WEBVTT

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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,

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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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(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.

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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 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,
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 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,

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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?"

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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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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,

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the 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
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,

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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 in Latin,

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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.

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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,
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.

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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
from all of the other memories

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floating around in your skull.

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But the common noun "baker" --
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
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
in the light of all the other things

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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,
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,

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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
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 of the story

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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
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,

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you would be able to see that.

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The idea behind the memory palace

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

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and populate it with images
of the things that you want to remember --

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the crazier, weirder, more bizarre,

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funnier, raunchier, stinkier the image is,

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the more unforgettable it's likely to be.

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

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to the earliest Latin memory treatises.

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So how does this work?

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Let's say that you've been invited
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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(Laughter)

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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
of crazy, ridiculous, unforgettable image,

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

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is this totally bizarre contest.

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(Laughter)

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And then you'd go inside your house,

00:14:14.554 --> 00:14:19.269
and you would see an image
of Cookie Monster on top of Mister Ed.

00:14:19.293 --> 00:14:20.538
And that would remind you

00:14:20.562 --> 00:14:23.439
that you would want to then
introduce your friend Ed Cook.

00:14:23.933 --> 00:14:26.376
And then you'd see
an image of Britney Spears

00:14:26.400 --> 00:14:29.188
to remind you of this funny
anecdote you want to tell.

00:14:29.212 --> 00:14:30.717
And you'd go into your kitchen,

00:14:30.741 --> 00:14:33.073
and the fourth topic
you were going to talk about

00:14:33.097 --> 00:14:35.643
was this strange journey
that you went on for a year,

00:14:35.667 --> 00:14:38.976
and you'd have some friends
to help you remember that.

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This is how Roman orators
memorized their speeches --

00:14:44.850 --> 00:14:48.147
not word-for-word, which is just
going to screw you up,

00:14:48.171 --> 00:14:50.234
but topic-for-topic.

00:14:50.877 --> 00:14:53.162
In fact, the phrase "topic sentence" --

00:14:54.733 --> 00:14:57.178
that comes from the Greek word "topos,"

00:14:57.202 --> 00:14:58.559
which means "place."

00:14:58.583 --> 00:15:02.770
That's a vestige of when people used
to think about oratory and rhetoric

00:15:02.794 --> 00:15:04.684
in these sorts of spatial terms.

00:15:04.708 --> 00:15:07.014
The phrase "in the first place,"

00:15:07.038 --> 00:15:09.739
that's like "in the first place
of your memory palace."

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I thought this was just fascinating,

00:15:12.357 --> 00:15:13.890
and I got really into it.

00:15:13.914 --> 00:15:16.672
And I went to a few more
of these memory contests,

00:15:16.696 --> 00:15:19.411
and I had this notion
that I might write something longer

00:15:19.435 --> 00:15:22.292
about this subculture
of competitive memorizers.

00:15:22.760 --> 00:15:24.030
But there was a problem.

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The problem was that a memory contest

00:15:27.649 --> 00:15:30.881
is a pathologically boring event.

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(Laughter)

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

00:15:38.633 --> 00:15:40.340
I mean, the most dramatic it gets

00:15:40.364 --> 00:15:42.673
is when somebody
starts massaging their temples.

00:15:42.697 --> 00:15:45.244
And I'm a journalist,
I need something to write about.

00:15:45.268 --> 00:15:48.696
I know that there's incredible stuff
happening in these people's minds,

00:15:48.720 --> 00:15:50.465
but I don't have access to it.

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00:15:50.489 --> 00:15:53.640
And I realized, if I was going
to tell this story,

00:15:53.664 --> 00:15:55.822
I needed to walk
in their shoes a little bit.

00:15:56.482 --> 00:15:59.573
And so I started trying
to spend 15 or 20 minutes

00:15:59.597 --> 00:16:02.335
every morning, before I sat
down with my New York Times,

00:16:02.359 --> 00:16:04.509
just trying to remember something.

00:16:04.929 --> 00:16:06.530
Maybe it was a poem,

00:16:06.554 --> 00:16:10.262
maybe it was names from an old yearbook
that I bought at a flea market.

00:16:11.244 --> 00:16:16.041
And I found that this was shockingly fun.

00:16:16.739 --> 00:16:18.319
I never would have expected that.

00:16:18.652 --> 00:16:21.875
It was fun because this is actually
not about training your memory.

00:16:21.899 --> 00:16:24.895
What you're doing, is you're trying
to get better and better

00:16:24.919 --> 00:16:26.951
at creating, at dreaming up,

00:16:26.975 --> 00:16:30.361
these utterly ludicrous,
raunchy, hilarious,

00:16:30.385 --> 00:16:33.462
and hopefully unforgettable
images in your mind's eye.

00:16:33.994 --> 00:16:35.553
And I got pretty into it.

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This is me wearing my standard
competitive memorizer's training kit.

NOTE Paragraph

00:16:41.538 --> 00:16:42.751
(Laughter)

NOTE Paragraph

00:16:42.775 --> 00:16:44.176
It's a pair of earmuffs

00:16:44.200 --> 00:16:48.152
and a set of safety goggles
that have been masked over

00:16:48.176 --> 00:16:50.258
except for two small pinholes,

00:16:50.282 --> 00:16:55.470
because distraction is the competitive
memorizer's greatest enemy.

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I ended up coming back
to that same contest

00:16:59.673 --> 00:17:01.514
that I had covered a year earlier,

00:17:01.538 --> 00:17:03.664
and I had this notion
that I might enter it,

00:17:03.688 --> 00:17:06.989
sort of as an experiment
in participatory journalism.

00:17:07.537 --> 00:17:10.655
It'd make, I thought, maybe
a nice epilogue to all my research.

00:17:11.105 --> 00:17:14.494
Problem was, the experiment went haywire.

00:17:15.248 --> 00:17:16.423
I won the contest --

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00:17:16.447 --> 00:17:17.551
(Laughter)

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00:17:17.575 --> 00:17:20.447
which really wasn't supposed to happen.

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(Applause)

NOTE Paragraph

00:17:26.731 --> 00:17:31.239
Now, it is nice to be able
to memorize speeches

00:17:31.263 --> 00:17:35.362
and phone numbers and shopping lists,

00:17:35.386 --> 00:17:37.465
but it's actually kind
of beside the point.

00:17:37.902 --> 00:17:39.073
These are just tricks.

00:17:39.746 --> 00:17:44.492
They work because they're based
on some pretty basic principles

00:17:44.516 --> 00:17:46.268
about how our brains work.

00:17:46.803 --> 00:17:50.220
And you don't have to be
building memory palaces

00:17:50.244 --> 00:17:52.482
or memorizing packs of playing cards

00:17:52.506 --> 00:17:56.883
to benefit from a little bit of insight
about how your mind works.

NOTE Paragraph

00:17:56.907 --> 00:17:59.098
We often talk about people
with great memories

00:17:59.122 --> 00:18:01.271
as though it were some sort
of an innate gift,

00:18:01.295 --> 00:18:02.574
but that is not the case.

00:18:03.605 --> 00:18:05.581
Great memories are learned.

00:18:06.835 --> 00:18:10.103
At the most basic level,
we remember when we pay attention.

00:18:10.761 --> 00:18:13.435
We remember when we are deeply engaged.

00:18:13.459 --> 00:18:17.601
We remember when we are able to take
a piece of information and experience,

00:18:17.625 --> 00:18:19.707
and figure out why it is meaningful to us,

00:18:19.731 --> 00:18:22.145
why it is significant, why it's colorful,

00:18:22.169 --> 00:18:26.133
when we're able to transform it
in some way that makes sense

00:18:26.157 --> 00:18:29.497
in the light of all of the other
things floating around in our minds,

00:18:29.521 --> 00:18:33.298
when we're able to transform
Bakers into bakers.

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00:18:35.116 --> 00:18:37.259
The memory palace,
these memory techniques --

00:18:37.283 --> 00:18:38.695
they're just shortcuts.

00:18:38.719 --> 00:18:41.279
In fact, they're not
even really shortcuts.

00:18:41.684 --> 00:18:44.199
They work because they make you work.

00:18:45.017 --> 00:18:48.259
They force a kind of depth of processing,

00:18:48.283 --> 00:18:49.780
a kind of mindfulness,

00:18:49.804 --> 00:18:53.684
that most of us don't normally
walk around exercising.

00:18:54.494 --> 00:18:56.295
But there actually are no shortcuts.

00:18:57.248 --> 00:18:59.280
This is how stuff is made memorable.

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00:19:00.105 --> 00:19:03.731
And I think if there's one thing
that I want to leave you with,

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,

00:19:10.307 --> 00:19:11.504
left me with,

00:19:11.528 --> 00:19:18.044
which is the notion that our lives
are the sum of our memories.

00:19:18.863 --> 00:19:24.829
How much are we willing to lose

00:19:24.853 --> 00:19:28.502
from our already short lives,

00:19:28.526 --> 00:19:34.098
by losing ourselves
in our Blackberries, our iPhones,

00:19:34.122 --> 00:19:38.984
by not paying attention
to the human being across from us

00:19:39.008 --> 00:19:40.559
who is talking with us,

00:19:40.583 --> 00:19:45.265
by being so lazy that we're not
willing to process deeply?

NOTE Paragraph

00:19:47.463 --> 00:19:49.183
I learned firsthand

00:19:49.207 --> 00:19:52.676
that there are incredible
memory capacities

00:19:52.700 --> 00:19:54.716
latent in all of us.

00:19:55.359 --> 00:19:58.182
But if you want to live a memorable life,

00:19:58.206 --> 00:20:00.515
you have to be the kind of person

00:20:00.539 --> 00:20:02.912
who remembers to remember.

NOTE Paragraph

00:20:02.936 --> 00:20:04.088
Thank you.

NOTE Paragraph

00:20:04.112 --> 00:20:07.796
(Applause)