为什么有些人似乎天赋异能，能够过目不忘在短时间内记下一本书的内容或是繁多的数字？是否他们的脑袋和我们的不一样，或他们更聪明？科技栏作家Joshua Foer给您详细讲解这种记忆方法 —— 他称其为"记忆宫殿" —— 并向您证明他的重点是: 任何人都可以拥有绝佳的记忆里，包括他自己。这个答案就是“精细编码"——他们把没有前因后果、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。
Feats of memory anyone can do 英语演讲稿带中文翻译：
I'd like to invite you to close your eyes.
请大家跟我一起闭上眼睛，象一下。
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. 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.
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，正在进行一场自行车赛，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，她在你咖啡桌上跳舞，并唱着"Hit Me Baby One More Time"，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，
Okay. Open your eyes.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，
(Laughter)(大笑)
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. I was like, this is unbelievable. These people must be freaks of nature.
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。
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. 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 was like, "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?"，
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"，
(Laughter)(哄笑)
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，
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，
I met a host of really interesting people. This is a guy called E.P. He's an amnesic who had, very possibly, the very 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，
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，
(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，
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，
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. 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?，
The sport of competitive memorizing is driven by a kind of arms race where every y