每日一词：
Poseidon's Kiss 波赛冬之吻
“上大号时马桶里噗通噗通溅起的打湿屁屁的水花”的文艺说法。
其化解之道的文艺说法叫
Poseidon's Pillow 波赛冬之枕
用几层厕纸垫到马桶水面防止溅起水花。
nudist 裸体主义者
to pedal 踩踏板（原为名词，后演化为活用动词）
sweaty 大汗淋漓的（可以用在很污的场景噢……）
awkward 尴尬的 注意和awesome（帅呆了，真棒）区分
perch 高位；鲈鱼
scantily 不足地
bizarre 奇异的
shuffle 洗（牌），随机播放
freak 疯子，怪人
savant 学者
miraculous 不可思议的
medieval 中世纪的，老式风格的
eccentric 古怪的，反常的
to end up doing sth. 结果做了某事
【例】 I majored in philosophy in college, but I ended up working in the field of real estates.
我大学主修哲学，结果后来进了房地产行业。
amnesic 遗忘的，失去记忆的
tragic 悲剧的 tragedy 悲剧 n.
spectrum 光谱，范围
scintillating 才华横溢的
treatise 论文，论述（不同于学业论文）
cultivated 培养出来的
codex 法典，药典
fundamental 基础的，重要的
有人能在很短时间内背下上千个数字
或是记下一叠或更多牌的顺序
科技栏作家 Joshua Foer 为你详细讲解这种记忆方法
他称其为"记忆宫殿"
（没错，夏洛克最擅长的那个）
并向你证明：
任何人都可以拥有绝佳的记忆力
【Subtitles and Transcript】
00:12 I'd like to invite you to close your eyes.
请大家跟我一起闭上眼睛，想象一下。
00:17 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.
你站在，自己家门口的外面，请留心一下门的颜色，以及门的材质，现在请想象一群超重的裸骑者。
00:36(Laughter)
00:37 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.
他们正在进行一场裸体自行车赛，向你的前门直冲而来，尽量让画面想象得栩栩如生近在眼前，他们都在奋力地踩脚踏板汗流浃背，路面非常颠簸，然后径直撞进了你家前门，自行车四下飞散 车轮从你身旁滚过，辐条扎进了各种尴尬角落，跨过门槛，进到门厅、走廊和门里的其他地方，室内光线柔和舒适，光线洒在甜饼怪物身上，他坐在一匹棕色骏马的马背上，正向你招手，这匹马会说话，你可以感觉到他的蓝色鬃毛让你鼻子发痒，你可以闻到他正要扔进嘴里的葡萄燕麦曲奇的香气，绕过他绕过他走进客厅，站在客厅里 把你的想象力调到最大档，想象小甜甜布兰妮，她衣着暴露 在你咖啡桌上跳舞，并唱着"Hit Me Baby One MoreTime"，接下来跟着我走进你的厨房，厨房的地面被一道黄砖路覆盖，依次钻出你的烤箱向你走来的是，《绿野仙踪》里的多萝西 铁皮人，稻草人和狮子，他们手挽着手蹦蹦跳跳地向你走来，
02:11 Okay. Open your eyes.
好了 睁开眼睛吧。
02:16 I want to tell you about a very bizarre contestthat 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 backas 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.
我要给你们讲一个每年春天在纽约，都会举办的奇异竞赛，叫做全美记忆冠军赛，几年前我作为一名科技类记者，去报道这项竞赛，心里想着大概那儿得像，怪才的"超级碗冠军赛"一样热闹吧，一大堆男人和屈指可数的女性，从小孩儿到老人，有些还不怎么注意个人卫生。
02:43 (Laughter)
大笑。
02:46 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 memorizethe order of a shuffled pack of playing cards the fastest. I was like, this is unbelievable. These people must be freaks of nature.
他们有的奋力在只看一次的情况下，记下上百个任意列出的数字，有的在努力记住成群的陌生人的名字，有的想在几分钟内努力背下整篇诗歌，还有的在比赛谁能以最快速度，记下一整副打乱的牌的顺序，我当时觉得这太不可思议了，这些人肯定天赋异禀。
03:11 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 realizethat 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 said, "Whoa. How come I never heard of this before?"
所以我开始采访参赛者，这位叫Ed Cook，是从英格兰来的，他在那儿接受了最好的记忆训练，我问他 "Ed 你是什么时候开始意识到，自己是记忆天才的?"，Ed答道，“我并不是什么专家，其实我的记忆力很一般，来参赛的每一个人，都会告诉你他们的记忆力只是一般水平，我们都在训练自己后才能，完成这些奇迹般的记忆游戏，我们运用了一系列古老的技巧，这些技巧是希腊人在两千五百年前发明的，西塞罗正是用了这些技巧，来记忆他的演讲稿的，中世纪学者用这种技巧来背诵正本书籍的内容"，我惊讶不已，"哇噻！怎么我从来没听说过呢?"。
04:01 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."
我们站在竞技大厅外，聪明过人、令人惊叹，而又稍有些古怪的英国人Ed，对我说， "Josh 你是个美国记者，你知道小甜甜布兰妮吧?”，我茫然不解， "什么? 当然。为什么要问这个?"，“因为我真的很想在，美国国家电台上教会布兰妮，怎样记住一整副打乱的牌的顺序，就能证明这是人人都可以做到的了。 "
04:32 (Laughter)
(哄笑)
04:37 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.
我说 "虽然我不是布兰妮，但你也可以教教我呀，总得找个人开教嘛 不是吗?"，接着 一段非常奇特的历程在我面前展开了序幕。
04:49 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.
结果第二年的大部分时间，我都花在了训练自己的记忆力，同时调查研究记忆上，我想尝试理解产生记忆的原理，为何有时会记了又忘，及其它到底隐藏着什么样的潜力。
05:03 And I met a host of really interesting people.This is a guy called E.P. He's an amnesic 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.
途中我遇到了很多有趣的人，其中一个叫E.P.，他患有健忘症。他的记忆力，恐怕是世界上最差的了，他的记忆能力差到，甚至记不得自己有健忘症，真的很神奇，虽然他是个悲剧角色，但通过他我们能了解到，记忆在何种程度上塑造了我们的人格。
05:27 At 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.
情况的另一个极端是 我遇到了这样一个人，他叫Kim Peek，他是Dustin Hoffman在电影《雨人》里的角色的原型，我和他花了一下午，在盐湖城公共图书馆里背电话簿，让我大开眼界。
05:43 (Laughter)
05:46 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.
回家后我读了许多关于记忆的论文，写于两千多年前的论文，用拉丁文写的，从古代，一直到后来中世纪期间。我学到很多很有意思的事儿，其中一个就是，曾经，训练、归束、培养记忆力的这种概念，完全不像如今那样陌生，曾几何时 人们寄希望于自己的记忆，能不遗余力地装饰自己的心灵。
06:27Over 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 easierfor 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.
07:06One of the last places on Earth where you still findpeople 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.
07:26A few years back a group of researchers at University College Londonbrought 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.
07:50There was, however, one really interesting and telling differencebetween the brains of the memory championsand 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 numbersand people's faces and pictures of snowflakes,they found that the memory champions were lighting up different parts of the brainthan 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?
08:28The 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.
08:43This is my friend Ben Pridmore,three-time world memory champion.On his desk in front of him are 36 shuffled packs of playing cardsthat 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 techniqueto memorize the precise order of 4,140 random binary digitsin half an hour.
09:10(Laughter)
09:12Yeah.
09:14And while there are a whole host of waysof remembering stuff in these competitions,everything, all of the techniques that are being used,ultimately come down to a conceptthat psychologists refer to as "elaborative encoding."
09:30And it's well-illustrated by a nifty paradoxknown 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 told you a while back?Do you remember what it was?"The person who was told his name is Bakeris less likely to remember the same wordthan the person was told his job is a baker.Same word, different amount of remembering; that's weird.What's going on here?
10:16Well, the name Baker doesn't actually mean anything to you.It is entirely untethered from all of the other memoriesfloating 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 Bakersinto 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 thingsthat you have in your mind.
11:15One of the more elaborate techniques for doing thisdates back 2,500 years to Ancient Greece.It came to be known as the memory palace.The story behind its creation goes like this:
11:28There 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.
12:34What 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 storythat 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 recallwho is sitting on top of a talking tan horsein your foyer right now,you would be able to see that.
13:17The idea behind the memory palaceis 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 yearsto the earliest Latin memory treatises.
13:43So 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.
14:03(Laughter)
14:04What you might dois 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 aboutis this totally bizarre contest.
14:22(Laughter)
14:23And 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 youthat you would want to then introduce your friend Ed Cook.And then you'd see an image of Britney Spearsto 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 aboutwas this strange journey that you went on for a year,and you'd have some friends to help you remember that.
14:52This 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 rhetoricin these sorts of spatial terms.The phrase "in the first place,"that's like "in the first place of your memory palace."
15:21I 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 longerabout this subculture of competitive memorizers.But there was a problem.The problem was that a memory contestis a pathologically boring event.
15:41(Laughter)
15:45Truly, it is like a bunch of people sitting around taking the SATs --I mean, the most dramatic it getsis 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.
16:01And 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 minutesevery 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 betterat creating, at dreaming up,these utterly ludicrous, raunchy, hilarious,and hopefully unforgettable images in your mind's eye.And I got pretty into it.
16:46This is me wearing my standard competitive memorizer's training kit.
16:52(Laughter)
16:53It's a pair of earmuffsand a set of safety goggles that have been masked overexcept for two small pinholes,because distraction is the competitive memorizer's greatest enemy.
17:07I ended up coming back to that same contestthat 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 --
17:27(Laughter)
17:28which really wasn't supposed to happen.
17:31(Applause)
17:37Now, it is nice to be able to memorize speechesand phone numbers and shopping lists,but it's actually kind of beside the point.These are just tricks.They work because they're based on some pretty basic principlesabout how our brains work.And you don't have to be building memory palacesor memorizing packs of playing cardsto benefit from a little bit of insight about how your mind works.
18:07We often talk about people with great memoriesas 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 makes sensein the light of all of the other things floating around in our minds,when we're able to transform Bakers into bakers.
18:46The 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.
19:11And 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,left me with,which is the notion that our lives are the sum of our memories.How much are we willing to losefrom our already short lives,by losing ourselves in our Blackberries, our iPhones,by not paying attention to the human being across from uswho is talking with us,by being so lazy that we're not willing to process deeply?
19:58I learned firsthandthat there are incredible memory capacitieslatent in all of us.But if you want to live a memorable life,you have to be the kind of personwho remembers to remember.
20:13Thank you.
20:15(Applause)
