TED演讲：如何拯救我们的健忘？
生活中我们会发现自己的记忆力越来越差，巨大的学习、工作压力、睡眠不足、焦虑、抑郁等因素都会导致我们越来越健忘，但其实任何人通过训练都可以拥有超凡的记忆力！
TED演讲稿
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.
请大家跟我一起闭上眼睛。想象一下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。
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.
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。
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.
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。
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."
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 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.
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。好了，睁开眼睛吧。
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.
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。
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.
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。
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.
我当时觉得，这太不可思议了。这些人肯定天赋异禀。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。
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."
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" 。
And I said, "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?"
我惊讶不已 "哇噻 怎么我从来没听说过呢?"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?"
"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." I was like, "Well, I'm not Britney Spears, but maybe you could teach me. I mean, you've got to start somewhere, right?"
“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"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?"
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.
接着，一段非常奇特的历程在我面前展开了序幕，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。
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。
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. 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.
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。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。
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.
我学到很多很有意思的事儿。其中一个就是曾经、训练、规束、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。
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.
近几千年来，人类发明了一系列技术--从字母表到卷轴到法典，印刷机，摄影技术，电脑，智能手机。让我们能越来越轻松地外化记忆能力。让我们从根本上把这种基础的人类能力拱手让出。
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.
这些技术让现代生活变为可能。但同时也改变了我们，不仅在文化上。我觉得也在认知上，不再需要费劲去记忆，有时会觉得我们已经忘了如何去记忆。
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.
在这片地球上已经很少有地方能让你觉得人们仍热衷于训练、规束、培养记忆力了。那非同寻常的记忆大赛算是一个。其实它也没有那么非同寻常。世界各地都开始举办这样的竞赛。我对此深深着迷。想要知道这些人是怎么做到的。
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.
几年前伦敦大学学院的一组研究人员请来一批记忆大赛的冠军接受研究。他们想要弄明白这些人的大脑是否跟我们其他人在解剖学上的结构不一样? 答案是否定的。那他们比我们都聪明吗? 他们给研究对象实施了一系列认知测试，依旧得出了否定结论。
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.
但对比受控制的比对目标的大脑，记忆大赛冠军们的大脑确实有一处很有趣的不同，很说明问题。这些人被送去做功能磁共振扫描大脑时，当他们在记忆数字或人脸或雪花图案时，研究人员发现记忆大赛冠军们的大脑激活的区域跟普通人不太一样。
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? 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 catch-up.
值得注意的是，他们看来是在用脑中在空间记忆和导航时会用到的部分，为什么? 我们可以从中得出什么样的结论呢?竞争性记忆的较量被一种类似军事比赛的方式推向了白热化。每年都会有人带着更有效的记忆方法现身赛场 ，而其他人就必须迎头赶上。
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.
这是我的朋友Ben Pridmore，赢得过三次国际记忆大赛冠军。在他的台前 有三十六副打乱顺序的牌，他要在一个小时内记下全部。用的是一种他自己发明的，也只有他会的技巧。用与此类似的方法他曾一字不差地背下了 4140个任意排列的二进制数，只用了半个小时。很牛吧
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."
参赛者在这些竞赛中运用过很多不同的记忆方法，各式各样，被运用到的所有技巧，最终都能归化为一个概念，心理学家称之为"精细编码"。
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." Okay?
这个概念能用一则幽默的悖论完美诠释叫做Baker/baker悖论。简单说来就是，假设我让两个人去记同一个词，我跟你说 "记住有个人叫Baker"。Baker是人名。我又来告诉你 "记住有个人是面包师(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 a baker. Same word, different amount of remembering; that's weird. What's going on here?
过了一段时间我又回来找到你们，问 "还记得我之前叫你们记住的那个词吗?" ”还记得是什么词吗?“ 被告知人名是Baker的人，记住这个词的可能性远不如被告知职业是面包师的那个人。同样的词导致不同的记忆程度，到底是为什么呢？
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.
是因为人名Baker没有任何特殊含义，没法跟你脑海里零碎繁杂的记忆产生任何联系。但是面包师(baker)作为一个常用名词，我们都知道面包师是什么。面包师带着搞笑的白帽子，他们手上沾满了面粉，他们下班回到家带着扑鼻的烤面包香。甚至可能有些人有朋友就是面包师。
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.
我们初次听到这个词时，马上就会产生各种各样的联想 这使我们能在一段时间后还能回忆起来。其实要理解记忆竞赛中的一切奥妙，或在日常生活中改善记忆力的秘诀，仅仅在于想办法把Baker中的大写B变为面包师(baker)中的小写b，把没有前因后果，没有重要性，没有涵义的信息用某种方法转化为有意义的内容，跟脑海里的其他记忆串联起来。
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.
这种精确记忆的技巧在两千五百年前的古希腊就已出现。后来将其称为记忆宫殿。发明这种技巧的过程如下：有个叫做Simonides的诗人，他要去参加一个晚宴。其实他算是被请去做表演嘉宾的，因为在那个年代 炫酷派对的标准。不是请D.J.来打碟，而是要请诗人来颂诗。
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.
他站起来，背出了他的全篇诗作，然后潇洒离去。他刚走出门口，晚宴大厅就塌了。砸死了里面所有的人，不仅全体死亡，所有的死者都被砸得面目全非。没人说得清死者都有些谁，没人说得清谁坐在哪儿，导致死者的尸体没法得到合适的殉葬安置。
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.
这又加重了整件事的悲剧色彩 。Simonides站在外面，作为废墟中的唯一幸存者，闭上眼睛，猛然意识到在他的脑海中，他眼前出现了所有宾客所坐的位置。他就牵着亲属们的手，穿过废墟，把他们带到了亲人身边。
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.
Simonides当时猛然醒悟的事，大概我们大家也都猜到了。其实是，不管我们有多不善于记住姓名，电话号码或是同事的每句指令，我们都拥有异常敏锐的视觉或空间记忆能力。
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.
要是我让你们逐字逐句地重述我刚才讲的Simonides故事的前十个字，应该没几个人会记得。但我敢打赌，如果我让你们现在回想下，在你的门厅里坐在会讲话的棕色骏马上的是谁，你们就明白我刚才说的意思了。
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.
记忆宫殿的原理就是在你的脑海里建立一栋想象大厦，并让你想记住的东西 的影像充满其中。越是疯狂、古怪、奇诡、荒诞搞笑、乱七八糟、招人厌恶的影像，就越容易记住。这个建议来自于两千多年前拉丁最早的记忆学者。
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.
那么这种说法的原理到底是什么呢？假设你被邀请站上TED的中心讲台演讲 而你想脱稿完成。如西塞罗在两千年前在TEDx罗马上的演讲一般，他就会这么霸气走一回，而你也想这样。你要做的就是想象自己站在自家门前。
And you'd come 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 contest. And then you'd go inside your house, and you would see an image of Cookie Monster on top of Mister Ed.
然后凭空想象出一段完全荒诞疯狂难忘的景象，用来提示你上台要提的第一件事就是这场诡异的裸骑大赛 。然后你走进房子里想到甜饼怪物， 坐在Ed先生背上的样子。
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'd 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'd have some friends to help you remember that.
这个景象会提醒你，要介绍你的朋友Ed Cook。然后你脑海里出现了小甜甜布兰妮的样子 ，你就会想起要讲那个关于布兰妮的小故事，然后你走进厨房，你要说到的第四个话题是，你花了一整年走过的奇妙历程，通过绿野仙踪就可以联想得到。
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.
这就是罗马演说家背诵演讲稿的秘诀，并非一字不差。逐字背诵只会平添麻烦，而是记住一个个主题。其实短语"主题句" 就来源于希腊词"topos"，意思是"地点"。这是古时候人们谈到演讲或是修辞时会用到的空间术语。
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.
短语 "第一" 就意味着你的记忆宫殿的第一层。这简直太有意思了。我对这起了很大的兴趣。后来我又去了更多记忆大赛。我开始萌发了要更详细描写 这种竞技记忆文化的念头 。
But there was a problem. The problem was that a memory contest is a pathologically boring event. 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.
但有一个问题。问题是记忆大赛其实过程很无聊的。真的，就像一群人坐那儿高考一样，最最激动人心的时刻也不过就是有人揉了揉太阳穴。我是个记者，总得有东西可写呀。
I know that there's 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.
我知道这些人脑子里肯定是惊涛骇浪，但我作为外人无法得见。我意识到，若我真的想报道这事儿，一定得亲身体验才行。所以我开始尝试着每天早上坐下来看纽约时报前，花上十五到二十分钟，尝试记忆一些事。
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 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.
背背小诗，背背我在跳蚤市场买来的旧年鉴里的人名。我惊奇地发现这其实非常带劲。要不去尝试根本想不到。有趣在于其实目标并不是要通过训练提高记忆力，而是你在努力培养改善、创造力、想象力在你的脑海里凭空造出那些完全滑稽荒诞胡乱，最好是难忘的影像，而它成为了我的乐趣，
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.
这是我戴着标准竞赛记忆者训练套装的样子。它有一对耳塞，一副护目镜 镜面全部遮黑，就留了两个小孔。因为竞技记忆者最大的敌人就是注意力分散。
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.
最后我再次回到了一年前报道的那场竞赛场上。我一时冲动也想报名参加， 就当做参与性新闻报道的实验了。我当时想，到时能在前言里调侃一下自己也好。问题是实验最后得到了意想不到的结果。那场竞赛我赢了 。真是完全出乎我预料之外。
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 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.
对我来说现在背演讲稿、电话号码或是购物单，都是小菜一碟，倒是很不错 。但其实这些都不重要了，这些都是小伎俩。这些记忆伎俩之所以有效是因为它们依仗人类大脑运转的一些基本原理， 并不用真的去建立记忆宫殿或记下几副牌的顺序，你也完全可以从了解大脑运转原理中获得一些益处。
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,
我们总会议论记忆力很好的人，总觉得那些人是天赋异禀，事实并不是这样 。强大的记忆力是可以习得的。从最根本的说起，专心致志就能记住，全心投入时就能记住。只要能想办法把信息和经历转化为有意义的事，就能记住 。
why it is significant, why it's colorful, when we're able to transform it in some way that 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.
想它为何重要，为何多彩，当我们能把它转化成为有前因后果的事并跟我们脑海中繁杂琐碎的其他事产生联想时，当我们能把人名Baker转化为面包师baker时。记忆宫殿或是那些记忆技巧，都只是捷径而已 。
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.
其实说到底它们都不能算捷径。这方法有效是因为它迫使你思考，它迫使你往更深层次去想，让你更加专注。大部分人平时并不会费力去训练这个。其实捷径并不存在，这一直就是我们能记住事物的原因。
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 he had a memory problem, left me with, which is the notion that our lives are the sum of our memories.
有一件事我希望你们能记住，就是E.P. 那个连自己患了健忘症都想不起来的人，让我深思得出了一个感想。人生就是我们个人记忆的合集。
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?
在短暂的人生里，你还愿意因为黑莓 iPhone 丧失多少瞬间。忽略对面坐着的人，在跟我们交谈的人，变得越发懒惰，不愿意深究任何事？
I learned firsth and 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.
通过亲身经历，我发现我们的身体里潜藏着不可思议的记忆能力。但若你想活得难忘，就得做那种记得时常记忆的人。
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