第一篇：TED英語演講稿：我們在出生前學到了什么

My subject today is learning.And in that spirit, I want to spring on you all a pop quiz.Ready? When does learning begin? Now as you ponder that question, maybe you're thinking about the first day of preschool or kindergarten, the first time that kids are in a classroom with a teacher.Or maybe you've called to mind the toddler phase when children are learning how to walk and talk and use a fork.Maybe you've encountered the Zero-to-Three movement, which asserts that the most important years for learning are the earliest ones.And so your answer to my question would be: Learning begins at birth.Well today I want to present to you an idea that may be surprising and may even seem implausible, but which is supported by the latest evidence from psychology and biology.And that is that some of the most important learning we ever do happens before we're born, while we're still in the womb.Now I'm a science reporter.I write books and magazine articles.And I'm also a mother.And those two roles came together for me in a book that I wrote called “Origins.” “Origins” is a report from the front lines of an exciting new field called fetal origins.Fetal origins is a scientific discipline that emerged just about two decades ago, and it's based on the theory that our health and well-being throughout our lives is crucially affected by the nine months we spend in the womb.Now this theory was of more than just intellectual interest to me.I was myself pregnant while I was doing the research for the book.And one of the most fascinating insights I took from this work is that we're all learning about the world even before we enter it.When we hold our babies for the first time, we might imagine that they're clean slates, unmarked by life, when in fact, they've already been shaped by us and by the particular world we live in.Today I want to share with you some of the amazing things that scientists are discovering about what fetuses learn while they're still in their mothers' bellies.First of all, they learn the sound of their mothers' voices.Because sounds from the outside world have to travel through the mother's abdominal tissue and through the amniotic fluid that surrounds the fetus, the voices fetuses hear, starting around the fourth month of gestation, are muted and muffled.One researcher says that they probably sound a lot like the the voice of Charlie Brown's teacher in the old “peanuts” cartoon.But the pregnant woman's own voice reverberates through her body, reaching the fetus much more readily.And because the fetus is with her all the time, it hears her voice a lot.Once the baby's born, it recognizes her voice and it prefers listening to her voice over anyone else's.How can we know this? Newborn babies can't do much, but one thing they're really good at is sucking.Researchers take advantage of this fact by rigging up two rubber nipples, so that if a baby sucks on one, it hears a recording of its mother's voice on a pair of headphones, and if it sucks on the other nipple, it hears a recording of a female stranger's voice.Babies quickly show their preference by choosing the first one.Scientists also take advantage of the fact that babies will slow down their sucking when something interests them and resume their fast sucking when they get bored.This is how researchers discovered that, after women repeatedly read aloud a section of Dr.Seuss' “The Cat in the Hat” while they were pregnant, their newborn babies recognized that passage when they hear it outside the womb.My favorite experiment of this kind is the one that showed that the babies of women who watched a certain soap opera every day during pregnancy recognized the theme song of that show once they were born.So fetuses are even learning about the particular language that's spoken in the world that they'll be born into.A study published last year found that from birth, from the moment of birth, babies cry in the accent of their mother's native language.French babies cry on a rising note while German babies end on a falling note, imitating the melodic contours of those languages.Now why would this kind of fetal learning be useful? It may have evolved to aid the baby's survival.From the moment of birth, the baby responds most to the voice of the person who is most likely to care for it--its mother.It even makes its cries sound like the mother's language, which may further endear the baby to the mother, and which may give the baby a head start in the critical task of learning how to understand and speak its native language.But it's not just sounds that fetuses are learning about in utero.It's also tastes and smells.By seven months of gestation, the fetus' taste buds are fully developed, and its olfactory receptors, which allow it to smell, are functioning.The flavors of the food a pregnant woman eats find their way into the amniotic fluid, which is continuously swallowed by the fetus.Babies seem to remember and prefer these tastes once they're out in the world.In one experiment, a group of pregnant women was asked to drink a lot of carrot juice during their third trimester of pregnancy, while another group of pregnant women drank only water.Six months later, the women's infants were offered cereal mixed with carrot juice, and their facial expressions were observed while they ate it.The offspring of the carrot juice drinking women ate more carrot-flavored cereal, and from the looks of it, they seemed to enjoy it more.A sort of French version of this experiment was carried out in Dijon, France where researchers found that mothers who consumed food and drink flavored with licorice-flavored anise during pregnancy showed a preference for anise on their first day of life, and again, when they were tested later, on their fourth day of life.Babies whose mothers did not eat anise during pregnancy showed a reaction that translated roughly as “yuck.” What this means is that fetuses are effectively being taught by their mothers about what is safe and good to eat.Fetuses are also being taught about the particular culture that they'll be joining through one of culture's most powerful expressions, which is food.They're being introduced to the characteristic flavors and spices of their culture's cuisine even before birth.Now it turns out that fetuses are learning even bigger lessons.But before I get to that, I want to address something that you may be wondering about.The notion of fetal learning may conjure up for you attempts to enrich the fetus--like playing Mozart through headphones placed on a pregnant belly.But actually, the nine-month-long process of molding and shaping that goes on in the womb is a lot more visceral and consequential than that.Much of what a pregnant woman encounters in her daily life--the air she breathes, the food and drink she consumes, the chemicals she's exposed to, even the emotions she feels--are shared in some fashion with her fetus.They make up a mix of influences as individual and idiosyncratic as the woman herself.The fetus incorporates these offerings into its own body, makes them part of its flesh and blood.And often it does something more.It treats these maternal contributions as information, as what I like to call biological postcards from the world outside.So what a fetus is learning about in utero is not Mozart's “Magic Flute” but answers to questions much more critical to its survival.Will it be born into a world of abundance or scarcity? Will it be safe and protected, or will it face constant dangers and threats? Will it live a long, fruitful life or a short, harried one? The pregnant woman's diet and stress level in particular provide important clues to prevailing conditions like a finger lifted to the wind.The resulting tuning and tweaking of a fetus' brain and other organs are part of what give us humans our enormous flexibility, our ability to thrive in a huge variety of environments, from the country to the city, from the tundra to the desert.To conclude, I want to tell you two stories about how mothers teach their children about the world even before they're born.In the autumn of 1944, the darkest days of World War II, German troops blockaded Western Holland, turning away all shipments of food.The opening of the Nazi's siege was followed by one of the harshest winters in decades--so cold the water in the canals froze solid.Soon food became scarce, with many Dutch surviving on just 500 calories a day--a quarter of what they consumed before the war.As weeks of deprivation stretched into months, some resorted to eating tulip bulbs.By the beginning of May, the nation's carefully rationed food reserve was completely exhausted.The specter of mass starvation loomed.And then on May 5th, 1945, the siege came to a sudden end when Holland was liberated by the Allies.The “Hunger Winter,” as it came to be known, killed some 10,000 people and weakened thousands more.But there was another population that was affected--the 40,000 fetuses in utero during the siege.Some of the effects of malnutrition during pregnancy were immediately apparent in higher rates of stillbirths, birth defects, low birth weights and infant mortality.But others wouldn't be discovered for many years.Decades after the “Hunger Winter,” researchers documented that people whose mothers were pregnant during the siege have more obesity, more diabetes and more heart disease in later life than individuals who were gestated under normal conditions.These individuals' prenatal experience of starvation seems to have changed their bodies in myriad ways.They have higher blood pressure, poorer cholesterol profiles and reduced glucose tolerance--a precursor of diabetes.Why would undernutrition in the womb result in disease later? One explanation is that fetuses are making the best of a bad situation.When food is scarce, they divert nutrients towards the really critical organ, the brain, and away from other organs like the heart and liver.This keeps the fetus alive in the short-term, but the bill comes due later on in life when those other organs, deprived early on, become more susceptible to disease.But that may not be all that's going on.It seems that fetuses are taking cues from the intrauterine environment and tailoring their physiology accordingly.They're preparing themselves for the kind of world they will encounter on the other side of the womb.The fetus adjusts its metabolism and other physiological processes in anticipation of the environment that awaits it.And the basis of the fetus' prediction is what its mother eats.The meals a pregnant woman consumes constitute a kind of story, a fairy tale of abundance or a grim chronicle of deprivation.This story imparts information that the fetus uses to organize its body and its systems--an adaptation to prevailing circumstances that facilitates its future survival.Faced with severely limited resources, a smaller-sized child with reduced energy requirements will, in fact, have a better chance of living to adulthood.The real trouble comes when pregnant women are, in a sense, unreliable narrators, when fetuses are led to expect a world of scarcity and are born instead into a world of plenty.This is what happened to the children of the Dutch “Hunger Winter.” And their higher rates of obesity, diabetes and heart disease are the result.Bodies that were built to hang onto every calorie found themselves swimming in the superfluous calories of the post-war Western diet.The world they had learned about while in utero was not the same as the world into which they were born.Here's another story.At 8:46 a.m.on September 11th, 2001, there were tens of thousands of people in the vicinity of the World Trade Center in New York--commuters spilling off trains, waitresses setting tables for the morning rush, brokers already working the phones on Wall Street.1,700 of these people were pregnant women.When the planes struck and the towers collapsed, many of these women experienced the same horrors inflicted on other survivors of the disaster--the overwhelming chaos and confusion, the rolling clouds of potentially toxic dust and debris, the heart-pounding fear for their lives.About a year after 9/11, researchers examined a group of women who were pregnant when they were exposed to the World Trade Center attack.In the babies of those women who developed post-traumatic stress syndrome, or pTSD, following their ordeal, researchers discovered a biological marker of susceptibility to pTSD--an effect that was most pronounced in infants whose mothers experienced the catastrophe in their third trimester.In other words, the mothers with post-traumatic stress syndrome had passed on a vulnerability to the condition to their children while they were still in utero.Now consider this: post-traumatic stress syndrome appears to be a reaction to stress gone very wrong, causing its victims tremendous unnecessary suffering.But there's another way of thinking about pTSD.What looks like pathology to us may actually be a useful adaptation in some circumstances.In a particularly dangerous environment, the characteristic manifestations of pTSD--a hyper-awareness of one's surroundings, a quick-trigger response to danger--could save someone's life.The notion that the prenatal transmission of pTSD risk is adaptive is still speculative, but I find it rather poignant.It would mean that, even before birth, mothers are warning their children that it's a wild world out there, telling them, “Be careful.”

Let me be clear.Fetal origins research is not about blaming women for what happens during pregnancy.It's about discovering how best to promote the health and well-being of the next generation.That important effort must include a focus on what fetuses learn during the nine months they spend in the womb.Learning is one of life's most essential activities, and it begins much earlier than we ever imagined.Thank you.

第二篇：TED英語演講稿：我們在出生前學到了什么（寫寫幫推薦）

TED英語演講稿：我們在出生前學到了

什么

my subject today is learning.and in that spirit, i want to spring on you all a pop quiz.ready? when does learning begin? now as you ponder that question, maybe you're thinking about the first day of preschool or kindergarten, the first time that kids are in a classroom with a teacher.or maybe you've called to mind the toddler phase when children are learning how to walk and talk and use a fork.maybe you've encountered the zero-to-three movement, which asserts that the most important years for learning are the earliest ones.and so your answer to my question would be: learning begins at birth.well today i want to present to you an idea that may be surprising and may even seem implausible, but which is supported by the latest evidence from psychology and biology.and that is that some of the most important learning we ever do happens before we're born, while we're still in the womb.now i'm a science reporter.i write books and magazine articles.and i'm also a mother.and those two roles came together for me in a book that i wrote called “origins.” “origins” is a report from the front lines of an exciting new field called fetal origins.fetal origins is a scientific discipline that emerged just about two decades ago, and it's based on the theory that our health and well-being throughout our lives is crucially affected by the nine months we spend in the womb.now this theory was of more than just intellectual interest to me.i was myself pregnant while i was doing the research for the book.and one of the most fascinating insights i took from this work is that we're all learning about the world even before we enter it.when we hold our babies for the first time, we might imagine that they're clean slates, unmarked by life, when in fact, they've already been shaped by us and by the particular world we live in.today i want to share with you some of the amazing things that scientists are discovering about what fetuses learn while they're still in their mothers' bellies.first of all, they learn the sound of their mothers' voices.because sounds from the outside world have to travel through the mother's abdominal tissue and through the amniotic fluid that surrounds the fetus, the voices fetuses hear, starting around the fourth month of gestation, are muted and muffled.one researcher says that they probably sound a lot like the the voice of charlie brown's teacher in the old “peanuts” cartoon.but the pregnant woman's own voice reverberates through her body, reaching the fetus much more readily.and because the fetus is with her all the time, it hears her voice a lot.once the baby's born, it recognizes her voice and it prefers listening to her voice over anyone else's.how can we know this? newborn babies can't do much, but one thing they're really good at is sucking.researchers take advantage of this fact by rigging up two rubber nipples, so that if a baby sucks on one, it hears a recording of its mother's voice on a pair of headphones, and if it sucks on the other nipple, it hears a recording of a female stranger's voice.babies quickly show their preference by choosing the first one.scientists also take advantage of the fact that babies will slow down their sucking when something interests them and resume their fast sucking when they get bored.this is how researchers discovered that, after women repeatedly read aloud a section of dr.seuss' “the cat in the hat” while they were pregnant, their newborn babies recognized that passage when they hear it outside the womb.my favorite experiment of this kind is the one that showed that the babies of women who watched a certain soap opera every day during pregnancy recognized the theme song of that show once they were born.so fetuses are even learning about the particular language that's spoken in the world that they'll be born into.a study published last year found that from birth, from the moment of birth, babies cry in the accent of their mother's native language.french babies cry on a rising note while german babies end on a falling note, imitating the melodic contours of those languages.now why would this kind of fetal learning be useful? it may have evolved to aid the baby's survival.from the moment of birth, the baby responds most to the voice of the person who is most likely to care for it--its mother.it even makes its cries sound like the mother's language, which may further endear the baby to the mother, and which may give the baby a head start in the critical task of learning how to understand and speak its native language.but it's not just sounds that fetuses are learning about in utero.it's also tastes and smells.by seven months of gestation, the fetus' taste buds are fully developed, and its olfactory receptors, which allow it to smell, are functioning.the flavors of the food a pregnant woman eats find their way into the amniotic fluid, which is continuously swallowed by the fetus.babies seem to remember and prefer these tastes once they're out in the world.in one experiment, a group of pregnant women was asked to drink a lot of carrot juice during their third trimester of pregnancy, while another group of pregnant women drank only water.six months later, the women's infants were offered cereal mixed with carrot juice, and their facial expressions were observed while they ate it.the offspring of the carrot juice drinking women ate more carrot-flavored cereal, and from the looks of it, they seemed to enjoy it more.a sort of french version of this experiment was carried out in dijon, france where researchers found that mothers who consumed food and drink flavored with licorice-flavored anise during pregnancy showed a preference for anise on their first day of life, and again, when they were tested later, on their fourth day of life.babies whose mothers did not eat anise during pregnancy showed a reaction that translated roughly as “yuck.” what this means is that fetuses are effectively being taught by their mothers about what is safe and good to eat.fetuses are also being taught about the particular culture that they'll be joining through one of culture's most powerful expressions, which is food.they're being introduced to the characteristic flavors and spices of their culture's cuisine even before birth.now it turns out that fetuses are learning even bigger lessons.but before i get to that, i want to address something that you may be wondering about.the notion of fetal learning may conjure up for you attempts to enrich the fetus--like playing mozart through headphones placed on a pregnant belly.but actually, the nine-month-long process of molding and shaping that goes on in the womb is a lot more visceral and consequential than that.much of what a pregnant woman encounters in her daily life--the air she breathes, the food and drink she consumes, the chemicals she's exposed to, even the emotions she feels--are shared in some fashion with her fetus.they make up a mix of influences as individual and idiosyncratic as the woman herself.the fetus incorporates these offerings into its own body, makes them part of its flesh and blood.and often it does something more.it treats these maternal contributions as information, as what i like to call biological postcards from the world outside.so what a fetus is learning about in utero is not mozart's “magic flute” but answers to questions much more critical to its survival.will it be born into a world of abundance or scarcity? will it be safe and protected, or will it face constant dangers and threats? will it live a long, fruitful life or a short, harried one? the pregnant woman's diet and stress level in particular provide important clues to prevailing conditions like a finger lifted to the wind.the resulting tuning and tweaking of a fetus' brain and other organs are part of what give us humans our enormous flexibility, our ability to thrive in a huge variety of environments, from the country to the city, from the tundra to the desert.to conclude, i want to tell you two stories about how mothers teach their children about the world even before they're born.in the autumn of 1944, the darkest days of world war ii, german troops blockaded western holland, turning away all shipments of food.the opening of the nazi's siege was followed by one of the harshest winters in decades--so cold the water in the canals froze solid.soon food became scarce, with many dutch surviving on just 500 calories a day--a quarter of what they consumed before the war.as weeks of deprivation stretched into months, some resorted to eating tulip bulbs.by the beginning of may, the nation's carefully rationed food reserve was completely exhausted.the specter of mass starvation loomed.and then on may 5th, 1945, the siege came to a sudden end when holland was liberated by the allies.the “hunger winter,” as it came to be known, killed some 10,000 people and weakened thousands more.but there was another population that was affected--the 40,000 fetuses in utero during the siege.some of the effects of malnutrition during pregnancy were immediately apparent in higher rates of stillbirths, birth defects, low birth weights and infant mortality.but others wouldn't be discovered for many years.decades after the “hunger winter,” researchers documented that people whose mothers were pregnant during the siege have more obesity, more diabetes and more heart disease in later life than individuals who were gestated under normal conditions.these individuals' prenatal experience of starvation seems to have changed their bodies in myriad ways.they have higher blood pressure, poorer cholesterol profiles and reduced glucose tolerance--a precursor of diabetes.why would undernutrition in the womb result in disease later? one explanation is that fetuses are making the best of a bad situation.when food is scarce, they divert nutrients towards the really critical organ, the brain, and away from other organs like the heart and liver.this keeps the fetus alive in the short-term, but the bill comes due later on in life when those other organs, deprived early on, become more susceptible to disease.but that may not be all that's going on.it seems that fetuses are taking cues from the intrauterine environment and tailoring their physiology accordingly.they're preparing themselves for the kind of world they will encounter on the other side of the womb.the fetus adjusts its metabolism and other physiological processes in anticipation of the environment that awaits it.and the basis of the fetus' prediction is what its mother eats.the meals a pregnant woman consumes constitute a kind of story, a fairy tale of abundance or a grim chronicle of deprivation.this story imparts information that the fetus uses to organize its body and its systems--an adaptation to prevailing circumstances that facilitates its future survival.faced with severely limited resources, a smaller-sized child with reduced energy requirements will, in fact, have a better chance of living to adulthood.the real trouble comes when pregnant women are, in a sense, unreliable narrators, when fetuses are led to expect a world of scarcity and are born instead into a world of plenty.this is what happened to the children of the dutch “hunger winter.” and their higher rates of obesity, diabetes and heart disease are the result.bodies that were built to hang onto every calorie found themselves swimming in the superfluous calories of the post-war western diet.the world they had learned about while in utero was not the same as the world into which they were born.here's another story.at 8:46 on september 11th, XX, there were tens of thousands of people in the vicinity of the world trade center in new york--commuters spilling off trains, waitresses setting tables for the morning rush, brokers already working the phones on wall street.1,700 of these people were pregnant women.when the planes struck and the towers collapsed, many of these women experienced the same horrors inflicted on other survivors of the disaster--the overwhelming chaos and confusion, the rolling clouds of potentially toxic dust and debris, the heart-pounding fear for their lives.about a year after 9/11, researchers examined a group of women who were pregnant when they were exposed to the world trade center attack.in the babies of those women who developed post-traumatic stress syndrome, or ptsd, following their ordeal, researchers discovered a biological marker of susceptibility to ptsd--an effect that was most pronounced in infants whose mothers experienced the catastrophe in their third trimester.in other words, the mothers with post-traumatic stress syndrome had passed on a vulnerability to the condition to their children while they were still in utero.now consider this: post-traumatic stress syndrome appears to be a reaction to stress gone very wrong, causing its victims tremendous unnecessary suffering.but there's another way of thinking about ptsd.what looks like pathology to us may actually be a useful adaptation in some circumstances.in a particularly dangerous environment，the

characteristic manifestations of ptsd--a hyper-awareness of one's surroundings, a quick-trigger response to danger--could save someone's life.the notion that the prenatal transmission of ptsd risk is adaptive is still speculative, but i find it rather poignant.it would mean that, even before birth, mothers are warning their children that it's a wild world out there, telling them, “be careful.”

let me be clear.fetal origins research is not about blaming women for what happens during pregnancy.it's about discovering how best to promote the health and well-being of the next generation.that important effort must include a focus on what fetuses learn during the nine months they spend in the womb.learning is one of life's most essential activities, and it begins much earlier than we ever imagined.thank you.

第三篇：TED英語演講稿：我們為什么快樂？

TED英語演講稿：我們為什么快樂？

When you have 21 minutes to speak, two million years seems like a really long time. But evolutionarily, two million years is nothing. And yet in two million years the human brain has nearly tripled in mass, going from the one-and-a-quarter pound brain of our ancestor here, Habilis, to the almost three-pound meatloaf that everybody here has between their ears. What is it about a big brain that nature was so eager for every one of us to have one?

Well, it turns out when brains triple in size, they don't just get three times bigger; they gain new structures. And one of the main reasons our brain got so big is because it got a new part, called the “frontal lobe.” And particularly, a part called the “pre-frontal cortex.” Now what does a pre-frontal cortex do for you that should justify the entire architectural overhaul of the human skull in the blink of evolutionary time?

Well, it turns out the pre-frontal cortex does lots of things, but one of the most important things it does is it is an experience simulator. Flight pilots practice in flight simulators so that they don't make real mistakes in planes. Human beings have this marvelous adaptation that they can actually have experiences in their heads before they try them out in real life. This is a trick that none of our ancestors could do, and that no other animal can do quite like we can. It's a marvelous adaptation. It's up there with opposable thumbs and standing upright and language as one of the things that got our species out of the trees and into the shopping mall.

Now -- (Laughter) -- all of you have done this. I mean, you know, Ben and Jerry's doesn't have liver-and-onion ice cream, and it's not because they whipped some up, tried it and went, “Yuck.” It's because, without leaving your armchair, you can simulate that flavor and say “yuck” before you make it.

Let's see how your experience simulators are working. Let's just run a quick diagnostic before I proceed with the rest of the talk. Here's two different futures that I invite you to contemplate, and you can try to simulate them and tell me which one you think you might prefer. One of them is winning the lottery. This is about 314 million dollars. And the other is becoming paraplegic. So, just give it a moment of thought. You probably don't feel like you need a moment of thought.

Interestingly, there are data on these two groups of people, data on how happy they are. And this is exactly what you expected, isn't it? But these aren't the data. I made these up!

These are the data. You failed the pop quiz, and you're hardly five minutes into the lecture. Because the fact is that a year after losing the use of their legs, and a year after winning the lotto, lottery winners and paraplegics are equally happy with their lives.

Now, don't feel too bad about failing the first pop quiz, because everybody fails all of the pop quizzes all of the time. The research that my laboratory has been doing, that economists and psychologists around the country have been doing, have revealed something really quite startling to us, something we call the “impact bias,” which is the tendency for the simulator to work badly. For the simulator to make you believe that different outcomes are more different than in fact they really are.

From field studies to laboratory studies, we see that winning or losing an election, gaining or losing a romantic partner, getting or not getting a promotion, passing or not passing a college test, on and on, have far less impact, less intensity and much less duration than people expect them to have. In fact, a recent study -- this almost floors me -- a recent study showing how major life traumas affect people suggests that if it happened over three months ago, with only a few exceptions, it has no impact whatsoever on your happiness.

Why? Because happiness can be synthesized. Sir Thomas Brown wrote in 1642, “I am the happiest man alive. I have that in me that can convert poverty to riches, adversity to prosperity. I am more invulnerable than Achilles; fortune hath not one place to hit me.” What kind of remarkable machinery does this guy have in his head?

Well, it turns out it's precisely the same remarkable machinery that all off us have. Human beings have something that we might think of as a “psychological immune system.” A system of cognitive processes, largely non-conscious cognitive processes, that help them change their views of the world, so that they can feel better about the worlds in which they find themselves. Like Sir Thomas, you have this machine. Unlike Sir Thomas, you seem not to know it. (Laughter)

We synthesize happiness, but we think happiness is a thing to be found. Now, you don't need me to give you too many examples of people synthesizing happiness, I suspect. Though I'm going to show you some experimental evidence, you don't have to look very far for evidence.

第四篇：TED英語演講稿

TED英語演講稿

TED英語演講稿

I was one of the only kids in college who had a reason to go to the P.O.box at the end of the day, and that was mainly because my mother has never believed in email, in Facebook, in texting or cell phones in general.And so while other kids were BBM-ing their parents, I was literally waiting by the mailbox to get a letter from home to see how the weekend had gone, which was a little frustrating when Grandma was in the hospital, but I was just looking for some sort of scribble, some unkempt cursive from my mother.And so when I moved to New York City after college and got completely sucker-punched in the face by depression, I did the only thing I could think of at the time.I wrote those same kinds of letters that my mother had written me for strangers, and tucked them all throughout the city, dozens and dozens of them.I left them everywhere, in cafes and in libraries, at the U.N., everywhere.I blogged about those letters and the days when they were necessary, and I posed a kind of crazy promise to the Internet: that if you asked me for a hand-written letter, I would write you one, no questions asked.Overnight, my inbox morphed into this harbor of heartbreak--a single mother in Sacramento, a girl being bullied in rural Kansas, all asking me, a 22-year-old girl who barely even knew her own coffee order, to write them a love letter and give them a reason to wait by the mailbox.Well, today I fuel a global organization that is fueled by those trips to the mailbox, fueled by the ways in which we can harness social media like never before to write and mail strangers letters when they need them most, but most of all, fueled by crates of mail like this one, my trusty mail crate, filled with the scriptings of ordinary people, strangers writing letters to other strangers not because they're ever going to meet and laugh over a cup of coffee, but because they have found one another by way of letter-writing.But, you know, the thing that always gets me about these letters is that most of them have been written by people that have never known themselves loved on a piece of paper.They could not tell you about the ink of their own love letters.They're the ones from my generation, the ones of us that have grown up into a world where everything is paperless, and where some of our best conversations have happened upon a screen.We have learned to diary our pain onto Facebook, and we speak swiftly in 140 characters or less.But what if it's not about efficiency this time? I was on the subway yesterday with this mail crate, which is a conversation starter, let me tell you.If you ever need one, just carry one of these.(Laughter)And a man just stared at me, and he was like, “Well, why don't you use the Internet?” And I thought, “Well, sir, I am not a strategist, nor am I specialist.I am merely a storyteller.” And so I could tell you about a woman whose husband has just come home from Afghanistan, and she is having a hard time unearthing this thing called conversation, and so she tucks love letters throughout the house as a way to say, “Come back to me.Find me when you can.” Or a girl who decides that she is going to leave love letters around her campus in Dubuque, Iowa, only to find her efforts ripple-effected the next day when she walks out onto the quad and finds love letters hanging from the trees, tucked in the bushes and the benches.Or the man who decides that he is going to take his life, uses Facebook as a way to say goodbye to friends and family.Well, tonight he sleeps safely with a stack of letters just like this one tucked beneath his pillow, scripted by strangers who were there for him when.These are the kinds of stories that convinced me that letter-writing will never again need to flip back her hair and talk about efficiency, because she is an art form now, all the parts of her, the signing, the scripting, the mailing, the doodles in the margins.The mere fact that somebody would even just sit down, pull out a piece of paper and think about someone the whole way through, with an intention that is so much harder to unearth when the browser is up and the iPhone is pinging and we've got six conversations rolling in at once, that is an art form that does not fall down to the Goliath of “get faster,” no matter how many social networks we might join.We still clutch close these letters to our chest, to the words that speak louder than loud, when we turn pages into palettes to say the things that we have needed to say, the words that we have needed to write, to sisters and brothers and even to strangers, for far too long.Thank you.(Applause)(Applause)

第五篇：TED英語演講稿

01.Remember to say thank you

Hi.I'm here to talk to you about the importance of praise, admiration and thank you, and having it be specific and genuine.And the way I got interested in this was, I noticed in myself, when I was growing up, and until about a few years ago, that I would want to say thank you to someone, I would want to praise them, I would want to take in their praise of me and I'd just stop it.And I asked myself, why? I felt shy, I felt embarrassed.And then my question became, am I the only one who does this? So, I decided to investigate.I'm fortunate enough to work in the rehab facility, so I get to see people who are facing life and death with addiction.And sometimes it comes down to something as simple as, their core wound is their father died without ever saying he's proud of them.But then, they hear from all the family and friends that the father told everybody else that he was proud of him, but he never told the son.It's because he didn't know that his son needed to hear it.So my question is, why don't we ask for the things that we need? I know a gentleman, married for 25 years, who's longing to hear his wife say, “Thank you for being the breadwinner, so I can stay home with the kids,” but won't ask.I know a woman who's good at this.She, once a week, meets with her husband and says, “I'd really like you to thank me for all these things I did in the house and with the kids.” And he goes, “Oh, this is great, this is great.” And praise really does have to be genuine, but she takes responsibility for that.And a friend of mine, April, who I've had since kindergarten, she thanks her children for doing their chores.And she said, “Why wouldn't I thank it, even though they're supposed to do it?”

So, the question is, why was I blocking it? Why were other people blocking it? Why can I say, “I'll take my steak medium rare, I need size six shoes,” but I won't say, “Would you praise me this way?” And it's because I'm giving you critical data about me.I'm telling you where I'm insecure.I'm telling you where I need your help.And I'm treating you, my inner circle, like you're the enemy.Because what can you do with that data? You could neglect me.You could abuse it.Or you could actually meet my need.And I took my bike into the bike store--I love this--same bike, and they'd do something called “truing” the wheels.The guy said, “You know, when you true the wheels, it's going to make the bike so much better.” I get the same bike back, and they've taken all the little warps out of those same wheels I've had for two and a half years, and my bike is like new.So, I'm going to challenge all of you.I want you to true your wheels: be honest about the praise that you need to hear.What do you need to hear? Go home to your wife--go ask her, what does she need? Go home to your husband--what does he need? Go home and ask those questions, and then help the people around you.And it's simple.And why should we care about this? We talk about world peace.How can we have world peace with different cultures, different languages? I think it starts household by household, under the same roof.So, let's make it right in our own backyard.And I want to thank all of you in the audience for being great husbands, great mothers, friends, daughters, sons.And maybe somebody's never said that to you, but you've done a really, really good job.And thank you for being here, just showing up and changing the world with your ideas.02.The benefits of a bilingual brain

?Hablas espa?ol? Parlez-vous fran?ais? ni hui shuo zhong wen ma? If you answered “si”,”oui” or ”hui” and you are watching this in English, chances are you belong to the world bilingual and multilingual majority.And besides having an easier time traveling, or watching movies without subtitles, knowing two or more languages means that your brain may actually look and work differently than those of your monolingual friends.So what does it really mean to know a language?

Language ability is typically measured in two active parts, speaking and writing, and two passive parts, listening and reading.While a balanced bilingual has near equal abilities across the board in two languages, most bilinguals around the world know and use their languages in vary proportions.And depending on their situation and how they acquired each language, they can be classified into three general types.For example, let’s take Gabriella, whose family immigrates to the US from Peru when she was two-years old.As a compound bilingual, Gabriella develops two linguistic codes simultaneously, with a single set of concepts, learning both English and Spanish as she begins to process the world around her.Her teenage brother, on the other hand, might be a coordinate bilingual, working with two sets of concepts, learning English in school, while continuing to speak Spanish at home and with friends.Finally, Gabriella’s parents are likely to be subordinate bilinguals who learned a secondary language by filtering it through their primary language.Because all types of bilingual people can become fully proficient in a language regardless of accent and pronunciation, the difference may not be apparent to be a casual observer.But recent advances in imaging technology have given neurolinguists a glimpse into how specific aspects of language learning affect the bilingual brain.It’s well known that the brain’s left hemisphere is more dominant and analytical in logical processes, while the right hemisphere is more active in emotional and social ones, though this is a matter of degree, not an absolute split.The fact that language involves both types of functions while lateralization develops gradually with age, has lead to the critical period hypothesis.According to this theory, children learn languages more easily because the plasticity of their developing brains let them use both hemispheres in language acquisition, while in most adults, language is lateralized to one hemisphere, usually the left.If this is true, learning a language in childhood may give you a more holistic grasp of its social and emotional contexts.Conversely, recent research showed that people who learned a second language in adulthood exhibit less emotional bias and a more rational approach when confronting problems in the second language than their native one.But regardless of when you acquire additional languages, being multilingual gives your brain some remarkable advantages.Some of these are even visible, such higher density of the gray matter that contains most of your brain’s neurons and synapses, and more activity in certain regions when engaging a second language.The heightened workout a bilingual brain receives throughout its life can also help delay the onset of diseases, like Alzheimers and Dementia by as much as 5 years.The idea of major cognitive benefits to bilingualism may seem intuitive now, but it would have surprised earlier experts.Before the 1960s, bilingualism was considered a handicap that slowed the child’s development by forcing them to spend them too much energy distinguishing between languages, a view based largely on flawed studies.And while a more recent study did show that reaction times and errors increase for some bilingual students in cross-language tests, it also showed that the effort and attention needed to switch between languages triggered more activity in, and potentially strengthened, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex.This is the part of brain that plays a large role in executive function, problem solving, switching between tasks, and focusing while filtering out irrelevant information.So, while bilingual may not necessarily make you smarter, it does make your brain more healthy, complex and actively engaged, and even if you didn’t have the good fortune of learning a second language like a child, it’s never too late to do yourself a favor and make the linguistic leap from, ”Hello,” to “Hola”, ”Bonjour” or “ninhao’s” because when it comes to our brains a little exercise can go a long way.03.Feats of memory anyone can do

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.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.Okay.Open your eyes.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.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.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 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?” “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?” 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.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.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.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.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.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.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.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 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.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.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.”

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? 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?

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.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.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.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.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.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.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.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.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.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.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.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.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.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.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.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.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.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.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.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, 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.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.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.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?

I learned firsthand 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.Thank you.01.請別忘記感謝身邊的人

嗨。我在這里要和大家談談向別人表達贊美，傾佩和謝意的重要性。并使它們聽來真誠，具體。

之所以我對此感興趣是因為我從我自己的成長中注意到幾年前，當我想要對某個人說聲謝謝時，當我想要贊美他們時，當我想接受他們對我的贊揚，但我卻沒有說出口。我問我自己，這是為什么？我感到害羞，我感到尷尬。接著我產生了一個問題難道我是唯一一個這么做的人嗎？所以我決定做些探究。

我非常幸運的在一家康復中心工作，所以我可以看到那些因為上癮而面臨生與死的人。有時候這一切可以非常簡單地歸結為，他們最核心的創傷來自于他們父親到死都未說過“他為他們而自豪”。但他們從所有其它家庭或朋友那里得知他的父親告訴其他人為他感到自豪，但這個父親從沒告訴過他兒子。因為他不知道他的兒子需要聽到這一切。

因此我的問題是，為什么我們不索求我們需要的東西呢？我認識一個結婚25年的男士渴望聽到他妻子說，“感謝你為這個家在外賺錢，這樣我才能在家陪伴著孩子，”但他從來不去問。我認識一個精于此道的女士。每周一次，她見到丈夫后會說，“我真的希望你為我對這個家和孩子們付出的努力而感謝我。”他會應和到“哦，真是太棒了，真是太棒了。”贊揚別人一定要真誠，但她對贊美承擔了責任。一個從我上幼兒園就一直是朋友的叫April的人，她會感謝她的孩子們做了家務。她說：“為什么我不表示感謝呢，即使他們本來就要做那些事情？”

因此我的問題是，為什么我不說呢？為什么其它人不說呢？為什么我能說：“我要一塊中等厚度的牛排，我需要6號尺寸的鞋子，”但我卻不能說：“你可以贊揚我嗎？”因為這會使我把我的重要信息與你分享。會讓我告訴了你我內心的不安。會讓你認為我需要你的幫助。雖然你是我最貼心的人，我卻把你當作是敵人。你會用我托付給你的重要信息做些什么呢？你可以忽視我。你可以濫用它。或者你可以滿足我的要求。

我把我的自行車拿到車行－－我喜歡這么做－－同樣的自行車，他們會對車輪做整形。那里的人說：“當你對車輪做整形時，它會使自行車變成更好。”我把這輛自行車拿回來，他們把有小小彎曲的鐵絲從輪子上拿走這輛車我用了2年半，現在還像新的一樣。所以我要問在場的所有人，我希望你們把你們的車輪整形一下：真誠面對對你們想聽到的贊美。你們想聽到什么呢？回家問問你們的妻子，她想聽到什么？回家問問你們的丈夫，他想聽到什么？回家問問這些問題，并幫助身邊的人實現它們。

非常簡單。為什么要關心這個呢？我們談論世界和平。我們怎么用不同的文化，不同的語言來保持世界和平？我想要從每個小家庭開始。所以讓我們在家里就把這件事情做好。我想要感謝所有在這里的人們因為你們是好丈夫，好母親，好伙伴，好女兒和好兒子。或許有些人從沒跟你們說過但你們已經做得非常非常得出色了。感謝你們來到這里，向世界顯示著你們的智慧，并用它們改變著世界。

02.雙語能力對大腦的益處驚人

你會說中文嗎？如果你能回答“si”、“oui”或者“是的”，而且能看懂這個英文短片，那么你就跟世界上很多人一樣、具備雙語能力或是多語能力。除了旅游時溝通比較方便、看電影不需要字幕這些好處之外，通曉兩種或者三種以上的語言，意味著你的大腦在結構上或運作上與你那些單一語言的朋友有著明顯的不同。所以到底什么才能算通曉一門語言呢？

衡量語言能力，主要包含兩個主動部分——說和寫，和兩個被動部分——聽和讀。雖然一個出色的雙語者對于兩種語言都有著相近的使用能力，但是大多數的雙語者對兩個語種的認知和使用能力是有差異的。根據個人所處的環境以及他們具體學語言的方法，雙語者通常可以分成三類。

舉個例子來說，Gabriella在兩歲時跟著家人由秘魯移民到美國。她屬于復合型雙語者，Gabriella在剛接觸這個世界時就同時學英語和西班牙語，所以給她一個概念、她的大腦就能同時喚起兩種語言信號。她有一個十幾歲的哥哥，則屬于協調型雙語使用者，他運用兩種不同的概念，一方面在學校學習英語，另一方面用西班牙語和家人、朋友交流。

最后，Gabriella的父母，則屬于從屬型雙語者。當他們學習外語（英語）時，需要通過母語進行翻譯再進行學習。

如果不考慮口音和發音問題，這三種類型的雙語者至少都算能精通一門語言。因此，一般人很難發現這三種類型的差異。然而現在，由于大腦成像技術不斷進步，神經語言學家能夠知道語言學習對雙語使用者的大腦產生什么樣的影響。

大家都知道，大腦的左半球是掌管數據和邏輯分析的，而大腦的右半球則掌管情感與社交，但這并不是絕對的、只是比例多少的問題。

語言同時包括了左腦和右腦的功能，而隨著年齡的增長，大腦的功能會逐漸側重其中的一邊，語言學習的關鍵時期假說就是由這個事實引申出來的。根據這個理論，兒童學習語言更容易，是因為他們的大腦仍在發展、可塑性更強，他們可以同時調用左右兩邊大腦的機能來學習語言；然而多數成年人只通過大腦的一邊（通常是左腦）學習語言。

如果這個假說是真的，那么在兒童時期學習語言可以讓你對其社會和情感內涵有著更整體的把握。另一方面，近期的研究表明，成年人學習外語時的情緒性偏見沒那么多，同時相比于母語環境，他們在外語環境中遇到問題時也更為理性。

無論如何，當你學習一門新的語言時，多語能力都會給你的大腦帶來明顯的好處。有些好處甚至是可視化的，比如大腦灰白質的密度增加，那里包含了大多數的神經元和突觸，而且在學習外語時，大腦的部分區域會變得更加活躍。雙語者的大腦可以持續不斷地接收強化訓練，這能讓一些病癥（如阿茲海默癡呆癥和失智癥）的發作推遲至5年以后。

雙語能力對認知能力的有所幫助在現代來看是很好理解的，但是過去的專家一定會對這個觀點大吃一驚。在1960年之前，人們認為使用雙語對于兒童的成長來說是一種障礙，因為這需要兒童花費精力去分辨別不同語言，這種觀點的產生源自有瑕疵的研究方法。

最新的研究的確顯示，在跨語言測驗當中，使用雙語的學生的反應時間與錯誤次數增加了；同時也表明，學生需要花費更多的努力和注意力進行語言的轉換，這也使得前額葉腦區更加活躍、進而強化其機能。前額葉腦區主要影響執行、解決問題、多任務轉換、集中注意力、排除無關信息的能力。

雖然學習雙語不一定能讓你更聰明，但是它可以讓你的大腦更加健康、多元和活躍。即使你在年幼時沒有機會學習第二語言，但是現在學習永遠不會太晚。從現在開始學一門外語吧，把“hello”轉換成“Hola”、“Bonjour”、“你好”(本文作者母語為英語)等外語問候，即使只是小小的訓練，也能對大腦有所幫助。03.每個人都能掌握的記憶技巧

請大家跟我一起閉上眼睛，象一下。

你站在，自己家門口的外面，請留心一下門的顏色，以及門的材質，現在請想象一群超重的裸騎者，正在進行一場裸體自行車賽，向你的前門直沖而來，盡量讓畫面想象得栩栩如生近在眼前，他們都在奮力地踩腳踏板汗流浹背，路面非常顛簸，然后徑直撞進了你家前門，自行車四下飛散車輪從你身旁滾過，輻條扎進了各種尷尬角落，跨過門檻，進到門廳、走廊和門里的其他地方，室內光線柔和舒適，光線灑在甜餅怪物身上，他坐在一匹棕色駿馬的馬背上，正向你招手，這匹馬會說話，你可以感覺到他的藍色鬃毛讓你鼻子發癢，你可以聞到他正要扔進嘴里的葡萄燕麥曲奇的香氣，繞過他繞過他走進客廳，站在客廳里把你的想象力調到最大檔，想象小甜甜布蘭妮，她衣著暴露在你咖啡桌上跳舞，并唱著“Hit Me Baby One More Time”，接下來跟著我走進你的廚房，廚房的地面被一道黃磚路覆蓋，依次鉆出你的烤箱向你走來的是，《綠野仙蹤》里的多蘿西鐵皮人，稻草人和獅子，他們手挽著手蹦蹦跳跳地向你走來，好了睜開眼睛吧，我要給你們講一個每年春天在紐約，都會舉辦的奇異競賽，叫做全美記憶冠軍賽，幾年前我作為一名科技類記者，去報道這項競賽，心里想著大概那兒得像，怪才的“超級碗冠軍賽”一樣熱鬧吧，一大堆男人和屈指可數的女性，從小孩兒到老人有些還不怎么注意個人衛生，有的奮力在只看一次的情況下，記下上百個任意列出的數字，有的在努力記住成群的陌生人的名字，有的想在幾分鐘內努力背下整篇詩歌，還有的在比賽誰能以最快速度，記下一整副打亂的牌的順序，我當時覺得這太不可思議了，這些人肯定天賦異稟。

所以我開始采訪參賽者，這位叫Ed Cook，是從英格蘭來的，他在那兒接受了最好的記憶訓練，我問他 “Ed 你是什么時候開始意識到，自己是記憶天才的?”，Ed答道“我并不是什么專家，其實我的記憶力很一般，來參賽的每一個人，都會告訴你他們的記憶力只是一般水平，我們都在訓練自己后才能，完成這些奇跡般的記憶游戲，我們運用了一系列古老的技巧，這些技巧是希臘人在兩千五百年前發明的，西塞羅正是用了這些技巧，來記憶他的演講稿的，中世紀學者用這種技巧來背誦正本書籍的內容“，我驚訝不已 ”哇噻怎么我從來沒聽說過呢?“，我們站在競技大廳外，聰明過人令人驚嘆，而又稍有些古怪的英國人Ed，對我說 ”Josh 你是個美國記者，你知道小甜甜布蘭妮吧?”，我茫然不解 “什么? 當然為什么要問這個?”，“因為我真的很想在，美國國家電臺上教會布蘭妮，怎樣記住一整副打亂的牌的順序，就能證明這是人人都可以做到的了“，我說 ”雖然我不是布蘭妮，但你也可以教教我呀，總得找個人開教嘛不是嗎?“，接著一段非常奇特的歷程在我面前展開了序幕，結果第二年的大部分時間，我都花在了訓練自己的記憶力，同時調查研究記憶上，我想嘗試理解產生記憶的原理，為何有時會記了又忘，及其它到底隱藏著什么樣的潛力，途中我遇到了很多有趣的人，其中一個叫E.P.，他患有健忘癥他的記憶力，恐怕是世界上最差的了，他的記憶能力差到，甚至記不得自己有健忘癥，真的很神奇，雖然他是個悲劇角色，但通過他我們能了解到，記憶在何種程度上塑造了我們的人格，情況的另一個極端是我遇到了這樣一個人，他叫Kim Peek，他是Dustin Hoffman在電影《雨人》里的角色的原型，我和他花了一下午，在鹽湖城公共圖書館里背電話簿，讓我大開眼界，回家后我讀了許多關于記憶的論文，寫于兩千多年前的論文，用拉丁文寫的從古代，一直到后來中世紀期間，我學到很多很有意思的事兒，其中一個就是，曾經，訓練規束培養記憶力的這種概念，完全不像如今那樣陌生，曾幾何時人們寄希望于自己的記憶，能不遺余力地裝飾自己的心靈，近幾千年來，人類發明了一系列技術，從字母表到卷軸，到法典印刷機攝影技術，電腦智能手機，讓我們能越來越輕松地，外化記憶能力，讓我們從根本上，把這種基礎的人類能力拱手讓出，這些技術讓現代生活變為可能，但同時也改變了我們，不僅在文化上，我覺得也在認知上，不再需要費勁去記憶，有時會覺得我們已經忘了如何去記憶，在這片地球上已經很少有地方，能讓你覺得人們仍熱衷于，訓練規束培養記憶力了，那非同尋常的記憶大賽算是一個，其實它也沒有那么非同尋常，世界各地都開始舉辦這樣的競賽，我對此深深著迷想要知道這些人是怎么做到的，幾年前倫敦大學學院的一組研究人員，請來一批記憶大賽的冠軍接受研究，他們想要弄明白，這些人的大腦，是否跟我們其他人在解剖學上的結構不一樣?，答案是否定的，那他們比我們都聰明嗎?，他們給研究對象實施了一系列認知測試，依舊得出了否定結論，但對比受控制的比對目標的大腦，記憶大賽冠軍們的大腦，確實有一處很有趣的不同很說明問題，這些人被送去做功能磁共振，掃描大腦時，當他們在記憶數字或人臉或雪花圖案時，研究人員發現記憶大賽冠軍們，的大腦激活的區域，跟普通人不太一樣，值得注意的是他們看來是在用，腦中在空間記憶和導航時會用到的部分，為什么? 我們可以從中得出什么樣的結論呢?，競爭性記憶的較量，被一種類似軍事比賽的方式推向了白熱化，每年都會有人，帶著更有效的記憶方法現身賽場，而其他人就必須迎頭趕上，這是我的朋友Ben Pridmore，贏得過三次國際記憶大賽冠軍，在他的臺前，有三十六副打亂順序的牌，他要在一個小時內記下全部，用的是一種他自己發明的也只有他會的技巧，用與此類似的方法，他曾一字不差地背下了，4140個任意排列的二進制數，只用了半個小時，很牛吧，參賽者在這些競賽中，運用過很多不同的記憶方法，各式各樣被運用到的所有技巧，最終都能歸化為一個概念，心理學家稱之為”精細編碼“，這個概念能用一則幽默的悖論完美詮釋，叫做Baker/baker悖論，簡單說來就是，假設我讓兩個人去記同一個詞，我跟你說，”記住有個人叫Baker“，Baker是人名，我又來告訴你 ”記住有個人是面包師(baker)“，過了一段時間我又回來找到你們，問 ”還記得我之前，叫你們記住的那個詞嗎?“，”還記得是什么詞嗎?“，被告知人名是Baker的人，記住這個詞的可能性遠不如，被告知職業是面包師的那個人，同樣的詞導致不同的記憶程度，到底是為什么呢，是因為人名Baker沒有任何特殊含義，沒法跟你腦海里，零碎繁雜的記憶產生任何聯系，但是面包師(baker)作為一個常用名詞，我們都知道面包師是什么，面包師帶著搞笑的白帽子，他們手上沾滿了面粉，他們下班回到家帶著撲鼻的烤面包香，甚至可能有些人有朋友就是面包師，我們初次聽到這個詞時，馬上就會產生各種各樣的聯想，這使我們能在一段時間后還能回憶起來，其實要理解記憶競賽中的，一切奧妙，或在日常生活中改善記憶力的秘訣，僅僅在于想辦法把Baker中的大寫B，變為面包師(baker)中的小寫b，把沒有前因后果，沒有重要性沒有涵義的信息，用某種方法轉化為，有意義的內容，跟腦海里的其他記憶串聯起來，這種精確記憶的技巧，在兩千五百年前的古希臘就已出現，后來將其稱為記憶宮殿，發明這種技巧的過程如下，有個叫做Simonides的詩人，他要去參加一個晚宴，其實他算是被請去做表演嘉賓的，因為在那個年代炫酷派對的標準，不是請D.J.來打碟而是要請詩人來頌詩，他站起來背出了他的全篇詩作然后瀟灑離去，他剛走出門口晚宴大廳就塌了，砸死了里面所有的人，不僅全體死亡，所有的死者都被砸得面目全非，沒人說得清死者都有些誰，沒人說得清誰坐在哪兒，導致死者的尸體沒法得到合適的殉葬安置，這又加重了整件事的悲劇色彩，Simonides站在外面，作為廢墟中的唯一幸存者，閉上眼睛猛然意識到，在他的腦海中，他眼前出現了所有賓客所坐的位置，他就牽著親屬們的手，穿過廢墟把他們帶到了親人身邊，Simonides當時猛然醒悟的事，大概我們大家也都猜到了，其實是不管我們，有多不善于記住姓名電話號碼，或是同事的每句指令，我們都擁有異常敏銳的視覺或空間記憶能力，要是我讓你們逐字逐句地重述，我剛才講的Simonides故事的前十個字，應該沒幾個人會記得，但我敢打賭，如果我讓你們現在回想下，在你的門廳里坐在會講話的棕色駿馬上的，是誰，你們就明白我剛才說的意思了，記憶宮殿的原理，就是在你的腦海里建立一棟想象大廈，并讓你想記住的東西，的影像充滿其中，越是瘋狂古怪奇詭，荒誕搞笑亂七八糟招人厭惡的影像，就越容易記住，這個建議來自于兩千多年前，拉丁最早的記憶學者，那么這種說法的原理到底是什么呢，假設你被邀請，站上TED的中心講臺演講，而你想脫稿完成，如西塞羅在兩千年前在TEDx羅馬上的演講一般，他就會這么霸氣走一回而你也想這樣，你要做的就是，想象自己站在自家門前，然后憑空想象出，一段完全荒誕瘋狂難忘的景象，用來提示你上臺要提的第一件事，就是這場詭異的裸騎大賽，然后你走進房子里，想到甜餅怪物，坐在Ed先生背上的樣子，這個景象會提醒你，要介紹你的朋友Ed Cook，然后你腦海里出現了小甜甜布蘭妮的樣子，你就會想起要講那個關于布蘭妮的小故事，然后你走進廚房，你要說到的第四個話題是，你花了一整年走過的奇妙歷程，通過綠野仙蹤就可以聯想得到，這就是羅馬演說家背誦演講稿的秘訣，并非一字不差逐字背誦只會平添麻煩，而是記住一個個主題，其實短語”主題句“，就來源于希臘詞”topos“，意思是”地點“，這是古時候，人們談到演講或是修辭時，會用到的空間術語，短語 ”第一"，就意味著你的記憶宮殿的第一層，這簡直太有意思了，我對這起了很大的興趣，后來我又去了更多記憶大賽，我開始萌發了要更詳細描寫，這種競技記憶文化的念頭，但有一個問題，問題是記憶大賽，其實過程很無聊的，(大笑)，真的就像一群人坐那兒高考一樣，最最激動人心的時刻，也不過就是有人揉了揉太陽穴，我是個記者總得有東西可寫呀，我知道這些人腦子里肯定是驚濤駭浪，但我作為外人無法得見，我意識到若我真的想報道這事兒，一定得親身體驗才行，所以我開始嘗試著每天早上坐下來看紐約時報前，花上十五到二十分鐘，嘗試記憶一些事，背背小詩，背背我在跳蚤市場買來的，舊年鑒里的人名，我驚奇地發現這其實非常帶勁，要不去嘗試根本想不到，有趣在于其實目標并不是要通過訓練提高記憶力，而是你在努力培養改善，創造力想象力，在你的腦海里憑空造出，那些完全滑稽荒誕胡亂最好是難忘的影像，而它成為了我的樂趣，這是我戴著標準競賽記憶者訓練套裝的樣子，它有一對耳塞，一副護目鏡鏡面全部遮黑，就留了兩個小孔，因為競技記憶者最大的敵人就是注意力分散，最后我再次回到了一年前報道的那場競賽場上，我一時沖動也想報名參加，就當做參與性新聞報道的實驗了，我當時想到時能在前言里調侃一下自己也好，問題是實驗最后得到了意想不到的結果，那場競賽我贏了，真是完全出乎我預料之外，對我來說現在，背演講稿電話號碼或是購物單，都是小菜一碟倒是很不錯，但其實這些都不重要了，這些都是小伎倆，這些記憶伎倆之所以有效，是因為它們依仗人類大腦運轉的，一些基本原理，并不用真的去建立記憶宮殿，或記下幾副牌的順序，你也完全可以從了解大腦運轉原理中，獲得一些益處，我們總會議論記憶力很好的人，總覺得那些人是天賦異稟，事實并不是這樣，強大的記憶力是可以習得的，從最根本的說起專心致志就能記住，全心投入時就能記住，只要能想辦法把信息和經歷，轉化為有意義的事，就能記住，想它為何重要為何多彩，當我們能把它轉化成為，有前因后果的事，并跟我們腦海中繁雜瑣碎的其他事產生聯想時，當我們能把人名Baker轉化為面包師baker時，記憶宮殿或是那些記憶技巧，都只是捷徑而已，其實說到底它們都不能算捷徑，這方法有效是因為它迫使你思考，它迫使你往更深層次去想，讓你更加專注，大部分人平時并不會費力去訓練這個，其實捷徑并不存在，這一直就是我們能記住事物的原因，有一件事我希望你們能記住，就是E.P.，那個連自己患了健忘癥都想不起來的人，讓我深思，得出了一個感想，人生就是我們個人記憶的合集，在短暫的人生里，你還愿意因為黑莓 iPhone，喪失多少瞬間，忽略對面坐著的人，在跟我們交談的人，變得越發懶惰不愿意，深究任何事？，通過親身經歷我發現，我們的身體里潛藏著，不可思議的記憶能力，但若你想活得難忘，就得做那種，記得時常記憶的人。

謝謝。