每个人都能掌握的记忆技巧

夜神◕_̯͡◕

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，

夜神◕_̯͡◕

(Laughter)
(大笑)，

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 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，

夜神◕_̯͡◕

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. 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.
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，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，

夜神◕_̯͡◕

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，

夜神◕_̯͡◕

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，

夜神◕_̯͡◕

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. 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 the rest of us can learn from this?
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，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?，

夜神◕_̯͡◕

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 catchup.
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，

夜神◕_̯͡◕

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，

夜神◕_̯͡◕

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"，

夜神◕_̯͡◕

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." 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 that he is a baker. Same word, different amount of remembering; that's weird. What's going on here?
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)"，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，