科学美国人：我们为什么不会忘记如何骑自行车?（容易）

特别

!

声明

本公众号会持续摘录英文文章供大家阅读学习。

文中所有观点不代表老顾或者公司立场。

本期文章来源：

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-dont-we-forget-how-to-ride-a-bike/

每日一句

翻译并发布在留言框（顾老师抽评）

正如名字所指的那样，主动词汇量指的是人们可以主动使用的词汇。

精选文章

读写天天练学员可获得中文翻译及文章的精读练习

The way memories are anchored in the brain plays a role, neuropsychologist Boris Suchan explains.

Most of us learn how to ride a bike during childhood. But as we grow older, many of us stop riding and put those once-beloved bikes in storage. Years later, when we discover these relics and hop on, it’s as if we never stopped biking.

This is surprising because our memories let us down in so many other instances, such as remembering the name of a place or a person we once knew or where we put our keys. So how is it that we can ride a bicycle when we haven’t done so in years?

As it turns out, different types of memories are stored in distinct regions of our brains. Long-term memory is divided into two types: declarative and procedural.

There are two types of declarative memory: Recollections of experiences such as the day we started school and our first kiss are called episodic memory. This type of recall is our interpretation of an episode or event that occurred. Factual knowledge, on the other hand, such as the capital of France, is part of semantic memory. These two types of declarative memory content have one thing in common—you are aware of the knowledge and can communicate the memories to others.

Skills such as playing an instrument or riding a bicycle are, however, anchored in a separate system, called procedural memory. As its name implies, this type of memory is responsible for performance.

One of the most famous studies showing the separate memory systems was that of an epileptic named Henry Gustav Molaison (aka H. M.). In the 1950s he underwent the removal of portions of his brain, including large parts of his hippocampus. After the operation doctors found that although the number of seizures had decreased, H. M. was unable to form new memories. Many of his memories of the time before the operation were also erased.

To learn more about his amnesia, neuropsychologists carried out various tests with H. M. In one, they asked him to trace a five-pointed star on a sheet of paper while only looking at it and his hand in a mirror—meaning the image was reversed. Although H. M.’s hand–eye coordination skills improved over the several days he performed this task, he never remembered performing it. This meant that he could develop new procedural, but not declarative, memories.

Is procedural knowledge then fundamentally more stable than explicit knowledge? As it turns out, the former is more resistant to both loss and trauma.

Even with traumatic brain injury the procedural memory system is hardly ever compromised. That’s because the basal ganglia, structures responsible for processing nondeclarative memory, are relatively protected in the brain’s center, below the cerebral cortex. However, it’s not clear, beyond brain damage, why procedural memory contents are not as easily forgotten as declarative ones are. According to one idea, in the regions where movement patterns are anchored fewer new nerve cells may be formed in adults. Without this neurogenesis, or continuous remodeling in those regions, it’s less likely for those memories to get erased.

One thing we know for sure, however, is simple sequences of movements we internalize, even far in the past, are typically preserved for a lifetime. Or as the saying goes, it’s “just like riding a bicycle.”

原文句子精读

句子精读：

This is surprising because our memories let us down in so many other instances, such as remembering the name of a place or a person we once knew or where we put our keys .

学习点一：

because， 状语从句

学习点二：

we once knew，定语从句，修饰a place or a person，省略了that

学习点三：

where we put our keys， 宾语从句，充当remembering的宾语

// 本文摘录词伙

/// 

NOCITCE

起作用 play a role

储存；入库put sth. in storage

骑上去 hop on

长期记忆 Long-term memory

一个共同点 have one thing in common

顾名思义 As its name implies

负责 be responsible for

进行测试 carry out tests

手眼协调能力 hand–eye coordination skills

抵抗... be resistant to

创伤性脑损伤 traumatic brain injury

大脑皮层 cerebral cortex

运动模式 movement patterns

神经细胞 nerve cells

被抹去 get erased

一生 for a lifetime

近期新闻

近期网络课程介绍

课程/留学咨询

微信扫二维码

关注服务号后发起会话

客服在线 早9:00-晚22:30