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Reading Harry Potter Gives Clues to Brain Activity

阅读《哈利波特》为研究人脑活动提供线索

　　U.南宫体育网站 S. News＆World Report

　　Reading about Harry Potter's adventures learning to fly his broomstick activates some of the same regions in the brain we use to perceive real people's actions and intentions.

　　In a unique study,南宫在线入口 scientists who peeked into the brains of people caught up in a good book emerged with maps of what a healthy brain does as it reads. The research reported Wednesday has implications for studying reading disorders or recovery from a stroke. The team from Carnegie Mellon University was pleasantly surprised that the experiment actually worked.

　　Most neuroscientists painstakingly have tracked how the brain processes a single word or sentence, looking for clues to language development or dyslexia by focusing on one aspect of reading at a time. But reading a story requires multiple systems working at once:南宫娱乐网站 recognizing how letters form a word, knowing the definitions and grammar, keeping up with the characters' relationships and the plot twists.

　　Measuring all that activity is remarkable, said Georgetown University neuroscientist Guinevere Eden, who helped pioneer brain-scanning studies of dyslexia but wasn't involved in the new work.

　　“It offers a much richer way of thinking about the reading brain, ”Eden said, calling the project“very clever and very exciting. ”

　　No turning pages inside a brain-scanning MRI machine; you have to lie still. So at Carnegie Mellon, eight adult volunteers watched for nearly 45 minutes as each word of Chapter 9 of“Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone”was flashed for half a second onto a screen inside the scanner.

　　Why that chapter? It has plenty of action and emotion as Harry swoops around on his broom, faces the bully Malfoy and later runs into a three-headed dog, but there's not too much going on for scientists to track, said lead researcher Leila Wehbe, a Ph. D．student.

　　The research team analyzed the scans, second by second, and created a computerized model of brain activity involved with different reading processes. The research was published Wednesday by the journal PLoS One.

　　“For the first time in history, we can do things like have you read a story and watch where in your brain the neural activity is happening, ”said senior author Tom Mitchell, director of Carnegie Mellon's Machine Learning Department. “Not just where are the neurons firing, but what information is being coded by those different neurons. ”

　　Wehbe had the idea to study reading a story rather than just words or phrases. But parsing the brain activity took extraordinary effort. For every word, the researchers identified features — the number of letters, the part of speech, if it was associated with a character or action or emotion or conversation. Then they used computer programming to analyze brain patterns associated with those features in every four-word stretch. They spotted some complex interactions. For example, the brain region that processes the characters' point of view is the one we use to perceive intentions behind real people's actions, Wehbe said. A region that we use to visually interpret other people's emotions helps decipher characters' emotions. That suggests we're using pretty high-level brain functions, not just the semantic concepts but our previous experiences, as we get lost in the story, she said.

　　A related study using faster brain-scanning techniques shows that much of the neural activity is about the history of the story up to that point, rather than deciphering the current word, Mitchell added.

　　The team's computer model can distinguish with 74 percent accuracy which of two text passages matches a pattern of neural activity, he said, calling it a first step as researchers tease apart what the brain does when someone reads.

　　提纲挈领

　　本文主要介绍了卡内基梅隆大学神经医学科研团队的一项脑部扫描试验。该试验的特色是以《哈利波特》第九章为阅读文本。它将有助于推进阅读障碍症及中风治疗的研究。该试验借助大脑核磁共振成像仪，将阅读时大脑的神经活动扫描下来，并结合文本阅读，对人脑活动进行解码式研究。研究发现，人脑在阅读时进行的不仅仅是句法的分析、组合，还包括更高层次的活动，如意图分析、情感共鸣、往事回忆等。

　　障碍词汇

　　peek [pi?k] v. 偷窥

　　【搭配】peek into偷看

　　【例句】 He just had time to peek into the room before the door closed.

　　他刚向房间里望了一眼门便关上了。

　　painstaking [?peinzteiki?] a. 极其仔细的；（不辞）劳苦的

　　【搭配】a painstaking process一个艰苦的过程

　　【例句】 He has finally cracked the system after years of painstaking research.

　　经过多年的努力研究，他最终破解了这个系统。

　　decipher [di?saif?（r）] v. 破译；解释

　　【搭配】decipher the code破译密码

　　【例句】The astronomer must decipher it before being able to assess its significance.

　　天文学家必须在对它的意义作出评价之前, 先把它翻译出来。

　　tease [ti?z] v. 梳理

　　【搭配】tease apart梳理

　　【例句】It's hard to tease apart factors and outcomes, Pettis says.

　　佩蒂斯表示，研究人员很难一一梳理这些因素和结果。

　　dyslexia [dis?leksi?] n. 读写困难；阅读障碍

　　parse [pɑ?z] v. 从语法上描述或分析（词句等）

　　难句翻译

　　No turning pages inside a brain-scanning MRI machine; you have to lie still.

　　译文：脑部核磁共振扫描成像仪上没有翻页，所以试验者必须持续平躺着。

Eight adult volunteers watched for nearly 45 minutes as each word of Chapter 9 of“Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone”was flashed for half a second onto a screen inside the scanner.

　　译文：在试验中，《哈利·波特与魔法石》第九章里的每个单词在扫描仪里的屏幕上依次闪过，每个单词只停留半秒钟。八个成年的被试要阅读45分钟。

The team's computer model can distinguish with 74 percent accuracy which of two text passages matches a pattern of neural activity, he said, calling it a first step as researchers tease apart what the brain does when someone reads.

　　译文：该团队的计算机模型能够以74%的精确度从两篇文章中分辨出符合人脑活动模式的那一篇，米切尔称这是研究人员在分析人脑阅读机制问题上迈出的第一步。

　　文化背景小链接

　　brain-scanning MRI machine：人脑核磁共振成像仪。其原理是利用核磁共振感知人脑中神经元细胞活动，通过电脑及其他接入设备在终端形成影像。当人的感觉器官从外界获取信息后，大脑就会在神经中枢形成固定的磁场；当仪器的精度足够高的时候，就能对人的神经活动了如指掌