2017年6月大学英语四级真题试卷及答案(第1套)
whole life in detail. “I could tell you everything about every day after that.”
[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 eve n suggest ways for us all to relive our past with greater clarity.
[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?
[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.
[G] It didn’t take long for magazines and documentary film-makers to come to understand her “total recall”，and thank to the subsequent media interest, a few dozen other subjects (including Veiseh) have sincecome forward and contacted the team at the University of California, Irvine.
[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?
[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 activityto 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.”
[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
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