Feats of memory anyone can do Joshua Foer

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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 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 whatever’s on the other side 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 it’s a

talking 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 walk past him into your living

room in your living room in full

imaginative broadband picture Britney

Spears

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 okay open your eyes

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 as a

science journalist expecting I guess

that this was going to be like the Super

Bowl of savants this was a bunch of guys

and a few ladies widely varying in both

age and hygienic upkeep they were

memorizing hundreds of random numbers

looking at them just once 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 fastest and 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 Edie cook who had come

over from England where he had one of

the best-trained memories and I said to

him Edie when did you realize that you

were a savant and it 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 Wow I never heard of this before

and we were standing outside the

competition hall and Edie who is a

wonderful brilliant but somewhat

eccentric English guy says to me Josh

you’re an American journalist

do you know Britney Spears I’m like what

no why because I really want to teach

Britney Spears how to memorize the order

of a shuffled pack of playing cards on

US national

vision it will prove to the world that

anybody can do this I was like well I’m

not Britney Spears but maybe you could

teach me I mean you got to start

somewhere right and that was the

beginning of a very strange journey for

I ended up spending the better part of

the next year not only training my

memory but also investigating it 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 this is a

guy called EP he’s an amnesiac who had

very possibly the worst memory in the

world his memory was so bad that he

didn’t even remember he had a memory

problem which is amazing and he was this

incredibly tragic figure but he was a

window into the extent to which our

memories make us who we are the other

end of the spectrum I met this guy this

is Kim peak he was the bassist for

Dustin Hoffman’s character in the movie

Rain Man we spent an afternoon together

in the Salt Lake City Public Library

memorizing phone books which was

scintillating

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

is that once upon a time 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 laborious ly furnishing their minds

over the last few millennia we’ve

invented a series of technologies from

the alphabet to the scroll 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 but

they’ve also changed us 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 that this totally

singular memory contest it’s actually

not that singular their contests held

all over the world and I was fascinated

I wanted to know how do these guys do it

few years back a group of researchers at

University College London brought a

bunch of memory champions into the lab

they wanted to know do these guys have

brains that are somehow structurally

anatomically different from the rest of

ours the answer was no are they

smarter than the rest of us they gave

him a bunch of cognitive testing 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

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

than everyone else 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 prid Moore 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 he used a similar technique to

memorize the precise order of 4140

random binary digits in half an hour

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 if I say to you remember that

there is a guy named Baker that’s his

name 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 had told you a while back to you

remember what it was the person who was

told his name is a baker is less likely

to remember the same word and the person

who was told his job is that he is a

baker

same word different amount of

remembering that’s weird

what’s going on here 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

Baker’s Baker’s wear funny white hats

Baker’s have flour on their hands

Baker’s smell good when they come home

from work maybe we even know a baker and

when we first hear that word we start

putting these associational hooks into

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 Baker’s into lowercase D

Baker’s to take information that is

lacking in context in significance in

meaning and transform it in some way so

that it becomes meaningful in the light

of all of the other things that you have

in your mind one of the more elaborate

techniques for doing this dates back

2500 years to ancient Greece came to be

known as the memory palace the story

behind its creation goes like this there

was a poet called Simon ADIZ who was

attending a banquet he was actually the

hired entertainment because back then he

want to throw a really slammin party you

didn’t hire a DJ you hired a poet and he

stands up delivers his poem from memory

walks out the door and at the moment he

does the banquet hall collapses kills

everybody inside 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 so I’m on of these standing

outside the Soul Survivor amid the

wreckage closes his eyes and has this

realization which is that in his mind’s

eye he can see

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

sigh monetise 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 semana Diez

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 in your foyer

right now 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

raunchy stinkier the images the more

unforgettable it’s likely to be this is

advice that goes back 2,000 plus years

to the earliest latin memory treatises

so how does this work 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 TEDx Rome 2,000

years ago what you might do is picture

yourself at the front door of your house

and you’d come up with some sort of an

absolutely crazy ridiculous

unforgettable image to remind you that

the first thing you want to talk about

is this totally bizarre contest and then

you go inside your house and you would

see an image of Cookie Monster on top of

mr. Edie and that would remind you that

you’d want to then introduce your friend

Edie cook and then you’d see an image of

Britney Spears to remind you

funny anecdote you want to tell and you

go into your kitchen and the fourth

topic you were gonna 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

orders memorize their speeches not word

for word which is just gonna screw you

but topic for topic in fact the phrase

topic sentence that comes from the Greek

word topos which means place 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 got

really into it 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 but there was a

problem the problem was that a memory

contest is a pathologically boring event

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 you know I know that there’s

this incredible stuff happening in these

people’s minds but I don’t have access

to it and I realized if I was gonna 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 it was a poem 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 and better at

creating at dreaming up these utterly

ludicrous raunchy hilarious and

hopefully unforgettable images in your

mind’s eye and I got pretty into it this

is me wearing my standard competitive

memorizers training

it that’s a pair of earmuffs and a set

of safety goggles that have been masked

over except for two small pin holes

because distraction is the competitive

memorizers greatest enemy I ended up

coming back to that same contest as I

had covered a year earlier I had this

notion that I might enter it sort of is

an experiment in participatory

journalism it make I thought maybe a

nice epilogue to all my research problem

was the experiment went haywire I won

the contest which really wasn’t supposed

to happen

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 these are just tricks they are

tricks that work because they are based

on some pretty basic principles about

how our brains work 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 but that is not the case great

memories are learned at the most basic

level we remember when we pay attention

we remember when we are deeply engaged

we remember when we were 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 it makes sense in the light of

all of the other things floating around

in our minds when we’re able to

transform bakers into Baker’s the memory

palace these memory techniques

they’re just shortcuts in fact they’re

not even really shortcuts they work

because they make you work they force a

kind of depth of processing a kind of

mindfulness 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 its what EP the amnesiac

who couldn’t even remember that he had a

memory problem left me with which is the

notion that our lives are the sum of our

memories how much are we willing to lose

from our already short lives by losing

ourselves in our blackberries or iPhones

not paying attention to the human being

across from us who is talking with us by

being so lazy that we’re not willing to

process deeply I learned firsthand that

there are incredible memory capacities

latent in all of us but if you want to

live a memorable life you have to be the

kind of person who remembers to remember

thank you

[Applause]

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you