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  3. (1) For most of us, memory is a kind of scrapbook, a mess of blurred and fad

(1) For most of us, memory is a kind of scrapbook, a mess of blurred and fad

游客2023-10-22  12
问题     (1) For most of us, memory is a kind of scrapbook, a mess of blurred and faded snapshots of our lives. As much as we would like to cling on to our past, even the most poignant moments can be washed away with time.
    (2) Ask Nirha Veiseh what he was doing for any day in the past 15 years, however, and he will give you the minutiae of the weather, what he was wearing, or even what side of the train he was sitting on his journey to work.
    (3) "My memory is like a library of VHS (Video Home System) tapes, walkthroughs of every day of my life from waking to sleeping," he explains.
    (4) Veiseh can even put a date on when those reels started recording: 20 December 2000, when he met his first girlfriend at his best friend’s 16th birthday party. He had always had a good memory, but the thrill of young love seems to have shifted a gear in his mind: from now on, he would start recording his whole life in detail. "I could tell you everything about every day after that."
    (5) Needless to say, people like Veiseh are of great interest to neuroscientists hoping to understand the way the brain records our lives. Quick explanations - such as the possibility that it may be associated with autism - have proven to be unfounded, but a couple of recent papers have finally opened a window on these people’s extraordinary minds. And this research might even suggest ways for us all to relive our past with greater clarity.
    (6) "Highly superior autobiographical memory"(or HSAM for short), first came to light in the early 2000s, with a young woman named Jill Price. Emailing the neuroscientist and memory researcher Jim McGaugh one day, she claimed that she could recall every day of her life since the age of 12. Could he help explain her experiences?
    (7) Intrigued, McGaugh invited her to his lab, and began to test her: he would give her a date and ask her to tell him about the world events on that day. True to her word, she was correct almost every time.
    (8) Luckily, Price had also kept a diary throughout that period, allowing the researchers to verify her recollections of personal incidents too; again, she was right the vast majority of the time. After a few years of these sporadic studies, they decided to give her a further, spontaneous test: "Name the dates of every single time you’ve visited our lab". In an instant, she reeled off a list of their appointments. "None of us was able to recall this list," McGaugh and his colleagues noted, but comparing her account with their own records, they found that she was absolutely accurate.
    (9) It didn’t take long for magazines and documentary film-makers to cotton on to her “total recall", and thanks to the subsequent media interest, a few dozen other subjects (including Veiseh) have since come forward and contacted the team at the University of California, Irvine. During one of his visits, Veiseh’s memory proved to be so accurate that he even found himself correcting the scientists’ test about the exact date that Michael Phelps won his eighth gold medal in the 2008 Beijing Olympics.
    (10) Intriguingly, their memories are highly self-centred: although they can remember "autobiographical" life events in extraordinary detail, they seem to be no better than average at recalling impersonal information, such as random lists of words. Nor are they necessarily better at remembering a round of drinks, say. "Sometimes I don’t remember what happened five minutes ago, but I can remember a detail from 22 January 2008," explains "Bill", who asked us not to use his full name to avoid unwanted attention. And although their memories are vast, they are still susceptible to some of the mistakes we all make: in 2013, Lawrence Patihis at the University of Southern Mississippi has recently found that people with HSAM still suffer from "false memories": they can be primed to remember world events that never actually occurred, for instance.
    (11) Clearly, there is no such thing as a "perfect” memory - their extraordinary minds are still using the same flawed tools that the rest of us rely on. The question is, how?
    (12) Some clues come from observing the way their memories evolve over time. Craig Stark at the University of California, Irvine recently questioned HSAM subjects one week, one month and one year after events in their life to see how their memories of events change over time. He thought, for instance, that HSAM subjects begin at a richer starting point, encoding more details as soon as an event has occurred. In reality, the differences only emerged months down the line: whereas for the other subjects, they had become faded and vague, for the HSAM subjects the events were still just as fresh. "It must be something about the way they hold on to the information that the rest of us aren’t doing," Stark says.
    (13) Disappointingly, brain scans have failed to reveal any huge anatomical differences that might explain how this occurs. "It’s not like they had some extra lobe or a ’third’ hemisphere of the brain," says Stark. True, they could spot some signature characteristics, such as additional wiring between the frontal lobes (involved in analytical thought) and the seahorse-shaped hippocampus towards the side of the skull, an area thought to be our memory’s "printing press". But it was perfectly possible that this was the result of their skills, and not the cause: after all, practising any skill, be it music, sport, or a language, can lead the brain to build more efficient neural networks. "It’s a chicken or egg kind of thing," says Stark. [br] Which of the following is NOT used in testing Price’s memory?
选项 A、Dates of her every visit to the lab.
B、Personal incidents in her diary.
C、Date on which Michael Phelps won the 8th gold medal in Beijing Olympics.
D、World events on specific dates.
答案 C
解析 细节题。题干问的是用来测试Price记忆力的内容，主要注意选项C，它的确是测试内容，但是针对的是Veiseh而不是Price。
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