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 seizures a number of years ago,

but it was during the time I was writing my last book,

and some people say that book is quite different.

I think that part of it also begins with a sense of identity crisis:

you know, who am I, why am I this particular person,

why am I not black like everybody else?

And sometimes you're equipped with skills,

but they may not be the kind of skills that enable creativity.

I used to draw. I thought I would be an artist.

And I had a miniature poodle.

And it wasn't bad, but it wasn't really creative.

Because all I could really do was represent in a very one-on-one way.

And I have a sense that I probably copied this from a book.

And then, I also wasn't really shining in a certain area that I wanted to be,

and you know, you look at those scores, and it wasn't bad,

but it was not certainly predictive that I would one day make

my living out of the artful arrangement of words.

Also, one of the principles of creativity is to have a little childhood trauma.

And I had the usual kind that I think a lot of people had,

and that is that, you know, I had expectations placed on me.

That figure right there, by the way,

figure right there was a toy given to me when I was but nine years old,

and it was to help me become a doctor from a very early age.

I have some ones that were long lasting: from the age of five to 15,

this was supposed to be my side occupation,

and it led to a sense of failure.

But actually, there was something quite real in my life

that happened when I was about 14.

And it was discovered that my brother, in 1967, and then my father,

six months later, had brain tumors.

And my mother believed that something had gone wrong,

and she was gonna find out what it was, and she was gonna fix it.

My father was a Baptist minister, and he believed in miracles,

and that God's will would take care of that.

But, of course, they ended up dying, six months apart.

And after that, my mother believed that it was fate, or curses

-- she went looking through all the reasons in the universe

why this would have happened.

Everything except randomness. She did not believe in randomness.

There was a reason for everything.

And one of the reasons, she thought, was that her mother,

who had died when she was very young, was angry at her.

And so, I had this notion of death all around me,

because my mother also believed that I would be next, and she would be next.

And when you are faced with the prospect of death very soon,

you begin to think very much about everything.

You become very creative, in a survival sense.

And this, then, led to my big questions.

And they're the same ones that I have today.

And they are: why do things happen, and how do things happen?

And the one my mother asked: how do I make things happen?

It's a wonderful way to look at these questions, when you write a story.

Because, after all, in that framework, between page one and 300,

you have to answer this question of why things happen, how things happen,

in what order they happen. What are the influences?

How do I, as the narrator, as the writer, also influence that?

And it's also one that, I think, many of our scientists have been asking.

It's a kind of cosmology, and I have to develop a cosmology of my own universe,

as the creator of that universe.

And you see, there's a lot of back and forth

in trying to make that happen, trying to figure it out

-- years and years, oftentimes.

So, when I look at creativity, I also think that it is this sense or this inability

to repress, my looking at associations in practically anything in life.

And I got a lot of them during what's been going on

throughout this conference,

almost everything that's been going on.

And so I'm going to use, as the metaphor, this association:

quantum mechanics, which I really don't understand,

but I'm still gonna use it as the process

for explaining how it is the metaphor.

So, in quantum mechanics, of course, you have dark energy and dark matter.

And it's the same thing in looking at these questions of how things happen.

There's a lot of unknown, and you often don't know what it is except by its absence.

But when you make those associations,

you want them to come together in a kind of synergy in the story,

and what you're finding is what matters. The meaning.

And that's what I look for in my work, a personal meaning.

There is also the uncertainty principle, which is part of quantum mechanics,

as I understand it. (Laughter)

And this happens constantly in the writing.

And there's the terrible and dreaded observer effect,

in which you're looking for something, and

you know, things are happening simultaneously,

and you're looking at it in a different way,

and you're trying to really look for the about-ness,

or what is this story about. And if you try too hard,

then you will only write the about.

You won't discover anything.

And what you were supposed to find,

what you hoped to find in some serendipitous way,

is no longer there.

Now, I don't want to ignore

the other side of what happens in our universe,

like many of our scientists have.

And so, I am going to just throw in string theory here,

and just say that creative people are multidimensional,

and there are 11 levels, I think, of anxiety.

(Laughter) And they all operate at the same time.

There is also a big question of ambiguity.

And I would link that to something called the cosmological constant.

And you don't know what is operating, but something is operating there.

And ambiguity, to me, is very uncomfortable

in my life, and I have it. Moral ambiguity.

It is constantly there. And, just as an example,

this is one that recently came to me.

It was something I read in an editorial by a woman

who was talking about the war in Iraq. And she said,

"Save a man from drowning, you are responsible to him for life."

A very famous Chinese saying, she said.

And that means because we went into Iraq, we should stay there

until things were solved. You know, maybe even 100 years.

So, there was another one that I came across,

and it's "saving fish from drowning."

And it's what Buddhist fishermen say,

because they're not supposed to kill anything.

And they also have to make a living, and people need to be fed.

So their way of rationalizing that is they are saving the fish from drowning,

and unfortunately, in the process the fish die.

Now, what's encapsulated in both these drowning metaphors

-- actually, one of them is my mother's interpretation,

and it is a famous Chinese saying, because she said it to me:

"save a man from drowning, you are responsible to him for life."

And it was a warning -- don't get involved in other people's business,

or you're going to get stuck.

OK. I think if somebody really was drowning, she'd save them.

But, both of these sayings -- saving a fish from drowning,

or saving a man from drowning -- to me they had to do with intentions.

And all of us in life, when we see a situation, we have a response.

And then we have intentions.

There's an ambiguity of what that should be that we should do,

and then we do something.

And the results of that may not match what our intentions had been.

Maybe things go wrong. And so, after that, what are our responsibilities?

What are we supposed to do?

Do we stay in for life,

or do we do something else and justify and say, well, my intentions were good,

and therefore I cannot be held responsible for all of it?

That is the ambiguity in my life

that really disturbed me, and led me to write a book called

"Saving Fish From Drowning."

I saw examples of that. Once I identified this question, it was all over the place.

I got these hints everywhere.

And then, in a way, I knew that they had always been there.

And then writing, that's what happens. I get these hints, these clues,

and I realize that they've been obvious, and yet they have not been.

And what I need, in effect, is a focus.

And when I have the question, it is a focus.

And all these things that seem to be flotsam and jetsam in life actually go through

that question, and what happens is those particular things become relevant.

And it seems like it's happening all the time.

You think there's a sort of coincidence going on, a serendipity,

in which you're getting all this help from the universe.

And it may also be explained that now you have a focus.

And you are noticing it more often.

But you apply this.

You begin to look at things having to do with your tensions.

Your brother, who's fallen in trouble, do you take care of him?

Why or why not?

It may be something that is perhaps more serious

-- as I said, human rights in Burma.

I was thinking that I shouldn't go because somebody said, if I did, it would show

that I approved of the military regime there.

And then, after a while, I had to ask myself,

"Why do we take on knowledge, why do we take on assumptions

that other people have given us?"

And it was the same thing that I felt when I was growing up,

and was hearing these rules of moral conduct from my father,

who was a Baptist minister.

So I decided that I would go to Burma for my own intentions,

and still didn't know that if I went there,

what the result of that would be, if I wrote a book --

and I just would have to face that later, when the time came.

We are all concerned with things that we see in the world that we are aware of.

We come to this point and say, what do I as an individual do?

Not all of us can go to Africa, or work at hospitals,

so what do we do, if we have this moral response, this feeling?