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I'd like to invite you to close your eyes.

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Imagine yourself standing

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outside the front door of your home.

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I'd like you to notice the color of the door,

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the material that it's made out of.

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Now visualize a pack of overweight nudists on bicycles.

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They are competing in a naked bicycle race,

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and they are headed straight for your front door.

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I need you to actually see this.

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They are pedaling really hard, they're sweaty,

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they're bouncing around a lot.

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And they crash straight into the front door of your home.

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Bicycles fly everywhere, wheels roll past you,

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spokes end up in awkward places.

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Step over the threshold of your door

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into your foyer, your hallway, whatever's on the other side,

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and appreciate the quality of the light.

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The light is shining down on Cookie Monster.

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Cookie Monster is waving at you

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from his perch on top of a tan horse.

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It's a talking horse.

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You can practically feel his blue fur tickling your nose.

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You can smell the oatmeal raisin cookie that he's about to shovel into his mouth.

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Walk past him. Walk past him into your living room.

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In your living room, in full imaginative broadband,

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picture Britney Spears.

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She is scantily clad, she's dancing on your coffee table,

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and she's singing "Hit Me Baby One More Time."

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And then follow me into your kitchen.

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In your kitchen, the floor has been paved over with a yellow brick road

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and out of your oven are coming towards you

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Dorothy, the Tin Man,

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the Scarecrow and the Lion from "The Wizard of Oz,"

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hand-in-hand skipping straight towards you.

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Okay. Open your eyes.

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I want to tell you about a very bizarre contest

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that is held every spring in New York City.

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It's called the United States Memory Championship.

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And I had gone to cover this contest a few years back

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as a science journalist

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expecting, I guess, that this was going to be

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like the Superbowl of savants.

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This was a bunch of guys and a few ladies,

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widely varying in both age and hygienic upkeep.

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(Laughter)

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They were memorizing hundreds of random numbers,

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looking at them just once.

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They were memorizing the names of dozens and dozens and dozens of strangers.

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They were memorizing entire poems in just a few minutes.

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They were competing to see who could memorize

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the order of a shuffled pack of playing cards the fastest.

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I was like, this is unbelievable.

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These people must be freaks of nature.

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And I started talking to a few of the competitors.

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This is a guy called Ed Cook

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who had come over from England

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where he had one of the best trained memories.

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And I said to him, "Ed, when did you realize

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that you were a savant?"

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And Ed was like, "I'm not a savant.

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In fact, I have just an average memory.

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Everybody who competes in this contest

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will tell you that they have just an average memory.

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We've all trained ourselves

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to perform these utterly miraculous feats of memory

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using a set of ancient techniques,

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techniques invented 2,500 years ago in Greece,

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the same techniques that Cicero had used

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to memorize his speeches,

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that medieval scholars had used to memorize entire books."

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And I was like, "Whoa. How come I never heard of this before?"

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And we were standing outside the competition hall,

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and Ed, who is a wonderful, brilliant,

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but somewhat eccentric English guy,

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says to me, "Josh, you're an American journalist.

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Do you know Britney Spears?"

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I'm like, "What? No. Why?"

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"Because I really want to teach Britney Spears

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how to memorize the order of a shuffled pack of playing cards

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on U.S. national television.

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It will prove to the world that anybody can do this."

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(Laughter)

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I was like, "Well I'm not Britney Spears,

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but maybe you could teach me.

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I mean, you've got to start somewhere, right?"

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And that was the beginning of a very strange journey for me.

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I ended up spending the better part of the next year

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not only training my memory,

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but also investigating it,

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trying to understand how it works,

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why it sometimes doesn't work

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and what its potential might be.

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I met a host of really interesting people.

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This is a guy called E.P.

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He's an amnesic who had, very possibly,

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the very worst memory in the world.

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His memory was so bad

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that he didn't even remember he had a memory problem,

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which is amazing.

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And he was this incredibly tragic figure,

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but he was a window into the extent

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to which our memories make us who we are.

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The other end of the spectrum: I met this guy.

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This is Kim Peek.

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He was the basis for Dustin Hoffman's character in the movie "Rain Man."

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We spent an afternoon together

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in the Salt Lake City Public Library memorizing phone books,

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which was scintillating.

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(Laughter)

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And I went back and I read a whole host of memory treatises,

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treatises written 2,000-plus years ago

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in Latin in Antiquity

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and then later in the Middle Ages.

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And I learned a whole bunch of really interesting stuff.

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One of the really interesting things that I learned

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is that once upon a time,

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this idea of having a trained, disciplined, cultivated memory

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was not nearly so alien as it would seem to us to be today.

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Once upon a time, people invested in their memories,

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in laboriously furnishing their minds.

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Over the last few millenia

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we've invented a series of technologies --

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from the alphabet to the scroll

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to the codex, the printing press, photography,

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the computer, the smartphone --

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that have made it progressively easier and easier

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for us to externalize our memories,

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for us to essentially outsource

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this fundamental human capacity.

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These technologies have made our modern world possible,

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but they've also changed us.

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They've changed us culturally,

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and I would argue that they've changed us cognitively.

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Having little need to remember anymore,

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it sometimes seems like we've forgotten how.

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One of the last places on Earth

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where you still find people passionate about this idea

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of a trained, disciplined, cultivated memory

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is at this totally singular memory contest.

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It's actually not that singular,

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there are contests held all over the world.

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And I was fascinated, I wanted to know how do these guys do it.

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A few years back a group of researchers at University College London

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brought a bunch of memory champions into the lab.

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They wanted to know:

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Do these guys have brains

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that are somehow structurally, anatomically different from the rest of ours?

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The answer was no.

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Are they smarter than the rest of us?

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They gave them a bunch of cognitive tests,

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and the answer was not really.

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There was however one really interesting and telling difference

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between the brains of the memory champions

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and the control subjects that they were comparing them to.

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When they put these guys in an fMRI machine,

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scanned their brains

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while they were memorizing numbers and people's faces and pictures of snowflakes,

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they found that the memory champions

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were lighting up different parts of the brain

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than everyone else.

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Of note, they were using, or they seemed to be using,

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a part of the brain that's involved in spatial memory and navigation.

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Why? And is there something the rest of us can learn from this?

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The sport of competitive memorizing

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is driven by a kind of arms race

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where every year somebody comes up

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with a new way to remember more stuff more quickly,

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and then the rest of the field has to play catchup.

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This is my friend Ben Pridmore,

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three-time world memory champion.

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On his desk in front of him

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are 36 shuffled packs of playing cards

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that he is about to try to memorize in one hour,

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using a technique that he invented and he alone has mastered.

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He used a similar technique

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to memorize the precise order

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of 4,140 random binary digits

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in half an hour.

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Yeah.

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And while there are a whole host of ways

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of remembering stuff in these competitions,

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everything, all of the techniques that are being used,

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ultimately come down to a concept

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that psychologists refer to as elaborative encoding.

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And it's well illustrated by a nifty paradox

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known as the Baker/baker paradox,

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which goes like this:

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If I tell two people to remember the same word,

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if I say to you,

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"Remember that there is a guy named Baker."

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That's his name.

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And I say to you, "Remember that there is a guy who is a baker."

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And I come back to you at some point later on,

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and I say, "Do you remember that word

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that I told you a while back?

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Do you remember what it was?"

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the person who was told his name is Baker

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is less likely to remember the same word

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than the person was told his job is that he is a baker.

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Same word, different amount of remembering; that's weird.

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What's going on here?

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Well the name Baker doesn't actually mean anything to you.

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It is entirely untethered

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from all of the other memories floating around in your skull.

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But the common noun baker,

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we know bakers.

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Bakers wear funny white hats.

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Bakers have flour on their hands.

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Bakers smell good when they come home from work.

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Maybe we even know a baker.

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And when we first hear that word,

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we start putting these associational hooks into it

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that make it easier to fish it back out at some later date.

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The entire art of what is going on

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in these memory contests

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and the entire art of remembering stuff better in everyday life

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is figuring out ways to transform capital B Bakers

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into lower-case B bakers --

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to take information that is lacking in context,

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in significance, in meaning

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and transform it in some way

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so that it becomes meaningful

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in the light of all the other things that you have in your mind.

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One of the more elaborate techniques for doing this

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dates back 2,500 years to Ancient Greece.

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It came to be known as the memory palace.

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This story behind its creation goes like this:

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There was a poet called Simonides

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who was attending a banquet.

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He was actually the hired entertainment,

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because back then if you wanted to throw a really slamming party,

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you didn't hire a D.J., you hired a poet.

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And he stands up, delivers his poem from memory, walks out the door,

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and at the moment he does, the banquet hall collapses,

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kills everybody inside.

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It doesn't just kill everybody,

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it mangles the bodies beyond all recognition.

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Nobody can say who was inside,

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nobody can say where they were sitting.

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The bodies can't be properly buried.

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It's one tragedy compounding another.

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Simonides, standing outside,

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the sole survivor amid the wreckage,

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closes his eyes and has this realization,

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which is that in his mind's eye,

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he can see where each of the guests at the banquet had been sitting.

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And he takes the relatives by the hand

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and guides them each to their loved ones amid the wreckage.

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What Simonides figured out at that moment

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is something that I think we all kind of intuitively know,

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which is that, as bad as we are

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at remembering names and phone numbers

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and word-for-word instructions from our colleagues,

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we have really exceptional visual and spatial memories.

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If I asked you to recount the first 10 words

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of the story that I just told you about Simonides,

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chances are you would have a tough time with it.

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But I would wager

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that if I asked you to recall

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who is sitting on top of a talking tan horse

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in your foyer right now,

262
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you would be able to see that.

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The idea behind the memory palace

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is to create this imagined edifice in your mind's eye

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and populate it with images

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of the things that you want to remember --

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the crazier, weirder, more bizarre,

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funnier, raunchier, stinkier the image is,

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the more unforgettable it's likely to be.

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This is advice that goes back 2,000-plus years

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to the earliest Latin memory treatises.

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So how does this work?

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Let's say that you've been invited

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to TED center stage to give a speech

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and you want to do it from memory,

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and you want to do it the way that Cicero would have done it

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if he had been invited to TEDxRome 2,000 years ago.

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What you might do

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is picture yourself at the front door of your house.

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And you'd come up with some sort

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of an absolutely crazy, ridiculous, unforgettable image

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to remind you that the first thing you want to talk about

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is this totally bizarre contest.

284
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And then you'd go inside your house,

285
00:14:13,708 --> 00:14:16,375
and you would see an image of Cookie Monster

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00:14:16,375 --> 00:14:18,708
on top of Mister Ed.

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And that would remind you

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that you would want to then introduce your friend Ed Cook.

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And then you'd see an image of Britney Spears

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to remind you of this funny anecdote you want to tell.

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And you go into your kitchen,

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and the fourth topic you were going to talk about

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was this strange journey that you went on for a year,

294
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and you have some friends to help you remember that.

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This is how Roman orators memorized their speeches --

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not word-for-word, which is just going to screw you up,

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but topic-for-topic.

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In fact, the phrase "topic sentence,"

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that comes from the Greek word topos,

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which means place.

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That's a vestige

302
00:15:00,458 --> 00:15:02,208
of when people used to think about oratory and rhetoric

303
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in these sorts of spatial terms.

304
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The phrase "in the first place,"

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that's like in the first place of your memory palace.

306
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I thought this was just fascinating,

307
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and I got really into it.

308
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And I went to a few more of these memory contests.

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And I had this notion that I might write something longer

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about this subculture of competitive memorizers.

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But there was a problem.

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The problem was that a memory contest

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is a pathologically boring event.

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(Laughter)

315
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Truly, it is like a bunch of people sitting around taking the SATs.

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00:15:36,625 --> 00:15:39,042
I mean, the most dramatic it gets

317
00:15:39,042 --> 00:15:42,083
is when somebody starts massaging their temples.

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And I'm a journalist, I need something to write about.

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I know that there's this incredible stuff happening in these people's minds,

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but I don't have access to it.

321
00:15:47,958 --> 00:15:52,917
And I realized, if I was going to tell this story,

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I needed to walk in their shoes a little bit.

323
00:15:54,667 --> 00:15:58,833
And so I started trying to spend 15 or 20 minutes

324
00:15:58,833 --> 00:16:02,083
every morning before I sat down with my New York Times

325
00:16:02,083 --> 00:16:04,189
just trying to remember something.

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Maybe it was a poem.

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00:16:06,273 --> 00:16:08,127
Maybe it was names from an old yearbook

328
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that I bought at a flea market.

329
00:16:10,156 --> 00:16:16,067
And I found that this was shockingly fun.

330
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I never would have expected that.

331
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It was fun because this is actually not about training your memory.

332
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What you're doing is you're trying to get better and better and better

333
00:16:23,792 --> 00:16:26,282
at creating, at dreaming up,

334
00:16:26,282 --> 00:16:28,792
these utterly ludicrous, raunchy, hilarious

335
00:16:28,792 --> 00:16:32,917
and hopefully unforgettable images in your mind's eye.

336
00:16:32,917 --> 00:16:33,792
And I got pretty into it.

337
00:16:33,792 --> 00:16:39,542
This is me wearing my standard competitive memorizer's training kit.

338
00:16:39,542 --> 00:16:44,000
It's a pair of earmuffs

339
00:16:44,000 --> 00:16:46,917
and a set of safety goggles that have been masked over

340
00:16:46,917 --> 00:16:48,667
except for two small pinholes,

341
00:16:48,667 --> 00:16:54,500
because distraction is the competitive memorizer's greatest enemy.

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00:16:54,500 --> 00:17:01,375
I ended up coming back to that same contest that I had covered a year earlier.

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And I had this notion that I might enter it,

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sort of as an experiment in participatory journalism.

345
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It'd make, I thought, maybe a nice epilogue to all my research.

346
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Problem was the experiment went haywire.

347
00:17:15,042 --> 00:17:15,917
I won the contest,

348
00:17:15,917 --> 00:17:19,190
which really wasn't supposed to happen.

349
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(Applause)

350
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Now it is nice

351
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to be able to memorize speeches

352
00:17:29,417 --> 00:17:33,542
and phone numbers and shopping lists,

353
00:17:33,542 --> 00:17:36,333
but it's actually kind of beside the point.

354
00:17:36,333 --> 00:17:37,208
These are just tricks.

355
00:17:37,208 --> 00:17:41,333
They are tricks that work

356
00:17:41,333 --> 00:17:42,208
because they're based on some pretty basic principles

357
00:17:42,208 --> 00:17:46,292
about how our brains work.

358
00:17:46,292 --> 00:17:47,167
And you don't have to be building memory palaces

359
00:17:47,167 --> 00:17:52,250
or memorizing packs of playing cards

360
00:17:52,250 --> 00:17:53,125
to benefit from a little bit of insight

361
00:17:53,125 --> 00:17:56,292
about how your mind works.

362
00:17:56,292 --> 00:17:57,167
We often talk about people with great memories

363
00:17:57,167 --> 00:18:01,292
as though it were some sort of an innate gift,

364
00:18:01,292 --> 00:18:02,167
but that is not the case.

365
00:18:02,167 --> 00:18:05,458
Great memories are learned.

366
00:18:05,458 --> 00:18:08,542
At the most basic level, we remember when we pay attention.

367
00:18:08,542 --> 00:18:13,333
We remember when we are deeply engaged.

368
00:18:13,333 --> 00:18:14,208
We remember when we are able

369
00:18:14,208 --> 00:18:17,625
to take a piece of information and experience

370
00:18:17,625 --> 00:18:19,731
and figure out why it is meaningful to us,

371
00:18:19,731 --> 00:18:22,154
why it is significant, why it's colorful,

372
00:18:22,169 --> 00:18:24,375
when we're able to transform it in some way

373
00:18:24,375 --> 00:18:26,792
that it makes sense

374
00:18:26,792 --> 00:18:28,542
in the light of all of the other things floating around in our minds,

375
00:18:28,542 --> 00:18:33,417
when we're able to transform Bakers into bakers.

376
00:18:33,417 --> 00:18:35,167
The memory palace, these memory techniques,

377
00:18:35,167 --> 00:18:38,375
they're just shortcuts.

378
00:18:38,375 --> 00:18:40,125
In fact, they're not even really shortcuts.

379
00:18:40,125 --> 00:18:43,958
They work because they make you work.

380
00:18:43,958 --> 00:18:48,375
They force a kind of depth of processing,

381
00:18:48,375 --> 00:18:49,250
a kind of mindfulness,

382
00:18:49,250 --> 00:18:53,417
that most of us don't normally walk around exercising.

383
00:18:53,417 --> 00:18:55,763
But there actually are no shortcuts.

384
00:18:55,763 --> 00:18:59,250
This is how stuff is made memorable.

385
00:18:59,250 --> 00:19:03,208
And I think if there's one thing that I want to leave you with,

386
00:19:03,208 --> 00:19:04,958
it's what E.P.,

387
00:19:04,958 --> 00:19:10,125
the amnesic who couldn't even remember that he had a memory problem,

388
00:19:10,125 --> 00:19:11,000
left me with,

389
00:19:11,000 --> 00:19:13,375
which is the notion

390
00:19:13,375 --> 00:19:18,750
that our lives are the sum of our memories.

391
00:19:18,750 --> 00:19:24,583
How much are we willing to lose

392
00:19:24,583 --> 00:19:26,250
from our already short lives

393
00:19:26,250 --> 00:19:32,333
by losing ourselves in our Blackberries, our iPhones,

394
00:19:32,333 --> 00:19:37,500
by not paying attention to the human being across from us

395
00:19:37,500 --> 00:19:40,583
who is talking with us,

396
00:19:40,583 --> 00:19:41,500
by being so lazy that we're not willing

397
00:19:41,500 --> 00:19:45,667
to process deeply?

398
00:19:45,667 --> 00:19:48,250
I learned firsthand

399
00:19:48,250 --> 00:19:50,000
that there are incredible memory capacities

400
00:19:50,000 --> 00:19:53,250
latent in all of us.

401
00:19:53,250 --> 00:19:55,000
But if you want to live a memorable life,

402
00:19:55,000 --> 00:19:59,125
you have to be the kind of person

403
00:19:59,125 --> 00:20:00,875
who remembers to remember.

404
00:20:00,875 --> 00:20:03,875
Thank you.

405
00:20:03,875 --> 00:20:06,473
(Applause)