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  3. Susan Greenfield’s recent comments about how modern technology and social media are changing the way our brains work have caused

Susan Greenfield’s recent comments about how modern technology and social media are changing the way our brains work have caused

admin2016-06-30  67
问题     Susan Greenfield’s recent comments about how modern technology and social media are changing the way our brains work have caused quite a stir in the academic community: these changes, she claims, are as important to understand as climate change. One interesting way of assessing the value of her statements is to look at the nature of the "reading brain".
    To begin with, the human brain was never meant to read. Not text, not computer screens, not tablets. There are no genes or areas in the brain devoted uniquely to reading. Rather, our ability to read represents our brain’s protean capacity to learn something outside our repertoire by creating new circuits that connect existing circuits in a different way. Indeed, every time we learn a new skill, that is what we are doing.
    New capacities, however, change us, as the evolutionarily new reading circuit illustrates. After we become literate, we literally " think differently" about language: images of brain activation between literate and nonliterate humans bear this out. The brain’s plasticity allows an intrinsic variety of possible circuits— there is no set genetic programme. For example, in the case of reading, this means there will be different reading brains depending on various environmental factors: the Chinese reading brain, for example, uses far more visual areas because there are more characters to learn.
    In 1968, Marshall McLuhan started conducting an experiment at Fordham University, in which he made students watch the same film on a cinema screen and a television, and analysed their different reactions: the characteristics of the medium, his hypothesis went, will always influence what parts of the reading circuit are employed and to what extent. At the time, many laughed off McLuhan’s theory, but it stands out like an apt prelude to the debate we are having today. The characteristics of a medium like the Internet invite the reader to move from one stimulus to the next in rapid fashion. The characteristics of a medium like the book invite more focused attention.
    Like Professor Greenfield, my research group and I are most concerned with how the acquisition of new capacities changes human development. In the case of reading, we know that the "expert reading brain" as we know it includes a beautifully complex circuit that integrates simpler decoding skills with what I call " deep reading" processes such as critical analysis, analogical thought, inference and insight.
    The integration of the simpler and the deeper reading processes is not automatic and requires years of learning by the novice reader, as well as extra milliseconds for any expert to read a more sophisticated text. The reality is that today’s expert reading circuit was formed under very different conditions and with different mediums than those of our childrens’.
    The questions that our society must ask revolve around whether the time-consuming demands of the deep-reading processes will be lost in a culture whose principal mediums advantage speed, multitasking, and processing the next and the next piece of information. Will an immersion in digitally-dominated forms of reading change the capacity of the young readers to form and to develop their deep reading processes? No one at this moment possesses the evidence to answer these questions, but our children’s development and our species-intellectual evolution require that we confront them.
Which of the following is INCORRECT about the reading function of the human brain?
选项 A、It develops by building more links.
B、It cannot be used to do screen-reading.
C、It depends on various zones of the brain.
D、It varies among different human species.
答案B
解析 细节题。第二段首句提到，人类大脑最初并非专为阅读而设，其后列举了一些阅读媒介，其中包括屏幕阅读。但作者意在说明大脑最初的状态没有任何专门的阅读区域，而不是说人们的大脑不能用来进行屏幕阅读，[B]是对原文的曲解，故为答案。[A]“它的发展依赖于建立更多连接”可在第二段第四句找到依据，因此排除；而根据第二段第三句和第四句可排除[C]“它需要依靠大脑的各个不同的区域”；作者在第三段中提及受到外部环境的影响，人们所主要依赖的阅读区域也是不同的，其后以中国人进行了举例说明，故也排除[D]。
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