Long TED Talk - Joshua Foer : Feats of memory anyone can do

summary
Joshua Foer is a science writer. He starts to get himself involved in the memory research and to realize how memory works  when he has to cover the news of U.S. Memory Championship. Today, the psychologists refer to the concept of techniques of memory as elaborative encoding. However, from the historical record, the techniques aren't new, which can date back to 2500 years to Ancient Greece. They all come from the idea called the memory palace. To remember information, the way is to transform it into something meaningful to us and create the images in our mind. The more bizarre the images are, it's more likely to help memorize. In fact, the mechanism it's not a shortcut but it's a sort of depth of processing. When we want to create images or make connection between two things, it actually force us to think and thus we're deeply engaged. The techniques are learned and everyone can be trained to have a good memory. In the end, Joshua Foer wants to remind us that our lives are made up of chunks of our memories, so if we want to live a memorable life, we have to remember to remember.

What can learners learn from this talk?
Since the technique can be learned, we can train to improve our memory. We can apply the techniques to our lives, and I think it helps to improve our speech skill, which make sure we won't forget what we're going to talk about in the speech. However, the techniques work because they force us to work, so it also implies us to pay much more attention to our lives. Pay attention to the people we have met with, and engaged to the things in the real world.