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  3. Passage Two (1) In the quest to fend off forgetfulness, some people build a palace of memory. It’s a method for memorizing

Passage Two (1) In the quest to fend off forgetfulness, some people build a palace of memory. It’s a method for memorizing

admin2022-09-07  56
问题     Passage Two
    (1)  In the quest to fend off forgetfulness, some people build a palace of memory. It’s a method for memorizing invented in ancient times by the Greek poet Simonides of Ceos, as legend has it, and more recently made popular by multiple best-selling books. Memory palaces provide imaginary architectural repositories for storing and retrieving anything you would like to remember. Sixteen centuries ago, St. Augustine spoke of "treasures of innumerable images" stored in his "spacious palaces of memory. " But 21st-century scientists who study memory have identified an important point to remember: Even the most luxurious palace of memory needs trash cans.
    (2)  Traditionally, forgetting has been regarded as a passive decay over time of the information recorded and stored in the brain. But while some memories may simply fade away like ink on paper exposed to sunlight, recent research suggests that forgetting is often more intentional, with erasure orchestrated by elaborate cellular and molecular mechanisms. And forgetfulness is not necessarily a sign of a faulty memory. Instead, forgetting may be the brain’s frontline strategy in processing incoming information. Forgetting is essential, some researchers now argue, because the biological goal of the brain’s memory apparatus is not preserving information, but rather helping the brain make sound decisions. Understanding how the brain forgets may offer clues to enhancing mental performance in healthy brains while also providing insights into the mechanisms underlying a variety of mental disorders.
    (3)  Memory itself is still something of a mystery, but it basically consists of physical changes in the brain that encode a representation of past experiences. Those memory traces—known as engrams—can be accessed to reconstruct the past, albeit imperfectly. Recalling a memory reactivates a pattern of nerve-cell signaling that mimics the original experience.
    (4)  Engrams obviously do not save every detail of every experience. Some records of activity patterns do not persist. And that’s a good thing. An overly precise memory is maybe not really what we want in the long term, because it prevents us from using our memories to generalize them to new situations. In fact, what we might want is a more flexible and more generalized memory, and that would involve a bit of forgetting of the details and more the development of a gist of a memory.
    (5)  Getting the gist, and just the gist, is therefore valuable as an aid to making smart decisions. In fact, it is wrong to think of memory simply as a means for high-fidelity transmission of information through time. Rather, the goal of memory is to guide intelligent decision making.
    (6)   Getting just the gist is especially helpful in changing environments, where loss of some memories improves decision making in several ways. For one thing, forgetting can eliminate outdated information that would hamper sound judgment. And memories that reproduce the past too faithfully can impair the ability to imagine differing futures, making behavior too inflexible to cope with changing conditions. Failure to forget can result in the persistence of unwanted or debilitating memories, as with post-traumatic stress disorder.
    (7)  Forgetting’s great value implies that it doesn’t happen accidentally. Psychologists have considered the possibility of active forgetting for more than half a century, but only in the past 15 years or so have researchers accumulated substantial neurobiological evidence on the issue. While the neuroscientific study of forgetting is still in its infancy, scientists have begun to discern some of the brain’s tactics for information erasure. Some forgetting does appear to be "passive" , as a result of either natural decay of the biological material forming engrams or the loss of ability to retrieve them. But many forms of forgetting are more like running a program that wipes data off your hard drive. New stimuli can actively interfere with old memories, for instance. Recalling parts of a memory can induce loss of other parts of it. In fact, forgetting could be the brain’s main strategy in managing information.
    (8)  If forgetting is the key to how the brain successfully processes the massive data input it encounters each day—as research accumulated so far suggests—then flaws in the forgetting process could plausibly contribute to brain disorders.  Deficits in the ability to forget may be involved in autism spectrum disorders, for instance. Certainly the powerful and debilitating memories of post-traumatic stress disorder reflect an inability to forget disturbing experiences. Unwanted, repetitive invasive memories are a feature of some psychiatric disorders, such as schizophrenia. And the inability to forget cues associated with addictive drug use impairs recovery from substance abuse. On the plus side, better insight into the biology of forgetting could help identify drugs capable of enhancing needed memories while disposing of undesirable ones. But such benefits may appear only after much more research.  
About engrains, which of the following statements is CORRECT?
选项 A、It can help to recall the memory about the past.
B、It can reveal the imperfection of brain functions.
C、It records some activity patterns that cannot persist.
D、It prevents us from keeping overly precise memories.
答案A
解析 细节题。根据题干关键词engrams定位至第三段。其中第二句指出，它可以用来重建过去，尽管并不完美，可见[A]表述正确，故为答案。[B]是根据该句中的albeit imperfectly设置的干扰项，文章虽然提到这种对过去的重建并不完美，但并没有提及大脑功能是否完美的问题，[B]为过度推断，故排除；第四段第二句指出，一些活动模式的记录无法持久，而这不属于记忆印记，[C]不符合原文，故排除；从后文可知，防止我们事无巨细一一记住的，不是记忆印记，而是遗忘，故排除[D]。
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