[Music] I'm actually here by mistake because when I signed up for this I thought that the e in Ted X stood for Education well as it turns out stands for entertainment and now I feel obligated to entertain you I need to watch my ease a little more carefully I want to tell you there's a reason why this was a problem for me I'm severely dyslectic so that's why I missed God Bless you that's why I missed the e in that particular situation so I'm going to make up uh for that uh Problem by throwing you
some chocolate so that you're going to like me right away so is you're awesome and wonderful you look terrific and so do you you are awesome human beings I want to tell you a little bit about myself I'm 6'4 I'm wearing a baseball cap it's probably as much as you really need to know oh come on it's funnier than that I uh I was in Oklahoma one time and I was throwing chocolate out to to the audience and there was a woman sitting about right where you are and she was looking at me like I
hate you and all of your immediate relatives and I thought I'm the great Dr Jim I will win her over so I threw a piece of chocolate to her and it was arcing through the air and I could see it coming down and I knew I was going to be wonderful and it went blun right in her hot coffee and spilled on her legs didn't win her over the kind of guy I am is when I first started my practice I lived in a Township where they put marks on the tires and I'm little OCD
it sort of bothers me a little bit when I do that so I figured out that if I move my Jeep Up 3 feet on the even days and moved it back two feet on the odd days on the 17th day as I drove past City Hall if I was going 30 m an hour the tires would spell bite [Laughter] me I had a lot of free time and if the mayor was looking I would wave as I went by my wife taught me an important lesson about statistics I went into the bathroom and there
was this much paper in there and I took it out to her and I said dear wife what's the deal with this paper and she gave me the look where one eyebrow goes up and the other one goes down I knew I was in trouble but I'm a guy I went back in a couple of weeks later and I saw this so I went out and confronted my wife and my wife has a PHD and she's w smarter than I am and she said look there's no pleasing you that's a 300% Improvement the moral of
that story is be careful that the statistics actually work in the real world I went to the Seminary that's another Ted Talk in and of itself very briefly and while I was in the Seminary I learned that if I was going to do good things in the world that I would have to stand on the shoulders of giants and a couple of you human beings are here and I've been standing on your shoulders for a number of years so thank you and I also learned that if you can't Dazzle them with Brilliance you should at
least baffle him with bullet points this is really funny because Ted hates bullet points but I was able to work it in all right humans that's my attempt at entertainment uh I would like to go on now to tell you why I'm here today I'm here to tell you about twice exceptional human beings those are people who have enormous strengths with debilitating weaknesses so the strengths make them gifted but the the disabilities are like oh my God simultaneously within the same person there were about 300,000 twice exceptional human beings uh who are small children and
about three times that many adults they're an N of one no two twice exceptional people are exactly the same it's all about the neurons and just for a second here in this first row although we don't have a full row I'm going to have you human beings do this go like this all right now just imagine somebody's next to you so the neurons don't actually touch what happens is an Impulse Comes This Way a little chemical is released it's caught here and it goes on the way so we've got a network here you are a
great Network I'm loving your networking all the way down so it says turn on turn on turn on turn off turn off turn off modulate a little bit more a little bit less in every possible Direction those are the ne the connections you can put your arms down you got your deltoid workout in there the number of connections you have really determines how bright you are so the the the most of us have about a 100 trillion neuronal connections but some of you lucky human beings have 10 to the 79 neuronal connections that's a one
with 79 zeros behind it you have my permission you can say Dr Jim said that I am more complicated than the Milky Way galaxy because I have more Connections in my mind than there are stars in the universe we're here today talking about bounce and this is all about the brain so we're going to go Hightech go like this in the front all right if the connections are good in the front you can be gifted if the connections are bad in the back you may have a disability of some sort so the giftedness is in
in the front the processing is in the back and giftedness is approximately two to the top five percentile hot tip here IQ tests are just one way to find giftedness and not really the only way I like to go to that great American philosopher Forest Gump yay and I stole this from Forest Gump gifted is as gifted does so if you're doing gifted don't worry about IQ tests what are the deficits well the deficits can be dyslexia a disability in Reading Writing or math it can be ADHD it can be generalized anxiety disorder it can
be the Spectrum disorders it can be depression here is a little example of how a deficit can work I'm going to change the emphasis on one word okay I'm dyslectic so I'm going to try this I did not say he took my pencil it was me I didn't say he took my pencil Ah that's that's him I didn't say he took my pencil but the son of has something of mine all I did was change a word and what happened to this sentence three different meanings what if you don't have the wiring to understand that
what if you don't have the wiring to know an angry face from an anxious face that could be a huge disability in our culture the rest of the world is like dude what is up could be twice exceptional is what is up these are people with enormous strengths and debilitating weaknesses most human beings learn the basic skills and as they go up to the more complex they get less and less competent but twice exceptional people are upside down in their abilities these human beings get stuck with some basic skill processing but do the harder stuff
much much much better they're way better in medical school than they were in the third grade Ernest Hemingway wrote one or two pretty good books he was a terrible speller Dan Quail believe it or not has Superior intelligence I swear to you but he's remembered for The Great Potato incident poor Dan Quail please don't put the dunce hat on somebody for a basic skill problem that's the back of the brain we're more interested in the fronts of the brain so what's the problem well gatekeeping mechanisms can be the problem and a gatekeeping mechanism can be
a standardized test it can be an obnoxious teacher it can be negative thinking within your own mind it can be the alphabet test and standardized testing it's some place that a person gets stuck of course we have Dr Theodore J naysayer to help us with this process and he's one of those guys that does this when he talks to you which is the international symbol of I am way better than you are and I had a joke worked out with the middle fingers but my wife said do not do that joke at the Ted talk
so I'm not but you know where I'm going with this I want to read you something that happened to me this is from a naysayer that I dealt with I wrote an article and here's what they wrote back to me I recently reviewed a rejoinder that you wrote for the Journal of learning dis uh difficulties about twice exceptional Learners I found the article to be trite lacking in content and generally missing any points that approximate reality love Mom that made me sweat but after a human being gets about 10,000 messages they start incorporating the negative
things that are going on ask yourselves when would you start believing it at a th messages 2,000 3,000 try 10,000 by the time you're 12 years old I want to tell you about the National Education ass Association I'm sorry about this hat I've got a bald head they're like you got to cover that head the lighting is going to make all the TV stuff go crazy but don't pull it down too far because then it's going to cover your face and we'll have shadows it's like good God here's what those folks had to say about
twice exceptionality looking at the big picture twice exceptional students are important to the future of our communities you're the community their unrealized potential can mean immeasurable societal costs I want you to think for a second about what those cost could be inspiring Community leaders who were never elected half of you can really relate to this right now cures for diseases that are never discovered twice exceptional people are wonderful medical researchers and Physicians revolutionary inventions that are never imp patented if you're an entrepreneur there's a good chance that you're a twice exceptional person I want to
tell you about Jimmy when I met this little guy who was an eight-year-old person and I knew I was in the presence of greatness but Jimmy gave me the double headache right away it's like oh man I'm in trouble with this guy his IQ tested at 158 his math was 178 100 is an average score my students at Washington University can't do the math that Jimmy was doing as an 8-year-old person he did it in his head without writing anything down now Jimmy has some problems he struggles socially and he doesn't have a lot of
friends but the thing is I want to be his buddy because I'm going to be working for him someday I want to tell you uh that he's as smart as Albert Einstein who was a twice exceptional person I want to uh talk about John for a few seconds John was a top 1 percentile guy handsome person health nut was a genius with Electronics but John had two problems severe depression and he could not do the Tim tables no matter how he tried to learn them so I said to him well John you know how do
you how do you do this he goes well Dr Jim ask me a question I said okay buddy seven time seven he goes okay Fred goes to the store to aisle 7 he walks halfway down he meets Sue Sue is the multiplier Sue reaches into the seventh shelf and pulls out a loaf of bread and on that bread is 49 he taught himself to do that no teacher taught him he did that for all the number sets story doesn't have a happy ending in his early 20s John took his own life 20 years after the
fact normally this really breaks me up but 20 years after the fact I still think about him in the Lost potential it's my allergies I'm sorry I can hear John's voice saying come on Dr Jim we got to bounce up let's get going well here's Leonardo D venci you know I'm a bald guys as you know I think I could pull that hat off what do you think it could happen this is what a twice exceptional person did with the Last Supper it's Legos when you see Legos I want you to be thinking ah there
may be a giftedness around here what we need is fairness I don't care if you're a conservative a moderate are a liberal I don't care if you're young or older like me we all want fairness we're wired for fairness so what does fairness mean it means equal access to participate in the society not getting stuck at a gatekeeping mechanism we're here to talk about bounce so it's getting from here bouncing over to there where you have equal access I want everyone all of you human beings here to be able to come to the table the
table should be filled with women and you women should make the same money as men I'm just saying yay every type of person including twice exceptional people need to come to the table because America is great when we're all participating well what are some of the things to keep people from getting there the alphabet tests you know what these are it's how you get into college and I've got a great idea for you alphabet test hum humans just let the test go for 12 hours you have your fast thinkers and they'll get it done in
the normal time and they'll get their scores and I want them to be air traffic controllers they're great people but what about the slow methodical precise twice exceptional people they will give us a measure of endurance that is so important we don't measure endurance it's the most important thing Edison told us that genius is 99% perspiration just use the roll on and you're all good with that right when you hear this statement if you're so smart how come you can't dot dot dot dot dot that's when the light bulb should go on this could be
a twice exceptional person okay what can you do from these chairs tonight I want you to validate strengths two human beings in this room valid validated my strengths and it's the only way that I got a was able to do this Ted Talk validating strengths is the number one thing that you can do I want you to think about something human beings no matter how big your issues are no matter what the gatekeeping systems are no matter how bad the naysayers are no matter what the basic skills problems are we're not going to have to
bounce past the gatekeeping mechanisms if the gates are open in the first place so I want you to do this real quickly with me because I'm long on time time go like this closed gatekeeping systems we can visualize and together open the gates so that everyone has equal access so let's do it let's open the gates thank you you've been wonderful
