Joshua Foer: Feats of memory anyone can

do

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 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, 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 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 that you were a savant?" 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 was like, "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. 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 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, but maybe you could teach me. 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 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.

I met a host of really interesting people. This is a guy called E.P. He's an amnesic who

had, very possibly, the very 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 Peek. He was the basis 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.

(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

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 laboriously furnishing their minds.

Over the last few millenia 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, 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 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. 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 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 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 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 catchup.

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. He used a

similar technique to memorize the precise order of 4,140 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." 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? Do you

remember what it was?" 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 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 bakers. Bakers wear funny white hats. Bakers have flour on their

hands. Bakers 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 Bakers into lower-case B

bakers -- 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 the other

things that you have in your mind.

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, and at the moment he does, the banquet hall

collapses, kills everybody inside. 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. Simonides, standing outside, 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 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, 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.

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 TEDxRome 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'd go inside

your house, and you would see an image of Cookie Monster on top of Mister Ed. And

that would remind you 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 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 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, 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. (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 this 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 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 memorizer's training kit. It's a pair of

earmuffs 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. I won the contest, 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. These are just tricks. They are tricks that work

because they're 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 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 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 bakers.

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, it's what E.P., the amnesic

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, our 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.

(Applause)