you realize is there any basis in reality? First of all none of my friends are like that
and all my friends are physicists, right.
Well there
is a kernel of truth and that is some of these individuals may suffer from
something called Asperger’s Syndrome which is a mild form of autism. These people are clueless when it comes to
social interactions. They don’t look you
in the eye, for example. And yet they have fantastic mental and mathematical
capabilities. We think, for example,
that Isaac Newton had Asperger’s. The
greatest scientist of all time was very strange. He had no friends to speak of. He could not carry a decent conversation and
yet here he was spitting out some of the greatest theories in the history of
science. Calculus. The Universal Law of Gravitation. The Theory of Optics. And we think he had Asperger’s Syndrome.
Now
Asperger’s Syndrome is a mild form of autism and in autism we have what are
called savants. That is people that have
an IQ of maybe 80 but have incredible mathematical and musical abilities. In fact, some of these individuals can hear
one symphony and just play it by memory on a piano. Other people could be in a helicopter, have a
helicopter ride over Manhattan, see the entire New York harbor and then from
memory sketch the entire harbor. In
fact, if you want to see it go to JFK Airport in New York City and you will see
it as you enter the international terminal.
So what is it about these people?
Well, first of all a lot of them had injuries to the left temporal
lobe. One individual had a bullet as a child
go right through the left temporal lobe.
Another person dove into a swimming pool and injured very badly the left
temporal lobe. And these people wound up
with incredible mathematical abilities as a consequence. And so what is it about their brains?
Well
Einstein’s brain has actually been preserved.
Einstein when he died had an autopsy in which case the pathologist stole
the brain without permission of the family.
He just realized that he was sitting next to something historic, took
the brain, took it home with him, and it was sitting in a jar in his home for
decades. He even drove across the
country with the jar inside his trunk.
And there’s even a TV special where you can actually see the cut up
brain of Albert Einstein. And you
realize first of all the brain is a little bit different. You can’t tell by looking at it that it’s so
remarkably different but you realize that the connections between the prefontal
cortex and the parietal lobe – a connection that is accentuated in people that
do abstract reasoning is thickened. So
there definitely is a difference in the brain of Einstein. But the question is did it make Einstein or
did Einstein make this change of the brain?
Are
champions born or are they made? That
still is not known because people who exercise mental abilities, mathematical
abilities, they can thicken that part of the brain themselves. So we know that people who do well in
mathematics, brain scans clearly show that their brains are slightly different
from the average brain. So in
conclusion, we’re still children with regards to understanding how this process
takes place. Tonight don’t go home and
bang yourself on the left temporal lobe.
We don’t know how it works. We
just know that in a tiny fraction of these cases people with injury to the left
temporal lobe, some of the become super geniuses.
Directed/Produced
by JONATHAN FOWLER AND DILLON FITTON
Grateful
thanks to MICHIO KAKU, BIG THINK, JONATHAN FOWLER, DILLON FITTON and YouTube.
