WEBVTT 00:00:00.273 --> 00:00:04.679 I'd like to invite you to close your eyes. NOTE Paragraph 00:00:04.679 --> 00:00:07.996 Imagine yourself standing 00:00:07.996 --> 00:00:11.123 outside the front door of your home. 00:00:11.123 --> 00:00:14.792 I'd like you to notice the color of the door, 00:00:14.792 --> 00:00:18.788 the material that it's made out of. 00:00:18.788 --> 00:00:25.508 Now visualize a pack of overweight nudists on bicycles. 00:00:25.508 --> 00:00:28.708 They are competing in a naked bicycle race, 00:00:28.708 --> 00:00:32.458 and they are headed straight for your front door. 00:00:32.458 --> 00:00:34.408 I need you to actually see this. 00:00:34.408 --> 00:00:37.500 They are pedaling really hard, they're sweaty, 00:00:37.500 --> 00:00:40.404 they're bouncing around a lot. 00:00:40.404 --> 00:00:44.208 And they crash straight into the front door of your home. 00:00:44.208 --> 00:00:48.127 Bicycles fly everywhere, wheels roll past you, 00:00:48.127 --> 00:00:51.958 spokes end up in awkward places. 00:00:51.958 --> 00:00:55.183 Step over the threshold of your door 00:00:55.183 --> 00:00:58.023 into your foyer, your hallway, whatever's on the other side, 00:00:58.023 --> 00:01:01.929 and appreciate the quality of the light. 00:01:01.929 --> 00:01:07.606 The light is shining down on Cookie Monster. 00:01:07.606 --> 00:01:10.792 Cookie Monster is waving at you 00:01:10.792 --> 00:01:13.496 from his perch on top of a tan horse. 00:01:13.496 --> 00:01:15.304 It's a talking horse. 00:01:15.304 --> 00:01:19.837 You can practically feel his blue fur tickling your nose. 00:01:19.837 --> 00:01:24.114 You can smell the oatmeal raisin cookie that he's about to shovel into his mouth. 00:01:24.114 --> 00:01:27.921 Walk past him. Walk past him into your living room. 00:01:27.921 --> 00:01:30.958 In your living room, in full imaginative broadband, 00:01:30.958 --> 00:01:33.770 picture Britney Spears. 00:01:33.770 --> 00:01:39.265 She is scantily clad, she's dancing on your coffee table, 00:01:39.265 --> 00:01:41.809 and she's singing "Hit Me Baby One More Time." 00:01:41.809 --> 00:01:44.731 And then follow me into your kitchen. 00:01:44.731 --> 00:01:49.031 In your kitchen, the floor has been paved over with a yellow brick road 00:01:49.031 --> 00:01:52.725 and out of your oven are coming towards you 00:01:52.725 --> 00:01:54.792 Dorothy, the Tin Man, 00:01:54.792 --> 00:01:57.173 the Scarecrow and the Lion from "The Wizard of Oz," 00:01:57.173 --> 00:02:00.000 hand-in-hand skipping straight towards you. NOTE Paragraph 00:02:00.000 --> 00:02:04.333 Okay. Open your eyes. NOTE Paragraph 00:02:04.333 --> 00:02:07.792 I want to tell you about a very bizarre contest 00:02:07.792 --> 00:02:10.875 that is held every spring in New York City. 00:02:10.875 --> 00:02:14.362 It's called the United States Memory Championship. 00:02:14.362 --> 00:02:17.260 And I had gone to cover this contest a few years back 00:02:17.260 --> 00:02:19.457 as a science journalist 00:02:19.457 --> 00:02:21.792 expecting, I guess, that this was going to be 00:02:21.792 --> 00:02:24.621 like the Superbowl of savants. 00:02:24.621 --> 00:02:28.130 This was a bunch of guys and a few ladies, 00:02:28.130 --> 00:02:32.869 widely varying in both age and hygienic upkeep. NOTE Paragraph 00:02:32.869 --> 00:02:35.150 (Laughter) NOTE Paragraph 00:02:35.150 --> 00:02:39.359 They were memorizing hundreds of random numbers, 00:02:39.359 --> 00:02:40.771 looking at them just once. 00:02:40.771 --> 00:02:45.133 They were memorizing the names of dozens and dozens and dozens of strangers. 00:02:45.133 --> 00:02:48.571 They were memorizing entire poems in just a few minutes. 00:02:48.571 --> 00:02:50.750 They were competing to see who could memorize 00:02:50.750 --> 00:02:54.750 the order of a shuffled pack of playing cards the fastest. 00:02:54.750 --> 00:02:56.594 I was like, this is unbelievable. 00:02:56.594 --> 00:02:59.750 These people must be freaks of nature. NOTE Paragraph 00:02:59.750 --> 00:03:03.375 And I started talking to a few of the competitors. 00:03:03.375 --> 00:03:04.750 This is a guy called Ed Cook 00:03:04.750 --> 00:03:06.317 who had come over from England 00:03:06.317 --> 00:03:08.283 where he had one of the best trained memories. 00:03:08.283 --> 00:03:12.048 And I said to him, "Ed, when did you realize 00:03:12.048 --> 00:03:14.556 that you were a savant?" 00:03:14.556 --> 00:03:17.320 And Ed was like, "I'm not a savant. 00:03:17.320 --> 00:03:19.896 In fact, I have just an average memory. 00:03:19.896 --> 00:03:21.568 Everybody who competes in this contest 00:03:21.568 --> 00:03:24.829 will tell you that they have just an average memory. 00:03:24.829 --> 00:03:26.708 We've all trained ourselves 00:03:26.708 --> 00:03:30.929 to perform these utterly miraculous feats of memory 00:03:30.929 --> 00:03:32.987 using a set of ancient techniques, 00:03:32.987 --> 00:03:36.535 techniques invented 2,500 years ago in Greece, 00:03:36.535 --> 00:03:39.667 the same techniques that Cicero had used 00:03:39.667 --> 00:03:41.527 to memorize his speeches, 00:03:41.527 --> 00:03:45.721 that medieval scholars had used to memorize entire books." 00:03:45.721 --> 00:03:49.437 And I was like, "Whoa. How come I never heard of this before?" NOTE Paragraph 00:03:49.437 --> 00:03:52.156 And we were standing outside the competition hall, 00:03:52.156 --> 00:03:55.833 and Ed, who is a wonderful, brilliant, 00:03:55.833 --> 00:03:58.898 but somewhat eccentric English guy, 00:03:58.898 --> 00:04:03.333 says to me, "Josh, you're an American journalist. 00:04:03.333 --> 00:04:05.439 Do you know Britney Spears?" 00:04:05.439 --> 00:04:10.252 I'm like, "What? No. Why?" 00:04:10.252 --> 00:04:13.333 "Because I really want to teach Britney Spears 00:04:13.333 --> 00:04:15.962 how to memorize the order of a shuffled pack of playing cards 00:04:15.962 --> 00:04:18.208 on U.S. national television. 00:04:18.208 --> 00:04:21.479 It will prove to the world that anybody can do this." NOTE Paragraph 00:04:21.479 --> 00:04:25.893 (Laughter) NOTE Paragraph 00:04:25.893 --> 00:04:29.383 I was like, "Well I'm not Britney Spears, 00:04:29.383 --> 00:04:32.148 but maybe you could teach me. 00:04:32.148 --> 00:04:34.583 I mean, you've got to start somewhere, right?" 00:04:34.583 --> 00:04:38.375 And that was the beginning of a very strange journey for me. NOTE Paragraph 00:04:38.375 --> 00:04:41.279 I ended up spending the better part of the next year 00:04:41.279 --> 00:04:43.375 not only training my memory, 00:04:43.375 --> 00:04:45.125 but also investigating it, 00:04:45.125 --> 00:04:47.231 trying to understand how it works, 00:04:47.231 --> 00:04:49.502 why it sometimes doesn't work 00:04:49.502 --> 00:04:51.987 and what its potential might be. NOTE Paragraph 00:04:51.987 --> 00:04:54.293 I met a host of really interesting people. 00:04:54.293 --> 00:04:56.075 This is a guy called E.P. 00:04:56.075 --> 00:04:58.583 He's an amnesic who had, very possibly, 00:04:58.583 --> 00:05:01.292 the very worst memory in the world. 00:05:01.292 --> 00:05:02.952 His memory was so bad 00:05:02.952 --> 00:05:05.702 that he didn't even remember he had a memory problem, 00:05:05.702 --> 00:05:07.589 which is amazing. 00:05:07.589 --> 00:05:09.304 And he was this incredibly tragic figure, 00:05:09.304 --> 00:05:11.292 but he was a window into the extent 00:05:11.292 --> 00:05:15.102 to which our memories make us who we are. NOTE Paragraph 00:05:15.102 --> 00:05:18.140 The other end of the spectrum: I met this guy. 00:05:18.140 --> 00:05:19.877 This is Kim Peek. 00:05:19.877 --> 00:05:23.364 He was the basis for Dustin Hoffman's character in the movie "Rain Man." 00:05:23.364 --> 00:05:26.046 We spent an afternoon together 00:05:26.046 --> 00:05:29.683 in the Salt Lake City Public Library memorizing phone books, 00:05:29.683 --> 00:05:32.770 which was scintillating. NOTE Paragraph 00:05:32.770 --> 00:05:35.727 (Laughter) NOTE Paragraph 00:05:35.727 --> 00:05:39.157 And I went back and I read a whole host of memory treatises, 00:05:39.157 --> 00:05:42.990 treatises written 2,000-plus years ago 00:05:42.990 --> 00:05:44.896 in Latin in Antiquity 00:05:44.896 --> 00:05:47.233 and then later in the Middle Ages. 00:05:47.233 --> 00:05:49.796 And I learned a whole bunch of really interesting stuff. 00:05:49.796 --> 00:05:53.038 One of the really interesting things that I learned 00:05:53.038 --> 00:05:55.514 is that once upon a time, 00:05:55.514 --> 00:06:01.286 this idea of having a trained, disciplined, cultivated memory 00:06:01.286 --> 00:06:06.314 was not nearly so alien as it would seem to us to be today. 00:06:06.314 --> 00:06:11.071 Once upon a time, people invested in their memories, 00:06:11.071 --> 00:06:16.096 in laboriously furnishing their minds. NOTE Paragraph 00:06:16.096 --> 00:06:18.219 Over the last few millenia 00:06:18.219 --> 00:06:20.965 we've invented a series of technologies -- 00:06:20.965 --> 00:06:23.375 from the alphabet to the scroll 00:06:23.375 --> 00:06:25.694 to the codex, the printing press, photography, 00:06:25.694 --> 00:06:27.608 the computer, the smartphone -- 00:06:27.608 --> 00:06:30.540 that have made it progressively easier and easier 00:06:30.540 --> 00:06:33.125 for us to externalize our memories, 00:06:33.125 --> 00:06:35.367 for us to essentially outsource 00:06:35.367 --> 00:06:39.080 this fundamental human capacity. 00:06:39.080 --> 00:06:42.679 These technologies have made our modern world possible, 00:06:42.679 --> 00:06:44.477 but they've also changed us. 00:06:44.477 --> 00:06:46.227 They've changed us culturally, 00:06:46.227 --> 00:06:49.761 and I would argue that they've changed us cognitively. 00:06:49.761 --> 00:06:52.327 Having little need to remember anymore, 00:06:52.327 --> 00:06:55.444 it sometimes seems like we've forgotten how. NOTE Paragraph 00:06:55.444 --> 00:06:57.183 One of the last places on Earth 00:06:57.183 --> 00:07:00.287 where you still find people passionate about this idea 00:07:00.287 --> 00:07:03.529 of a trained, disciplined, cultivated memory 00:07:03.529 --> 00:07:06.288 is at this totally singular memory contest. 00:07:06.288 --> 00:07:07.604 It's actually not that singular, 00:07:07.604 --> 00:07:09.929 there are contests held all over the world. 00:07:09.929 --> 00:07:14.087 And I was fascinated, I wanted to know how do these guys do it. NOTE Paragraph 00:07:14.087 --> 00:07:18.806 A few years back a group of researchers at University College London 00:07:18.806 --> 00:07:21.583 brought a bunch of memory champions into the lab. 00:07:21.583 --> 00:07:23.089 They wanted to know: 00:07:23.089 --> 00:07:24.456 Do these guys have brains 00:07:24.456 --> 00:07:28.898 that are somehow structurally, anatomically different from the rest of ours? 00:07:28.898 --> 00:07:31.902 The answer was no. 00:07:31.902 --> 00:07:35.006 Are they smarter than the rest of us? 00:07:35.006 --> 00:07:36.717 They gave them a bunch of cognitive tests, 00:07:36.717 --> 00:07:38.987 and the answer was not really. NOTE Paragraph 00:07:38.987 --> 00:07:42.315 There was however one really interesting and telling difference 00:07:42.315 --> 00:07:44.423 between the brains of the memory champions 00:07:44.423 --> 00:07:46.990 and the control subjects that they were comparing them to. 00:07:46.990 --> 00:07:49.667 When they put these guys in an fMRI machine, 00:07:49.667 --> 00:07:51.711 scanned their brains 00:07:51.711 --> 00:07:56.717 while they were memorizing numbers and people's faces and pictures of snowflakes, 00:07:56.717 --> 00:07:59.033 they found that the memory champions 00:07:59.033 --> 00:08:01.277 were lighting up different parts of the brain 00:08:01.277 --> 00:08:03.288 than everyone else. 00:08:03.288 --> 00:08:06.573 Of note, they were using, or they seemed to be using, 00:08:06.573 --> 00:08:10.790 a part of the brain that's involved in spatial memory and navigation. 00:08:10.790 --> 00:08:17.033 Why? And is there something the rest of us can learn from this? NOTE Paragraph 00:08:17.033 --> 00:08:21.233 The sport of competitive memorizing 00:08:21.233 --> 00:08:24.081 is driven by a kind of arms race 00:08:24.081 --> 00:08:27.125 where every year somebody comes up 00:08:27.125 --> 00:08:29.813 with a new way to remember more stuff more quickly, 00:08:29.813 --> 00:08:31.652 and then the rest of the field has to play catchup. NOTE Paragraph 00:08:31.652 --> 00:08:33.500 This is my friend Ben Pridmore, 00:08:33.500 --> 00:08:35.250 three-time world memory champion. 00:08:35.250 --> 00:08:37.083 On his desk in front of him 00:08:37.083 --> 00:08:40.777 are 36 shuffled packs of playing cards 00:08:40.777 --> 00:08:43.525 that he is about to try to memorize in one hour, 00:08:43.525 --> 00:08:47.881 using a technique that he invented and he alone has mastered. 00:08:47.881 --> 00:08:49.792 He used a similar technique 00:08:49.792 --> 00:08:52.234 to memorize the precise order 00:08:52.234 --> 00:08:58.042 of 4,140 random binary digits 00:08:58.042 --> 00:09:00.944 in half an hour. 00:09:00.944 --> 00:09:02.875 Yeah. NOTE Paragraph 00:09:02.875 --> 00:09:06.423 And while there are a whole host of ways 00:09:06.423 --> 00:09:10.000 of remembering stuff in these competitions, 00:09:10.000 --> 00:09:12.892 everything, all of the techniques that are being used, 00:09:12.892 --> 00:09:15.500 ultimately come down to a concept 00:09:15.500 --> 00:09:19.148 that psychologists refer to as elaborative encoding. NOTE Paragraph 00:09:19.148 --> 00:09:21.829 And it's well illustrated by a nifty paradox 00:09:21.829 --> 00:09:23.875 known as the Baker/baker paradox, 00:09:23.875 --> 00:09:25.437 which goes like this: 00:09:25.437 --> 00:09:28.333 If I tell two people to remember the same word, 00:09:28.333 --> 00:09:29.900 if I say to you, 00:09:29.900 --> 00:09:33.527 "Remember that there is a guy named Baker." 00:09:33.527 --> 00:09:35.033 That's his name. 00:09:35.033 --> 00:09:40.819 And I say to you, "Remember that there is a guy who is a baker." 00:09:40.819 --> 00:09:44.061 And I come back to you at some point later on, 00:09:44.061 --> 00:09:47.100 and I say, "Do you remember that word 00:09:47.100 --> 00:09:48.477 that I told you a while back? 00:09:48.477 --> 00:09:50.275 Do you remember what it was?" 00:09:50.275 --> 00:09:53.542 The person who was told his name is Baker 00:09:53.542 --> 00:09:55.861 is less likely to remember the same word 00:09:55.861 --> 00:09:59.712 than the person was told his job is that he is a baker. 00:09:59.712 --> 00:10:02.791 Same word, different amount of remembering; that's weird. 00:10:02.791 --> 00:10:04.768 What's going on here? NOTE Paragraph 00:10:04.768 --> 00:10:09.804 Well the name Baker doesn't actually mean anything to you. 00:10:09.804 --> 00:10:12.095 It is entirely untethered 00:10:12.095 --> 00:10:15.333 from all of the other memories floating around in your skull. 00:10:15.333 --> 00:10:17.223 But the common noun baker, 00:10:17.223 --> 00:10:19.094 we know bakers. 00:10:19.094 --> 00:10:21.123 Bakers wear funny white hats. 00:10:21.123 --> 00:10:22.750 Bakers have flour on their hands. 00:10:22.750 --> 00:10:24.825 Bakers smell good when they come home from work. 00:10:24.825 --> 00:10:26.952 Maybe we even know a baker. 00:10:26.952 --> 00:10:28.363 And when we first hear that word, 00:10:28.363 --> 00:10:31.208 we start putting these associational hooks into it 00:10:31.208 --> 00:10:35.279 that make it easier to fish it back out at some later date. 00:10:35.279 --> 00:10:38.237 The entire art of what is going on 00:10:38.237 --> 00:10:40.352 in these memory contests 00:10:40.352 --> 00:10:43.579 and the entire art of remembering stuff better in everyday life 00:10:43.579 --> 00:10:47.565 is figuring out ways to transform capital B Bakers 00:10:47.565 --> 00:10:49.561 into lower-case B bakers -- 00:10:49.561 --> 00:10:52.948 to take information that is lacking in context, 00:10:52.948 --> 00:10:55.254 in significance, in meaning 00:10:55.254 --> 00:10:56.804 and transform it in some way 00:10:56.804 --> 00:10:58.979 so that it becomes meaningful 00:10:58.979 --> 00:11:03.764 in the light of all the other things that you have in your mind. NOTE Paragraph 00:11:03.764 --> 00:11:07.498 One of the more elaborate techniques for doing this 00:11:07.498 --> 00:11:11.417 dates back 2,500 years to Ancient Greece. 00:11:11.417 --> 00:11:13.395 It came to be known as the memory palace. 00:11:13.395 --> 00:11:16.820 The story behind its creation goes like this: 00:11:16.820 --> 00:11:19.792 There was a poet called Simonides 00:11:19.792 --> 00:11:21.698 who was attending a banquet. 00:11:21.698 --> 00:11:23.946 He was actually the hired entertainment, 00:11:23.946 --> 00:11:26.958 because back then if you wanted to throw a really slamming party, 00:11:26.958 --> 00:11:30.170 you didn't hire a D.J., you hired a poet. 00:11:30.170 --> 00:11:35.040 And he stands up, delivers his poem from memory, walks out the door, 00:11:35.040 --> 00:11:40.152 and at the moment he does, the banquet hall collapses, 00:11:40.152 --> 00:11:42.833 kills everybody inside. 00:11:42.833 --> 00:11:45.398 It doesn't just kill everybody, 00:11:45.398 --> 00:11:49.262 it mangles the bodies beyond all recognition. 00:11:49.262 --> 00:11:51.583 Nobody can say who was inside, 00:11:51.583 --> 00:11:54.754 nobody can say where they were sitting. 00:11:54.754 --> 00:11:56.993 The bodies can't be properly buried. 00:11:56.993 --> 00:12:00.836 It's one tragedy compounding another. 00:12:00.836 --> 00:12:03.540 Simonides, standing outside, 00:12:03.540 --> 00:12:05.671 the sole survivor amid the wreckage, 00:12:05.671 --> 00:12:09.307 closes his eyes and has this realization, 00:12:09.307 --> 00:12:11.845 which is that in his mind's eye, 00:12:11.845 --> 00:12:16.990 he can see where each of the guests at the banquet had been sitting. 00:12:16.990 --> 00:12:19.333 And he takes the relatives by the hand 00:12:19.333 --> 00:12:23.391 and guides them each to their loved ones amid the wreckage. NOTE Paragraph 00:12:23.391 --> 00:12:26.655 What Simonides figured out at that moment 00:12:26.655 --> 00:12:30.088 is something that I think we all kind of intuitively know, 00:12:30.088 --> 00:12:32.500 which is that, as bad as we are 00:12:32.500 --> 00:12:35.394 at remembering names and phone numbers 00:12:35.394 --> 00:12:38.052 and word-for-word instructions from our colleagues, 00:12:38.052 --> 00:12:43.542 we have really exceptional visual and spatial memories. 00:12:43.542 --> 00:12:47.138 If I asked you to recount the first 10 words 00:12:47.138 --> 00:12:49.602 of the story that I just told you about Simonides, 00:12:49.602 --> 00:12:52.090 chances are you would have a tough time with it. 00:12:52.090 --> 00:12:54.404 But I would wager 00:12:54.404 --> 00:12:57.087 that if I asked you to recall 00:12:57.087 --> 00:13:01.643 who is sitting on top of a talking tan horse 00:13:01.643 --> 00:13:03.641 in your foyer right now, 00:13:03.641 --> 00:13:05.966 you would be able to see that. NOTE Paragraph 00:13:05.966 --> 00:13:08.496 The idea behind the memory palace 00:13:08.496 --> 00:13:13.129 is to create this imagined edifice in your mind's eye 00:13:13.129 --> 00:13:14.875 and populate it with images 00:13:14.875 --> 00:13:17.083 of the things that you want to remember -- 00:13:17.083 --> 00:13:20.412 the crazier, weirder, more bizarre, 00:13:20.412 --> 00:13:24.012 funnier, raunchier, stinkier the image is, 00:13:24.012 --> 00:13:26.887 the more unforgettable it's likely to be. 00:13:26.887 --> 00:13:29.721 This is advice that goes back 2,000-plus years 00:13:29.721 --> 00:13:32.506 to the earliest Latin memory treatises. NOTE Paragraph 00:13:32.506 --> 00:13:34.335 So how does this work? 00:13:34.335 --> 00:13:36.875 Let's say that you've been invited 00:13:36.875 --> 00:13:40.681 to TED center stage to give a speech 00:13:40.681 --> 00:13:43.215 and you want to do it from memory, 00:13:43.215 --> 00:13:48.260 and you want to do it the way that Cicero would have done it 00:13:48.260 --> 00:13:52.919 if he had been invited to TEDxRome 2,000 years ago. 00:13:52.919 --> 00:13:55.177 What you might do 00:13:55.177 --> 00:14:00.396 is picture yourself at the front door of your house. 00:14:00.396 --> 00:14:02.438 And you'd come up with some sort 00:14:02.438 --> 00:14:05.946 of an absolutely crazy, ridiculous, unforgettable image 00:14:05.946 --> 00:14:08.929 to remind you that the first thing you want to talk about 00:14:08.929 --> 00:14:11.721 is this totally bizarre contest. 00:14:11.721 --> 00:14:14.554 And then you'd go inside your house, 00:14:14.554 --> 00:14:17.406 and you would see an image of Cookie Monster 00:14:17.406 --> 00:14:19.293 on top of Mister Ed. 00:14:19.293 --> 00:14:20.562 And that would remind you 00:14:20.562 --> 00:14:23.736 that you would want to then introduce your friend Ed Cook. 00:14:23.736 --> 00:14:26.400 And then you'd see an image of Britney Spears 00:14:26.400 --> 00:14:29.212 to remind you of this funny anecdote you want to tell. 00:14:29.212 --> 00:14:30.884 And you go into your kitchen, 00:14:30.884 --> 00:14:32.729 and the fourth topic you were going to talk about 00:14:32.729 --> 00:14:35.667 was this strange journey that you went on for a year, 00:14:35.667 --> 00:14:40.631 and you have some friends to help you remember that. NOTE Paragraph 00:14:40.631 --> 00:14:44.850 This is how Roman orators memorized their speeches -- 00:14:44.850 --> 00:14:48.244 not word-for-word, which is just going to screw you up, 00:14:48.244 --> 00:14:50.656 but topic-for-topic. 00:14:50.656 --> 00:14:53.563 In fact, the phrase "topic sentence," 00:14:53.563 --> 00:14:56.863 that comes from the Greek word "topos," 00:14:56.863 --> 00:14:58.583 which means "place." 00:14:58.583 --> 00:15:00.150 That's a vestige 00:15:00.150 --> 00:15:02.470 of when people used to think about oratory and rhetoric 00:15:02.470 --> 00:15:04.708 in these sorts of spatial terms. 00:15:04.708 --> 00:15:06.645 The phrase "in the first place," 00:15:06.645 --> 00:15:10.068 that's like in the first place of your memory palace. NOTE Paragraph 00:15:10.068 --> 00:15:12.048 I thought this was just fascinating, 00:15:12.048 --> 00:15:13.948 and I got really into it. 00:15:13.948 --> 00:15:16.696 And I went to a few more of these memory contests. 00:15:16.696 --> 00:15:19.257 And I had this notion that I might write something longer 00:15:19.257 --> 00:15:22.550 about this subculture of competitive memorizers. 00:15:22.550 --> 00:15:24.577 But there was a problem. 00:15:24.577 --> 00:15:27.325 The problem was that a memory contest 00:15:27.325 --> 00:15:31.054 is a pathologically boring event. 00:15:31.054 --> 00:15:33.660 (Laughter) 00:15:33.660 --> 00:15:38.210 Truly, it is like a bunch of people sitting around taking the SATs. 00:15:38.210 --> 00:15:39.904 I mean, the most dramatic it gets 00:15:39.904 --> 00:15:41.283 is when somebody starts massaging their temples. 00:15:41.283 --> 00:15:44.321 And I'm a journalist, I need something to write about. 00:15:44.321 --> 00:15:48.098 I know that there's this incredible stuff happening in these people's minds, 00:15:48.098 --> 00:15:50.198 but I don't have access to it. NOTE Paragraph 00:15:50.198 --> 00:15:52.917 And I realized, if I was going to tell this story, 00:15:52.917 --> 00:15:55.667 I needed to walk in their shoes a little bit. 00:15:55.667 --> 00:15:59.248 And so I started trying to spend 15 or 20 minutes 00:15:59.248 --> 00:16:02.083 every morning before I sat down with my New York Times 00:16:02.083 --> 00:16:04.604 just trying to remember something. 00:16:04.604 --> 00:16:06.273 Maybe it was a poem. 00:16:06.273 --> 00:16:08.312 Maybe it was names from an old yearbook 00:16:08.312 --> 00:16:10.571 that I bought at a flea market. 00:16:10.571 --> 00:16:16.067 And I found that this was shockingly fun. 00:16:16.067 --> 00:16:18.145 I never would have expected that. 00:16:18.145 --> 00:16:21.508 It was fun because this is actually not about training your memory. 00:16:21.508 --> 00:16:24.546 What you're doing is you're trying to get better and better and better 00:16:24.546 --> 00:16:26.975 at creating, at dreaming up, 00:16:26.975 --> 00:16:29.869 these utterly ludicrous, raunchy, hilarious 00:16:29.869 --> 00:16:33.994 and hopefully unforgettable images in your mind's eye. 00:16:33.994 --> 00:16:35.577 And I got pretty into it. NOTE Paragraph 00:16:35.577 --> 00:16:42.234 This is me wearing my standard competitive memorizer's training kit. 00:16:42.234 --> 00:16:44.200 It's a pair of earmuffs 00:16:44.200 --> 00:16:47.609 and a set of safety goggles that have been masked over 00:16:47.609 --> 00:16:50.282 except for two small pinholes, 00:16:50.282 --> 00:16:55.608 because distraction is the competitive memorizer's greatest enemy. NOTE Paragraph 00:16:55.608 --> 00:17:01.375 I ended up coming back to that same contest that I had covered a year earlier. 00:17:01.375 --> 00:17:03.481 And I had this notion that I might enter it, 00:17:03.481 --> 00:17:06.783 sort of as an experiment in participatory journalism. 00:17:06.783 --> 00:17:11.304 It'd make, I thought, maybe a nice epilogue to all my research. 00:17:11.304 --> 00:17:15.042 Problem was the experiment went haywire. 00:17:15.042 --> 00:17:17.779 I won the contest, 00:17:17.779 --> 00:17:20.882 which really wasn't supposed to happen. NOTE Paragraph 00:17:20.882 --> 00:17:26.731 (Applause) NOTE Paragraph 00:17:26.731 --> 00:17:28.436 Now it is nice 00:17:28.436 --> 00:17:31.263 to be able to memorize speeches 00:17:31.263 --> 00:17:34.357 and phone numbers and shopping lists, 00:17:34.357 --> 00:17:37.133 but it's actually kind of beside the point. 00:17:37.133 --> 00:17:39.331 These are just tricks. 00:17:39.331 --> 00:17:41.333 They are tricks that work 00:17:41.333 --> 00:17:44.516 because they're based on some pretty basic principles 00:17:44.516 --> 00:17:46.292 about how our brains work. 00:17:46.292 --> 00:17:50.244 And you don't have to be building memory palaces 00:17:50.244 --> 00:17:52.250 or memorizing packs of playing cards 00:17:52.250 --> 00:17:54.263 to benefit from a little bit of insight 00:17:54.263 --> 00:17:56.907 about how your mind works. NOTE Paragraph 00:17:56.907 --> 00:17:58.700 We often talk about people with great memories 00:17:58.700 --> 00:18:01.000 as though it were some sort of an innate gift, 00:18:01.000 --> 00:18:02.890 but that is not the case. 00:18:02.890 --> 00:18:06.658 Great memories are learned. 00:18:06.658 --> 00:18:10.127 At the most basic level, we remember when we pay attention. 00:18:10.127 --> 00:18:13.333 We remember when we are deeply engaged. 00:18:13.333 --> 00:18:14.854 We remember when we are able 00:18:14.854 --> 00:18:17.625 to take a piece of information and experience 00:18:17.625 --> 00:18:19.731 and figure out why it is meaningful to us, 00:18:19.731 --> 00:18:22.154 why it is significant, why it's colorful, 00:18:22.169 --> 00:18:25.098 when we're able to transform it in some way 00:18:25.098 --> 00:18:26.592 that it makes sense 00:18:26.592 --> 00:18:28.819 in the light of all of the other things floating around in our minds, 00:18:28.819 --> 00:18:34.079 when we're able to transform Bakers into bakers. NOTE Paragraph 00:18:34.079 --> 00:18:36.505 The memory palace, these memory techniques, 00:18:36.505 --> 00:18:38.375 they're just shortcuts. 00:18:38.375 --> 00:18:40.940 In fact, they're not even really shortcuts. 00:18:40.940 --> 00:18:44.343 They work because they make you work. 00:18:44.343 --> 00:18:48.283 They force a kind of depth of processing, 00:18:48.283 --> 00:18:49.804 a kind of mindfulness, 00:18:49.804 --> 00:18:54.032 that most of us don't normally walk around exercising. 00:18:54.032 --> 00:18:56.594 But there actually are no shortcuts. 00:18:56.594 --> 00:18:59.450 This is how stuff is made memorable. NOTE Paragraph 00:18:59.450 --> 00:19:03.593 And I think if there's one thing that I want to leave you with, 00:19:03.593 --> 00:19:06.327 it's what E.P., 00:19:06.327 --> 00:19:10.125 the amnesic who couldn't even remember that he had a memory problem, 00:19:10.125 --> 00:19:11.615 left me with, 00:19:11.615 --> 00:19:13.713 which is the notion 00:19:13.713 --> 00:19:18.750 that our lives are the sum of our memories. 00:19:18.750 --> 00:19:24.583 How much are we willing to lose 00:19:24.583 --> 00:19:28.250 from our already short lives 00:19:28.250 --> 00:19:35.210 by losing ourselves in our Blackberries, our iPhones, 00:19:35.210 --> 00:19:39.008 by not paying attention to the human being across from us 00:19:39.008 --> 00:19:40.583 who is talking with us, 00:19:40.583 --> 00:19:42.654 by being so lazy that we're not willing 00:19:42.654 --> 00:19:46.344 to process deeply? NOTE Paragraph 00:19:46.344 --> 00:19:48.788 I learned firsthand 00:19:48.788 --> 00:19:52.185 that there are incredible memory capacities 00:19:52.185 --> 00:19:54.188 latent in all of us. 00:19:54.188 --> 00:19:57.585 But if you want to live a memorable life, 00:19:57.585 --> 00:19:59.971 you have to be the kind of person 00:19:59.971 --> 00:20:02.937 who remembers to remember. NOTE Paragraph 00:20:02.937 --> 00:20:04.706 Thank you. NOTE Paragraph 00:20:04.706 --> 00:20:07.796 (Applause)