Human connection is all about two things — vulnerability and empathy. Both individuals need to have both in order for there to be a good connection. As a society, we are becoming increasingly isolated, and social media makes it so easy to show our good side. Once everyone starts putting up their good side, it becomes so much harder to be vulnerable. We want people to like us, but without showing all the ugly stuff inside, we can never form anything other than a relationship on the surface.

However, we need so much more than just vulnerability in order for any kind of relationship (friendship, romantic relationship, etc.) to work. When we give out vulnerability, we need someone on the other end to receive that vulnerability, that is empathy. Vulnerability without empathy is still a disconnect. You end up with a diary, or a teddy bear. Have you ever noticed that no matter how much you hug the teddy bear, it doesn’t hug back? That’s vulnerability without empathy. There’s a reason why we need more than a diary or a teddy bear.

Empathy is different from sympathy. Sympathy is seeing someone else’s situation and saying “you will be ok”. Empathy is stepping into someone else’s shoes and crying with them. I will never forget the one friend that heard about a rough patch I was going through a few years ago and started crying. She didn’t fix my problems, but she made me feel 10x better because she understood me. She made my problem her problem, and that is perhaps the greatest thing another human being could do. That’s true empathy.

But the vulnerability-empathy relationship also has to go both ways. If one side has a lot of vulnerability and the other side has a lot of empathy but isn’t willing to be vulnerable, you have a therapist-patient relationship. Vulnerability has to go both ways, and vulnerability in turn generates more vulnerability. Once one side lets down their guard, the other side is often more willing to do the same. It becomes a positive feedback loop that causes two people to be increasingly closer to each other, but only when there’s empathy coming back from both sides.

If vulnerability comes from both sides, but only one side is empathetic, or worse yet, the person not receiving empathy ends up feeling like they have given without receiving, then they might end up thinking the other person is self-centered and only thinks of themselves.

Here’s a summary of all the different possibilities:

Many people assume that if they lack close friends they can really talk to when they are going through a rough patch, there’s something wrong with them. However, we can see that it’s something that can be changed, but only if both sides are willing. Find people that are willing to be vulnerable and empathetic, and take the step to do so in return. If someone is going through a rough patch and you don’t know what to say to them, you don’t have to. You just have to be willing to step into their shoes, walk with them in the journey, cry with them, and check upon them regularly. There’s hope, and as I learned recently, just because someone doesn’t empathize with you yet, it doesn’t mean they never will.

“Doubt is the precursor to fear”, says solo rock climber Alex Honnold, after finally climbing the El Capitan vertical rock formation without a rope after more than a decade of mental and physical preparation.

As an amateur rock climber, I often look to those that do so professionally with awe. Outdoor climbing without a rope is something I have never been able to do because I have always assumed that I wasn’t strong enough. Once I’m thousands of feet in the air with zero support and my strength wears out, that would probably (no, most definitely) be the end of me.

Design on the other hand, is relatively non-life threatening (as far as I know). Yet, time and time again, I’m struck by how much people stay in the safe zone.

Ideation (what many refer to as brainstorming) is my favorite stage in the design thinking process. It is the bridge between “what is” and “what could be”. Creative ideas bring about a new world that excites me. There are no rules or failures in this process, only crazy ideas and learning experiences. The possibilities are endless!

When I first started teaching students design, I was taken back by how many stayed in the safe zone. I have taught students from just about every age group by now, starting from junior and senior kindergarten all the way to industry professionals. One thing that consistently strikes me is how much I can learn from the kids and how safe and set industry professionals are in their ways of thinking.

A few months ago, while working with a bunch of kindergarten kids, I watched a little girl play with a Mr. Potato Head toy during playtime. She was about five years old, sitting quietly by herself, with all the components of Mr. Potato Head’s face on the floor around her. She had casually started assembling his face back together and I couldn’t help but laugh. She had put one of Mr. Potato Head’s ears where the mouth should have been. The lips were in place of the eye, and one eye was on the side. It was a freakishly looking creature. Yet, she was enjoying herself. She then moved onto Mrs. Potato Head, and proceeded to do similar things. Mrs. Potato Head’s arm was now in the middle of her face. It was a sobering learning moment for me. I thought about all the Mr. Potato Heads in our lives, and how many people laughed at our Mr. Potato Heads and how many authority figures in our lives tried to get us to put Mr. Potato Head together the “correct” way. What we don’t realize is that the “correct” way is just the “normal” way, and if we keep creating what’s normal, how would that allow room for creativity?

As I reflected on my own journey, I realized that I wasn’t always that creative either. I delved into science early, and overtime, equated that with a lack of creativity. In high school, I entered a special arts program, and being new to the program, I didn’t get enough time to learn the “conventions”. I started creating art that was considered strange by others. My portfolio was a physical, “infinite” box with layers of increasingly smaller pieces of artwork. My sketchbook turned into a 3D person with a pencil holder. I often drew using media that were incompatible with paper, in turn creating interesting results. My art teacher loved them and encouraged me to create more. The encouragements made me believe in myself, and overtime, as I believed in the narrative that I was a creative person, I stopped suppressing my crazy ideas and naturally became more creative. I also realized that STEM, which I loved, did not supress creativity in favor of logic as I once thought, but is very much in desperate need of creativity to find solutions to some of our biggest challenges.

“Learn the rules, then break them.” My high school art teacher would often say.

One thing I love about MIT is the way it encourages students to try out wild ideas. It dares to ask the question what if and work together to find the answers. It encourages collaboration, and values different skill sets across a multitude of disciplines. It shouts — you matter, and you have something to contribute— possibly one of the most important messages of all times. MIT is where I found my confidence and my voice after years of gloomy engineering after the said arts program that once made me feel alive. MIT is where I told people my crazy ideas and expected a bunch of smart people to tell me how all these were impossible because of this or that, but instead were met with — that’s an interesting idea, let’s try it out! The worst thing that could happen is it doesn’t work out and we will learn something from it.

I wish all schools were like this, and I wish every person that expressed creativity was encouraged instead of shot down by others. But since this clearly isn’t the case, how do we help people to release their creative potential? Believe in them. Tell them their contributions matter. Tell them the ridiculous ideas that people used to laugh at them for aren’t actually bad. People laugh because they conform to the norm. Once we get rid of their doubt, we can get rid of their fears. Once that fear is gone, creativity can flourish again. No, it’s not easy, but it’s possible. We do this through incremental successes and allowing people to get used to failures.

At the end of the day, believing in people really does make a difference, so let’s do that together.

How to Help People Release Their Creative Potential was originally published in 8px Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I hear you. But I also want you to take a step back and look at the bigger picture. Sure, injustice and inequality are everywhere, I don’t deny that. But you are ultimately in charge of your life.

Here’s the thing. You can’t solve a problem you are willing to have. If you want something badly enough, you will eventually find a way. If not, you will find an excuse. Why do we hear such inspirational stories of people with disabilities achieving more than an average person could ever achieve in their lifetime? Because they want it badly enough that they are willing to overcome many obstacles. Otherwise, it just becomes a circumstance in their life.

I agree that we need to encourage girls to pursue STEM, I agree that we need to give people of color more opportunities. But ultimately, what we need to give people is simply one thing — encouragement. Encourage people to go far, encourage people to value their interests and passions above people’s opinions, tell people you believe in them, encourage people to take a chance and not worry about falling down, but getting up over and over until falling down no longer hurts (as much).

Let’s do less criticizing and more encouraging of each other. The internet doesn’t have to be filled with hateful comments, the world doesn’t have to be filled with focusing on what’s not fair.

Take it from a woman of color in STEM, the world isn’t as terrible as you think.

This post isn’t going to get on anyone's good side. But it’s my reality.

I grew up in an Atheist household. My mother started teaching me math and literature skills when I was less than two years old. By the time I was three, I was reading books on my own. By the time I was five, I became obsessed with the world of science through children’s encyclopedias. We didn’t have a lot of money growing up. My family was struggling to make ends meet, and I didn’t have any luxury of doing science experiments, so I drowned myself in books. It wasn’t long before I became a hardcore Darwinist.

I first became exposed to religion at the age of nine. I have a very small, close-knitted family and my aunt had just become a new Christian and started taking the entire family to church. The rest of the family thought she was crazy but somehow went along (mostly to keep the peace as she was very persistent). I hated church. I was more than convinced that people were brain-washed or hypnotized and didn’t want anything to do with it. After all, where are the evidences for an invisible man in the sky that loves and takes care of everyone? There was one Sunday morning when I refused to get up and my aunt eventually gave up and left me in bed and went to church with the whole family without me. After that, every Sunday I would pretend I was asleep and hope that they would leave without me.

Fast-forward to high school. Science at this point had long become a life and career objective. There was just one slight problem. My grade 9 science teacher had referred to the elements in the periodic table as theories. He then went on to refer to all of what science has discovered to be theories. That tiny, but significant label started to bother me. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t get it out of my head. In my young brain at the time, I had grown up hungrily learning everything I can in science and assumed everything to be facts. The word theory pulled out the rug from under my feet.

Theories. That means uncertainties. It meant that everything I had thought to be true could potentially turn out to be false at some point in time. Initially, that thought devastated me. I felt betrayed by science. It was like finding out your best friend had been lying to you all these years. Eventually, I came to terms with it. With that, came two changes. Skepticism and open-mindedness. I started to question everything I learned. What are the evidences? Why do you claim xyz? I also started to look for alternatives. Is this the only explanation? Are there other explanations that are equally valid? I no longer took things at face-value and started to critically look at the evidences behind the claims.

This was also an age where I started to seriously think about the meaning of life and my purpose on earth. With that, I turned to the alternatives. As implausible as it sounded, I became more open-minded and started to look at philosophy and religion. Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, and world religion. Now, I liked the Christians, I thought they were really nice people, but crazy nevertheless. My experiences over the years allowed me to befriend a good number of them, and I liked their lifestyles, I just had a hard time believing what they believed in. In my younger years, when my aunt used to drag the whole family to church (she stopped when my immediate family moved from the U.S. to Canada when I was 12), I had briefly prayed the sinners prayer at a Christian event of some sort at the age of 11 as “fire-proof insurance” just in case this thing is real, which I was highly skeptical of.

In any case, I started to look at realms outside of science to explain life. I really wanted to know two things: why am I alive and what am I supposed to be doing with my life? With that, came the question of “is there a creator”? This was when I started to seriously research into whether God exists. I started out with science, are there specific evidences for or against God? I was surprised to find that science does not conflict with the idea of a supernatural being. I then started researching into the world’s major religions. I figured that if an Almighty being exists and is powerful enough to create the universe, this being would probably be powerful enough to make themselves known to a good portion of people. Flawed logic? Maybe, but I stuck to researching major religions for that reason. I quickly eliminated Buddhism and Hinduism when I saw too many points that didn’t seem to agree with logic that no one seems be able to answer. I then read through a good portion of the Qur’an (which was quite difficult to read, actually). However, after finding too many seemingly contradictions, I decided to do more research and ask people about it. Wrong choice. I ended up with a lot of angry threats from people for questioning the Qur’an (apparently you are never supposed to question the Qur’an), and eventually, there were too many unresolved contradictions that no one could/would explain that I crossed it off my list as well. Christianity was tough to eliminate. After reading through the Bible in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek by comparing the original manuscripts, and researching into the history in details, I couldn’t find many big issues with it. There were definitely smaller issues, but issues that were slowly and painstakingly addressed one-by-one by people as well as my own research. I also found a number of errors in the Bible, errors that Bible scholars were very open and willing to admit, and errors that ironically assured me methods for tracing back to the original text were valid, unlike the other ancient texts I read (Qur’an for one).

However, even if the history did seemingly check out, I wasn’t fully convinced. Finally, after years of research, I fell on my knees and prayed. “God, if You exist, reveal Yourself to me. If it turns out that you are real, I will follow You for the rest of my life, no matter what the cost”.

After three consecutive nights of praying this prayer, seven things that I could not explain through science happened to me. I didn’t know what to call them, but I suppose the closest word would be “miracles”. On top of all this, at this point in time, I started to look into evidences in science for an intelligent creator, and the months of new evidences at the time convinced me enough that I became a Christian.

At that time, my parents, being Atheists and as Asian as they can be, didn’t welcome the new changes too readily. They weren’t particularly against Christianity (they thought it teaches you how to be a “good” person), but didn’t want this new found faith to hinder my school work. I wasn’t allowed to go to church until I graduated from my undergraduate studies. My family caught me with a Bible at one point and threw it across the room and then yelled at me. So I hid my Bible after that so that they could never catch me reading it or praying. Fellowships on Friday nights always turned into a major fight. But eventually, I was allowed to go to church four years later.

Fast forward a few years, and at this point, after graduating from my undergrad and working for a few years as a professional engineer, I decided to return to the world of academia. I somehow found myself at MIT and Harvard, a region of the U.S. that is highly secularized. As I started to explore neuroscience and bioengineering, I started to discover things that seemed to fit better with evolution — a “theory” that I had long thought was no longer valid after I became a Christian and a proponent for intelligent design. However, I couldn’t ignore it or sweep it under the rug. I didn’t become a Christian because it was an emotional crutch. I became a Christian because I thought the evidences leaned in that direction and I had to go where the evidences were going. However, after learning that the flagellum can be created with fewer proteins, and that blood clotting can certainly take fewer steps, Behe’s theory of irreducible complexity — one of the “pillars” of my faith — broke down for me. There were also new evidences for transitional fossils that weren’t present earlier when I did my research years ago. I started to seriously reconsider the validity of my earlier research into Christianity. If I was wrong about evolution, what if everything else was all confirmation bias? Is there any validity to my faith? Why do Christians believe what they believe? I spoke to and asked many, many people over the last few months. I became agnostic once again, with many uncertainties.

Over the last few months, I am extremely grateful for the dozens of Christians and Atheists I have spoken to about this here at MIT, along with dozens of science professionals in academia across the U.S., including the Director of NIH, Francis Collins.

I have come to a few conclusions:

1. Given my other “pillars” — historical evidences for Christianity which I personally poured years of research into, cosmological evidences for a creator (weaker, but still evidences), and the evidences in neuroscience (weak, but still evidences), plus my own experiences that I could not explain through science, there is still enough to convince me that God exists and that Christianity has enough validity for me to believe.
2. I am very uncomfortable with uncertainty. To me, believing in God “just in case God exists” isn’t good enough. After all, it turns my faith into a cost-benefit analysis, and I end up doing things that benefit me and run at the first sight of anything that will cost me. Life is also too short to waste on things that aren’t true.
3. A few people told me that faith is about your relationship with God, not evidences. That just isn’t good enough for me. After all, your relationship with God could all be confirmation bias, and I can’t live with that.
4. Believing in evolution has put my faith in chaos. There were many, many unresolved questions a few months ago such as: why did God call everything He made good if cancer and mutations existed since the beginning? If He made “failed prototypes” in evolution in order to create the final versions, how can He be omnipotent? Deaths and extinctions surely existed from the beginning (or else bugs would have overpopulated the planet very quickly), how is that good? If Adam and Eve were “the first humans”, did their parents (who looked more human than ape) not have souls and were not made in the image of God? What made that distinct cutoff? More importantly, why did the Bible present the first 11 chapters of Genesis that way if that wasn’t how the events unfolded? Can you trust the rest of the Bible in light of all of this? I’m thankful for the Christians that believed in evolution (which is pretty much every Christian here at MIT) who sat down and patiently wrestled with me over these questions, not all of which are fully answered to my satisfaction, but many were.

I’m now a Christian again. But if you have a good argument, I’m willing to listen, and if it sounds reasonable, I’m willing to investigate/research more, and change my mind if there are enough evidences that lean towards it. (However, what I don’t appreciate is unwarranted name-calling and insults because of my beliefs).

I know that this isn’t a satisfying post to either side. But I’m ok with that. This is my faith journey, and there’s probably more to come in the future. I don’t have all the answers, but I am more than willing to learn, to grow, and to change if necessary.

Thank you for reading.

A case of mistaken identity occurred a few years ago. A man was angrily shouting at me, complaining about the quality of his service and making unreasonable demands. After patiently listening for about 20 minutes, I finally told him that our customer service department would be able to help him with his (unreasonable) demands. At this point, he paused abruptly and suddenly realized who he was talking to. He then started apologizing profusely and his attitude change 180°. He became unusually polite and courteous. To this day, this experience still has a profound impact on me.

Jobs in society typically can be divided into two categories: maintenance and innovation. Maintenance-related jobs include administrative work, customer service, janitorial duties, plumbing, electrical work, and factory work. Blue collared jobs, mostly. Innovation-related jobs nowadays include data science, engineering, architecture, artificial intelligence/machine learning, nuclear physics, CRISPR gene editing, and entrepreneurship.

Due to a variety of factors, including education, the world has learned to value innovation and de-value maintenance, unless that maintenance becomes personal (occupations that lawyers and doctors hold, for example). We look down on blue collared workers and highly respect scientists and company CEOs.

The truth is, we need a balance of both. Maintenance is what keeps the world from falling apart, while innovation pushes boundaries at a (significant) cost. It is often the maintenance crew that cleans up our messes so we can keep going, and yet we are the ones that take all the credit.

The world can often survive without innovation, but it cannot survive without maintenance. But, when was the last time we really got to know the janitor that cleans up after our messes? Do we know their names? Do we know anything about their family? What their hopes and dreams are? Their stories? If they leave the job tomorrow and a new janitor comes in, would we even notice? Would we care? What makes some people more significant than others in our society? It’s not their kindness, it’s not their smile, it’s their status. We are so focused on production and security and the status quo that we forget to be human. Inclusion only goes so far.

The experience I had above was an eye-opener. Due to a variety of factors, I have never found myself in a job under a maintenance category before. I have always taken the innovation route. As a result, besides that experience, I can’t recall a time when I have been treated badly, talked to harshly, or looked down on by customers. I’m used to the respect that comes with my titles and achievements. That experience gave me a glimpse into how unfairly people in the maintenance category are treated. It made me angry, and over the years, I’ve tried to subtly hint at people who treat me well that my status should not be the reason for them to treat me better. This went nowhere. What’s needed is either a fundamental transformation of cultural values, or bringing people up in status. This is where automation comes in.

When artificial intelligence (AI) came into my world a number of years ago, I reacted to it quite differently than others. For one thing, I faced it with skepticism. As advanced as machine learning (ML) has gotten, I doubt its ability to replicate the amygdala and make judgmental calls that are non-data and rule based. I also doubt its ability to replicate learning-by-association methods that the brain utilizes. AI, on many fronts, uses vastly different models than the human brain. Brain cells’ abilities to function on their own and connect to other brain cells without a central system is something technology still cannot replicate. The possibility of AI to ever achieve human consciousness and emotional intelligence is something I am highly skeptical of. Having said that, one thing that I don’t doubt is AI’s ability to automate manual and tedious tasks, even tasks that require high customization are now within the reach of ML. When our research group writes Python codes to automate the image recognition of brain cells in mice to detect certain patterns, we are often pleased by the months of work machine learning can cut down, and yet weary of the effects of the margins of error that comes with it. What many experts are starting to see is a shift in the job market where AI is replacing a multitude of these manual and tedious jobs across many parts of the world. This is obviously not happening as quickly as media is hyping it up to be, but it’s heading in that direction (personally, I think the media is making AI sound far more advanced than it actually is, but that’s the case for pretty much every technology out there).

What this means is that the first people to be out of a job are people in the maintenance category. Personally, I think that’s a good thing. This pushes people to get more education and end up in the innovation category, where more jobs are likely going to be created to fill the voids that are created by the shift. In the innovation category, these people will likely find more job satisfaction, meaning and purpose, and respect from others. Of course, this is trivializing the picture, and many factors need to be taken into consideration here, including financial situations, family support, etc. Government and society need to take part in supporting people to gain more education and move up in status in society.

I support automation and AI job replacement, not because I’m an evil engineer, but because it forces people that are at the bottom of the society to move upwards for survival reasons. It also gives their lives more meaning. After all, if your work can be replaced by a robot, then it might as well be replaced by a robot, so that you can spend your life happier and doing more meaningful things.

Why Artificial Intelligence is About Promoting Social Status was originally published in MIT Bootcamp Alumni — Community Press on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This is a post of follow up thoughts to my previous post on “When You Don’t Have One True Calling — Being a Polymath in a Highly Specialized Society”.

“I am an ENFJ” (or one of the other 15 variations of the four-lettered Myers-Briggs classification), people would often tell me before going on to explain what to expect of their behaviors. Sometimes they would go on to guess mine, which makes me cringe a bit. Prior to the popularity of Myers-Briggs personality tests, many other internet quizzes of sorts were in abundance from identifying the temperaments of your personality to the type of leadership style you have, to something as basic as identifying whether you are an introvert or an extrovert, or even astrology signs. Unlike others, I would often cringe at these types of classifications. In my teenage years, I took these types of tests in abundance, mainly to understand myself better. What I soon realized was that these tests did little to help with that, but rather made me more confused than ever. The popular Myers-Briggs personality test was no exception. After taking the test more than a dozen times, I have gotten every single combination of results at least once. I used to jokingly tell people that I have multiple personalities and I’m not sure when any of the personalities will take over. The truth is, conforming to a label feels like we are boxing ourselves in, restricting ourselves from any kind of change beyond certain boundaries. It tells me that I must be a certain way and people expect certain things out of me once they put a label on me. “I thought you were an INFJ, I didn’t expect you to do that”. I would occasionally hear some variation of that from one person to another. The truth is, people are complex, and we are very much situation-based. A variety of factors such as our mood, current energy level, recent events, etc. all affect how we act on a daily basis. To bucketize someone’s behavior and expect the same outcome day after day for an extended period of time, regardless of what changes took place in the person’s life seems irrational, but we all do it in order to make sense of our world. Overtime, I would argue that being aware of these buckets also restricts our actions. In some sense, it’s similar to accepting your weaknesses (I’m not a writer, why am I writing?) instead of changing them. In this case, accepting that you are a certain way instead of seeking out other ways that may be suitable for your life at a particular time. The truth is, sometimes I’m introverted (socializing drains me), other times I’m extroverted (interacting with people energizes me more), sometimes I’m extremely organized, other times I’m very messy. Sometimes I’m highly logical, other times I’m very emotional. Sometimes I’m highly scientific, other times I’m more creative and artistic. Sometimes I’m highly focused, other times I’m extremely distracted. I’m sure all of you are as well to a certain extent. To bucketize me is to eliminate half of myself, and I feel like most people have limited half of their potentials this way.

Categorizations are unavoidable. Oftentimes it is also how our worlds work. We organize information into neat piles in order to understand them. However, when it comes to people, these categorizations also make me highly uncomfortable. Sometimes I wonder why so many people conform to groups and settings instead of freely allowing themselves to be.

“In truth, we are all fast and slow, strong and weak, motivated and lazy in a thousand tiny ways throughout our days that the generalizations simply don’t capture.”
- Douglas Stone

I stare at the clock on my desk. 8:05PM. A mixture of hot and cold feelings pours over me. 8 gives me joy. A bubbly, warm feeling, a maternal care, almost, that is infused with 5, an uptight, military, hostile feeling. I’m currently working on my neuroscience research, and yet I have trouble concentrating on the paper at hand. The clock continues to tick. 8:06PM rolls around, and I’m a lot more at ease. 6 once again is feminine. It’s the image of a slightly chubby mid-aged lady, an aunt of some sort, that gives you cookies and listens to your problems about boys. The clock continues to tick. I have to meet some friends at 9, and I tried to concentrate on finishing up my research paper before meeting up with them.

At 8:45 PM, a number that has red and white stripes that remind me of a jet in the air, I stood up and left my room. As I got in the elevator of my dorm to go downstairs to meet my friends, I can hear the faint beeping sound as the elevator passes by each floor. Seven, six, five, four, three. The elevator doors open, and in comes a guy with a baseball hat and a skateboard. Awfully late for skateboarding, I thought to myself. The elevator doors close and the descend continues. Each floor has its own personality, each floor has its own gender and stories.

I’ve felt numbers my whole life. It’s something that I lived with and thought was perfectly normal until the topic of synesthesia came up in a discussion about neuroscience a few years ago. Seeing how I am ambidextrous, someone asked if I was synesthetic as well. He was doing research on correlations between mix-handed individuals and synesthesia. I didn’t know what it was and after much digging around, I realized that I indeed have synesthesia, multiple forms of it, in fact.

In my younger years, the world was a fascinating place to me. The smell, the sound, the sight, everything in life was so new and exciting. Unbeknownst to my parents, what they attributed to an active imagination turned out to be a physical anomaly. Parts of my brain overlapped in early childhood and the trigger of one would cause another. This is synesthesia. Unlike my peers, I loved math, though I didn’t dare to ever say that out loud in school for the fear of being bullied. Numbers represented a world where the good and evil interacted freely, and the outcomes are often different from those in the real world. Each number was different, each number had its own personality, gender, and story. Even numbers were feminine, and odd numbers were masculine. During my “boys have cooties” stage of childhood, I vehemently hated odd numbers. Those brain patterns reached well into adulthood, when I no longer believe that “boys have cooties” but still resent most odd numbers for some odd reason. What was more fascinating was that when numbers interacted, you can turn good into evil, and evil into good. When 4 and 5 interacted, they formed either 9 or 20 in my small, child-like mind at the time. 4 was my absolute favorite number in the world. It was the definition of perfection. Nothing in the world was quite as beautiful. 5 on the other hand, was this uptight, military figure. He is short and skinny and short-tempered. Intimidating and well-hated by everyone. Yet, when 4 and 5 meet, 4 can either turn 5 into the image of a slightly tamed woman, 20, who is still arrogant and yet classy and beautiful, or 5 can turn 4 into 9, another short-tempered man that looks kind of like Mario. Researchers have very little to say about ordinal-linguistic personification synesthesia, the technical term to describe this odd behavior. It is largely understudied. Letters have personalities for me too, Chinese characters, especially. Perhaps some of my speed reading tendencies have to do with reading based on feelings of letters/characters rather than actual meaning. It’s messy and strange, but somehow helps me to learn, perhaps even a little more effectively.

Numbers also appear on a 3D map around me. Researchers call this number-form synesthesia. When I commit a number or a series of numbers to memory, they are stored on the 3D map. There are hills and valleys, twists and turns on this map. It’s like riding down a windy road on a motorcycle on a hot summer day. The trees and shrubs along the way become numbers, numbers that in turn become meaningful. I almost never forget a birthday, or what my agenda looks like for next Wednesday (what researchers call sequence-space synesthesia (SSS), though I would group it together with number-form synesthesia), because everything is so visual and locational. When I perform mental calculations, these 3D maps come alive. The bends and folds allow numbers to jump and transform when you apply different operations to them. Their personalities in turn change. So do genders.

Synesthesia isn’t a bad thing. I was able to fast track my math to college level by the end of elementary school. I once tried to memorize digits of pi in middle school out of boredom and got to 200 digits within 10 minutes before I grew bored of that. I can still easily recite these 200 digits to this day.

Over the years, my synesthesia has definitely changed. Number maps evolved. When I’m learning a new language, numbers greater than 100 turn towards the left, where there are more shadows and uncertainty. When I’m doing familiar calculations, numbers greater than 100 turn towards the right, and a familiar and more relaxing scenery unfolds. When I’m looking at housing prices and mortgages, the numbers hang off a cliff steeply at a 90-degree angle. Numbers greater than $200,000 steadily make an ascend into the abyss of despair. Numbers have feelings. The day I turned 25, I felt a huge bump on the road in my 3D map. That lump remained there, tripping me every time I come across the number 25. By the time I approached 30, I saw a sharp turn towards the right, and with it, came feelings of despair. Some people call it a quarter-life crisis. That quarter-life crisis is a lot more visual and acute to me given my synesthesia.

Personalities for numbers also changed. Admittingly, this is the one type of synesthesia I have that has slowly faded over time. I recall as a toddler, I had strong feelings of love towards the number 4. I would loudly declare it every time someone asked what my favorite number was. Imagine the look of utter shock and confusion on Asian adults’ faces as they hear the number. My ethnic culture is seemingly filled with superstition. 4 homophonically sounded like the word for death in Chinese, and many considered it to be bad luck. By the time I was seven, an Asian adult finally challenged me in my reasoning for loving the number 4. By then, my ordinal-linguistic personification synesthesia has started to fade, and I could no longer conjure up feelings as strong as they once were towards the number, let alone coming up with a reason why I liked the number so much. Is it the shape? No, 4 looked angular and ugly. Is it because a square had 4 sides? No. I had no particular affinities for squares. At that moment, I wondered to myself why I liked the number 4 so much all this time. Not being able to provide a satisfactory answer, I watched helplessly as said adult smugly declared that I had no good reason to like a bad luck number that signified death, and hence ended my favorite number reign with the number 4.

In high school, my friends and I developed a code system for guys we liked so that we can talk about them without people finding out. I decided to go with the numbering system because it was easy for me. Since odd numbers are male, I decided to label my crushes based on odd numbers. As a result, these numbers took on new identities, so much so that I could hardly remember the old identities they once had for certain numbers as my ordinal-linguistic personification synesthesia slowly faded away. Oddly enough, the beginning of puberty also marked the first time I didn’t hate odd numbers as much. Relationships also marked the first time I could no longer stand to look at certain numbers. To this day, the number 23 conjures up feelings of anger and hurt, even though the person associated with the number no longer causes me said feelings.

Today, I’m old enough that synesthesia has been partially replaced by other mechanisms in my brain. When I see my credit card number, I see mathematical relationships between numbers within the sequence. When I remember phone numbers, I see a shape/pattern outlined by the path one would take on a phone when dialing the number. These new mechanisms are weaker, and signs of aging have made me more accident prone in memorizing inaccurate information at times. But my synesthesia hasn’t completely gone away. Synesthesia, this automatic process that I have no control over, still pops up everywhere about 50–75% of the time when I see and use numbers. I don’t know if it will ever completely go away. But I do know that I will miss it if it does.

P.S. I’ve been trying to “exploit” my synesthesia to enhance my language learning abilities. Read more about it here in my post How To Learn Any Language in a Few Months — Language Learning Tips I Gathered Over the Last Few Years from Studying Almost a Dozen Languages.

What it’s Like to “Feel” Numbers — Inside the Brain of a Synesthete was originally published in Dialogue & Discourse on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Jill is a 37-year-old mother of two. Her husband was often drunk and abusive, and she finally mustered up enough courage to escape once day while he was knocked out cold, bringing her two kids with her. After months of struggling to make ends meet, trying to put food on the table and constantly fearing being evicted for her late rents, she ended up on a wrong turn out of desperation and found herself convicted. Life behind bars was difficult, but once she was out, life on the outside became even more difficult. Her children were being cared for by her aging mother, who no longer has the energy or the resources to do so. She lost her part-time job due to her incarceration and had a tough time getting another job due to her record. Being a woman of color did not help her chances either.

David is a 58-year-old living on the street. Years ago, when he found out his wife had an affair, he was devastated. When the divorce finally came through, his wife took the house and left him with nothing. He was depressed and turned to alcohol. One thoughtless decision led him to lose his job. He ended up on the streets. After a period of time, he developed a chronical pain in his chest, followed by frequent coughing of blood. One day, while leaning against a wall, he felt a lump in his back. In desperation, he ruined his otherwise clean criminal record by robbing $1 from the bank, then sat quietly while waiting for the police to show up and arrest him. At least there’s food, shelter, and treatment for his health problems in jail, he thought to himself.

Sarah is 22 years old. Her mother has a debilitating illness and could work. Her father died when she was 12, leaving behind 4 younger siblings for her to take care of, which forced her to grow up too quickly. Sarah loves to read and swim and dreams of becoming a marine biologist one day and study the effects of climate change on ocean life. However, she had to drop out of high school to take care of her younger siblings. She works 3 jobs just to make ends meet for the family of 6.

Adrian was just 14 when he got caught dealing drugs with some older kids. Being in and out of foster homes all his life, he thought he finally found a place where he belonged. Now 45, he finally got out of prison after multiple convictions and sentences. But the outside world is a lot tougher than he remembered. He had no one and nothing. With nowhere to go and no money to live on, after only two weeks, he decided to commit another crime and landed himself back in prison, the only place he knew how to function, the place he called … home.

Each of these individuals’ lives could have been drastically changed should a Universal Basic Income (UBI) program be in place. It is a basic human right to have food, shelter, and other necessities needed to survive. UBI is the monetary amount given to ensure such rights to each individual within a certain vicinity (usually a city or town) regardless of income, gender, and race, among other factors. This is different from a welfare program in that a wealthy person would receive the same amount as a poor person, which overcomes the problem many welfare programs experience where individuals on welfare do not want to lose their welfare, and hence get stuck in a perpetual cycle instead of advancing their education and career. By ensuring that every citizen receives the same UBI amount regardless of their income tier, the person no longer has to worry about losing their welfare money once they reach the next threshold in their income, which encourages them to advance forward.

Possibly the biggest drawback to UBI is the cost of running such a program. Simply put, though UBI seems to be an ideal way for many to get a fresh start in life, in most countries/cities, the government just doesn’t have enough money to fund every single adult using UBI without severely impairing the entire system in terms of health care, law enforcement, education, transportation, and many other vital functions. The cost of implementing UBI in the U.S. alone is estimated to be $3.9 trillion. However, a few cities within North America as well as around the world have tried out short trials of UBI with positive results. It was observed that crime rates dropped, hospital visits dropped, work-related injuries dropped, and though the working population percentage dropped slightly, the majority of them were new mothers and teenagers, and as a result, teenager graduation rates increased.

It’s obvious to many that the benefits of UBI far outweighs the cons. So, the big question is, considering how much UBI costs, how can we actually make this work? Many have already proposed shifting welfare budget over to UBI, and savings on health care and crime related costs due to the UBI program will largely help. But even with all these taken into consideration, we are still short.

Here’s my proposal: what if the barrier for UBI was just slightly higher, so that it’s low enough for everyone to still obtain the income, and yet high enough that some (i.e.: those that are wealthier) would think it’s not worth the trouble? And what if this task can in turn also help the government complete certain tasks that it would normally spend a large portion of its budgets on? This could be a task of some sort, a survey, perhaps, or a system like CAPTCHA (where ordinary people are helping to convert old books into digital format, word by word). Can ordinary citizens help to verify taxes fragment by fragment so as to not invade privacy? Pick up recycling? Clean up the ocean? Operate suicide help lines? Pick a task out of a list that is suitable for them? Now, I understand that the whole point is to receive an income without doing work to deserve it, but what if the task is small enough to not be considered a job, but big enough to create enough barriers so that not everyone ends up participating, and yet everyone could if they chose to, regardless of physical/mental ability (or be able to be exempted with a form of some sort if necessary). This would help cut financial burdens by saving money in: 1. Not giving UBI to everyone but only those that complete certain tasks, 2. Original government spendings in hiring people to complete these tasks, 3. Government spendings in healthcare, prison, and other departments as people become healthier as a society. Plus, such tasks empower people and turns the UBI into a hand up instead of a handout, which produces drastically different effects on the individual.

Admittingly, I haven’t worked out the details. I don’t have the economic or political background to assess the feasibility of this. But if this works, the implications could be huge for many individuals.

Some points to consider:
1. Any system that includes additional checkpoints/barriers requires additional implementations/resources/time/cost. These will need to be taken into consideration when selecting one or more tasks that act as a barrier to filter out the wealthy (within their own will)

2. Some sort of filter is still inevitable, with consequences.
a. Filtering by age: If there is no filter in place and children are allowed to participate, this will encourage a spike in population increase, as observed in similar concepts to UBI such as China’s food coupon program that ran from 1964 to 1996, or the Canada Child Benefit (CCB). However, should a filter be set in place (say anyone over the age of 18 may receive UBI), then a family with two adults plus two children may receive the same amount as a family with two adults plus six children, leaving the former with more and the latter with barely enough. There’s also the consideration of orphans and emancipated individuals. How do we reach these individuals were we to filter by age?
b. Filtering by immigration status of individual: If no filter is in place, then it encourages an influx of movement into the country/region. However, if there is a filter (citizenship requirement — which is usually the case), it doesn’t solve issues for many that have other types of status (permanent residents, aliens, undocumented individuals, etc.), which in turn only addresses the problem of part of the population and potentially creates further problems/tensions within the population.
c. Filtering by criminal background: as my examples above pointed out, incarcerated individuals often have a hard time re- integrating with society upon release and have a 2/3 chance of being rearrested within three years of release. According to 2015 statistics, an inmate costs taxpayers an average of $33,274 per year, which adds up to a total of $1 trillion per year in the U.S. alone. Trial runs of UBI have shown to reduce the initial incarceration rate as well as the rearrest rate. Many believe that UBI should not be distributed to those behind bars but should resume once they are released, a view that I do not stand to object.
d. Filter by mental state: should mentally unhealthy individuals be given UBI? Or should this amount be given to a caretaker who will manage the money for the individual? If these individuals are confined to an institution, should they still receive UBI if their needs are already being looked after?

3. What do you do with individuals that pass away before they use their income? Do you validate that the participant is still alive every single month? This is where the proposal I mentioned above may come in handy, where the completion of a task could potentially help to ensure that the person is still alive.

4. Taxing the wealthy in order to fund the UBI program discourages people from working hard and rising to the top once the tax reaches a certain threshold. After all, why bother when after tax the person will be making the same amount as everyone else anyway?

5. UBI encourages low-wage individuals to advance in their career. However, a shortage of workers that could do such jobs could also create problems such as an influx of migrant workers and the rush of automation and machines to fulfill the shortage. Unfortunately, we don’t have enough data to analyze all the implications of such drastic changes on the economy and the society.

6. We may not be able to fund more densely populated wealthy countries with UBI, but is it possible to fund poorer countries where the cost of living is much lower per person? Perhaps some form of trade could possibly help (I'm aware of my over-optimistic hope in this).

There are still many factors about UBI that are unknown. However, should the burdens of UBI be lightened with the above proposal, perhaps UBI is more feasible than we think, and in turn, its implications more clearly understood than we previously predicted.

Note: the names in the stories above have been changed to protect identities of individuals.

Back story: I started to seriously pursue product design/industrial design/mechanical engineering in 2016 when I finally had access to machine shop tools. I have always loved working with my hands. When I was younger, I used to take everything I could get my hands on apart. As I got older, I started to tinker with more things other than electronics, including fixing cars, building houses with Habitat for Humanity, and building furniture using very, very manual hand tools (wood, screws, screwdrivers, and a manual saw). The first time I laid my hands on power tools and machineries such as mills and lathes in a machine shop in 2016, I thought I was in heaven. It wasn’t long before I got up to speed on most of the tools in the machine shop and decided to practice them on actual projects.

Over the course of the last two years, I must have done over 60 different projects on the side, many of which failed miserably, but I had a lot of fun in the process and learned a ton through my mistakes.

Earlier this year, after building three instruments and a skateboard (photo below), one of my instructors, who became aware of my mildly increasing obsession with making randomly things with machine tools asked casually “your projects seem to be getting bigger and bigger. What are you going to build next? A boat?”

I didn’t have a good answer for him at the time, partially because I had another dozen half-finished projects already in the pipeline that I was excited to try out. But it did get me thinking about what bigger, crazier projects I wanted to work on. Seeing how I have always been fascinated with cars, motorcycles, and planes, and was hoping to complete my collection of the three types of licenses within the next year or two, the thought of building a plane came to mind, followed immediately by the thought of “I must have lost my mind”, then a sense of excitement, then a frenzy of Googling. The human race is wonderful and fascinating. Whatever crazy idea you have, there are usually a few dozen others out there that make your crazy idea look tame. This was no exception, I soon found YouTube videos of others making homemade planes, and not dying from flying them. I then returned back to my instructor, the one that once responded “of course, why would you do anything normal?” when I told him what I was doing as side projects over winter break (creating holograms from lasers, cloning 3D objects using resin, among other things), and asked for advice on how to build a plane. He quickly referred me to the Experimental Aircraft Association, where I found people all across the country that have built planes before. Turns out, I haven’t lost my mind after all. My instructor did warn me that a project like this requires a farm and about 10 years of time, and that although my dorm room is big enough to fit my guitars and skateboard projects, it certainly won’t be big enough to fit a plane. But I was too excited to see the illogical part of all this, especially after finding out that this project is actually feasible!

Now, for someone with zero experience in building a plane, I recruited the help of my friend Dave from the MIT Media Lab, who is currently training for his pilot license, and the two of us set out on a journey to find out as much as we can about how to build a plane. We decided that it would probably make sense to learn to fix a plane first to understand the innerworkings of a plane before building one from scratch (or a kit). By chance, right around when we started searching for a plane to fix, an alum was trying to donate a plane to MIT’s flying club, and the plane needs a lot of fixing up as it hasn’t been used in almost a decade and wasn’t in flyable condition. We eagerly jumped onboard, along with a few other students from the flying club and a few pilots/staff from the airport.

So here are some things I learned from fixing the plane.

1. It’s ok to have crazy dreams — If I had shot down my own idea before I got a chance to even explore it, I would never have had such amazing opportunities to work on this project.
2. But back your crazy dreams with baby steps — I started with woodworking over the years via building houses, furniture, an ukulele, then guitar, then bass, and a skateboard, then more recently metal work via machining a flashlight, a remote controlled race car, and then fixing a plane before working on building an actual plane. I also tinkered with/fixed cars growing up. Each project gave me more confidence and skillsets that proved to be valuable to this project.
3. But also be daring enough to just jump in — I knew nothing about planes coming in. It was intimidating to work with retired pilots that have flown, built, and fixed planes for decades. But one thing I learned since I got to MIT is that it’s better to ask questions and be willing to learn than to remain an idiot and pretend that you are smart, only for people to find out the hard way that you are not. I came in bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, into a whole new world that was filled with excitement and possibilities. I also gained a whole new level of respect for pilots. For example, did you know that it’s harder to fly on a rainy day (you can’t see ahead without instruments) than at night (where you can see further ahead than during the day sometimes) or when it snows (where you can see below pretty well)? Or that you can usually land a plane safely after the engine explodes or dies in midair? Or that the paint job of the plane actually affects the way it flies?
4. Find people crazy enough to support your dreams — One thing I love about MIT is the culture. Moving here two years ago was the first time when my crazy ideas were not only not shot down but encouraged. Having support for my crazy ideas has been tremendously helpful in finding the resources needed to turn these ideas into possible realities.
5. Find people that will do it with you — I honestly don’t know what I would have done if I didn’t have my teams that allowed my startups to come to life, and many other crazy ideas I had, including my thesis, took multiple professors (five so far, to be precise), multiple labs, across two universities (MIT and Harvard) to transform what seemed like science fiction into science. This plane project is no exception. I also learned that though there is no I in team, I was also an important part of the team. For example, I learned that my hands are the only ones small enough to fit into the gap between the wings and the body of the plane to attach and tighten the wings to the plane, and torque it using the precise range of force to ensure the wings don’t fall off the plane in midair (a seemingly important step).
6. Things are often only as hard as your imagination makes it out to be — before fixing this aircraft, I was imagining that I’d need a graduate degree in aeronautical engineering in order to have enough background to work on a project like this. But I was more of the type of gal to play basketball than to read a book about basketball. Jumping into the deep-end in hands-on knowledge was the most preferable way for me to learn. I was surprised to quickly realize how similar a small aircraft was to that of a car in components and the basic concepts for how it works. Had I dismissed the idea out of fear of how hard it would have been, I would have missed out on a great opportunity. Perhaps it’s my engineering mindset, perhaps it’s my naive nature, but I love problems, and I tend to run towards the problem rather than away from it. In fact, I wished the aircraft was a little more broken and worn down so that I could learn even more about how it works. A few times during the repair process, I was tempted to take a sledge hammer and destroy parts of it just so that I could learn how to repair it some more.
7. Stay stubborn and strong willed — I’m not known for taking no for an answer. As a kid, if I didn’t get my way, I would scream at the top of my lungs for hours on end until I either got my way or passed out from exhaustion. Now, that technique obviously doesn’t work anymore, but what that translated into is this relentless energy towards problem solving. This unwillingness to give up when things get hard. Some people call this grit. I call it stubbornness. But whatever you call it, once I have a dream, I am stubborn enough that I have to see the dream through. This has been tremendously helpful in accomplishing my goals over the years, and this is no exception. Which leads to my next point.
8. People will drop out. Keep going anyway. Dreams only die when you give up on them, not when people give up on you — People are busy, many have ten million opportunities that look attractive and they shop around. But don’t let that discourage you. There’s a world of difference between someone who is doing something because it is their dream and passion vs. something that they see as optional/nice to have. If it is your dream/passion, you will find a way, if not, you will find an excuse. It would be nice to find people who share the same dreams as you, but if not, keep going anyway.
9. I don’t ever regret the risks I have taken, I only regret the ones that I didn’t take— If you asked me what my most proud projects to date are, I would point you to the guitars, skateboard, and plane project above. Each represented a risk I took and the many hurdles I came along the way to significantly better myself. In fact, even the failed projects taught me a significant amount, sometimes even more so than the projects that succeeded. But if you were to ask me what my biggest regrets are, I would point you to the eight years I spent as an electrical engineer, “stuck” at a job that I wasn’t happy in but afraid of quitting and doing something else and failing (quitting my job and moving to Boston to begin a new life in 2016 was the best decision I have ever made). I would also point you to many past projects such as the liftavator, a crazy idea I had that everyone laughed at years ago that I never ended up pursuing, only for Verizon to take a modified version of the idea and have it go viral. There’s no use in crying over spilled milk, but you can learn from them and change future outcomes. Bottom line: take more risks
10. Build even bigger dreams — Don’t settle, don’t be complacent. Dream bigger. After all, people like Elon Musk, as crazy as they are, are successful because they dare to dream.

And, if things don’t go according to plan, that’s ok! That’s part of what makes life exciting!

Next up, our journey in building our own plane! It’s finally happening! Stay tuned! No dream is too big!

It’s Ok to Have Crazy Dreams — Lessons Learned from Fixing An Aircraft as an Amateur was originally published in MIT Bootcamp Alumni — Community Press on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I stare at the clock on my desk. 8:05PM. A mixture of hot and cold feelings pours over me. 8 gives me joy. A bubbly, warm feeling, a maternal care, almost, that is infused with 5, an uptight, military, hostile feeling. I’m currently working on my neuroscience research, and yet I have trouble concentrating on the paper at hand. The clock continues to tick. 8:06PM rolls around, and I’m a lot more at ease. 6 once again is feminine. It’s the image of a slightly chubby mid-aged lady, an aunt of some sort, that gives you cookies and listens to your problems about boys. The clock continues to tick. I have to meet some friends at 9, and I tried to concentrate on finishing up my research paper before meeting up with them.

At 8:45 PM, a number that has red and white stripes that remind me of a jet in the air, I stood up and left my room. As I got in the elevator of my dorm to go downstairs to meet my friends, I can hear the faint beeping sound as the elevator passes by each floor. Seven, six, five, four, three. The elevator doors open, and in comes a guy with a baseball hat and a skateboard. Awfully late for skateboarding, I thought to myself. The elevator doors close and the descend continues. Each floor has its own personality, each floor has its own gender and stories.

I’ve felt numbers my whole life. It’s something that I lived with and thought was perfectly normal until the topic of synesthesia came up in a discussion about neuroscience a few years ago. Seeing how I am ambidextrous, someone asked if I was synesthetic as well. He was doing research on correlations between mix-handed individuals and synesthesia. I didn’t know what it was and after much digging around, I realized that I indeed have synesthesia, multiple forms of it, in fact.

In my younger years, the world was a fascinating place to me. The smell, the sound, the sight, everything in life was so new and exciting. Unbeknownst to my parents, what they attributed to an active imagination turned out to be a physical anomaly. Parts of my brain overlapped in function in early childhood and the trigger of one would cause another. This is synesthesia. Unlike my peers, I loved math, though I didn’t dare to ever say that out loud in school for the fear of being bullied. Numbers represented a world where the good and evil interacted freely, and the outcomes are often different from those in the real world. Each number was different, each number had its own personality, gender, and story. Even numbers were feminine, and odd numbers were masculine. During my “boys have cooties” stage of childhood, I vehemently hated odd numbers. Those brain patterns reached well into adulthood, when I no longer believe that “boys have cooties” but still resent most odd numbers for some odd reason. What was more fascinating was that when numbers interacted, you can turn good into evil, and evil into good. When 4 and 5 interacted, they formed either 9 or 20 in my small, child-like mind at the time. 4 was my absolute favorite number in the world. It was the definition of perfection. Nothing in the world was quite as beautiful. 5 on the other hand, was this uptight, military figure. He is short and skinny and short-tempered. Intimidating and well-hated by everyone. Yet, when 4 and 5 meet, 4 can either turn 5 into the image of a slightly tamed woman, 20, who is still arrogant and yet classy and beautiful, or 5 can turn 4 into 9, another short-tempered man that looks kind of like Mario. Researchers have very little to say about ordinal-linguistic personification synesthesia, the technical term to describe this odd behavior. It is largely understudied. Letters have personalities for me too, Chinese characters, especially. Perhaps some of my speed reading tendencies have to do with reading based on feelings of letters/characters rather than actual meaning. It’s messy and strange, but somehow helps me to learn, perhaps even a little more effectively.

Numbers also appear on a 3D map around me. Researchers call this number-form synesthesia. When I commit a number or a series of numbers to memory, they are stored on the 3D map. There are hills and valleys, twists and turns on this map. It’s like riding down a windy road on a motorcycle on a hot summer day. The trees and shrubs along the way become numbers, numbers that in turn become meaningful. I almost never forget a birthday, or what my agenda looks like for next Wednesday (what researchers call sequence-space synesthesia (SSS), though I would group it together with number-form synesthesia), because everything is so visual and locational. When I perform mental calculations, these 3D maps come alive. The bends and folds allow numbers to jump and transform when you apply different operations to them. Their personalities in turn change. So do genders.

Synesthesia isn’t a bad thing. I was able to fast track my math to college level by the end of elementary school. I once tried to memorize digits of pi in middle school out of boredom and got to 200 digits within 10 minutes before I grew bored of that. I can still easily recite these 200 digits to this day.

Unfortunately many other types of synesthesia I had faded away before I was even aware of their existence. I still vaguely remember associating certain words with taste and smell (lexical-gustatory synesthesia), and as a toddler I refused to eat egg puddings because they tasted like the word “ming” in Mandarin (which translates to something along the lines of sensitive or keen in English), which gave me an unpleasant fishy, rubbery feeling (not the pudding or the definition of the word, but the “personality” of the word). As a toddler, I also repeatedly told my mother that my blanket “smelled like the sun”. My poor mother never understood what I meant, and to this day, I have a hard time explaining them except to point her to research on synesthesia.

Over the years, my synesthesia had definitely changed. Many faded away. For those that remained, such as number maps, they evolved. When I’m learning a new language, numbers greater than 100 turn towards the left, where there are more shadows and uncertainty. When I’m doing familiar calculations, numbers greater than 100 turn towards the right, and a familiar and more relaxing scenery unfolds. When I’m looking at housing prices and mortgages, the numbers hang off a cliff steeply at a 90-degree angle. Numbers greater than $200,000 steadily make an ascend into the abyss of despair. Numbers have feelings. The day I turned 25, I felt a huge bump on the road in my 3D map. That lump remained there, tripping me every time I come across the number 25. By the time I approached 30, I saw a sharp turn towards the right, and with it, the once green hills became dark and shadowy. Some people call it a quarter-life crisis. That quarter-life crisis is a lot more visual and acute to me given my synesthesia.

Personalities for numbers also changed. Admittingly, this is the one type of synesthesia I have that has slowly faded over time. I recall as a toddler, I had strong feelings of love towards the number 4. I would loudly declare it every time someone asked what my favorite number was. Imagine the look of utter shock and confusion on Asian adults’ faces as they hear the number. My ethnic culture is seemingly filled with superstition. 4 homophonically sounded like the word for death in Chinese, and many considered it to be bad luck. By the time I was seven, an Asian adult finally challenged me in my reasoning for loving the number 4. By then, my ordinal-linguistic personification synesthesia has started to fade, and I could no longer conjure up feelings as strong as they once were towards the number, let alone coming up with a reason why I liked the number so much. Is it the shape? No, 4 looked angular and ugly. Is it because a square had 4 sides? No. I had no particular affinities for squares. At that moment, I wondered to myself why I liked the number 4 so much all this time. Not being able to provide a satisfactory answer, I watched helplessly as said adult smugly declared that I had no good reason to like a bad luck number that signified death, and hence ended my favorite number reign with the number 4.

In high school, my friends and I developed a code system for guys we liked so that we can talk about them without people finding out. I decided to go with the numbering system because it was easy for me. Since odd numbers are male, I decided to label my crushes based on odd numbers. As a result, these numbers took on new identities, so much so that I could hardly remember the old identities they once had for certain numbers as my ordinal-linguistic personification synesthesia slowly faded away. Oddly enough, the beginning of puberty also marked the first time I didn’t hate odd numbers as much. Relationships also marked the first time I could no longer stand to look at certain numbers. To this day, the number 23 conjures up feelings of anger and hurt, even though the person associated with the number no longer causes me said feelings.

Today, I’m old enough that synesthesia has been partially replaced by other mechanisms in my brain. When I see my credit card number, I see mathematical relationships between numbers within the sequence. When I remember phone numbers, I see a shape/pattern outlined by the path one would take on a phone when dialing the number. These new mechanisms are weaker, and signs of aging have made me more accident prone in memorizing inaccurate information at times. But my synesthesia hasn’t completely gone away. Synesthesia, this automatic process that I have no control over, still pops up everywhere about 50–75% of the time when I see and use numbers. I don’t know if it will ever completely go away. But I do know that I will miss it if it does.

P.S. I’ve been trying to “exploit” my synesthesia to enhance my language learning abilities. Read more about it here in my post How To Learn Any Language in a Few Months — Language Learning Tips I Gathered Over the Last Few Years from Studying Almost a Dozen Languages.

Also check out The Case for Multiple Personalities.