Transcription
Let's move on to - Amy - Aimee Mullins, who's up next.
We have a little video, I believe - roll about Aimee Mullins. If we could pull the video please.
It's born without fibulas in both legs. I was amputated aged one, and I've been running like hell ever since. However, fit all over the place. I was speaking to a group of about 300 kids, ages 6 to 8, at a Children's Museum, and I brought with me a bag full of legs, similar to the kinds of things you see up here, and had them laid out on a table for the kids.
From my experience, you know kids are naturally curious about what they don't know or don't understand. As far into them, they only learn to be frightened of those differences when an adult influences them to behave that way. I just pictured a first-grade teacher out in the lobby with these unruly kids saying, "Now whatever you do, don't stare at her legs," when, of course, that's the point. That's why I was there. I wanted to invite them to look and explore.
Now we will welcome the incomparable Aimee Mullins. [Applause]
Chipmunk cheeks. Oh, daydreaming. Most people think it's just idle reverie, a lapse in attention. But what if it's actually the habitual practice of imagining? The practice of ignoring our current boundaries of reality and disregarding, on purpose, what we've been told makes sense?
Obviously, I was always a big daydreamer in elementary school. My report cards had two columns: one for grades and one for attitude. I had good grades, but routinely I got minus signs in the attitude column. The teacher comments went something like this: “Amy is never really with us. Amy is always somewhere else,” or “She is a chronic daydreamer,” like it was a contagious medical condition.
So essentially, I was getting A's, but I was scolded for how I arrived at them, and I was made to feel ashamed for how my mind works, how I solved problems, and absorbed information. It took me a long time to really own the way my mind works and stop apologizing for how it engages with the world.
Most of you here know me for being able to design parts of my body, but the genesis of that was in harnessing what happened regularly in my mind as a child: designing and redesigning an identity, which usually had nothing to do with what other people expected it would be.
I spent a lot of time in children's hospitals, and when I couldn't actually leave the hospital bed with two full plaster casts on, I used daydreaming as a tool to become an explorer. I traveled in my head. I honed my ability to imagine other times and places in great detail, places I'd never been to.
So as a four-year-old, I was flying around on a magic carpet across the Great Pyramids of Egypt. I was just in with the knights of the round table. I was telling that to a friend the other day, and she was like, "Oh yeah, yeah, I loved that whole maiden in the tower daydream when I was a kid." I was like, "No, I wasn't the girl locked in the tower. I was the guy on the horse rescuing the girl in the tower. I was the knight." Obviously.
I mean, scientists tell us that these daydreams are self-generated. It's fascinating. They emerge on their own, not from what we perceive, so they're unique to each of us. We each have this wellspring of visions inside us that gives us access to the essence of who we are. But we also have that ability to create other versions of ourselves that explore different ways of being.
I've never actually felt the ground beneath my feet, but I've wiggled my toes. I have flexed my ankles, and yeah, I say "ouch" when someone steps on my feet. I do those things so known in my daydreams that when they do become real, I will already have experienced them.
Daydreaming is different than night dreaming in that you're claiming autonomy over what you can envision. When we're kids, the only place we have autonomy is in our own minds. We need to nurture a guilt-free environment where our children can daydream. And, you know, while we're at it, let's abandon our proclivity to tell kids not to get their hopes up or to be realistic when they're imagining what they might do or who they might become.
Instead, let's foster an atmosphere where we're free to be highly improbable and wildly unrealistic in our goal-setting. None of my best adventures, many of them documented here at TED over the last 16 years, have materialized because I've been realistic. I didn't have a clear path that was carved out for me, so things that had never existed before had to become real in here before they ever had a chance to become possible in the eyes of anyone else.
I designed my future by daydreaming it. We can act on our imagination by daydreaming. It's the bridge between imagining and creating. Daydreaming helps us see a path where the unknown, the unexperienced, or the unreal becomes seen known and ultimately much closer to being real.
Creativity is imagination actualized. The dreamers who act are lauded. We call them visionaries, pioneers, trailblazers. That ability to do what they dream is seen as special or unique, but it's not unique; it's just practiced. We come into this world innately able to imagine in daydreams, but as we become adults, we often stop ourselves from having them.
I mean, we're reporting on our current realities more often than we're imagining better ones. So let's make daydreaming a choice, not an accident. We can and should habituate it and practice it like it's a sport or any other skill that requires a commitment of time.
Einstein claimed to have begun his theory of relativity while daydreaming regularly about running alongside a sunbeam to the edge of the universe. Now, I have no idea what that image has to do with math and science, but it worked for him because he allowed himself the daydreaming time to explore it.
T.E. Lawrence said, “All men dream, but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds, waken the day to find that it was vanity. But the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act on their dreams with open eyes to make them possible.”
Now that's the kind of dangerous we should all get behind. Next. [Applause]