Tom Chi uses the piano to explain how inventions reshape human possibility. When the piano emerged around 1700, it created new neural patterns and opened expressions that rippled across generations. He calls this expanding palette of human experience the "palette of being" - colors you can explore or add to, expanding what's possible for everyone after you.
Chapters
This is the story of how our minds are connected. And I'm not going to go into, like, kind of mystical woo woo territory about, like, you know, ESP and all that sort of thing. Other speakers can talk about that, that's totally fine. But instead I'm going to talk about very concretely how all of our thoughts and minds are connected. And I'm going to do it through the story of this instrument, piano. Now, anybody who's seen somebody who's really great play the piano, you just know that this is a magical thing, right? Basically, people can create joy, they can express pain, they can express so much complexity and emotion. They can do it with force. They can do it with subtlety. This instrument is a powerful, powerful instrument. And the people that play piano, whether they're concert pianists or professional musicians, or musicians of any stripe, if you were to kind of scan their brains and kind of see what's going on, you actually see a good chunk of their brains when they're doing this stuff is being dedicated to how to play the piano. So there's structures that are related to the movement of the fingers across the keys. There are structures that are related to music theory and how to relate that to what the piano is capable of doing, the motion of the pedal and so on and so forth. But one thing that you may not have thought of. So of course, if you do this sort of thing, if you play the piano, you will have these structures in your brain. And all the people that play the piano have these kind of parallel structures in the brain that allow them to play the piano. Of course. But a thing that you may not have thought about this process is that before the year 1700, this was a set of patterns of the brain that was just not possible. Because in the year 1700, the piano was invented. Literally, this type of beauty was not possible until that year 1700. And it took a bunch of centuries after that for people to develop all the different styles of piano playing for us to achieve the level of beauty that we have arrived at with the piano. Now, what does this mean for us? Well, number one, it means that there's a set of people that invented it, and their patterns of thoughts propagated forward and opened up the bound for many other people to go play around with this instrument. And that propagated forward for many other people to develop interesting styles and be able to teach other folks that that then studied piano. And really, this piece of work allowed us to open up entirely new vistas of human experience and possibility. And those thoughts were directly connected in a chain of possibility. Now, in the larger scope, I call this phenomenon the palette of being. Because what happens is every single one of us is born into a world where particular things are possible. So you might be born into a world where it's possible to become a pianist or musician, it's possible to become a computer scientist, it's possible to become a dancer, it's possible to become all these things. There's colors in the palette that you can go dabble in and paint from in order to create the masterpiece that is your life now. The thing beyond that, which I think is way more profound, is that the colors don't stay stable. The way that you live your life, you can add colors. The people that got together and took their mechanical engineering prowess and invented the piano, they added a color. It meant that every bit of civilization afterwards now has a new color to work with outside of people that have invented things. Just sometimes your way of being adds a new color, right? Kind of an aside. It's like, I remember when Lady Gaga was coming up, I was like, that's so Madonna, what she's doing, right? And it's because, like, Madonna came in here and she, like, just was a particular way. And then a generation later, like, somebody could look at that, and it's like, I like that. And she's not, you know, exact copy of Nobody Will Ever Be. But she decided to use some of those colors that did not exist before in order to go paint with and do something phenomenal. And this is actually the opportunity of all of our lives to be able to not only deeply embrace and play with all the colors and the palette of being, but through what we create in this life, through our relationships, and through just our basic way of being, to add colors to this so that future generations are able to invent, live, be in a different way with each other.
