科技英語閱讀特訓:記錄記憶

‘Mind-reading’

‘This “mind-reading” experiment, is quite a sensationalist term,’ says Dr Demis Hassabis reflecting on the media response to a recent experiment, ‘but it’s not entirely incorrect either.’ Hassabis is one of a group of Wellcome Trust researchers based at University College London, who have been looking at how memory is stored in the brain. ‘I am interested in auto-biographical memory, events in our lives, what makes us who we are,’ says Hassabis. ‘That is the type of memory that goes first in Amnesia, in Alzheimer’s, it’s the most vulnerable because it is also the most complex memory.’ The team is looking for what is encoded by memory when people experience something, and are exploring the hippocampus, the part of the brain critical for memory.

Higher-level thinking

‘People have done experiments,’ says Hassabis, ‘where they have shown participants pictures of cars and people, and they worked out from their brain activity what they were looking at.’ What they haven’t been able to identify is higher-level thinking, such as spatial memory. Before he completed his Doctorate, Hassabis was a well-known computer games developer, and he brought this expertise to this project.

‘We basically created an experiment with a virtual reality environment,’ says Hassabis, ‘which people navigated around, like playing Quake. The only task you had to do is walk from A to B to C to D, four pre-described positions in a green room and a blue room.’ When participants reached the assigned point they pressed a button, eyes down to the floor so they weren’t registering any image in particular, while brain activity was being scanned the whole time.

Spatial memory

‘We showed,’ explains Hassabis, ‘that just from activity in the hippocampus, we can predict where somebody was standing in the room. We are in some sense looking at the internal representation of space in the person’s brain. The only difference in each position is the person’s internal map of where they are. We were the first to show a high-level thought, a high-level memory, and investigate the nature of that in the human brain.’ The key says Hassabis, is that if you know what makes something memorable, you could develop a therapy to, ‘emphasize those aspects that we know are good for something being memorable.’

大腦解讀

“這項實驗的叫‘大腦解讀’，這名字聽上去可夠有轟動效應的。” 回憶起媒體對這項試驗的反應，戴米斯?哈薩比斯說，“但這也不完全不對。”哈薩比斯是倫敦大學學院的一名維康基金會研究員。他主要研究記憶是如何儲存在大腦中的。“我的研究興趣是人的自傳式記憶，我們生命中各種事件和我們如何形成自己個性的，”哈薩比斯說。“如果人們患上了遺忘症或阿爾茨海默氏症（又稱早老性痴呆症），自傳式記憶將最先消失。這種記憶最容易受損，因為它是最複雜的記憶。”哈薩比斯所在的研究隊伍正試圖發現，當人們經歷一個事件時，是什麼被編碼在了記憶裡。他們還在進行海馬區的掃描工作。這一區域對記憶來說至關重要。

高階記憶

哈薩比斯說：“人們對大腦進行過很多實驗。比如，科學家給人們出示汽車或人物的圖片，並通過研究人腦的'活動判斷他們所看的圖片內容。” 但是，這些實驗還沒有涉及人的高階記憶，比如空間記憶。在完成自己博士學位之前，哈薩比斯就已經是一個知名的電腦遊戲開發人了，他把自己這方面的專業知識應用到該專案的研究中來。

“我們利用虛擬現實技術設計了這個實驗，”哈薩比斯說，“人們可以在這個虛擬世界自由行動，就像玩《雷神之錘》遊戲一樣。這裡面你唯一要完成的任務就是從A點走到B點再走到C點再走到D點。這四個預先設定好的點分佈在一間綠屋子和一間藍屋子裡。” 參與者到達一個預定點後就按一下按鈕。然後眼睛看地板，這樣他的大腦就不會接收任何別的影象。這時科學家會對他的大腦活動進行掃描。

空間記憶

“實驗顯示，”哈薩比斯說，“單從觀察海馬區的活動，我們就能預測出實驗參與者在房間中的位置。從某種程度上講，我們在觀察大腦對空間的內部反映。各個點的唯一不同在於它們在大腦內部地圖上位置的不同。我們是第一個做到呈現人類這種高階思維和高階記憶的。我們正在對這種記憶的屬性進行研究。”哈薩比斯說，研究的重要性在於，如果我們能夠發現是什麼因素使某個事件進入記憶，我們就能研究出一種治療方式，用來“強化那些使人們獲得記憶的因素。”

該內容來源於英國總領事館文化教育處