雅思阅读 194: When the Mind Roams — The Neuroscience of Divergent Thought（思维漫游时：发散思维的神经科学）

改编自 PMC / NeuroImage / Cerebral Cortex 关于默认模式网络与创造力的研究（2024-2025年）。雅思阅读 Section 3 难度，约 1050 词。 素材来源：https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11449134/

Reading Passage

A. Ask a psychologist to measure creativity in a single sitting, and the task they reach for is almost embarrassingly mundane: list as many uses as you can think of for an ordinary brick. This is the Alternative Uses Task, and from the number of ideas a person produces, their novelty and the stretch between them — whether the answers cluster around "build a wall" or roam into "use it as a hammer, a doorstop, a sculpture" — researchers score a capacity they call divergent thinking. It is deliberately contrasted with convergent thinking, the narrow process that homes in on a single correct answer to a well-defined problem. Long dismissed as a quirky trait of artists and eccentrics, divergent thinking is now treated as the everyday engine of creativity — the ability to move away from the obvious answer and assemble ideas that normally live in separate compartments of the mind. For most of the twentieth century this process was hidden inside the black box of introspection; people reported that ideas arrived in the shower or on a long walk, but no one could say what the brain was doing to make them appear. Modern brain imaging has begun to prise that box open, and the picture emerging is stranger and more useful than anyone expected.

B. The first surprise concerns the brain network that springs to life when the problem is set aside. Named the default mode network, it is a set of regions along the brain's midline that glow on a scanner precisely when a person is doing nothing in particular — daydreaming, recalling the past or imagining a future. For years it was interpreted as idle wiring, the neural equivalent of a humming engine in neutral, a region that simply had to stay awake when nothing else was demanded. Later work showed that it is far from idle: during the quiet interval after a hard problem has been abandoned, this network keeps working behind the scenes, generating loose combinations of concepts and testing unlikely connections. It draws on stored memories and recombines them without the constraints of a single goal, reaching across ideas that we would never knowingly put together. It is the network that produces the famous "aha" moment, and it explains why stepping away from a desk — a walk, a night's sleep — so often unsticks a thought that refusal had jammed. Creativity, in this view, is not produced by staring harder but by letting the mind wander.

C. The trouble is that the network responsible for free association sits uneasily beside the one responsible for getting things done. The executive control network is the focused, goal-directed system that plans, evaluates and rejects; it is what marshals attention when you read a manual or balance a budget. It is what allows you to judge whether a novel idea is any good and to refine it into something usable. In most people, these two networks behave like rivals: when one rises, the other falls. The mind either roams or it concentrates, and it tends not to do both at once. This rivalry explains a familiar frustration — the brilliant notion that collapses the moment you try to develop it, or the disciplined plan that never produces a genuinely fresh idea. Generation and selection draw on opposing machinery, and a brain in which they are locked in permanent opposition finds it hard to be creative at all, producing either wild fantasy that cannot be built or competent drudgery that surprises no one. The everyday experience of being stuck on a problem is, in neural terms, exactly this deadlock.

D. Recent imaging studies suggest that creative individuals are distinguished less by a single powerful region than by a peculiar flexibility. Rather than the two networks staying apart, highly creative people show stronger and more balanced communication between them, switching between roaming and focusing as the task demands. The evidence is no longer merely correlational. When researchers directly stimulated regions of the default network in volunteers performing the Alternative Uses Task, the originality of their answers dropped sharply — while the sheer number of ideas and the tendency to daydream were left untouched. That is a telling result: it shows the default network is not simply the seat of unfocused wandering, but a specific contributor to the novelty of what is produced. Cut it, and ideas keep coming, but they are derivative and tame. The capacity to generate original combinations, in other words, has a separable neural basis, one that can be tampered with independently of how fluently a person speaks. This is why two people who produce the same number of ideas can still differ sharply in how surprising those ideas are.

E. These findings carry a practical message that runs against ordinary advice. We are urged to "think harder" and to concentrate until a solution breaks, yet the neuroscience points the other way: creativity seems to depend on the brain's willingness to reconfigure its networks — to relax control just enough for remote associations to surface, then to tighten it again to evaluate them. Flow states, in which a person is lost in a craft and self-consciousness fades, appear to hinge on this same smooth handover between networks rather than on the suppression of either one. Whether this flexibility can be trained, or whether it reflects a stable individual difference, remains open, though some studies suggest it can be nudged by particular kinds of mental exercise. What is clear is that the romantic image of creativity as lightning striking a single inspired mind underestimates the choreography underneath it: two competing systems that, in the most creative minds, learn to take turns. The insight points less to a rare gift than to a trainable balance.

Questions 1-4

Choose the correct heading for paragraphs B, C, D and E from the list of headings below.

List of Headings i. The network that wakes up when we stop trying ii. Why the Alternative Uses Task is flawed iii. Two systems that usually pull against each other iv. What sets creative brains apart — and causal evidence v. The romantic history of genius vi. Why "concentrate harder" may be bad advice vii. How the brain produces language

1. Paragraph B: ____
2. Paragraph C: ____
3. Paragraph D: ____
4. Paragraph E: ____

Questions 5-8

Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.

5. What does the Alternative Uses Task measure? A. How quickly a person can solve a logic puzzle. B. A capacity for divergent thinking through novel idea generation. C. The size of a person's working memory. D. Reaction time in a focused task.

6. The default mode network is most active when a person is A. performing a demanding arithmetic test. B. doing little in particular, such as daydreaming. C. sleeping deeply under anaesthesia. D. speaking in public.

7. According to the writer, what is unusual about highly creative people's brains? A. Their default network shuts down completely. B. The executive network stops functioning. C. The two networks communicate flexibly and take turns. D. They use only one network at a time.

8. What happened when researchers stimulated the default network during the task? A. Volunteers produced fewer ideas altogether. B. The originality of the ideas declined, but fluency was unaffected. C. Volunteers stopped daydreaming entirely. D. Performance improved dramatically.

Questions 9-13

Do the following statements agree with the claims of the writer?

Write:

• TRUE if the statement agrees with the information
• FALSE if the statement contradicts the information
• NOT GIVEN if there is no information on this

9. The default mode network was once regarded as inactive or "idle" wiring.
10. In most people, the default and executive networks tend to reinforce each other's activity.
11. Direct stimulation of the default network reduced both idea quantity and daydreaming.
12. Flow states appear to depend on smooth switching between the two networks.
13. Creativity has been shown to be entirely fixed and untrainable.

Questions 14-15

Complete the summary below using NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage.

The capacity to move beyond the obvious answer is called (14) __________ thinking, and it appears to depend on flexible communication between the default mode network and the (15) __________ network.

答案与解析

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