天津阅读 Rd023・2024_03 阅读理解

Humans have evolved to spend long periods doing physical exercise. But why doesn’t everyone enjoy exercising? The complexity of the human brain is to blame.

Evolving an ability doesn’t automatically mean we’ll want to use it. While physical exercise isn’t that bad, it’s still typically unpleasant. It has to be: you’re pushing your body to its physical limits, which leads to significant discomfort.

Another issue is that the human brain is highly sensitive to wasted effort. Studies have shown that it calculates the effort required for actions and tends to stop us from squandering vital resources on fruitless efforts, like walking over 30 km for a handful of berries.

The thing is, regular exercise to get “in shape” requires constant and considerable effort — all for gradual progress and uncertain rewards. So, your brain’s tendency to ask, “Is it worth it?” will be hard to quieten. This particular feature also means we typically prefer things which offer minimum effort for maximum reward.

Thankfully, the human brain is a complex organ. It isn’t ruled by its more primitive drives. While many species’ thought processes are limited to “Food, eat it!”, “Danger, run!”, “Pain, avoid!”, we’ve evolved beyond that. Our brains can form multiple long-term goals and ambitions. We can imagine a desirable future scenario, figure out how we’d achieve it, and do just that. Or at least work toward it. This directly impacts how our brain processes motivation and willpower. It makes us capable of delayed gratification: we can recognize that rejecting a reward now can lead to a greater reward later, and act accordingly.

So how does the brain process motivation? The self-discrepancy theory suggests we have several “selves” active in our minds at any given time: our “actual” self, our “ideal” self, and our “ought” self. Your “actual” self is how you are right now. Your “ideal” self is what you want to be. And your “ought” self is the self that does what you ought to be doing to become your “ideal” self. So, if your “ideal” self is a professional footballer, and your “actual” self isn’t, your “ought” self is the one that spends a lot of time training, exercising, and getting better at football.

As far as your brain is concerned, there are processes that discourage exercise, and processes that encourage it. Ideally, you’ll end up putting more weight on the latter than the former.

Staring at the bookcases in my study, packed with so many great books that had remained unread, I heard a loud voice in my head — “Shame on you! How can you leave these masterpieces unread?”

The first book I picked up was Montaigne’s Essays. To my surprise I discovered in the margins what clearly was my own faded handwriting. So I was actually reading it again, but what I was rereading seemed entirely new. I also found sentences underlined. Only this time I wondered: Why did I underline this sentence? It’s the next one that is important!

Clearly, my way of reading the text had shifted, and I myself had changed over the years. This raised the larger question of rereading. It comes in many forms. There’s voluntary rereading, the result of a willful decision to revisit a book one has admired, or a book that has left one with some unanswered questions. This kind of planned revisit could also be for confirming certain details in the text, or for checking on the moves of a given character. A devoted teacher might also wish to refresh his closeness to a work, and thus avoid teaching through the same old written notes with soporific effects.

Contrarily, there’s involuntary rereading. The original reading was either forgotten or so totally absorbed that the new chance encounter with the text produced surprise and astonishment. My reaction to the renewed reading no longer corresponded to the original experience, and I was no longer sure that I recognized myself as the same reader.

Then there are what one might call subconscious rereadings, those that occur without the specific act of reading, much as the memory of a tune can keep coming back to the mind without its actually being heard again. This form of remembered contact with a book can accompany us during a lifetime and continue to strengthen and shape us. Much in the same manner, we may over the years recite to ourselves poems learnt by heart long ago, which have become part of our self-recognition.

All of these ways of reading are valuable. Renewed contact with a novel or a poem can activate the search for a better knowledge of the self. The new reading, a form of revision, uncovers the change in us. The newness is not in the text. It is we who have evolved. In the process of rereading, our outlook has also been significantly changed. Rereading makes it possible for us to see the world around us, ourselves included, in a new light.

Our teacher, Miss Chevalier was a small woman, with a moon face, fatty fingers and curls that sprang straight up from her head, hence the funny name “Poodle”. She taught in our reading club. Sometimes she would look in and ask what we were reading — not to check but to know.

That’s what happened the day my club was reading aloud a poem by Henry Longfellow. I guess I was better than the others, for Miss Chevalier asked a while later, “Addie, I was wondering if you would recite the whole poem to the Saturday evening’s club.” She said a famous professor was going to give a lecture about the poet, and a presentation of that poem would be a fresh way to start.

She asked me to memorize it. “But that shouldn’t be a problem for a child of your ability,” she added. I’m telling you, my happy feet barely touched the ground all the way home. To me, that was the biggest thing ever and I soon learned the whole poem by heart, well prepared for our first rehearsal.

I was desperately nervous when I went to her office the next day. But the good thing was she always had the smile that would make you feel like you just did something right.

Halfway through the poem, Miss Chevalier stopped me and asked if I knew what “impetuous” meant. Despite her encouraging smile, I wanted to sink through the floor because I was unsure about its pronunciation as well as its meaning. Miss Chevalier pretended not to have noticed my red face and handed me a dictionary, asking me to read its definition aloud. “Impetuous has two definitions: rushing with great force or violence; acting suddenly, with little thought.”

She asked me which one fitted the poem. I read both definitions over again, trying to figure it out, but Miss Chevalier must have read my mind. “There is no wrong answer,” she said, “I want to know your opinion, Addie.” Hesitantly, I said, “Maybe… both.”

She liked that. “One has to be impetuous both ways or they wouldn’t dare to face up to any challenge. Would you call yourself impetuous?”

I knew she was asking for an opinion. “My mother thinks being impetuous for girls is improper, anyway.”

She said my mom was somewhat right about that. “But girls should also be wise to take up challenges when needed. I believe you are such a girl.”

After that, I would never call Miss Chevalier “Poodle” again.

Research sometimes proves, with data, what we more or less already know (e.g. Exercise is good for you, and polluted air isn’t). Still, sometimes our assumptions are incorrect, and scientific findings surprise researchers, along with the rest of us. A recent example is the phenomenon of disappearing lakes in parts of the frozen treeless Arctic region.

You might think these lakes would be expanding, not disappearing. As climate change warms the region — melting surface snow and ice as well as the permafrost — there should be more surface water, forming larger lakes and even new ones. Recently, however, scientists have observed not just shrinking lakes but lakes that have completely gone away.

Many scientists shared the commonsense expectation that as permafrost melted, lakes would at first expand with meltwater flowing into them. Eventually, researchers made a prediction that progressive warming during the 21st and 22nd centuries would dry out the Arctic, and lakes would begin to shrink. But now it looks as if Arctic lakes are disappearing a century sooner than predicted. A case in point is that some large, age-old lakes shrank dramatically in what appears to have been a matter of months. Scientists have labeled this phenomenon “disastrous lake loss”.

What caused this? The frozen solid ground actually contains bits of rock, mineral and organic matter, leaving spaces in between. And because these spaces are filled with solid ice, liquid water cannot readily get inside, but it can when the permafrost melts, allowing more water to get through. Soon after that, around 192 lakes in northwestern Alaska are gone from sight.

Why did scientists miss this? One probable reason is that most climate models assume that the melting of permafrost is driven only by warming air.

New evidence suggests, however, that rainfall — particularly increasing autumn rain — is now contributing significantly to permafrost loss. The rainfall carries heat into the ground. Yet none of the existing models includes such processes.

That is a good example of why — no matter how complex our models are or may one day be — we need direct observation of the natural world.