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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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The 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.

263
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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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00:13:14,875 --> 00:13:17,083
of the things that you want to remember --

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the crazier, weirder, more bizarre,

268
00:13:20,412 --> 00:13:24,012
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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00:14:05,946 --> 00:14:08,929
to remind you that the first thing you want to talk about

283
00:14:08,929 --> 00:14:11,721
is this totally bizarre contest.

284
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And then you'd go inside your house,

285
00:14:14,554 --> 00:14:17,406
and you would see an image of Cookie Monster

286
00:14:17,406 --> 00:14:19,293
on top of Mister Ed.

287
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And that would remind you

288
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that you would want to then introduce your friend Ed Cook.

289
00:14:23,736 --> 00:14:26,400
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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00:14:32,729 --> 00:14:35,667
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.

295
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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,

297
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but topic-for-topic.

298
00:14:50,656 --> 00:14:53,563
In fact, the phrase "topic sentence,"

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that comes from the Greek word "topos,"

300
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which means "place."

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That's a vestige

302
00:15:00,150 --> 00:15:02,470
of when people used to think about oratory and rhetoric

303
00:15:02,470 --> 00:15:04,708
in these sorts of spatial terms.

304
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The phrase "in the first place,"

305
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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
00:15:12,048 --> 00:15:13,948
and I got really into it.

308
00:15:13,948 --> 00:15:16,696
And I went to a few more of these memory contests.

309
00:15:16,696 --> 00:15:19,257
And I had this notion that I might write something longer

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about this subculture of competitive memorizers.

311
00:15:22,550 --> 00:15:24,577
But there was a problem.

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The problem was that a memory contest

313
00:15:27,325 --> 00:15:31,054
is a pathologically boring event.

314
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(Laughter)

315
00:15:33,660 --> 00:15:38,210
Truly, it is like a bunch of people sitting around taking the SATs.

316
00:15:38,210 --> 00:15:39,904
I mean, the most dramatic it gets

317
00:15:39,904 --> 00:15:41,283
is when somebody starts massaging their temples.

318
00:15:41,283 --> 00:15:44,321
And I'm a journalist, I need something to write about.

319
00:15:44,321 --> 00:15:48,098
I know that there's this incredible stuff happening in these people's minds,

320
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but I don't have access to it.

321
00:15:50,198 --> 00:15:52,917
And I realized, if I was going to tell this story,

322
00:15:52,917 --> 00:15:55,667
I needed to walk in their shoes a little bit.

323
00:15:55,667 --> 00:15:59,248
And so I started trying to spend 15 or 20 minutes

324
00:15:59,248 --> 00:16:02,083
every morning before I sat down with my New York Times

325
00:16:02,083 --> 00:16:04,604
just trying to remember something.

326
00:16:04,604 --> 00:16:06,273
Maybe it was a poem.

327
00:16:06,273 --> 00:16:08,312
Maybe it was names from an old yearbook

328
00:16:08,312 --> 00:16:10,571
that I bought at a flea market.

329
00:16:10,571 --> 00:16:16,067
And I found that this was shockingly fun.

330
00:16:16,067 --> 00:16:18,145
I never would have expected that.

331
00:16:18,145 --> 00:16:21,508
It was fun because this is actually not about training your memory.

332
00:16:21,508 --> 00:16:24,546
What you're doing is you're trying to get better and better and better

333
00:16:24,546 --> 00:16:26,975
at creating, at dreaming up,

334
00:16:26,975 --> 00:16:29,869
these utterly ludicrous, raunchy, hilarious

335
00:16:29,869 --> 00:16:33,994
and hopefully unforgettable images in your mind's eye.

336
00:16:33,994 --> 00:16:35,577
And I got pretty into it.

337
00:16:35,577 --> 00:16:42,234
This is me wearing my standard competitive memorizer's training kit.

338
00:16:42,234 --> 00:16:44,200
It's a pair of earmuffs

339
00:16:44,200 --> 00:16:47,609
and a set of safety goggles that have been masked over

340
00:16:47,609 --> 00:16:50,282
except for two small pinholes,

341
00:16:50,282 --> 00:16:55,608
because distraction is the competitive memorizer's greatest enemy.

342
00:16:55,608 --> 00:17:01,375
I ended up coming back to that same contest that I had covered a year earlier.

343
00:17:01,375 --> 00:17:03,481
And I had this notion that I might enter it,

344
00:17:03,481 --> 00:17:06,783
sort of as an experiment in participatory journalism.

345
00:17:06,783 --> 00:17:11,304
It'd make, I thought, maybe a nice epilogue to all my research.

346
00:17:11,304 --> 00:17:15,042
Problem was the experiment went haywire.

347
00:17:15,042 --> 00:17:17,779
I won the contest,

348
00:17:17,779 --> 00:17:20,882
which really wasn't supposed to happen.

349
00:17:20,882 --> 00:17:26,731
(Applause)

350
00:17:26,731 --> 00:17:28,436
Now it is nice

351
00:17:28,436 --> 00:17:31,263
to be able to memorize speeches

352
00:17:31,263 --> 00:17:34,357
and phone numbers and shopping lists,

353
00:17:34,357 --> 00:17:37,133
but it's actually kind of beside the point.

354
00:17:37,133 --> 00:17:39,331
These are just tricks.

355
00:17:39,331 --> 00:17:41,333
They are tricks that work

356
00:17:41,333 --> 00:17:44,516
because they're based on some pretty basic principles

357
00:17:44,516 --> 00:17:46,292
about how our brains work.

358
00:17:46,292 --> 00:17:50,244
And you don't have to be building memory palaces

359
00:17:50,244 --> 00:17:52,250
or memorizing packs of playing cards

360
00:17:52,250 --> 00:17:54,263
to benefit from a little bit of insight

361
00:17:54,263 --> 00:17:56,907
about how your mind works.

362
00:17:56,907 --> 00:17:58,700
We often talk about people with great memories

363
00:17:58,700 --> 00:18:01,000
as though it were some sort of an innate gift,

364
00:18:01,000 --> 00:18:02,890
but that is not the case.

365
00:18:02,890 --> 00:18:06,658
Great memories are learned.

366
00:18:06,658 --> 00:18:10,127
At the most basic level, we remember when we pay attention.

367
00:18:10,127 --> 00:18:13,333
We remember when we are deeply engaged.

368
00:18:13,333 --> 00:18:14,854
We remember when we are able

369
00:18:14,854 --> 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 --> 00:18:25,098
when we're able to transform it in some way

373
00:18:25,098 --> 00:18:26,592
that it makes sense

374
00:18:26,592 --> 00:18:28,819
in the light of all of the other things floating around in our minds,

375
00:18:28,819 --> 00:18:34,079
when we're able to transform Bakers into bakers.

376
00:18:34,079 --> 00:18:36,505
The memory palace, these memory techniques,

377
00:18:36,505 --> 00:18:38,375
they're just shortcuts.

378
00:18:38,375 --> 00:18:40,940
In fact, they're not even really shortcuts.

379
00:18:40,940 --> 00:18:44,343
They work because they make you work.

380
00:18:44,343 --> 00:18:48,283
They force a kind of depth of processing,

381
00:18:48,283 --> 00:18:49,804
a kind of mindfulness,

382
00:18:49,804 --> 00:18:54,032
that most of us don't normally walk around exercising.

383
00:18:54,032 --> 00:18:56,594
But there actually are no shortcuts.

384
00:18:56,594 --> 00:18:59,450
This is how stuff is made memorable.

385
00:18:59,450 --> 00:19:03,593
And I think if there's one thing that I want to leave you with,

386
00:19:03,593 --> 00:19:06,327
it's what E.P.,

387
00:19:06,327 --> 00:19:10,125
the amnesic who couldn't even remember that he had a memory problem,

388
00:19:10,125 --> 00:19:11,615
left me with,

389
00:19:11,615 --> 00:19:13,713
which is the notion

390
00:19:13,713 --> 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 --> 00:19:28,250
from our already short lives

393
00:19:28,250 --> 00:19:35,210
by losing ourselves in our Blackberries, our iPhones,

394
00:19:35,210 --> 00:19:39,008
by not paying attention to the human being across from us

395
00:19:39,008 --> 00:19:40,583
who is talking with us,

396
00:19:40,583 --> 00:19:42,654
by being so lazy that we're not willing

397
00:19:42,654 --> 00:19:46,344
to process deeply?

398
00:19:46,344 --> 00:19:48,788
I learned firsthand

399
00:19:48,788 --> 00:19:52,185
that there are incredible memory capacities

400
00:19:52,185 --> 00:19:54,188
latent in all of us.

401
00:19:54,188 --> 00:19:57,585
But if you want to live a memorable life,

402
00:19:57,585 --> 00:19:59,971
you have to be the kind of person

403
00:19:59,971 --> 00:20:02,937
who remembers to remember.

404
00:20:02,937 --> 00:20:04,706
Thank you.

405
00:20:04,706 --> 00:20:07,796
(Applause)