2017年06月四级第1套长篇阅读匹配原文翻译及答案

A) For most of us, memory is a mess of blurred and faded pictures of our lives. As much as we would like to cling on to our past, even the saddest moments can be washed away with time.

对我们大多数人来说，记忆是一堆模糊褪色的生活画面。尽管我们多么想紧抓过去不放，即使是最悲伤的时刻也会随时间流逝而消逝。

B) Ask Nima Veiseh what he was doing for any day in the past 15 years, however, and he will give you the details of the weather, what he was wearing, or even what side of the train he was sitting on his journey to work. "My memory is like a library of video tapes, walk-throughs of every day of my life from waking to sleeping," he explains.

然而，问尼玛·维塞过去15年中任何一天他在做什么，他会告诉你天气的细节、他穿了什么，甚至上班路上他坐在火车的哪一边。“我的记忆就像一个视频磁带图书馆，记录了我从醒来到睡着的每一天，”他解释道。

C) Veiseh can even put a date on when those tapes started recording: 15 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."

维塞甚至能说出这些磁带开始录制的日期：2000年12月15日，当时他在好朋友的16岁生日聚会上遇到了他的初恋女友。他一直有很好的记忆力，但年轻爱情的兴奋似乎在他脑海中切换了一个档位：从那时起，他将开始详细记录他的整个生活。“我可以告诉你那之后每一天的所有事情。”

D) Needless to say, people like Veiseh are of great interest to neuroscientists hoping to understand the way the brain records our lives. A couple of recent papers have finally opened a window on these people's extraordinary minds. And such research might even suggest ways for us all to relive our past with greater clarity.

不用说，像维塞这样的人对神经科学家来说极感兴趣，他们希望理解大脑记录我们生活的方式。最近几篇论文终于为这些人非凡的思维打开了一扇窗户。这样的研究甚至可能为我们所有人提供以更清晰的方式重温过去的方法。

E) "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?

“高度优越自传式记忆”（简称HSAM）在21世纪初首次被发现，与一位名叫吉尔·普赖斯的年轻女性有关。一天，她给神经科学家和记忆研究员吉姆·麦高发电子邮件，声称她能回忆起自12岁以来每一天的生活。他能帮助解释她的经历吗？

F) 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.

麦高邀请她到他的实验室，开始测试她：他会给她一个日期，让她告诉他那天的世界大事。她言出必行，几乎每次都正确。

G) It didn't take long for magazines and documentary film-makers to come to understand 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.

没过多久，杂志和纪录片制作人就了解了她的“完全回忆”，由于随后的媒体关注，其他几十名受试者（包括维塞）后来出现并联系了加州大学欧文分校的团队。

H) Interestingly, 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 (任意选取的) lists of words. Nor are they necessarily better at remembering a round of drinks, say. And although their memories are vast, they are still likely to suffer from "false memories". 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?

有趣的是，他们的记忆高度以自我为中心：尽管他们能以非凡的细节记住“自传性”生活事件，但在回忆非个人信息方面，比如随机（任意选取的）单词列表，他们似乎并不比普通人更好。例如，他们也不一定更擅长记住一轮饮料。而且，尽管他们的记忆量巨大，他们仍然可能遭受“虚假记忆”的困扰。显然，没有所谓的“完美”记忆——他们非凡的思维仍然使用我们其他人依赖的同样有缺陷的工具。问题是，这是怎么做到的？

I) Lawrence Patihis at the University of Southern Mississippi recently studied around 20 people with HSAM and found that they scored particularly high on two measures: fantasy proneness (倾向) and absorption. Fantasy proneness could be considered a tendency to imagine and daydream, whereas absorption is the tendency to allow your mind to become fully absorbed in an activity to pay complete attention to the sensations (感受) and the experiences. "I'm extremely sensitive to sounds, smells and visual detail," explains Nicole Donohue, who has taken part in many of these studies. "I definitely feel things more strongly than the average person."

南密西西比大学的劳伦斯·帕西斯最近研究了大约20名HSAM患者，发现他们在两个指标上得分特别高：幻想倾向和专注度。幻想倾向可以被视为想象和做白日梦的倾向，而专注度则是让思维完全沉浸在活动中，以完全关注感受和经历的倾向。“我对声音、气味和视觉细节极其敏感，”尼科尔·多诺霍解释道，她参与了许多这些研究。“我肯定比普通人感受事物更强烈。”

J) The absorption helps them to establish strong foundations for recollection, says Patihis, and the fantasy proneness means that they revisit those memories again and again in the coming weeks and months. Each time this initial memory trace is "replayed", it becomes even stronger. In some ways, you probably go through that process after a big event like your wedding day, but the difference is that thanks to their other psychological tendencies, the HSAM subjects are doing it day in, day out, for the whole of their lives.

帕西斯说，专注度帮助他们为回忆建立坚实的基础，而幻想倾向意味着他们在未来的几周和几个月里反复重温那些记忆。每次这个初始记忆痕迹被“重播”，它都会变得更强大。在某种程度上，你可能在婚礼日这样的大事件后经历这个过程，但不同之处在于，由于他们的其他心理倾向，HSAM受试者日复一日、一生都在做这件事。

K) Not everyone with a tendency to fantasise will develop HSAM, though, so Patihis suggests that something must have caused them to think so much about their past. "Maybe some experience in their childhood meant that they became obsessed (着迷) with calendars and what happened to them," says Patihis.

然而，并非每个有幻想倾向的人都会发展出HSAM，所以帕西斯认为一定有什么原因导致他们如此多地思考过去。“也许童年的一些经历意味着他们变得对日历和发生在他们身上的事情着迷，”帕西斯说。

L) The people with HSAM I've interviewed would certainly agree that it can be a mixed blessing. On the plus side, it allows you to relive the most transformative and enriching experiences. Veiseh, for instance, travelled a lot in his youth. In his spare time, he visited the local art galleries, and the paintings are now lodged deep in his autobiographical memories.

我采访过的HSAM患者肯定会同意这可能是喜忧参半。从积极的一面看，它让你重温最具变革性和丰富性的经历。例如，维塞年轻时经常旅行。在空闲时间，他参观了当地的美术馆，那些画作现在深深扎根于他的自传记忆中。

M) "Imagine being able to remember every painting, on every wall, in every gallery space, between nearly 40 countries," he says. "That's a big education in art by itself." With this comprehensive knowledge of the history of art, he has since become a professional painter.

“想象一下，能够记住近40个国家中每个美术馆空间、每面墙上的每一幅画，”他说。“这本身就是一种艺术的大教育。”凭借对艺术史的全面了解，他后来成为了一名专业画家。

N) Donohue, now a history teacher, agrees that it helped during certain parts of her education. "I can definitely remember what I learned on certain days at school. I could imagine what the teacher was saying or what it looked like in the book."

多诺霍现在是一名历史老师，她同意这在她教育的某些部分有所帮助。“我肯定能记住在学校某些日子学到的东西。我可以想象老师在说什么或书上是什么样子。”

O) Not everyone with HSAM has experienced these benefits, however. Viewing the past in high definition can make it very difficult to get over pain and regret. "It can be very hard to forget embarrassing moments," says Donohue. "You feel the same emotions—it is just as raw, just as fresh... You can't turn off that stream of memories, no matter how hard you try." Veiseh agrees. "It is like having these open wounds—they are just a part of you," he says.

然而，并非每个HSAM患者都经历了这些好处。以高清视角审视过去可能使克服痛苦和遗憾变得非常困难。“很难忘记尴尬的时刻，”多诺霍说。“你感受到同样的情感——同样原始、同样新鲜……无论你多么努力，都无法关闭那股记忆流。”维塞同意。“就像有这些开放的伤口——它们只是你的一部分，”他说。

P) This means they often have to make a special effort to lay the past to rest. Bill, for instance, often gets painful "flashbacks", in which unwanted memories intrude into his consciousness, but overall he has chosen to see it as the best way of avoiding repeating the same mistakes. "Some people are absorbed in the past but not open to new memories, but that's not the case for me. I look forward to each day and experiencing something new."

这意味着他们常常必须特别努力地将过去安息。例如，比尔经常痛苦的“闪回”，其中 unwanted memories 侵入他的意识，但总体上，他选择将其视为避免重复同样错误的最佳方式。“有些人沉浸在过去，但不接纳新记忆，但我不是这样。我期待每一天和体验新事物。”