Power

The value of nothing: out of nothing comes something. That was an essay I wrote when I was 11 years old and I got a B+. (Laughter) What I'm going to talk about: nothing out of something, and how we create. And I'm gonna try and do that within the 18-minute time span that we were told to stay within, and to follow the TED commandments: that is, actually, something that creates a near-death experience, but near-death is good for creativity. (Laughter) OK.
So, I also want to explain, because Dave Eggers said he was going to heckle me if I said anything that was a lie, or not true to universal creativity. And I've done it this way for half the audience, who is scientific. When I say we, I don't mean you, necessarily; I mean me, and my right brain, my left brain, and the one that's in between that is the censor and tells me what I'm saying is wrong. And I'm going do that also by looking at what I think is part of my creative process, which includes a number of things that happened, actually -- the nothing started even earlier than the moment in which I'm creating something new. And that includes nature, and nurture, and what I refer to as nightmares.
Now in the nature area, we look at whether or not we are innately equipped with something, perhaps in our brains, some abnormal chromosome that causes this muse-like effect. And some people would say that we're born with it in some other means, and others, like my mother, would say that I get my material from past lives. Some people would also say that creativity may be a function of some other neurological quirk -- van Gogh syndrome -- that you have a little bit of, you know, psychosis, or depression. I do have to say, somebody -- I read recently that van Gogh wasn't really necessarily psychotic, that he might have had temporal lobe seizures, and that might have caused his spurt of creativity, and I don't -- I suppose it does something in some part of your brain. And I will mention that I actually developed temporal lobe...