Hi there, everyone. It's Chris Anderson here. You're tuning into a special archive edition of

TED Talks Daily. This one is from novelist Elif Shafak. She makes the case that embracing complexity

and the multiple versions of ourselves is an antidote to tribalism. After the talk, if you'd like to hear

more, I'd love you to check out my podcast,

The TED Interview, where I sit down with Aleph to dive much deeper into these ideas. You'll hear

about the role she thinks that emotion plays in the populism we see rising across the world today.

So that's the TED interview on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you

listen. Can you taste words? It was a question that caught me by surprise. This summer, I was

giving a talk at a literary festival, and afterwards, as I was signing books, a teenage girl came with her friend,

and this is what she asked me.

I told her that some people experienced an overlap in their senses

so that they could hear colors or see sounds,

and many writers were fascinated by this subject, myself included.

But she cut me off, and bit impatiently and said, yeah, I know all of that. It's called synesthesia. We learned about school. But my mom is

reading your book. And she says there's lots of food and ingredients and the long dinner scene in it.

She gets hungry at every page.

So I was thinking, how come you don't get hungry when you write?

And I thought, maybe you could taste words.

Does it make sense?

And actually, it did make sense.

Because ever since my childhood, each letter in the alphabet has a different

color, and colors bring me flavors. So, for instance, the color purple is quite pungent, almost

...