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了解大脑如何运转,保证更加健康生活

2013-05-19来源:互联网
Then they divided the whole brain into small sections with a three-dimensional grid and recorded the activity in each section of the grid for each second. They used sophisticated statistical analyses to find the relationship between the patterns of brain activity and the content of the videos.
他们使用3D坐标把大脑划分为若干小区域,并且记录下每个区域每秒钟的活动情况,再采用严密的数据分析法来找到脑部活动机制和视频内容之间的关系。

The twist was that the participants either looked for human beings in the videos or looked for vehicles. When they looked for humans, great swaths of the brain became a 'human detector'─more sensitive to humans and less sensitive to vehicles. Looking for vehicles turned more of the brain into a 'vehicle detector.' And when people looked for humans their brains also became more sensitive to related objects, like cats and plants. When they looked for vehicles, their brains became more sensitive to clocks and buildings as well.
实验参与者被要求在影片中寻找人物或者交通工具。寻找人物的时候,脑部的若干区域会变为一台“人物探测器”,也就是对于人物更加敏感而对交通工具较不敏感。寻找交通工具则使脑部更像一台“交通工具探测器”。当人们在搜寻人物时,大脑也对相关的事物更为敏感,比如猫咪和植物。而搜寻交通工具时,大脑则对钟表和建筑物更为敏感。

In fact, the response patterns of most brain areas changed when people changed the focus of their attention. Something as ineffable as where you focus your attention can make your whole brain work differently.
事实上,大多数脑部区域的反应机制随着人们注意力的转移而改变。人的注意力集中在不同地方,整个大脑的运行方式也就不同。

People often assume that knowing about the brain is all that you need to explain how the mind works, so that neuroscience will replace psychology. That may account for the curious popular enthusiasm for the phrenological 'lighting up' studies. It is as if the very thought that something psychological is 'in the brain' gives us a little explanatory frisson, even though we have known for at least a century that everything psychological is 'in the brain' in some sense. But it would be just as accurate to say that knowing about the mind explains how the brain works.
人们常常理所当然地认为了解了大脑就能够解释心理活动,所以神经学将会取代心理学。这一点可以解释人们对于颅相学“激活”理论的好奇和热情。尽管从某种程度上来说,人们早在一个多世纪前就已经了解到所有心理活动都“存在于脑海里”,但这一说法仍旧无法解释清楚问题。而较为准确的说法是,了解了心理就能解释大脑如何运转。

The new, more dynamic picture of the brain makes psychology even more crucial. The researchers could only explain the very complex pattern of brain activity by relating it to what they knew about categorization and attention. In the same way, knowing the activity of every wire on every chip in my computer wouldn't tell me much if I didn't also know the program my machine was running.
这些新的、更富于动态的脑部图片令心理学变得更加重要,因为神经学研究者只能通过控制分类方法和关注点来解释复杂的脑部活动机制。这就好比,如果不知道电脑软件的运行方式,即便知道电脑硬件的每根导线如何工作也并无大用。

Neuroscience may be sexier than psychology right now, and it certainly has a lot more money and celebrity. But they really cannot get along without each other.
或许当下神经学比心理学更受关注,获得了更多经费也产生了更多名家,但是这两门学科是相互依存的。