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  3. Working a typewriter by touch, like riding a bicycle or strolling on a path,

Working a typewriter by touch, like riding a bicycle or strolling on a path,

游客2023-12-05  16
问题     Working a typewriter by touch, like riding a bicycle or strolling on a path, is best done by not giving it a glancing thought. Once you do, your fingers fumble and hit the wrong keys. To do things involving practiced skills, you need to turn loose the systems of muscles and nerves responsible for each maneuver, place them on their own, and stay out of it. There is no real loss of authority in this, since you get to decide whether to do the thing or not, and you can intervene and embellish the technique any time you like; if you want to ride a bicycle backward, or walk with an eccentric loping gait giving a little skip every fourth step, whistling at the same time, you can do that. But if you concentrate your attention on the details, keeping in touch with each muscle, thrusting yourself into a free fall with each step and catching yourself at the last moment by sticking out the other foot in time to break the fall, you will end up immobilized, vibrating with fatigue.
    It is a blessing to have options for choice and change in the learning of such unconsciously coordinated acts. If we were born with all these knacks inbuilt, automated like ants, we would surely miss the variety. It would be a less interesting world if we all walked and skipped alike, and never fell from bicycles. If we were all genetically programmed to play the piano deftly from birth, we might never learn to understand music.
    The rules are different for the complicated, coordinated, fantastically skilled manipulations we perform with our insides. We do not have to learn anything. Our smooth-muscle cells are born with complete instructions, in need of no help from us, and they work away on their own schedules, modulating the lumen of blood vessels, moving things through intestines. Secretary cells elaborate their products in privacy; the heart contracts and relaxes; cells communicate with each other by simply touching; all this goes on continually, without ever a personal word from us. The arrangement is that of an ecosystem, with the operation of each part being governed by the state and function of all the other parts. When things are going well, as they generally are, it is an infallible mechanism.
    But now the autonomy of this interior domain, long regarded as inviolate, is open to question. The experimental psychologists have recently found that visceral organs can be taught to do various things, as easily as a boy learns to ride a bicycle, by the instrumental techniques of operant conditioning. If a thing is done in the way the teacher wants, at a signal, and a suitable reward given immediately to reinforce the action, it becomes learned. Rats, rewarded by stimulation of their cerebral "pleasure centers", have been instructed to speed up or slow down their hearts at a signal, or to alter their blood pressures, or switch off certain waves in their electroencephalograms and switch on others.
    The same technology has been applied to human beings, with other kinds of rewards, and the results have been startling. It is claimed that you can teach your kidneys to change the rate of urine formation, raise or lower your blood pressure, change your heart rate, write different brain waves, at will.
    There is already talk of a breakthrough in the prevention and treatment of human disease. According to proponents, when the technology is perfected and extended it will surely lead to new possibilities for therapy. If a rat can be trained to dilate the blood vessels of one of his ears more than those of the other, as has been reported, what rich experiences in self-control and self-operation may lie just ahead for man? There are already cryptic advertisements in the personal columns of literary magazines, urging the purchase of electronic headsets for the training and regulation of one’s own brain waves, according to one’s taste.
    You can have it. Not to downgrade it. It is extremely important, I know, and one ought to feel elated by the prospect of taking personal charge, calling the shots, running one’s cells around like toy trains. Now that we know that viscera can be taught, the thought comes naturally that we’ve been neglecting them all these years, and by judicious application of human intelligence, these primitive structures can be trained to whatever standards of behavior we wish to set for them. [br] Recently experimental psychologists have proved that______.
选项 A、rat’s intelligence is not higher than man’s
B、man’s diseases can be cured by operant conditioning
C、people can train their body structures to act at will
D、it is easy to control the action of your body parts
答案 C
解析 细节题。第四段第二句指出，实验心理学家最近发现内脏器官可以通过操作性条件反射的工具性技术来学习做各种事情，就像孩子学习骑自行车那么容易。第五段第二句指出，据称，你可以随意地让你的肾脏学习改变排尿的频率、降低或升高血压、改变心率、读写不同的脑波。故[C]为答案，同时排除[D]；文中没有将人类和老鼠的智力进行对比，故排除[A]；第六段前两句也提到了在预防和治疗人类疾病上的突破。支持者们声称，当技术成熟并得以推广时，就一定会有新的治疗办法。显然现在技术还未成熟，故排除[B]。
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