Dr Robin Kelly on the human hologram, Live from TEDx Auckland

4:30 on a Thursday is the worst time in the week for human concentration -- thank you, Richard!
 
He brought some props: a knife, an apple, a backup apple, and a few props that are so small nobody will ever see.
 
In 20 minutes, he hopes to impress on us his journey and the certain amount of understanding he's got going over 35 years of being a doctor. When you start being a doctor, they look at you and say, "You're a bit young to be a doctor, aren't you?" Then there's a time when they say nothing, and then they say, "Don't you think you should get a younger partner?"
 
Soon after he became a doctor, he became interested in acupuncture, especially ear acupuncture. He found that the problems of the body could be contained in a very small part of the body, namely the ear. As a doctor, you tend to practice on your family first, and he found that people who come in with a sore neck would have a tender spot on their ear and a pin there would relieve the soreness, same for nausea, smoking cessation, etc.
 
He thought everyone would love this, and now, ear acupuncture is the first line of first aid on the front lines in Afghanistan and Iraq. They've been able to reduce the amount of morphine needed. They're using it domestically to prevent post-op pain in knee surgery, and reducing the requirement for ibuprofen.
 
Earlier this year, the New Scientist magazine ran a cover story that suggested that our world is a giant hologram. That our universe is like a giant IMax screen and by our senses, we convert it into a 3- and 4-dimensional world.
 
In a hologram, every part, no matter how small, contains the whole. "An instant, an aspect of nature contains all of nature" - Claude Monet
 
He cuts an apple to demonstrate the perfect pentagram inside. The interesting thing about the pentagram is that it carries a ratio: 1:1.618 (the Golden Mean). Leonardo used this in his work, e.g. in the Mona Lisa. It appears in the way a conch grows ("This is why they call it the growth of 'conchousness'" -- har har!)
 
Shows the way hair grows, the way galaxies grow, the magnetic field of the Earth, the magnetic field of the heart. All of us sitting here, we are in each other's heart space.
 
To see the world in a grain of sand... William Blake. And he wonders about these brilliant people, like William Shakespeare, how could they know enough to do what they did? Is it possible that they're somehow downloading universal wisdom, that this is somehow another understanding of what it is to be human? How do autistic savants do what they do? They have real difficulty living in this three-dimensional world.
 
What a fascinating and lovely man.