人类使用远不止10%的大脑.doc

人类使用远不止10%的大脑Humans Already Use Way, Way More Than 10 Percent of Their Brains人类使用远不止10%的大脑By now, perhaps youve seen the trailer for the new sci-fi thriller Lucy. It starts with a flurry of stylized special effects and Scarlett Johansson serving up a barrage of bad-guy beatings. Then comes Morgan Freeman, playing a professorial neuroscientist with the obligatory brown blazer, to deliver the films familiar premise to a full lecture hall: “It is estimated most human beings only use 10 percent of the brains capacity. Imagine if we could access 100 percent. Interesting things begin to happen.”可能你已经看过了科幻惊悚片超体的预告。一开始是一连串极具个人风格的特效，接着斯嘉丽约翰逊与坏人激烈打斗。然后摩根弗里曼出场，饰演一个神经学家，穿着标志性的棕色大衣，在座无虚席的演讲厅里侃侃而谈关于这部电影著名的大前提：“据估计，人类使用不到大脑的10%的能力。想象一下如果我们能够100%充分利用我们的大脑，那会是多么有趣的现象啊。”Johansson as Lucy, who has been kidnapped and implanted with mysterious drugs, becomes a test case for those interesting things, which seem to include even more impressive beatings and apparently some kind of Matrix-esque time-warping skills.约翰逊饰演的露西遭人绑架，被植入了神秘药物，成为了有趣现象的试验品。这些有趣现象包括更多的打斗和黑客帝国式的时间扭曲能力。Of course, the idea that “you only use 10 percent of your brain” is, indeed, 100 hundred percent bogus. Why has this myth persisted for so long, and when is it finally going to die?当然，“你仅使用了10%的大脑”这种想法100%是假的。为什么这种谣言被传了这么久，什么时候才能消失呢？Unfortunately, not any time soon. A survey last year by The Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinsons Research found that 65 percent of Americans believe the myth is true, 5 percent more than those who believe in evolution. Even Myth busters, which declared the statistic a myth a few years ago, further muddied the waters: The show merely increased the erroneous 10 percent figure and implied, incorrectly, that people use 35 percent of their brains.很遗憾，这不是很快就能发生的事。去年麦克J福克斯基金为帕金森综合症研究进行了一项调查发现，65%的美国人相信这个谣言，比相信进化论的人还多5%。甚至在流言终结者几年前宣称了这个数据只是谣言之后，也只是搅混了这趟水：这档节目只是增加了错误的10%这个数字，暗指人类使用了35%的大脑。这也是不正确的。Like most legends, the origin of this fiction is unclear, though there are some clues. According to Sam Wang, a neuroscientist at Princeton and the author of Welcome to Your Brain, the catalyst may have been the self-help industry. In the early 1900s, William James, one of the most influential thinkers in modern psychology, famously said that humans have unused mental potential. This completely reasonable assertion was later revived, in mangled form, by the writer Lowell Thomas in his foreword to the 1936 self-help bible How To Win Friends And Influence People. “Professor William James of Harvard used to say that the average person develops only 10 percent of his latent mental ability,” Thomas wrote. It appears that he, or perhaps someone else in his day, simply plucked the golden number out of the sky.就像很多的传说一样，这个说法的起源已经难以追溯，但是还是有些线索。根据普林斯顿大学的神经学家，即欢迎来到脑的世界作者山姆王的说法，自助行业可能是催化剂。早在20世纪伊始，现代心理学最具影响力的人物之一威廉詹姆斯曾有一著名论断，人类并没有完全开发他们的精神潜力。这一合情合理的论断后来被作家洛厄尔托马斯在1936年为自助圣经如何赢得友谊及影响他人一书撰写的前言中错误地传播。托马斯写道“哈佛大学的威廉詹姆斯曾说过人类平均开发的潜意识能力只有10%。”这表明他本人或者是当时的某人凭空捏造了这一数据。The 10 percent claim is demonstrably false on a number of levels. First, the entire brain is active all the time. The brain is an organ. Its living neurons, and the cells that support them, are always doing something. (Wheres the “you only use 10 percent of your spleen” myth?) Joe LeDoux, a professor of neuroscience and psychology at NYU, thinks that people today may be thrown off by the “blobs”the dispersed markers of high brain activityseen in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) of the human brain. These blobs are often what people are talking about when they refer to the brain “lighting up.”10%的说法明显是错误的。首先，大脑在任何时候都是活跃的。大脑是一个器官。它的生物神经元和支持神经元的细胞每时每刻都在工作。（那“你仅仅使用了10%的脾脏”这个说法从何而来呢？）乔勒杜是纽约大学的神经科学和心理学教授，他认为现在人们可能被一些“斑点”迷惑了，即在功能磁共振成像（fMRI）上所见的大脑活动活跃的分散标记。这些斑点就是人们常说的大脑“点亮”。Say youre watching a movie in an fMRI scanner. Certain areas of your brainthe auditory and visual cortices, for instancewill be significantly more active than others; and that activity will show up as colored splotches when the fMRI images are later analyzed. These blobs of significant activity usually cover small portions of the brain image, often less than 10 percent, which could make it seem, to the casual observer, that the rest of the brain is idling. But, as LeDoux put it to me in an email, “the brain could be one hundred percent active during a task with only a small percentage of brain activity unique to the task.” This kind of imaging highlights big differences in regional brain activity, not everything the brain is doing.比如说在你看电影的时候观察fMRI扫描仪。你大脑的某些区域，如关系听觉和视觉的区域，会比其他区域更为活跃；这些活动的区域在后面分析fMRI图像时会展现出彩色的斑点。这些活跃区域的斑点通常只占大脑图像的一小部分，不到10%。这会使粗心的观察者认为大脑的其他部分都在休眠。但是正如勒杜在给我的邮件中所说的，“在一项任务中，可能100%的大脑都在活动，但是只有一小部分的大脑与此项任务相关。”这种图像强调了大脑区域活动的巨大差异，而不是强调大脑在做的任何事情。In fact, the entire premise of only “using” a certain proportion of your brain is misguided. When your brain works on a problemturning light that hits your retina into an image, or preparing to reach for a pint of beer, or solving an algebra problemits effectiveness is as much a question of “where” and “when” as it is of “how much.” Certain regions of the brain are more specialized than others to deal with certain tasks, and most behavior depends on tight temporal coordination between those regions. Your visual system helps you locate that pint of beer, and your motor system gets your hand around it. The idea that swaths of the brain are stagnant pudding while one section does all the work is silly. The brain is a complex, constantly multi-tasking network of tissue.实际上，整个只“使用”部分大脑的这个前提就是一种误导。当你的大脑在想一个问题时，如开灯让你的视网膜能看到图像，或者准备拿一品脱的啤酒，或者解决一个代数问题，真正有效的问题是大脑的“哪部分”和“什么时候”处理这些问题，而不是解决这些问题使用了“多少”大脑。大脑特定的专门区域来处理特定的任务。而且大多数行为依靠的是不同区域间的紧密合作。你的视觉系统帮助你定位啤酒的位置，你的运动系统指挥你的手够着它。认为大脑的一个部分在工作的时候，其他的部分如同布丁一般静止，这是愚蠢的想法。大脑是个永远在进行着多项工作的复杂的网络。Still, the appeal of the myth is clear. If we only use 10 percent of our brains, imagine how totally great life would be if we could use more. You could dazzle Grandma and her nursing-home crew during Jeopardy. Or, like Lucy, you could learn Chinese calligraphy in an hour. The 10-percent myth presses the same buttons as any self-help scheme that promises to make us better, faster. As Wang told me, its “like the 4-hour workweek guy.”同样这句谣言的吸引力显而易见。如果我们只使用了10%的大脑，试想我们如果可以使用更多的话，生活会变得多么不凡。你可以在危险边缘节目上让你的祖母和敬老院的工作人员大开眼界。抑或像露西一样，在一个小时之内学会中国书法。这个10%的谣言就像其他自助计划一样，承诺我们可以变得更好，更快。就像王告诉我的，这就像一周工作4小时的主人公一样。And thats why the 10-percent myth, compared with other fantasies, is especially pernicious. It has a distinct air of scientific plausibilityits a zippy one-liner with a nice round number, a virus with obvious vectors in pop-psychology books, easy to repeat at cocktail parties. The myth is also part of a larger way of thinking about the brain that is characterized by misleading simplificationslike the notion that the right side of the brain is creative and the left side rational. “Those kinds of ideas self-perpetuate,” LeDoux told me. “Its like saying dopamine is responsible for pleasure and the amygdala makes fear. Both are wrong.”这就是为什么10%的谣言相比起其他的幻想来说，尤其有害。它看起来具有科学说服力，一条线加一个圆圈，在流行心理学书籍中有着像病毒一样的显著的推动性，很容易在鸡尾酒会上得到复述。这个谣言也是将大脑误解为简单事物的思维方式之一，如右脑主要负责创造，而左脑负责理性这个想法一样。勒杜说：“这些自成一派的想法就像多巴胺负责产生愉悦，而杏仁核产生恐惧一样，都是错误的。”Neuroscience is still in its adolescence, but it is all too often served to the public as a more mature field. As psychologist Gary Marcus recently argued, biologyincluding neuroscienceis not like physics, where scientists build on a bedrock of established formal laws. As of yet, neuroscience has no such foundation, which may increase the likelihood that sweeping myths about the brain endure. Neuroscience and psychology a