2023年考研英语二阅读 Text 3 原文翻译及答案解析

The Internet may be changing merely what we remember, not our capacity to do so, suggests Columbia University psychology professor Betsy Sparrow. In 2011, Sparrow led a study in which participants were asked to record 40 factoids in a computer ("an ostrich's eye is bigger than its brain," for example). Half of the participants were told the information would be erased, while the other half were told it would be saved. Guess what? The latter group made no effort to recall the information when quizzed on it later, because they knew they could find it on their computers. In the same study, a group was asked to remember both the information and the folders it was stored in. They didn't remember the information, but they remembered how to find the folders. In other words, human memory is not deteriorating but " adapting to new communications technology," Sparrow says.

互联网可能只是改变了我们记忆的内容，而非我们的记忆能力，哥伦比亚大学心理学教授贝琪·斯帕罗指出。2011年，斯帕罗领导了一项研究，参与者被要求在电脑中记录40个琐事（例如，“鸵鸟的眼睛比它的大脑还大”）。一半参与者被告知信息将被删除，另一半被告知信息将被保存。猜猜怎么着？后者在后续测试中并未努力回忆这些信息，因为他们知道可以在电脑上找到。在同一项研究中，一组被要求同时记住信息和存储它的文件夹。他们没有记住信息，但记住了如何找到文件夹。换句话说，人类记忆并未退化，而是在“适应新的通信技术”，斯帕罗说。

In a very practical way, the Internet is becoming an external hard drive for our memories, a process known as "cognitive offloading. " Traditionally, this role was fulfilled by data banks, libraries, and other humans. Your father may never remember birthdays because your mother does, for instance. Some worry that this is having a destructive effect on society, but Sparrow sees an upside. Perhaps, she suggests, the trend will change our approach to learning from a focus on individual facts and memorization to an emphasis on more conceptual thinking-something that is not available on the Internet. " I personally have never seen all that much intellectual value in memorizing things," Sparrow says, adding that we haven't lost our ability to do it.

从非常实际的角度来看，互联网正在成为我们记忆的外接硬盘，这个过程被称为“认知卸载”。传统上，这个角色由数据库、图书馆和其他人承担。例如，你的父亲可能从不记得生日，因为你母亲记得。一些人担心这对社会有破坏性影响，但斯帕罗看到了积极的一面。或许，她认为，这种趋势将改变我们的学习方式，从专注于个别事实和记忆转向更强调概念性思维——这是互联网上无法提供的。“我个人从未在记忆事物上看到那么多智力价值，”斯帕罗说，并补充说我们并没有失去这种能力。

Still other experts say it's too soon to understand how the Internet affects our brains. There is no experimental evidence showing that it interferes with our ability to focus, for instance, wrote psychologists Christopher Chabris and Daniel J. Simons. And surfing the web exercised the brain more than reading did among computer-savvy older adults in a 2008 study involving 24 participants at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at the University of California, Los Angeles.

其他专家则表示，现在理解互联网如何影响我们的大脑还为时过早。心理学家克里斯托弗·查布里斯和丹尼尔·J·西蒙斯写道，没有实验证据表明它干扰了我们的专注能力。例如，在一项2008年的研究中，涉及加州大学洛杉矶分校塞梅尔神经科学与人类行为研究所的24名参与者，对于精通电脑的老年人来说，上网比阅读更能锻炼大脑。

"There may be costs associated with our increased reliance on the Internet, but I'd have to imagine that overall the benefits are going to outweigh those costs," observes psychology professor Benjamin Storm. " It seems pretty clear that memory is changing, but is it changing for the better? At this point, we don't know. "

“我们对互联网依赖的增加可能带来成本，但我不得不想象总体上收益将超过这些成本，”心理学教授本杰明·斯托姆观察到。“似乎很明显，记忆正在改变，但它是变得更好了吗？目前，我们还不知道。”