【正文】 ind of mindfulness, that most of us don39。re able to transform Bakers into memory palace, these memory techniquesthey39。s colorful, when we39。re based on some pretty basic principles about how our brains you don39。t supposed to , it is nice to be able to memorize speeches and phone numbers and shopping lists, but it39。s greatest ended up ing 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 39。s training 39。re trying to get better and better at creating, at dreaming up, these utterly ludicrous, raunchy, hilarious, and hopefully unforgettable images in your mind39。t have access to I realized, if I was going to tell this story, I needed to walk in their shoes a little 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 it was a poem, maybe it was names from an old yearbook that I bought at a flea I found that this was shockingly never would have expected was fun because this is actually not about training your you39。s incredible stuff happening in these people39。s like “in the first place of your memory palace.”I thought this was just fascinating, and I got really into 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 petitive there was a problem was that a memory contest is a pathologically boring , it is like a bunch of people sitting around taking the SATsI mean, the most dramatic it gets is when somebody starts massaging their I39。d have some friends to help you remember is how Roman orators memorized their speechesnot wordforword, which is just going to screw you up, but fact, the phrase “topic sentence”that es from the Greek word “topos,” which means “place.” That39。d see an image of Britney Spears to remind you of this funny anecdote you want to you39。d e up with some sort of crazy, ridiculous, unforgettable image, to remind you that the first thing you want to talk about is this totally bizarre then you39。s say that you39。s eye, and populate it with images of the things that you want to rememberthe crazier, weirder, more bizarre, funnier, raunchier, stinkier the image is, the more unforgettable it39。s one tragedy pounding , standing outside, the sole survivor amid the wreckage, closes his eyes and has this realization, which is that in his mind39。t just kill everybody, it mangles the bodies beyond all can say who was inside, nobody can say where they were bodies can39。t actually mean anything to is entirely untethered from all of the other memories floating around in your the mon noun “baker”we know wear funny white have flour on their smell good when they e home from we even know a 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 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 lowercase B bakersto take information that is lacking in context, in significance, in meaning, and transform it in some way, so that it bees meaningful in the light of all the other things that you have in your of the more elaborate techniques for doing this dates back 2,500 years to Ancient came to be known as the memory story behind its creation goes like this:There was a poet called Simonides, who was attending a was actually the hired entertainment, because back then, if you wanted to throw a really slamming party, you didn39。s 39。s his I say to you, “Remember that there is a guy who is a baker.” Okay? And I e 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 a word, different amount of remembering。s involved in spatial memory and ? And is there something that the rest of us can learn from this?The sport of petitive memorizing is driven by a kind of arms race where, every year, somebody es up with a new way to remember more stuff more quickly, and then the rest of the field has to play is my friend Ben Pridmore, threetime world memory 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 used a similar technique to memorize the precise order of 4,140 random binary digits in half an while there are a whole host of ways of remembering stuff in these petitions, everything, all of the techniques that are being used, ultimately e down to a concept that psychologists refer to as “elaborative encoding.”And it39。s actually not that singular, there are contests held all over the I was fascinated, I wanted to know how do these guys do few years back a group of researchers at University College London brought a bunch of memory champions into the wanted to know: Do these guys have brains that are somehow structurally, anatomically different from the rest of ours? The answer was they smarter than the rest of us? They gave them a bunch of cognitive tests, and the answer was: not was, however, one really interesting and telling difference between the brains of the memory champions and the control subjects that they were paring them they put these guys in an fMRI machine, scanned their brains while they were memorizing numbers and people39。ve changed us little need to remember anymore, it sometimes seems like we39。ve also changed 39。s character in the movie “Rain Man.” We spent an afternoon together in the Salt Lake City Public Library memorizing phone books, which was I went back and I read a whole host of memory treatises, treatises written 2,000plus years ago in Latin, in antiquity, and then later, in the Middle I lear