I'd like to invite you to close your eyes.
Imagine yourself standing outside the front door of your home.
I'd like you to notice the color of the door,
the material that it's made out of.
Now visualize a pack of overweight nudists on bicycles.
(Laughter)
They are competing in a naked bicycle race,
and they are headed straight for your front door.
I need you to actually see this.
They are pedaling really hard, they're sweaty,
they're bouncing around a lot.
And they crash straight into the front door of your home.
Bicycles fly everywhere, wheels roll past you,
spokes end up in awkward places.
Step over the threshold of your door into your foyer, your hallway,
and appreciate the quality of the light.
The light is shining down on Cookie Monster.
Cookie Monster is waving at you from his perch on top of a tan horse.
You can practically feel his blue fur tickling your nose.
You can smell the oatmeal raisin cookie that he's about to shovel into his mouth.
Walk past him into your living room.
In your living room, in full imaginative broadband,
She is scantily clad, she's dancing on your coffee table,
and she's singing "Hit Me Baby One More Time."
And then, follow me into your kitchen.
In your kitchen, the floor has been paved over with a yellow brick road,
and out of your oven are coming towards you Dorothy, the Tin Man,
the Scarecrow and the Lion from "The Wizard of Oz,"
hand-in-hand, skipping straight towards you.
I want to tell you about a very bizarre contest
that is held every spring in New York City.
It's called the United States Memory Championship.
And I had gone to cover this contest a few years back
expecting, I guess, that this was going to be like the Superbowl of savants.
This was a bunch of guys and a few ladies,
widely varying in both age and hygienic upkeep.
(Laughter)
They were memorizing hundreds of random numbers,
They were memorizing the names of dozens and dozens and dozens of strangers.
They were memorizing entire poems in just a few minutes.
They were competing to see who could memorize
the order of a shuffled pack of playing cards the fastest.
I was like, this is unbelievable.
These people must be freaks of nature.
And I started talking to a few of the competitors.
This is a guy called Ed Cook, who had come over from England,
where he had one of the best-trained memories.
And I said to him, "Ed, when did you realize
And Ed was like, "I'm not a savant.
In fact, I have just an average memory.
Everybody who competes in this contest will tell you
that they have just an average memory.
We've all trained ourselves to perform these utterly miraculous feats of memory
using a set of ancient techniques,
techniques invented 2,500 years ago in Greece,
the same techniques that Cicero had used to memorize his speeches,
that medieval scholars had used to memorize entire books."
And I said, "Whoa. How come I never heard of this before?"
And we were standing outside the competition hall,
and Ed, who is a wonderful, brilliant, but somewhat eccentric English guy,
says to me, "Josh, you're an American journalist.
"Because I really want to teach Britney Spears
how to memorize the order of a shuffled pack of playing cards
on U.S. national television.
It will prove to the world that anybody can do this."
(Laughter)
I was like, "Well, I'm not Britney Spears,
I mean, you've got to start somewhere, right?"
And that was the beginning of a very strange journey for me.
I ended up spending the better part of the next year
trying to understand how it works,
why it sometimes doesn't work,
and what its potential might be.
And I met a host of really interesting people.
He's an amnesic who had, very possibly,
the worst memory in the world.
that he didn't even remember he had a memory problem,
And he was this incredibly tragic figure,
but he was a window into the extent to which our memories make us who we are.
At the other end of the spectrum, I met this guy.
This is Kim Peek, he was the basis for Dustin Hoffman's character
We spent an afternoon together in the Salt Lake City Public Library
(Laughter)
And I went back and I read a whole host of memory treatises,
treatises written 2,000-plus years ago in Latin,
in antiquity, and then later, in the Middle Ages.
And I learned a whole bunch of really interesting stuff.
One of the really interesting things that I learned
this idea of having a trained, disciplined, cultivated memory
was not nearly so alien as it would seem to us to be today.
Once upon a time, people invested in their memories,
in laboriously furnishing their minds.
we've invented a series of technologies --
from the alphabet, to the scroll,
to the codex, the printing press, photography,
the computer, the smartphone --
that have made it progressively easier and easier
for us to externalize our memories,
for us to essentially outsource this fundamental human capacity.
These technologies have made our modern world possible,
They've changed us culturally,
and I would argue that they've changed us cognitively.
Having little need to remember anymore,
it sometimes seems like we've forgotten how.
One of the last places on Earth where you still find
people passionate about this idea of a trained, disciplined, cultivated memory,
is at this totally singular memory contest.
It's actually not that singular,
there are contests held all over the world.
And I was fascinated, I wanted to know how do these guys do it.
A few years back a group of researchers at University College London
brought a bunch of memory champions into the lab.
Do these guys have brains that are somehow structurally,
anatomically different from the rest of ours?
Are they smarter than the rest of us?
They gave them a bunch of cognitive tests, and the answer was: not really.
There was, however, one really interesting and telling difference
between the brains of the memory champions
and the control subjects that they were comparing them to.
When they put these guys in an fMRI machine,
scanned their brains while they were memorizing numbers
and people's faces and pictures of snowflakes,
they found that the memory champions were lighting up different parts of the brain
Of note, they were using, or they seemed to be using,
a part of the brain that's involved in spatial memory and navigation.
Why?
And is there something that the rest of us can learn from this?
The sport of competitive memorizing is driven by a kind of arms race where,
every year, somebody comes up with a new way to remember more stuff more quickly,
and then the rest of the field has to play catch-up.
This is my friend Ben Pridmore,
three-time world memory champion.
On his desk in front of him are 36 shuffled packs of playing cards
that he is about to try to memorize in one hour,
using a technique that he invented and he alone has mastered.
to memorize the precise order of 4,140 random binary digits
(Laughter)
Yeah.
And while there are a whole host of ways
of remembering stuff in these competitions,
everything, all of the techniques that are being used,
ultimately come down to a concept
that psychologists refer to as "elaborative encoding."
And it's well-illustrated by a nifty paradox
known as the Baker/baker paradox, which goes like this:
If I tell two people to remember the same word,
"Remember that there is a guy named Baker."
And I say to you, "Remember that there is a guy who is a baker."
Okay?
And I come back to you at some point later on,
and I say, "Do you remember that word that I told you a while back?
The person who was told his name is Baker
is less likely to remember the same word
than the person was told his job is a baker.
Same word, different amount of remembering; that's weird.
Well, the name Baker doesn't actually mean anything to you.
It is entirely untethered from all of the other memories
floating around in your skull.
But the common noun "baker" -- we know bakers.
Bakers have flour on their hands.
Bakers smell good when they come home from work.
And when we first hear that word,
we start putting these associational hooks into it,
that make it easier to fish it back out at some later date.
The entire art of what is going on in these memory contests,
and the entire art of remembering stuff better in everyday life,
is figuring out ways to transform capital B Bakers
into lower-case B bakers --
to take information that is lacking in context,
so that it becomes meaningful in the light of all the other things
One of the more elaborate techniques for doing this
dates back 2,500 years to Ancient Greece.
It came to be known as the memory palace.
The story behind its creation goes like this:
There was a poet called Simonides, who was attending a banquet.
He was actually the hired entertainment,
because back then, if you wanted to throw a really slamming party,
you didn't hire a D.J., you hired a poet.
And he stands up, delivers his poem from memory, walks out the door,
It doesn't just kill everybody,
it mangles the bodies beyond all recognition.
Nobody can say who was inside,
nobody can say where they were sitting.
The bodies can't be properly buried.
It's one tragedy compounding another.
the sole survivor amid the wreckage,
closes his eyes and has this realization,
which is that in his mind's eye,
he can see where each of the guests at the banquet had been sitting.
And he takes the relatives by the hand,
and guides them each to their loved ones amid the wreckage.
What Simonides figured out at that moment,
is something that I think we all kind of intuitively know,
which is that, as bad as we are at remembering names and phone numbers,
and word-for-word instructions from our colleagues,
we have really exceptional visual and spatial memories.
If I asked you to recount the first 10 words of the story
that I just told you about Simonides,
chances are you would have a tough time with it.
But, I would wager that if I asked you to recall
who is sitting on top of a talking tan horse
you would be able to see that.
The idea behind the memory palace
is to create this imagined edifice in your mind's eye,
and populate it with images of the things that you want to remember --
the crazier, weirder, more bizarre,
funnier, raunchier, stinkier the image is,
the more unforgettable it's likely to be.
This is advice that goes back 2,000-plus years
to the earliest Latin memory treatises.
Let's say that you've been invited to TED center stage to give a speech,
and you want to do it from memory,
and you want to do it the way that Cicero would have done it,
if he had been invited to TEDxRome 2,000 years ago.
(Laughter)
is picture yourself at the front door of your house.
And you'd come up with some sort of crazy, ridiculous, unforgettable image,
to remind you that the first thing you want to talk about
is this totally bizarre contest.
(Laughter)
And then you'd go inside your house,
and you would see an image of Cookie Monster on top of Mister Ed.
that you would want to then introduce your friend Ed Cook.
And then you'd see an image of Britney Spears
to remind you of this funny anecdote you want to tell.
And you'd go into your kitchen,
and the fourth topic you were going to talk about
was this strange journey that you went on for a year,
and you'd have some friends to help you remember that.
This is how Roman orators memorized their speeches --
not word-for-word, which is just going to screw you up,
In fact, the phrase "topic sentence" --
that comes from the Greek word "topos,"
That's a vestige of when people used to think about oratory and rhetoric
in these sorts of spatial terms.
The phrase "in the first place,"
that's like "in the first place of your memory palace."
I thought this was just fascinating,
And I went to a few more of these memory contests,
and I had this notion that I might write something longer
about this subculture of competitive memorizers.
The problem was that a memory contest
is a pathologically boring event.
(Laughter)
Truly, it is like a bunch of people sitting around taking the SATs --
I mean, the most dramatic it gets
is when somebody starts massaging their temples.
And I'm a journalist, I need something to write about.
I know that there's incredible stuff happening in these people's minds,
but I don't have access to it.
And I realized, if I was going to tell this story,
I needed to walk in their shoes a little bit.
And so I started trying to spend 15 or 20 minutes
every morning, before I sat down with my New York Times,
just trying to remember something.
maybe it was names from an old yearbook that I bought at a flea market.
And I found that this was shockingly fun.
I never would have expected that.
It was fun because this is actually not about training your memory.
What you're doing, is you're trying to get better and better
these utterly ludicrous, raunchy, hilarious,
and hopefully unforgettable images in your mind's eye.
This is me wearing my standard competitive memorizer's training kit.
(Laughter)
and a set of safety goggles that have been masked over
except for two small pinholes,
because distraction is the competitive memorizer's greatest enemy.
I ended up coming back to that same contest
that I had covered a year earlier,
and I had this notion that I might enter it,
sort of as an experiment in participatory journalism.
It'd make, I thought, maybe a nice epilogue to all my research.
Problem was, the experiment went haywire.
(Laughter)
which really wasn't supposed to happen.
(Applause)
Now, it is nice to be able to memorize speeches
and phone numbers and shopping lists,
but it's actually kind of beside the point.
They work because they're based on some pretty basic principles
And you don't have to be building memory palaces
or memorizing packs of playing cards
to benefit from a little bit of insight about how your mind works.
We often talk about people with great memories
as though it were some sort of an innate gift,
At the most basic level, we remember when we pay attention.
We remember when we are deeply engaged.
We remember when we are able to take a piece of information and experience,
and figure out why it is meaningful to us,
why it is significant, why it's colorful,
when we're able to transform it in some way that makes sense
in the light of all of the other things floating around in our minds,
when we're able to transform Bakers into bakers.
The memory palace, these memory techniques --
In fact, they're not even really shortcuts.
They work because they make you work.
They force a kind of depth of processing,
that most of us don't normally walk around exercising.
But there actually are no shortcuts.
This is how stuff is made memorable.
And I think if there's one thing that I want to leave you with,
it's what E.P., the amnesic who couldn't even remember he had a memory problem,
which is the notion that our lives are the sum of our memories.
How much are we willing to lose
by losing ourselves in our Blackberries, our iPhones,
by not paying attention to the human being across from us
by being so lazy that we're not willing to process deeply?
that there are incredible memory capacities
But if you want to live a memorable life,
you have to be the kind of person
(Applause)