了解大脑如何运转,保证更加健康生活

For the last 20 years neuroscientists have shown us compelling pictures of brain areas 'lighting up' when we see or hear, love or hate, plan or act. These studies were an important first step. But they also suggested a misleadingly simple view of how the brain works. They associated specific mental abilities with specific brain areas, in much the same way that phrenology, in the 19th century, claimed to associate psychological characteristics with skull shapes.
过去20年间，神经学家向人们展示了饶有趣味的画面：当我们在聆听或观赏、喜爱或厌恶、思考或行动时，大脑的不同区域是如何被激活的。是这些研究成果迈出了关键性的第一步，但它们对大脑简单运转方式的认知却充满了误导。这些研究认为特定脑部区域和不同心理活动相关，这一观点与19世纪的颅相学颇为相似，此学说宣称人的心理特质与颅骨形状相关。

Most people really want to understand the mind, not the brain. Why do we experience and act on the world as we do? Associating a piece of the mind with a piece of the brain does very little to answer that question. After all, for more than a century we have known that our minds are the result of the stuff between our necks and the tops of our heads. Just adding that vision is the result of stuff at the back and that planning is the result of stuff in the front, it doesn't help us understand how vision or planning work.
大多数人更想了解人的心理，而不是头脑。为什么我们对世界产生了现在这样的感知和行为？大脑某部分与心理某部分相配合的理论不大能够回答这个问题。毕竟一个多世纪以来，我们已经认识到，心理活动是源于颈部与头顶之间的那个器官。单纯认为想象力是大脑后部的产物、规划能力是大脑前部的产物并不能帮助我们理解想象力或者规划能力是怎样运转的。

But new techniques are letting researchers look at the activity of the whole brain at once. What emerges is very different from the phrenological view. In fact, most brain areas multitask; they are involved in many different kinds of experiences and actions. And the brain is dynamic. It can respond differently to the same events in different times and circumstances.
但是新技术使研究者得以同时观测整个大脑的活动，从而得出的结果与颅相学理论大为不同。事实上，大部分脑部区域都身兼数职，参与了多种多样的感知和行为。大脑非常活跃，它能够在不同的时间和空间对于相同的事件产生不同的反应。

A new study in Nature Neuroscience by Jack L. Gallant, Tolga Çukur and colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley, dramatically illustrates this new view. People in an fMRI scanner watched a half-hour-long sequence combining very short video clips of everyday scenes. The scientists organized the video content into hundreds of categories, describing whether each segment included a plant or a building, a cat or a clock.
加州大学伯克利分校(University of California, Berkeley)的杰克•L•格加伦特(Jack L. Gallant)和托尔加•丘库尔(Tolga Çukur)及其同事在《自然神经科学》(Nature Neuroscience)杂志上发表了一项新的研究，很好地诠释了这一新观点。实验对象在核磁共振仪上观看了时长半小时的视频，其中包含了关于日常生活的小片段。科学家将视频内容归为数百个种类，划分标准是每个片段中是否包含植物或者建筑、猫或者时钟，等等。