每日一詞：

Poseidon's Kiss 波賽冬之吻

“上大號時馬桶里噗通噗通濺起的打濕屁屁的水花”的文藝說法励背。

其化解之道的文藝說法叫

Poseidon's Pillow 波賽冬之枕

用幾層廁紙墊到馬桶水面防止濺起水花闽烙。

nudist 裸體主義者

to pedal 踩踏板（原為名詞每界，后演化為活用動詞）

sweaty 大汗淋漓的（可以用在很污的場景噢……）

awkward 尷尬的 注意和awesome（帥呆了日缨，真棒）區(qū)分

perch 高位钱反；鱸魚

scantily 不足地

bizarre 奇異的

shuffle 洗（牌），隨機播放

freak 瘋子匣距，怪人

savant 學(xué)者

miraculous 不可思議的

medieval 中世紀(jì)的面哥，老式風(fēng)格的

eccentric 古怪的，反常的

to end up doing sth. 結(jié)果做了某事

【例】 I majored in philosophy in college, but I ended up working in the field of real estates.

我大學(xué)主修哲學(xué)毅待，結(jié)果后來進了房地產(chǎn)行業(yè)尚卫。

amnesic 遺忘的，失去記憶的

tragic 悲劇的 tragedy 悲劇 n.

spectrum 光譜尸红，范圍

scintillating 才華橫溢的

treatise 論文吱涉，論述（不同于學(xué)業(yè)論文）

cultivated 培養(yǎng)出來的

codex 法典，藥典

fundamental 基礎(chǔ)的外里，重要的

有人能在很短時間內(nèi)背下上千個數(shù)字

或是記下一疊或更多牌的順序

科技欄作家 Joshua Foer 為你詳細(xì)講解這種記憶方法

他稱其為"記憶宮殿"

（沒錯怎爵，夏洛克最擅長的那個）

并向你證明：

任何人都可以擁有絕佳的記憶力

【Subtitles and Transcript】

00:12 I'd like to invite you to close your eyes.

請大家跟我一起閉上眼睛，想象一下盅蝗。

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.

你站在鳖链，自己家門口的外面，請留心一下門的顏色墩莫，以及門的材質(zhì)芙委，現(xiàn)在請想象一群超重的裸騎者。

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.

他們正在進行一場裸體自行車賽狂秦，向你的前門直沖而來灌侣，盡量讓畫面想象得栩栩如生近在眼前，他們都在奮力地踩腳踏板汗流浹背裂问，路面非常顛簸侧啼，然后徑直撞進了你家前門玖姑，自行車四下飛散 車輪從你身旁滾過，輻條扎進了各種尷尬角落慨菱，跨過門檻，進到門廳戴甩、走廊和門里的其他地方符喝，室內(nèi)光線柔和舒適，光線灑在甜餅怪物身上甜孤，他坐在一匹棕色駿馬的馬背上协饲，正向你招手，這匹馬會說話缴川，你可以感覺到他的藍色鬃毛讓你鼻子發(fā)癢茉稠，你可以聞到他正要扔進嘴里的葡萄燕麥曲奇的香氣，繞過他繞過他走進客廳把夸，站在客廳里 把你的想象力調(diào)到最大檔而线，想象小甜甜布蘭妮，她衣著暴露 在你咖啡桌上跳舞恋日，并唱著"Hit Me Baby One MoreTime"膀篮，接下來跟著我走進你的廚房，廚房的地面被一道黃磚路覆蓋岂膳，依次鉆出你的烤箱向你走來的是誓竿，《綠野仙蹤》里的多蘿西 鐵皮人，稻草人和獅子谈截，他們手挽著手蹦蹦跳跳地向你走來筷屡，

02:11 Okay. Open your eyes.

好了 睜開眼睛吧。

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.

我要給你們講一個每年春天在紐約簸喂，都會舉辦的奇異競賽毙死，叫做全美記憶冠軍賽，幾年前我作為一名科技類記者娘赴，去報道這項競賽规哲，心里想著大概那兒得像，怪才的"超級碗冠軍賽"一樣熱鬧吧诽表，一大堆男人和屈指可數(shù)的女性唉锌，從小孩兒到老人，有些還不怎么注意個人衛(wèi)生竿奏。

02:43 (Laughter)

大笑袄简。

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.

他們有的奮力在只看一次的情況下，記下上百個任意列出的數(shù)字泛啸，有的在努力記住成群的陌生人的名字绿语，有的想在幾分鐘內(nèi)努力背下整篇詩歌，還有的在比賽誰能以最快速度，記下一整副打亂的牌的順序吕粹，我當(dāng)時覺得這太不可思議了种柑，這些人肯定天賦異稟。

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?"

所以我開始采訪參賽者匹耕，這位叫Ed Cook聚请，是從英格蘭來的，他在那兒接受了最好的記憶訓(xùn)練稳其，我問他 "Ed 你是什么時候開始意識到驶赏，自己是記憶天才的?"，Ed答道既鞠，“我并不是什么專家煤傍，其實我的記憶力很一般，來參賽的每一個人嘱蛋，都會告訴你他們的記憶力只是一般水平蚯姆，我們都在訓(xùn)練自己后才能，完成這些奇跡般的記憶游戲浑槽，我們運用了一系列古老的技巧蒋失，這些技巧是希臘人在兩千五百年前發(fā)明的，西塞羅正是用了這些技巧桐玻，來記憶他的演講稿的篙挽，中世紀(jì)學(xué)者用這種技巧來背誦正本書籍的內(nèi)容"，我驚訝不已镊靴，"哇噻铣卡！怎么我從來沒聽說過呢?"。

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."

我們站在競技大廳外偏竟，聰明過人煮落、令人驚嘆，而又稍有些古怪的英國人Ed踊谋，對我說蝉仇， "Josh 你是個美國記者，你知道小甜甜布蘭妮吧?”殖蚕，我茫然不解轿衔， "什么? 當(dāng)然。為什么要問這個?"睦疫，“因為我真的很想在害驹，美國國家電臺上教會布蘭妮，怎樣記住一整副打亂的牌的順序蛤育，就能證明這是人人都可以做到的了宛官。 "

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.

我說 "雖然我不是布蘭妮葫松，但你也可以教教我呀，總得找個人開教嘛 不是嗎?"底洗，接著 一段非常奇特的歷程在我面前展開了序幕腋么。

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.

結(jié)果第二年的大部分時間，我都花在了訓(xùn)練自己的記憶力亥揖，同時調(diào)查研究記憶上党晋，我想嘗試?yán)斫猱a(chǎn)生記憶的原理，為何有時會記了又忘徐块，及其它到底隱藏著什么樣的潛力。

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灾而，其中一個叫E.P.胡控，他患有健忘癥。他的記憶力旁趟，恐怕是世界上最差的了昼激，他的記憶能力差到，甚至記不得自己有健忘癥锡搜，真的很神奇橙困，雖然他是個悲劇角色，但通過他我們能了解到耕餐，記憶在何種程度上塑造了我們的人格凡傅。

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.

情況的另一個極端是 我遇到了這樣一個人，他叫Kim Peek肠缔，他是Dustin?Hoffman在電影《雨人》里的角色的原型夏跷，我和他花了一下午，在鹽湖城公共圖書館里背電話簿明未，讓我大開眼界槽华。

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.

回家后我讀了許多關(guān)于記憶的論文趟妥，寫于兩千多年前的論文猫态，用拉丁文寫的，從古代披摄，一直到后來中世紀(jì)期間亲雪。我學(xué)到很多很有意思的事兒，其中一個就是行疏，曾經(jīng)匆光，訓(xùn)練、歸束酿联、培養(yǎng)記憶力的這種概念终息，完全不像如今那樣陌生夺巩，曾幾何時 人們寄希望于自己的記憶，能不遺余力地裝飾自己的心靈周崭。

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)