0:00:00.273,0:00:04.679
I'd like to invite you to close your eyes.

0:00:04.679,0:00:07.996
Imagine yourself standing

0:00:07.996,0:00:11.123
outside the front door of your home.

0:00:11.123,0:00:14.792
I'd like you to notice the color of the door,

0:00:14.792,0:00:18.788
the material that it's made out of.

0:00:18.788,0:00:25.508
Now visualize a pack of overweight nudists on bicycles.

0:00:25.508,0:00:28.708
They are competing in a naked bicycle race,

0:00:28.708,0:00:32.458
and they are headed straight for your front door.

0:00:32.458,0:00:34.408
I need you to actually see this.

0:00:34.408,0:00:37.500
They are pedaling really hard, they're sweaty,

0:00:37.500,0:00:40.404
they're bouncing around a lot.

0:00:40.404,0:00:44.208
And they crash straight into the front door of your home.

0:00:44.208,0:00:48.127
Bicycles fly everywhere, wheels roll past you,

0:00:48.127,0:00:51.958
spokes end up in awkward places.

0:00:51.958,0:00:55.183
Step over the threshold of your door

0:00:55.183,0:00:58.023
into your foyer, your hallway, whatever's on the other side,

0:00:58.023,0:01:01.929
and appreciate the quality of the light.

0:01:01.929,0:01:07.606
The light is shining down on Cookie Monster.

0:01:07.606,0:01:10.792
Cookie Monster is waving at you

0:01:10.792,0:01:13.496
from his perch on top of a tan horse.

0:01:13.496,0:01:15.304
It's a talking horse.

0:01:15.304,0:01:19.837
You can practically feel his blue fur tickling your nose.

0:01:19.837,0:01:24.114
You can smell the oatmeal raisin cookie that he's about to shovel into his mouth.

0:01:24.114,0:01:27.921
Walk past him. Walk past him into your living room.

0:01:27.921,0:01:30.958
In your living room, in full imaginative broadband,

0:01:30.958,0:01:33.770
picture Britney Spears.

0:01:33.770,0:01:39.265
She is scantily clad, she's dancing on your coffee table,

0:01:39.265,0:01:41.809
and she's singing "Hit Me Baby One More Time."

0:01:41.809,0:01:44.731
And then follow me into your kitchen.

0:01:44.731,0:01:49.031
In your kitchen, the floor has been paved over with a yellow brick road

0:01:49.031,0:01:52.725
and out of your oven are coming towards you

0:01:52.725,0:01:54.792
Dorothy, the Tin Man,

0:01:54.792,0:01:57.173
the Scarecrow and the Lion from "The Wizard of Oz,"

0:01:57.173,0:02:00.000
hand-in-hand skipping straight towards you.

0:02:00.000,0:02:04.333
Okay. Open your eyes.

0:02:04.333,0:02:07.792
I want to tell you about a very bizarre contest

0:02:07.792,0:02:10.875
that is held every spring in New York City.

0:02:10.875,0:02:14.362
It's called the United States Memory Championship.

0:02:14.362,0:02:17.260
And I had gone to cover this contest a few years back

0:02:17.260,0:02:19.457
as a science journalist

0:02:19.457,0:02:21.792
expecting, I guess, that this was going to be

0:02:21.792,0:02:24.621
like the Superbowl of savants.

0:02:24.621,0:02:28.130
This was a bunch of guys and a few ladies,

0:02:28.130,0:02:32.869
widely varying in both age and hygienic upkeep.

0:02:32.869,0:02:35.150
(Laughter)

0:02:35.150,0:02:39.359
They were memorizing hundreds of random numbers,

0:02:39.359,0:02:40.771
looking at them just once.

0:02:40.771,0:02:45.133
They were memorizing the names of dozens and dozens and dozens of strangers.

0:02:45.133,0:02:48.571
They were memorizing entire poems in just a few minutes.

0:02:48.571,0:02:50.750
They were competing to see who could memorize

0:02:50.750,0:02:54.750
the order of a shuffled pack of playing cards the fastest.

0:02:54.750,0:02:56.594
I was like, this is unbelievable.

0:02:56.594,0:02:59.750
These people must be freaks of nature.

0:02:59.750,0:03:03.375
And I started talking to a few of the competitors.

0:03:03.375,0:03:04.750
This is a guy called Ed Cook

0:03:04.750,0:03:06.317
who had come over from England

0:03:06.317,0:03:08.283
where he had one of the best trained memories.

0:03:08.283,0:03:12.048
And I said to him, "Ed, when did you realize

0:03:12.048,0:03:14.556
that you were a savant?"

0:03:14.556,0:03:17.320
And Ed was like, "I'm not a savant.

0:03:17.320,0:03:19.896
In fact, I have just an average memory.

0:03:19.896,0:03:21.568
Everybody who competes in this contest

0:03:21.568,0:03:24.829
will tell you that they have just an average memory.

0:03:24.829,0:03:26.708
We've all trained ourselves

0:03:26.708,0:03:30.929
to perform these utterly miraculous feats of memory

0:03:30.929,0:03:32.987
using a set of ancient techniques,

0:03:32.987,0:03:36.535
techniques invented 2,500 years ago in Greece,

0:03:36.535,0:03:39.667
the same techniques that Cicero had used

0:03:39.667,0:03:41.527
to memorize his speeches,

0:03:41.527,0:03:45.721
that medieval scholars had used to memorize entire books."

0:03:45.721,0:03:49.437
And I was like, "Whoa. How come I never heard of this before?"

0:03:49.437,0:03:52.156
And we were standing outside the competition hall,

0:03:52.156,0:03:55.833
and Ed, who is a wonderful, brilliant,

0:03:55.833,0:03:58.898
but somewhat eccentric English guy,

0:03:58.898,0:04:03.333
says to me, "Josh, you're an American journalist.

0:04:03.333,0:04:05.439
Do you know Britney Spears?"

0:04:05.439,0:04:10.252
I'm like, "What? No. Why?"

0:04:10.252,0:04:13.333
"Because I really want to teach Britney Spears

0:04:13.333,0:04:15.962
how to memorize the order of a shuffled pack of playing cards

0:04:15.962,0:04:18.208
on U.S. national television.

0:04:18.208,0:04:21.479
It will prove to the world that anybody can do this."

0:04:21.479,0:04:25.893
(Laughter)

0:04:25.893,0:04:29.383
I was like, "Well I'm not Britney Spears,

0:04:29.383,0:04:32.148
but maybe you could teach me.

0:04:32.148,0:04:34.583
I mean, you've got to start somewhere, right?"

0:04:34.583,0:04:38.375
And that was the beginning of a very strange journey for me.

0:04:38.375,0:04:41.279
I ended up spending the better part of the next year

0:04:41.279,0:04:43.375
not only training my memory,

0:04:43.375,0:04:45.125
but also investigating it,

0:04:45.125,0:04:47.231
trying to understand how it works,

0:04:47.231,0:04:49.502
why it sometimes doesn't work

0:04:49.502,0:04:51.987
and what its potential might be.

0:04:51.987,0:04:54.293
I met a host of really interesting people.

0:04:54.293,0:04:56.075
This is a guy called E.P.

0:04:56.075,0:04:58.583
He's an amnesic who had, very possibly,

0:04:58.583,0:05:01.292
the very worst memory in the world.

0:05:01.292,0:05:02.952
His memory was so bad

0:05:02.952,0:05:05.702
that he didn't even remember he had a memory problem,

0:05:05.702,0:05:07.589
which is amazing.

0:05:07.589,0:05:09.304
And he was this incredibly tragic figure,

0:05:09.304,0:05:11.292
but he was a window into the extent

0:05:11.292,0:05:15.102
to which our memories make us who we are.

0:05:15.102,0:05:18.140
The other end of the spectrum: I met this guy.

0:05:18.140,0:05:19.877
This is Kim Peek.

0:05:19.877,0:05:23.364
He was the basis for Dustin Hoffman's character in the movie "Rain Man."

0:05:23.364,0:05:26.046
We spent an afternoon together

0:05:26.046,0:05:29.683
in the Salt Lake City Public Library memorizing phone books,

0:05:29.683,0:05:32.770
which was scintillating.

0:05:32.770,0:05:35.727
(Laughter)

0:05:35.727,0:05:39.157
And I went back and I read a whole host of memory treatises,

0:05:39.157,0:05:42.990
treatises written 2,000-plus years ago

0:05:42.990,0:05:44.896
in Latin in Antiquity

0:05:44.896,0:05:47.233
and then later in the Middle Ages.

0:05:47.233,0:05:49.796
And I learned a whole bunch of really interesting stuff.

0:05:49.796,0:05:53.038
One of the really interesting things that I learned

0:05:53.038,0:05:55.514
is that once upon a time,

0:05:55.514,0:06:01.286
this idea of having a trained, disciplined, cultivated memory

0:06:01.286,0:06:06.314
was not nearly so alien as it would seem to us to be today.

0:06:06.314,0:06:11.071
Once upon a time, people invested in their memories,

0:06:11.071,0:06:16.096
in laboriously furnishing their minds.

0:06:16.096,0:06:18.219
Over the last few millenia

0:06:18.219,0:06:20.965
we've invented a series of technologies --

0:06:20.965,0:06:23.375
from the alphabet to the scroll

0:06:23.375,0:06:25.694
to the codex, the printing press, photography,

0:06:25.694,0:06:27.608
the computer, the smartphone --

0:06:27.608,0:06:30.540
that have made it progressively easier and easier

0:06:30.540,0:06:33.125
for us to externalize our memories,

0:06:33.125,0:06:35.367
for us to essentially outsource

0:06:35.367,0:06:39.080
this fundamental human capacity.

0:06:39.080,0:06:42.679
These technologies have made our modern world possible,

0:06:42.679,0:06:44.477
but they've also changed us.

0:06:44.477,0:06:46.227
They've changed us culturally,

0:06:46.227,0:06:49.761
and I would argue that they've changed us cognitively.

0:06:49.761,0:06:52.327
Having little need to remember anymore,

0:06:52.327,0:06:55.444
it sometimes seems like we've forgotten how.

0:06:55.444,0:06:57.183
One of the last places on Earth

0:06:57.183,0:07:00.287
where you still find people passionate about this idea

0:07:00.287,0:07:03.529
of a trained, disciplined, cultivated memory

0:07:03.529,0:07:06.288
is at this totally singular memory contest.

0:07:06.288,0:07:07.604
It's actually not that singular,

0:07:07.604,0:07:09.929
there are contests held all over the world.

0:07:09.929,0:07:14.087
And I was fascinated, I wanted to know how do these guys do it.

0:07:14.087,0:07:18.806
A few years back a group of researchers at University College London

0:07:18.806,0:07:21.583
brought a bunch of memory champions into the lab.

0:07:21.583,0:07:23.089
They wanted to know:

0:07:23.089,0:07:24.456
Do these guys have brains

0:07:24.456,0:07:28.898
that are somehow structurally, anatomically different from the rest of ours?

0:07:28.898,0:07:31.902
The answer was no.

0:07:31.902,0:07:35.006
Are they smarter than the rest of us?

0:07:35.006,0:07:36.717
They gave them a bunch of cognitive tests,

0:07:36.717,0:07:38.987
and the answer was not really.

0:07:38.987,0:07:42.315
There was however one really interesting and telling difference

0:07:42.315,0:07:44.423
between the brains of the memory champions

0:07:44.423,0:07:46.990
and the control subjects that they were comparing them to.

0:07:46.990,0:07:49.667
When they put these guys in an fMRI machine,

0:07:49.667,0:07:51.711
scanned their brains

0:07:51.711,0:07:56.717
while they were memorizing numbers and people's faces and pictures of snowflakes,

0:07:56.717,0:07:59.033
they found that the memory champions

0:07:59.033,0:08:01.277
were lighting up different parts of the brain

0:08:01.277,0:08:03.288
than everyone else.

0:08:03.288,0:08:06.573
Of note, they were using, or they seemed to be using,

0:08:06.573,0:08:10.790
a part of the brain that's involved in spatial memory and navigation.

0:08:10.790,0:08:17.033
Why? And is there something the rest of us can learn from this?

0:08:17.033,0:08:21.233
The sport of competitive memorizing

0:08:21.233,0:08:24.081
is driven by a kind of arms race

0:08:24.081,0:08:27.125
where every year somebody comes up

0:08:27.125,0:08:29.813
with a new way to remember more stuff more quickly,

0:08:29.813,0:08:31.652
and then the rest of the field has to play catchup.

0:08:31.652,0:08:33.500
This is my friend Ben Pridmore,

0:08:33.500,0:08:35.250
three-time world memory champion.

0:08:35.250,0:08:37.083
On his desk in front of him

0:08:37.083,0:08:40.777
are 36 shuffled packs of playing cards

0:08:40.777,0:08:43.525
that he is about to try to memorize in one hour,

0:08:43.525,0:08:47.881
using a technique that he invented and he alone has mastered.

0:08:47.881,0:08:49.792
He used a similar technique

0:08:49.792,0:08:52.234
to memorize the precise order

0:08:52.234,0:08:58.042
of 4,140 random binary digits

0:08:58.042,0:09:00.944
in half an hour.

0:09:00.944,0:09:02.875
Yeah.

0:09:02.875,0:09:06.423
And while there are a whole host of ways

0:09:06.423,0:09:10.000
of remembering stuff in these competitions,

0:09:10.000,0:09:12.892
everything, all of the techniques that are being used,

0:09:12.892,0:09:15.500
ultimately come down to a concept

0:09:15.500,0:09:19.148
that psychologists refer to as elaborative encoding.

0:09:19.148,0:09:21.829
And it's well illustrated by a nifty paradox

0:09:21.829,0:09:23.875
known as the Baker/baker paradox,

0:09:23.875,0:09:25.437
which goes like this:

0:09:25.437,0:09:28.333
If I tell two people to remember the same word,

0:09:28.333,0:09:29.900
if I say to you,

0:09:29.900,0:09:33.527
"Remember that there is a guy named Baker."

0:09:33.527,0:09:35.033
That's his name.

0:09:35.033,0:09:40.819
And I say to you, "Remember that there is a guy who is a baker."

0:09:40.819,0:09:44.061
And I come back to you at some point later on,

0:09:44.061,0:09:47.100
and I say, "Do you remember that word

0:09:47.100,0:09:48.477
that I told you a while back?

0:09:48.477,0:09:50.275
Do you remember what it was?"

0:09:50.275,0:09:53.542
The person who was told his name is Baker

0:09:53.542,0:09:55.861
is less likely to remember the same word

0:09:55.861,0:09:59.712
than the person was told his job is that he is a baker.

0:09:59.712,0:10:02.791
Same word, different amount of remembering; that's weird.

0:10:02.791,0:10:04.768
What's going on here?

0:10:04.768,0:10:09.804
Well the name Baker doesn't actually mean anything to you.

0:10:09.804,0:10:12.095
It is entirely untethered

0:10:12.095,0:10:15.333
from all of the other memories floating around in your skull.

0:10:15.333,0:10:17.223
But the common noun baker,

0:10:17.223,0:10:19.094
we know bakers.

0:10:19.094,0:10:21.123
Bakers wear funny white hats.

0:10:21.123,0:10:22.750
Bakers have flour on their hands.

0:10:22.750,0:10:24.825
Bakers smell good when they come home from work.

0:10:24.825,0:10:26.952
Maybe we even know a baker.

0:10:26.952,0:10:28.363
And when we first hear that word,

0:10:28.363,0:10:31.208
we start putting these associational hooks into it

0:10:31.208,0:10:35.279
that make it easier to fish it back out at some later date.

0:10:35.279,0:10:38.237
The entire art of what is going on

0:10:38.237,0:10:40.352
in these memory contests

0:10:40.352,0:10:43.579
and the entire art of remembering stuff better in everyday life

0:10:43.579,0:10:47.565
is figuring out ways to transform capital B Bakers

0:10:47.565,0:10:49.561
into lower-case B bakers --

0:10:49.561,0:10:52.948
to take information that is lacking in context,

0:10:52.948,0:10:55.254
in significance, in meaning

0:10:55.254,0:10:56.804
and transform it in some way

0:10:56.804,0:10:58.979
so that it becomes meaningful

0:10:58.979,0:11:03.764
in the light of all the other things that you have in your mind.

0:11:03.764,0:11:07.498
One of the more elaborate techniques for doing this

0:11:07.498,0:11:11.417
dates back 2,500 years to Ancient Greece.

0:11:11.417,0:11:13.395
It came to be known as the memory palace.

0:11:13.395,0:11:16.820
The story behind its creation goes like this:

0:11:16.820,0:11:19.792
There was a poet called Simonides

0:11:19.792,0:11:21.698
who was attending a banquet.

0:11:21.698,0:11:23.946
He was actually the hired entertainment,

0:11:23.946,0:11:26.958
because back then if you wanted to throw a really slamming party,

0:11:26.958,0:11:30.170
you didn't hire a D.J., you hired a poet.

0:11:30.170,0:11:35.040
And he stands up, delivers his poem from memory, walks out the door,

0:11:35.040,0:11:40.152
and at the moment he does, the banquet hall collapses,

0:11:40.152,0:11:42.833
kills everybody inside.

0:11:42.833,0:11:45.398
It doesn't just kill everybody,

0:11:45.398,0:11:49.262
it mangles the bodies beyond all recognition.

0:11:49.262,0:11:51.583
Nobody can say who was inside,

0:11:51.583,0:11:54.754
nobody can say where they were sitting.

0:11:54.754,0:11:56.993
The bodies can't be properly buried.

0:11:56.993,0:12:00.836
It's one tragedy compounding another.

0:12:00.836,0:12:03.540
Simonides, standing outside,

0:12:03.540,0:12:05.671
the sole survivor amid the wreckage,

0:12:05.671,0:12:09.307
closes his eyes and has this realization,

0:12:09.307,0:12:11.845
which is that in his mind's eye,

0:12:11.845,0:12:16.990
he can see where each of the guests at the banquet had been sitting.

0:12:16.990,0:12:19.333
And he takes the relatives by the hand

0:12:19.333,0:12:23.391
and guides them each to their loved ones amid the wreckage.

0:12:23.391,0:12:26.655
What Simonides figured out at that moment

0:12:26.655,0:12:30.088
is something that I think we all kind of intuitively know,

0:12:30.088,0:12:32.500
which is that, as bad as we are

0:12:32.500,0:12:35.394
at remembering names and phone numbers

0:12:35.394,0:12:38.052
and word-for-word instructions from our colleagues,

0:12:38.052,0:12:43.542
we have really exceptional visual and spatial memories.

0:12:43.542,0:12:47.138
If I asked you to recount the first 10 words

0:12:47.138,0:12:49.602
of the story that I just told you about Simonides,

0:12:49.602,0:12:52.090
chances are you would have a tough time with it.

0:12:52.090,0:12:54.404
But I would wager

0:12:54.404,0:12:57.087
that if I asked you to recall

0:12:57.087,0:13:01.643
who is sitting on top of a talking tan horse

0:13:01.643,0:13:03.641
in your foyer right now,

0:13:03.641,0:13:05.966
you would be able to see that.

0:13:05.966,0:13:08.496
The idea behind the memory palace

0:13:08.496,0:13:13.129
is to create this imagined edifice in your mind's eye

0:13:13.129,0:13:14.875
and populate it with images

0:13:14.875,0:13:17.083
of the things that you want to remember --

0:13:17.083,0:13:20.412
the crazier, weirder, more bizarre,

0:13:20.412,0:13:24.012
funnier, raunchier, stinkier the image is,

0:13:24.012,0:13:26.887
the more unforgettable it's likely to be.

0:13:26.887,0:13:29.721
This is advice that goes back 2,000-plus years

0:13:29.721,0:13:32.506
to the earliest Latin memory treatises.

0:13:32.506,0:13:34.335
So how does this work?

0:13:34.335,0:13:36.875
Let's say that you've been invited

0:13:36.875,0:13:40.681
to TED center stage to give a speech

0:13:40.681,0:13:43.215
and you want to do it from memory,

0:13:43.215,0:13:48.260
and you want to do it the way that Cicero would have done it

0:13:48.260,0:13:52.919
if he had been invited to TEDxRome 2,000 years ago.

0:13:52.919,0:13:55.177
What you might do

0:13:55.177,0:14:00.396
is picture yourself at the front door of your house.

0:14:00.396,0:14:02.438
And you'd come up with some sort

0:14:02.438,0:14:05.946
of an absolutely crazy, ridiculous, unforgettable image

0:14:05.946,0:14:08.929
to remind you that the first thing you want to talk about

0:14:08.929,0:14:11.721
is this totally bizarre contest.

0:14:11.721,0:14:14.554
And then you'd go inside your house,

0:14:14.554,0:14:17.406
and you would see an image of Cookie Monster

0:14:17.406,0:14:19.293
on top of Mister Ed.

0:14:19.293,0:14:20.562
And that would remind you

0:14:20.562,0:14:23.736
that you would want to then introduce your friend Ed Cook.

0:14:23.736,0:14:26.400
And then you'd see an image of Britney Spears

0:14:26.400,0:14:29.212
to remind you of this funny anecdote you want to tell.

0:14:29.212,0:14:30.884
And you go into your kitchen,

0:14:30.884,0:14:32.729
and the fourth topic you were going to talk about

0:14:32.729,0:14:35.667
was this strange journey that you went on for a year,

0:14:35.667,0:14:40.631
and you have some friends to help you remember that.

0:14:40.631,0:14:44.850
This is how Roman orators memorized their speeches --

0:14:44.850,0:14:48.244
not word-for-word, which is just going to screw you up,

0:14:48.244,0:14:50.656
but topic-for-topic.

0:14:50.656,0:14:53.563
In fact, the phrase "topic sentence,"

0:14:53.563,0:14:56.863
that comes from the Greek word "topos,"

0:14:56.863,0:14:58.583
which means "place."

0:14:58.583,0:15:00.150
That's a vestige

0:15:00.150,0:15:02.470
of when people used to think about oratory and rhetoric

0:15:02.470,0:15:04.708
in these sorts of spatial terms.

0:15:04.708,0:15:06.645
The phrase "in the first place,"

0:15:06.645,0:15:10.068
that's like in the first place of your memory palace.

0:15:10.068,0:15:12.048
I thought this was just fascinating,

0:15:12.048,0:15:13.948
and I got really into it.

0:15:13.948,0:15:16.696
And I went to a few more of these memory contests.

0:15:16.696,0:15:19.257
And I had this notion that I might write something longer

0:15:19.257,0:15:22.550
about this subculture of competitive memorizers.

0:15:22.550,0:15:24.577
But there was a problem.

0:15:24.577,0:15:27.325
The problem was that a memory contest

0:15:27.325,0:15:31.054
is a pathologically boring event.

0:15:31.054,0:15:33.660
(Laughter)

0:15:33.660,0:15:38.210
Truly, it is like a bunch of people sitting around taking the SATs.

0:15:38.210,0:15:39.904
I mean, the most dramatic it gets

0:15:39.904,0:15:41.283
is when somebody starts massaging their temples.

0:15:41.283,0:15:44.321
And I'm a journalist, I need something to write about.

0:15:44.321,0:15:48.098
I know that there's this incredible stuff happening in these people's minds,

0:15:48.098,0:15:50.198
but I don't have access to it.

0:15:50.198,0:15:52.917
And I realized, if I was going to tell this story,

0:15:52.917,0:15:55.667
I needed to walk in their shoes a little bit.

0:15:55.667,0:15:59.248
And so I started trying to spend 15 or 20 minutes

0:15:59.248,0:16:02.083
every morning before I sat down with my New York Times

0:16:02.083,0:16:04.604
just trying to remember something.

0:16:04.604,0:16:06.273
Maybe it was a poem.

0:16:06.273,0:16:08.312
Maybe it was names from an old yearbook

0:16:08.312,0:16:10.571
that I bought at a flea market.

0:16:10.571,0:16:16.067
And I found that this was shockingly fun.

0:16:16.067,0:16:18.145
I never would have expected that.

0:16:18.145,0:16:21.508
It was fun because this is actually not about training your memory.

0:16:21.508,0:16:24.546
What you're doing is you're trying to get better and better and better

0:16:24.546,0:16:26.975
at creating, at dreaming up,

0:16:26.975,0:16:29.869
these utterly ludicrous, raunchy, hilarious

0:16:29.869,0:16:33.994
and hopefully unforgettable images in your mind's eye.

0:16:33.994,0:16:35.577
And I got pretty into it.

0:16:35.577,0:16:42.234
This is me wearing my standard competitive memorizer's training kit.

0:16:42.234,0:16:44.200
It's a pair of earmuffs

0:16:44.200,0:16:47.609
and a set of safety goggles that have been masked over

0:16:47.609,0:16:50.282
except for two small pinholes,

0:16:50.282,0:16:55.608
because distraction is the competitive memorizer's greatest enemy.

0:16:55.608,0:17:01.375
I ended up coming back to that same contest that I had covered a year earlier.

0:17:01.375,0:17:03.481
And I had this notion that I might enter it,

0:17:03.481,0:17:06.783
sort of as an experiment in participatory journalism.

0:17:06.783,0:17:11.304
It'd make, I thought, maybe a nice epilogue to all my research.

0:17:11.304,0:17:15.042
Problem was the experiment went haywire.

0:17:15.042,0:17:17.779
I won the contest,

0:17:17.779,0:17:20.882
which really wasn't supposed to happen.

0:17:20.882,0:17:26.731
(Applause)

0:17:26.731,0:17:28.436
Now it is nice

0:17:28.436,0:17:31.263
to be able to memorize speeches

0:17:31.263,0:17:34.357
and phone numbers and shopping lists,

0:17:34.357,0:17:37.133
but it's actually kind of beside the point.

0:17:37.133,0:17:39.331
These are just tricks.

0:17:39.331,0:17:41.333
They are tricks that work

0:17:41.333,0:17:44.516
because they're based on some pretty basic principles

0:17:44.516,0:17:46.292
about how our brains work.

0:17:46.292,0:17:50.244
And you don't have to be building memory palaces

0:17:50.244,0:17:52.250
or memorizing packs of playing cards

0:17:52.250,0:17:54.263
to benefit from a little bit of insight

0:17:54.263,0:17:56.907
about how your mind works.

0:17:56.907,0:17:58.700
We often talk about people with great memories

0:17:58.700,0:18:01.000
as though it were some sort of an innate gift,

0:18:01.000,0:18:02.890
but that is not the case.

0:18:02.890,0:18:06.658
Great memories are learned.

0:18:06.658,0:18:10.127
At the most basic level, we remember when we pay attention.

0:18:10.127,0:18:13.333
We remember when we are deeply engaged.

0:18:13.333,0:18:14.854
We remember when we are able

0:18:14.854,0:18:17.625
to take a piece of information and experience

0:18:17.625,0:18:19.731
and figure out why it is meaningful to us,

0:18:19.731,0:18:22.154
why it is significant, why it's colorful,

0:18:22.169,0:18:25.098
when we're able to transform it in some way

0:18:25.098,0:18:26.592
that it makes sense

0:18:26.592,0:18:28.819
in the light of all of the other things floating around in our minds,

0:18:28.819,0:18:34.079
when we're able to transform Bakers into bakers.

0:18:34.079,0:18:36.505
The memory palace, these memory techniques,

0:18:36.505,0:18:38.375
they're just shortcuts.

0:18:38.375,0:18:40.940
In fact, they're not even really shortcuts.

0:18:40.940,0:18:44.343
They work because they make you work.

0:18:44.343,0:18:48.283
They force a kind of depth of processing,

0:18:48.283,0:18:49.804
a kind of mindfulness,

0:18:49.804,0:18:54.032
that most of us don't normally walk around exercising.

0:18:54.032,0:18:56.594
But there actually are no shortcuts.

0:18:56.594,0:18:59.450
This is how stuff is made memorable.

0:18:59.450,0:19:03.593
And I think if there's one thing that I want to leave you with,

0:19:03.593,0:19:06.327
it's what E.P.,

0:19:06.327,0:19:10.125
the amnesic who couldn't even remember that he had a memory problem,

0:19:10.125,0:19:11.615
left me with,

0:19:11.615,0:19:13.713
which is the notion

0:19:13.713,0:19:18.750
that our lives are the sum of our memories.

0:19:18.750,0:19:24.583
How much are we willing to lose

0:19:24.583,0:19:28.250
from our already short lives

0:19:28.250,0:19:35.210
by losing ourselves in our Blackberries, our iPhones,

0:19:35.210,0:19:39.008
by not paying attention to the human being across from us

0:19:39.008,0:19:40.583
who is talking with us,

0:19:40.583,0:19:42.654
by being so lazy that we're not willing

0:19:42.654,0:19:46.344
to process deeply?

0:19:46.344,0:19:48.788
I learned firsthand

0:19:48.788,0:19:52.185
that there are incredible memory capacities

0:19:52.185,0:19:54.188
latent in all of us.

0:19:54.188,0:19:57.585
But if you want to live a memorable life,

0:19:57.585,0:19:59.971
you have to be the kind of person

0:19:59.971,0:20:02.937
who remembers to remember.

0:20:02.937,0:20:04.706
Thank you.

0:20:04.706,0:20:07.796
(Applause)