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

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Imagine yourself standing
outside the front door of your home.

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

4
00:00:14,792 --> 00:00:16,773
the material that it's made out of.

5
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Now visualize a pack
of overweight nudists on bicycles.

6
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(Laughter)

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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
into your foyer, your hallway,

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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
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.

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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 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.

35
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I want to tell you
about a very bizarre contest

36
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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.

38
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And I had gone to cover
this contest a few years back

39
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as a science journalist,

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expecting, I guess, that this was going
to be 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,

45
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looking at them just once.

46
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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.

48
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They were competing
to see who could memorize

49
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the order of a shuffled pack
of playing cards the fastest.

50
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I was like, this is unbelievable.

51
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These people must be freaks of nature.

52
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And I started talking
to a few of the competitors.

53
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This is a guy called Ed Cook,
who had come over from England,

54
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where he had one
of the best-trained memories.

55
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And I said to him,
"Ed, when did you realize

56
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that you were a savant?"

57
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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 will tell you

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that they have just an average memory.

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We've all trained ourselves 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 to memorize his speeches,

65
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that medieval scholars had used
to memorize entire books."

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And I said, "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,
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?"

71
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I'm like, "What? No. Why?"

72
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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,

78
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but maybe you could teach me.

79
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I mean, you've got to start
somewhere, right?"

80
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And that was the beginning
of a very strange journey for me.

81
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I ended up spending
the better part of the next year

82
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not only training my memory,

83
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but also investigating it,

84
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trying to understand how it works,

85
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why it sometimes doesn't work,

86
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and what its potential might be.

87
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And 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,

90
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the worst memory in the world.

91
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His memory was so bad,

92
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that he didn't even remember
he had a memory problem,

93
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which is amazing.

94
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And he was this incredibly tragic figure,

95
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but he was a window into the extent
to which our memories make us who we are.

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At the other end
of the spectrum, I met this guy.

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This is Kim Peek, he was the basis
for Dustin Hoffman's character

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in the movie "Rain Man."

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We spent an afternoon together
in the Salt Lake City Public Library

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memorizing phone books,

101
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which was scintillating.

102
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(Laughter)

103
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And I went back and I read
a whole host of memory treatises,

104
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treatises written 2,000-plus
years ago in Latin,

105
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in antiquity, 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
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
where you still find

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people passionate about this idea 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
that are somehow structurally,

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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,
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
while they were memorizing numbers

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and people's faces
and pictures of snowflakes,

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they found that the memory champions 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?

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

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The sport of competitive memorizing
is driven by a kind of arms race where,

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every year, somebody comes up with a new
way to remember more stuff more quickly,

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and then the rest of the field
has to play catch-up.

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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
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
of 4,140 random binary digits

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in half an hour.

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(Laughter)

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Yeah.

166
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And while there are a whole host of ways

167
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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,
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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Okay?

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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
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 a baker.

185
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Same word, different amount
of remembering; that's weird.

186
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What's going on here?

187
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Well, the name Baker
doesn't actually mean anything to you.

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It is entirely untethered
from all of the other memories

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floating around in your skull.

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00:10:15,786 --> 00:10:18,940
But the common noun "baker" --
we know bakers.

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Bakers wear funny white hats.

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00:10:21,123 --> 00:10:22,726
Bakers have flour on their hands.

193
00:10:22,750 --> 00:10:25,036
Bakers smell good
when they come home from work.

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Maybe we even know a baker.

195
00:10:27,089 --> 00:10:28,818
And when we first hear that word,

196
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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
in these memory contests,

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00:10:40,352 --> 00:10:44,164
and the entire art of remembering
stuff better in everyday life,

200
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is figuring out ways
to transform capital B Bakers

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00:10:47,973 --> 00:10:49,838
into lower-case B bakers --

202
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to take information
that is lacking in context,

203
00:10:53,174 --> 00:10:55,230
in significance, in meaning,

204
00:10:55,254 --> 00:10:56,780
and transform it in some way,

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00:10:56,804 --> 00:11:01,002
so that it becomes meaningful
in the light of all the other things

206
00:11:01,026 --> 00:11:02,985
that you have in your mind.

207
00:11:04,620 --> 00:11:07,863
One of the more elaborate
techniques for doing this

208
00:11:07,887 --> 00:11:11,088
dates back 2,500 years to Ancient Greece.

209
00:11:11,580 --> 00:11:13,580
It came to be known as the memory palace.

210
00:11:13,968 --> 00:11:16,179
The story behind its creation
goes like this:

211
00:11:17,427 --> 00:11:21,834
There was a poet called Simonides,
who was attending a banquet.

212
00:11:21,858 --> 00:11:23,922
He was actually the hired entertainment,

213
00:11:23,946 --> 00:11:27,042
because back then, if you wanted
to throw a really slamming party,

214
00:11:27,066 --> 00:11:29,674
you didn't hire a D.J., you hired a poet.

215
00:11:30,237 --> 00:11:35,672
And he stands up, delivers his poem
from memory, walks out the door,

216
00:11:35,696 --> 00:11:37,800
and at the moment he does,

217
00:11:37,824 --> 00:11:39,497
the banquet hall collapses.

218
00:11:40,895 --> 00:11:42,809
Kills everybody inside.

219
00:11:43,753 --> 00:11:45,675
It doesn't just kill everybody,

220
00:11:45,699 --> 00:11:48,681
it mangles the bodies
beyond all recognition.

221
00:11:49,793 --> 00:11:52,142
Nobody can say who was inside,

222
00:11:52,166 --> 00:11:54,730
nobody can say where they were sitting.

223
00:11:54,754 --> 00:11:56,969
The bodies can't be properly buried.

224
00:11:56,993 --> 00:12:00,256
It's one tragedy compounding another.

225
00:12:01,613 --> 00:12:03,516
Simonides, standing outside,

226
00:12:03,540 --> 00:12:05,647
the sole survivor amid the wreckage,

227
00:12:05,671 --> 00:12:10,064
closes his eyes and has this realization,

228
00:12:10,088 --> 00:12:12,029
which is that in his mind's eye,

229
00:12:12,053 --> 00:12:16,744
he can see where each of the guests
at the banquet had been sitting.

230
00:12:17,450 --> 00:12:19,562
And he takes the relatives by the hand,

231
00:12:19,586 --> 00:12:22,374
and guides them each
to their loved ones amid the wreckage.

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00:12:23,998 --> 00:12:26,996
What Simonides figured out at that moment,

233
00:12:27,020 --> 00:12:30,219
is something that I think
we all kind of intuitively know,

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which is that, as bad as we are
at remembering names and phone numbers,

235
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and word-for-word instructions
from our colleagues,

236
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we have really exceptional
visual and spatial memories.

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00:12:43,860 --> 00:12:47,583
If I asked you to recount
the first 10 words of the story

238
00:12:47,607 --> 00:12:50,209
that I just told you about Simonides,

239
00:12:50,233 --> 00:12:52,803
chances are you would have
a tough time with it.

240
00:12:52,827 --> 00:12:57,246
But, I would wager
that if I asked you to recall

241
00:12:57,270 --> 00:13:01,967
who is sitting on top
of a talking tan horse

242
00:13:01,991 --> 00:13:04,007
in your foyer right now,

243
00:13:04,031 --> 00:13:05,546
you would be able to see that.

244
00:13:06,498 --> 00:13:08,674
The idea behind the memory palace

245
00:13:08,698 --> 00:13:13,261
is to create this imagined edifice
in your mind's eye,

246
00:13:13,285 --> 00:13:17,348
and populate it with images
of the things that you want to remember --

247
00:13:17,372 --> 00:13:20,617
the crazier, weirder, more bizarre,

248
00:13:20,641 --> 00:13:24,488
funnier, raunchier, stinkier the image is,

249
00:13:24,512 --> 00:13:27,155
the more unforgettable it's likely to be.

250
00:13:27,179 --> 00:13:29,925
This is advice that goes
back 2,000-plus years

251
00:13:29,949 --> 00:13:32,124
to the earliest Latin memory treatises.

252
00:13:32,506 --> 00:13:33,727
So how does this work?

253
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Let's say that you've been invited
to TED center stage to give a speech,

254
00:13:41,280 --> 00:13:43,918
and you want to do it from memory,

255
00:13:43,942 --> 00:13:48,526
and you want to do it the way
that Cicero would have done it,

256
00:13:48,550 --> 00:13:52,065
if he had been invited
to TEDxRome 2,000 years ago.

257
00:13:52,462 --> 00:13:53,660
(Laughter)

258
00:13:53,684 --> 00:13:55,455
What you might do

259
00:13:55,479 --> 00:14:00,009
is picture yourself
at the front door of your house.

260
00:14:01,084 --> 00:14:06,309
And you'd come up with some sort
of crazy, ridiculous, unforgettable image,

261
00:14:06,333 --> 00:14:09,101
to remind you that the first thing
you want to talk about

262
00:14:09,125 --> 00:14:11,383
is this totally bizarre contest.

263
00:14:11,407 --> 00:14:12,541
(Laughter)

264
00:14:12,565 --> 00:14:14,530
And then you'd go inside your house,

265
00:14:14,554 --> 00:14:19,269
and you would see an image
of Cookie Monster on top of Mister Ed.

266
00:14:19,293 --> 00:14:20,538
And that would remind you

267
00:14:20,562 --> 00:14:23,439
that you would want to then
introduce your friend Ed Cook.

268
00:14:23,933 --> 00:14:26,376
And then you'd see
an image of Britney Spears

269
00:14:26,400 --> 00:14:29,188
to remind you of this funny
anecdote you want to tell.

270
00:14:29,212 --> 00:14:30,717
And you'd go into your kitchen,

271
00:14:30,741 --> 00:14:33,073
and the fourth topic
you were going to talk about

272
00:14:33,097 --> 00:14:35,643
was this strange journey
that you went on for a year,

273
00:14:35,667 --> 00:14:38,976
and you'd have some friends
to help you remember that.

274
00:14:41,048 --> 00:14:44,826
This is how Roman orators
memorized their speeches --

275
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not word-for-word, which is just
going to screw you up,

276
00:14:48,171 --> 00:14:50,234
but topic-for-topic.

277
00:14:50,877 --> 00:14:53,162
In fact, the phrase "topic sentence" --

278
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that comes from the Greek word "topos,"

279
00:14:57,202 --> 00:14:58,559
which means "place."

280
00:14:58,583 --> 00:15:02,770
That's a vestige of when people used
to think about oratory and rhetoric

281
00:15:02,794 --> 00:15:04,684
in these sorts of spatial terms.

282
00:15:04,708 --> 00:15:07,014
The phrase "in the first place,"

283
00:15:07,038 --> 00:15:09,739
that's like "in the first place
of your memory palace."

284
00:15:10,611 --> 00:15:12,333
I thought this was just fascinating,

285
00:15:12,357 --> 00:15:13,890
and I got really into it.

286
00:15:13,914 --> 00:15:16,672
And I went to a few more
of these memory contests,

287
00:15:16,696 --> 00:15:19,411
and I had this notion
that I might write something longer

288
00:15:19,435 --> 00:15:22,292
about this subculture
of competitive memorizers.

289
00:15:22,760 --> 00:15:24,030
But there was a problem.

290
00:15:24,577 --> 00:15:27,625
The problem was that a memory contest

291
00:15:27,649 --> 00:15:30,881
is a pathologically boring event.

292
00:15:30,905 --> 00:15:34,064
(Laughter)

293
00:15:34,088 --> 00:15:38,057
Truly, it is like a bunch of people
sitting around taking the SATs --

294
00:15:38,633 --> 00:15:40,340
I mean, the most dramatic it gets

295
00:15:40,364 --> 00:15:42,673
is when somebody
starts massaging their temples.

296
00:15:42,697 --> 00:15:45,244
And I'm a journalist,
I need something to write about.

297
00:15:45,268 --> 00:15:48,696
I know that there's incredible stuff
happening in these people's minds,

298
00:15:48,720 --> 00:15:50,465
but I don't have access to it.

299
00:15:50,489 --> 00:15:53,640
And I realized, if I was going
to tell this story,

300
00:15:53,664 --> 00:15:55,822
I needed to walk
in their shoes a little bit.

301
00:15:56,482 --> 00:15:59,573
And so I started trying
to spend 15 or 20 minutes

302
00:15:59,597 --> 00:16:02,335
every morning, before I sat
down with my New York Times,

303
00:16:02,359 --> 00:16:04,509
just trying to remember something.

304
00:16:04,929 --> 00:16:06,530
Maybe it was a poem,

305
00:16:06,554 --> 00:16:10,262
maybe it was names from an old yearbook
that I bought at a flea market.

306
00:16:11,244 --> 00:16:16,041
And I found that this was shockingly fun.

307
00:16:16,739 --> 00:16:18,319
I never would have expected that.

308
00:16:18,652 --> 00:16:21,875
It was fun because this is actually
not about training your memory.

309
00:16:21,899 --> 00:16:24,895
What you're doing, is you're trying
to get better and better

310
00:16:24,919 --> 00:16:26,951
at creating, at dreaming up,

311
00:16:26,975 --> 00:16:30,361
these utterly ludicrous,
raunchy, hilarious,

312
00:16:30,385 --> 00:16:33,462
and hopefully unforgettable
images in your mind's eye.

313
00:16:33,994 --> 00:16:35,553
And I got pretty into it.

314
00:16:35,577 --> 00:16:41,514
This is me wearing my standard
competitive memorizer's training kit.

315
00:16:41,538 --> 00:16:42,751
(Laughter)

316
00:16:42,775 --> 00:16:44,176
It's a pair of earmuffs

317
00:16:44,200 --> 00:16:48,152
and a set of safety goggles
that have been masked over

318
00:16:48,176 --> 00:16:50,258
except for two small pinholes,

319
00:16:50,282 --> 00:16:55,470
because distraction is the competitive
memorizer's greatest enemy.

320
00:16:56,684 --> 00:16:59,649
I ended up coming back
to that same contest

321
00:16:59,673 --> 00:17:01,514
that I had covered a year earlier,

322
00:17:01,538 --> 00:17:03,664
and I had this notion
that I might enter it,

323
00:17:03,688 --> 00:17:06,989
sort of as an experiment
in participatory journalism.

324
00:17:07,537 --> 00:17:10,655
It'd make, I thought, maybe
a nice epilogue to all my research.

325
00:17:11,105 --> 00:17:14,494
Problem was, the experiment went haywire.

326
00:17:15,248 --> 00:17:16,423
I won the contest --

327
00:17:16,447 --> 00:17:17,551
(Laughter)

328
00:17:17,575 --> 00:17:20,447
which really wasn't supposed to happen.

329
00:17:20,471 --> 00:17:26,707
(Applause)

330
00:17:26,731 --> 00:17:31,239
Now, it is nice to be able
to memorize speeches

331
00:17:31,263 --> 00:17:35,362
and phone numbers and shopping lists,

332
00:17:35,386 --> 00:17:37,465
but it's actually kind
of beside the point.

333
00:17:37,902 --> 00:17:39,073
These are just tricks.

334
00:17:39,746 --> 00:17:44,492
They work because they're based
on some pretty basic principles

335
00:17:44,516 --> 00:17:46,268
about how our brains work.

336
00:17:46,803 --> 00:17:50,220
And you don't have to be
building memory palaces

337
00:17:50,244 --> 00:17:52,482
or memorizing packs of playing cards

338
00:17:52,506 --> 00:17:56,883
to benefit from a little bit of insight
about how your mind works.

339
00:17:56,907 --> 00:17:59,098
We often talk about people
with great memories

340
00:17:59,122 --> 00:18:01,271
as though it were some sort
of an innate gift,

341
00:18:01,295 --> 00:18:02,574
but that is not the case.

342
00:18:03,605 --> 00:18:05,581
Great memories are learned.

343
00:18:06,835 --> 00:18:10,103
At the most basic level,
we remember when we pay attention.

344
00:18:10,761 --> 00:18:13,435
We remember when we are deeply engaged.

345
00:18:13,459 --> 00:18:17,601
We remember when we are able to take
a piece of information and experience,

346
00:18:17,625 --> 00:18:19,707
and figure out why it is meaningful to us,

347
00:18:19,731 --> 00:18:22,145
why it is significant, why it's colorful,

348
00:18:22,169 --> 00:18:26,133
when we're able to transform it
in some way that makes sense

349
00:18:26,157 --> 00:18:29,497
in the light of all of the other
things floating around in our minds,

350
00:18:29,521 --> 00:18:33,298
when we're able to transform
Bakers into bakers.

351
00:18:35,116 --> 00:18:37,259
The memory palace,
these memory techniques --

352
00:18:37,283 --> 00:18:38,695
they're just shortcuts.

353
00:18:38,719 --> 00:18:41,279
In fact, they're not
even really shortcuts.

354
00:18:41,684 --> 00:18:44,199
They work because they make you work.

355
00:18:45,017 --> 00:18:48,259
They force a kind of depth of processing,

356
00:18:48,283 --> 00:18:49,780
a kind of mindfulness,

357
00:18:49,804 --> 00:18:53,684
that most of us don't normally
walk around exercising.

358
00:18:54,494 --> 00:18:56,295
But there actually are no shortcuts.

359
00:18:57,248 --> 00:18:59,280
This is how stuff is made memorable.

360
00:19:00,105 --> 00:19:03,731
And I think if there's one thing
that I want to leave you with,

361
00:19:03,755 --> 00:19:10,283
it's what E.P., the amnesic who couldn't
even remember he had a memory problem,

362
00:19:10,307 --> 00:19:11,504
left me with,

363
00:19:11,528 --> 00:19:18,044
which is the notion that our lives
are the sum of our memories.

364
00:19:18,863 --> 00:19:24,829
How much are we willing to lose

365
00:19:24,853 --> 00:19:28,502
from our already short lives,

366
00:19:28,526 --> 00:19:34,098
by losing ourselves
in our Blackberries, our iPhones,

367
00:19:34,122 --> 00:19:38,984
by not paying attention
to the human being across from us

368
00:19:39,008 --> 00:19:40,559
who is talking with us,

369
00:19:40,583 --> 00:19:45,265
by being so lazy that we're not
willing to process deeply?

370
00:19:47,463 --> 00:19:49,183
I learned firsthand

371
00:19:49,207 --> 00:19:52,676
that there are incredible
memory capacities

372
00:19:52,700 --> 00:19:54,716
latent in all of us.

373
00:19:55,359 --> 00:19:58,182
But if you want to live a memorable life,

374
00:19:58,206 --> 00:20:00,515
you have to be the kind of person

375
00:20:00,539 --> 00:20:02,912
who remembers to remember.

376
00:20:02,936 --> 00:20:04,088
Thank you.

377
00:20:04,112 --> 00:20:07,796
(Applause)