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
me
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
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
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
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 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
up
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
by
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
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you