Speaker: Joshua Foer

Language: English

Introduction: 20 12? |? Someone can remember thousands of numbers in a short time, or write down the order of a stack or more cards. Joshua Foer, a science and technology columnist, explained this memory method in detail-he called it "Memory Palace"-and proved to you that his view is that anyone can have an excellent memory, including himself.

Chinese speech

Please close your eyes with me first.

Imagine you are standing outside your house. Please pay attention to the color and material of the door. Now imagine that a group of overweight naked cyclists are having a naked bike race and coming straight to your front door. Try to make the picture vivid. They are all struggling to step on the pedal, sweating like a pig, and the road is very bumpy. Then they go straight into your front door, bicycles fly around and wheels run over you.

You cross the threshold and enter the hall, corridor and other places through the door. The light in the room is soft and comfortable. The light shone on the cookie monster. He is sitting on horseback and waving to you. This horse can still talk. You can feel his blue mane scratching your nose, and you can smell the smell of the grape oatmeal cookies he is about to throw into his mouth. Then bypass him and walk into the living room. Stand in the living room and give full play to your imagination. Imagine britney spears dancing on your coffee table and singing "Hit me again, baby".

Next, come with me to your kitchen. There is a yellow brick road on the kitchen floor, and then you come out of your oven. Dorothy, Tin Man, Scarecrow and Lion in The Wizard of Oz are skipping towards you, holding hands.

Okay, open your eyes.

I'm going to tell you about a strange competition held in new york every spring. It's called the National Memory Championship. A few years ago, as a science and technology reporter, I reported the contest and thought: It must be as lively as the geek's "Super Bowl Championship". From children to old people, there are many men and only a handful of women. Some of them don't pay much attention to personal hygiene, some try to write down hundreds of randomly listed numbers only once, some try to remember the names of strangers, and some want to remember the whole poem in a few minutes. I think this is incredible. These people must be very talented.

So I started interviewing contestants. Ed Cook is from England, where he received the best memory training. I asked him, "Ed, when did you begin to realize that you are a memory genius?" Ed replied, "I'm not an expert. Actually, my memory is average. Everyone who comes to the competition will tell you that their memory is just average. We are all training ourselves before completing these magical memory games. We use a series of ancient skills, which were invented by Greeks 2500 years ago. Cicero used these skills to memorize his speeches, and medieval scholars also used these skills to recite the original contents. " I'm surprised. "How come I've never heard of it?" .

We were standing outside the competition hall, and Ed, a clever, surprising and eccentric Englishman, said to me, "Josh, you are an American journalist. You know britney spears, right? " I'm at a loss. "Of course. But why do you ask? " Because I really want to teach britney spears how to memorize a whole shuffle sequence on national radio, so that I can prove that everyone can do it. I said, "I'm not britney spears, but you can teach me. Someone has to teach me? "

Then, a very strange journey began in front of me.

Results I spent most of the second year training my memory and investigating my memory. I want to try to understand the principle of memory, why I sometimes remember and forget, and what other potential is hidden.

On the way, I met many interesting people, one of whom was E.P. He had amnesia. His memory is probably the worst in the world, so bad that he doesn't even remember that he has amnesia. It's really amazing. Although he is a tragic figure, through him, we can understand to what extent memory shapes our personality. At the other extreme, I met a man named king peake, who was the prototype of dustin hoffman's role in Rain Man. I recited the phone book with him in the public library of Salt Lake City all afternoon, which opened my eyes.

After returning to China, I read many papers on memory, written more than two thousand years ago, in Latin, from ancient times to the late Middle Ages. I have learned a lot of interesting things, one of which is that once, the concepts of training, discipline and memory cultivation were not as strange as they are now. Once upon a time, people hoped that memory would spare no effort to decorate their hearts.

In recent thousands of years, human beings have invented a series of technologies, from the alphabet to scrolls, to codes, printing presses, photography, computers and smart phones. These technologies make it easier for us to externalize our memory ability and let us fundamentally hand over this basic human ability. These technologies make modern life possible, but at the same time, they have also changed us, not only culturally, but also cognitively. We no longer need to bother to remember, and sometimes we feel that we have forgotten how to remember.

On this earth, you can feel that there are few places where people are still keen on training, discipline and memory cultivation. That extraordinary memory contest is one of them. Actually, it's not that unusual, but competitions like this are all over the world, and I'm fascinated. I want to know how these people do it.

A few years ago, a group of researchers from University College London invited a group of winners of a memory contest to study. They want to know whether their brains are anatomically different from the rest of us. The answer is no. Are they smarter than all of us? They conducted a series of cognitive tests on the subjects, but they still came to a negative conclusion.

However, compared with the brains of controlled subjects, the brains of memory contest champions do have interesting differences. When these people were sent to do functional magnetic vibration scanning, the researchers found that when they were memorizing numbers or faces or snowflake patterns, their brain activation areas were different from those of ordinary people. It is worth noting that the brain part they use is only used for spatial memory and navigation. Why? What conclusions can we draw from it?

The contest of competitive memory has been heated up in a way similar to military competition. Every year, someone will appear on the field with more effective memory methods, while others must catch up.

My friend Ben Pridmore has won the international memory contest three times. There are 36 decks of cards in front of him that are out of order. He must write them all down in an hour, using the technology he invented himself, and only he knows it. In a similar way, he memorized 4 140 random binary numbers word for word, which took only half an hour. That's great.

Participants use many different memory methods in these competitions, and all the skills they use can finally be domesticated into a concept, which psychologists call "fine coding". This concept can be perfectly explained by a humorous paradox called Baker/Baker Paradox. Simply put, suppose I ask two people to remember the same word, I tell you to "remember a person named Baker", Baker is a person's name, and I tell you to "remember a person named Baker". After a while, I came back and asked you, "Remember that word I asked you to remember before?" Do you remember what that word is? "Compared with those who are told that their occupation is a baker, people who are told that their name is a baker are much less likely to remember this word. Why do the same words lead to different memory levels?

This technique of accurate memory appeared in ancient Greece 2500 years ago, and was later called the memory palace. The process of inventing this technology is as follows: A poet named Szimonidesz is going to attend a dinner party. In fact, he was invited to be a guest performer. Because in those days, the standard of coolness was not to ask D.J. to play CDs, but to ask poets to sing poems.

He stood up, recited the whole poem and left smartly. Hardly had he walked out of the gate when the dining hall collapsed and all the people inside were killed. Not only were all dead, but all the dead were smashed beyond recognition. No one can tell who the deceased was or who was sitting there, which made the body of the deceased unable to be properly placed for human sacrifice, which aggravated the tragic color of the whole thing. Szimonidesz stood outside, as the only survivor in the ruins, closed his eyes and suddenly realized that in his mind, all the guests were sitting in front of him, so he took his relatives by the hand, walked through the ruins and took them to their relatives.

What happened when Szimonidesz suddenly woke up was probably what all of us guessed. No matter how bad we are at remembering names, phone numbers or every instruction of our colleagues, we have an extremely keen visual or spatial memory. If I ask you to repeat the first ten words of Szimonidesz's story word by word, few people will remember it, but I bet that if I ask you to think back now, the man sitting on a talking brown horse in your hall will remember it.

The principle of memory palace is to build an imaginary building in your mind and fill it with images of things you want to remember. The more crazy, weird, bizarre, absurd, funny, messy and disgusting pictures, the easier it is to remember. This suggestion comes from the earliest memory scholar in Latin more than 2000 years ago.

So, what is the principle of this statement? Suppose you are invited to give a speech on the central platform of ted, and you want to finish it from the lecture, just like Cicero's speech in TEDx Rome two thousand years ago. He will walk so domineering and you want to do the same. All you have to do is imagine yourself standing in front of your house, and then imagine a completely absurd, crazy and unforgettable scene out of thin air to remind you that the first thing you should mention when you come to power is this weird naked riding contest, and then you will remember it when you walk into the house.

This scene will remind you to introduce your friend Ed Cook, and then britney spears will appear in your mind, and you will remember to tell that little story about britney spears, and then you will go into the kitchen. The fourth topic you want to talk about is the wonderful journey you spent a whole year, which can be associated with the Wizard of Oz.

This is the secret of Roman orators reciting speeches word for word, because reciting them word for word will only add trouble, but you should remember the topics one by one. In fact, the phrase "topic sentence" comes from the Greek word "topos", which means "place" and is a spatial term used by ancient people when talking about speeches or rhetoric. The phrase "first" means that you remember the first floor of the palace.

This is very interesting, and I am very interested in it. Later, I went to more memory contests, and I began to have the idea of describing this competitive memory culture in more detail. But the problem is that the memory contest process is actually boring (laughs). Really, it's like a group of people sitting there for the college entrance examination. The most exciting moment is just someone rubbing their temples. I'm a reporter, so I have to write something. I know these people must have stormy waves in their hearts, but I can't see that they are outsiders.

I realized that if I really want to report this story, I must experience it personally, so I began to try to sit down and read The New York Times every morning, and spend 15 to 20 minutes trying to remember something, and remember the poems and names in the old yearbook I bought at the flea market. I was surprised to find that it was actually very exciting. If I don't try, I will never think of it. Interestingly, the goal is not to improve my memory through training, but to cultivate and improve your creativity and imagination, and to create those completely ridiculous and unforgettable images out of thin air in your mind, which has become my pleasure.

I'm wearing a standard training suit to remember the game. It's like this: a pair of earplugs, goggles and a mirror are all covered with black, leaving two small holes, because the biggest enemy of competitive memory is distraction.

Finally, I went back to the competition reported a year ago and wanted to sign up on impulse as an experiment reported by participatory journalism. At that time, I thought it would be good to tease myself in the preface. The problem is that the experiment finally got unexpected results, and I won the game. It was completely out of my expectation.

Memorizing speeches, phone numbers or shopping lists is a piece of cake for me now, but it's good. But in fact, it doesn't matter. These are all tricks. These memory tricks are effective because they rely on some basic principles of human brain operation. You really don't need to build a memory palace or write down the order of several decks. You can also get some benefits from understanding how the brain works.

We always talk about people with good memories and always think that those people are talented. That was not the case. A strong memory can be learned. From the most fundamental point of view, when you concentrate, when you devote yourself wholeheartedly, as long as you can find ways to turn information and experience into meaningful things and think about why it is important and why it is colorful, it can be remembered. When we can turn it into a causal thing and associate it with other complicated and trivial things in our minds, when we can turn the name baker into a baker.

Memory palace, or those memory skills, are just shortcuts. In fact, in the final analysis, it is not a shortcut. This method is very effective because it forces you to think, forces you to think deeper and makes you more focused. Most people are too lazy to train this at ordinary times. In fact, there is no shortcut, which has always been the reason why we can remember things.

One thing I hope you can remember, that is, E.P., the man who can't even remember that he has amnesia, made me think deeply and got a feeling that life is a collection of our personal memories. In a short life, how many moments are you willing to lose because of BlackBerry and iPhone? How long are you willing to ignore the person sitting opposite us? Are you still willing to be lazier and unwilling to delve into anything?

Through personal experience, I found that we have incredible memories in our bodies, but if you want to live an unforgettable life, you have to be the kind of person who often thinks about it.

Thank you (applause)