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talk to you briefly about perception. When he was writing the plays and the short stories

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that would make his name, Anton Chekhov kept a notebook in which he noted down his observations

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of the world around him, little details that other people seemed to miss. Every time I

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read Chekhov and his unique vision of human life, I'm reminded of why I, too, became a

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writer. In my books, I explore the nature of perception and how different kinds of perceiving

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create different kinds of knowing and understanding. Here are three questions drawn from my work.

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rather than try to figure them out

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I'm going to ask you to consider for a moment

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the intuitions and the gut instincts

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that are going through your head and your heart

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as you look at them

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for example the calculation

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can you feel where on the number line

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the solution is likely to fall

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or look at the foreign word and the sounds

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can you get a sense of the range of meanings

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that it's pointing you towards

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And in terms of the line of poetry, why does the poet use the word hare rather than rabbit?

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I'm asking you to do this because I believe that our personal perceptions, you see, are at the heart of how we acquire knowledge.

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Aesthetic judgments, rather than abstract reasoning, guide and shape the process by which we all come to know what we know.

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I'm an extreme example of this.

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My worlds of words and numbers blare with color, emotion, and personality.

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As Juan said, it's a condition that scientists call synesthesia,

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an unusual cross-talk between the senses.

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Here are the numbers 1 to 12 as I see them.

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Every number with its own shape and character.

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One is a flash of bright light.

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Six is a tiny and very sad black hole.

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The sketches are in black and white here,

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but in my mind, they have colors.

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Three is green, four is blue, five is yellow.

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I paint as well, and here is one of my paintings.

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It's a multiplication of two prime numbers,

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three-dimensional shapes,

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and the space they create in the middle creates a new shape,

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the answer to the sum.

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What about bigger numbers?

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Well, you can't get much bigger than pi,

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the mathematical constant.

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It's an infinite number, literally goes on forever.