雅思阅读 114: Why We Put Things Off: The Time-Biased Brain（我们为何拖延：时间偏向的大脑）

改编自 Scientific Reports / 神经科学综述（2024-2026）。雅思阅读 Section 3 难度，约 1050 词。 素材来源：https://watchmy.health/articles/procrastination-science-how-to-stop

Reading Passage

A. Most people imagine procrastination as a failure of willpower: a lazy student staring at a screen, a writer avoiding a blank page, a worker scrolling through messages while a deadline looms. That intuitive picture has turned out to be largely wrong. Researchers who study delay now argue that procrastination is less about idleness than about emotion. The person who postpones a difficult task is not doing nothing; they are actively choosing a more pleasant activity to escape a feeling — anxiety, boredom, resentment, or the dread of falling short. Once the behaviour is reframed as mood repair rather than laziness, it ceases to look like a moral failing and begins to look like a predictable quirk of how the human brain values rewards. That reframing matters, because it points to different cures. Scolding a procrastinator for lacking discipline addresses the wrong problem; regulating the unpleasant emotion that triggers the avoidance addresses the right one. A deadline, in this view, does not only allocate time; it also rebrands a task as a source of dread, and the dread itself is what the brain is fleeing from.

B. Behind that habit sits a well-documented quirk known as temporal discounting, or delay discounting. Human beings reliably prefer a smaller reward they can have right now to a larger reward that arrives later, even when the later prize is objectively worth more. Offered ten dollars today or fifteen next week, many will take the ten. Offered a slice of cake now or a slimmer waistline in six months, the cake tends to win. The same calculus shapes bigger choices too — saving for retirement, starting exercise, quitting smoking — all of which ask the present self to pay for a future prize it cannot quite feel. Psychologists describe the shape of this preference as "hyperbolic": the value of a delayed reward collapses steeply as soon as it is pushed even a short distance into the future, then flattens out. The curve means that two rewards both weeks away may be judged sensibly, but the moment one of them becomes available immediately, it exerts a magnetic pull that no deliberation can easily resist. A 2024 study in Scientific Reports confirmed that the steepness with which an individual discounts the future predicts how much they put off real-world tasks, tying the laboratory choice experiment to the messy business of daily life.

C. Brain imaging has traced this tug-of-war to two competing networks. When people choose between an immediate and a delayed reward, an evolutionarily older "limbic" network — involving the ventral striatum, the medial prefrontal cortex and the posterior cingulate — fires especially strongly for the choice that pays out now. Alongside it, a lateral prefrontal network, centred on the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, responds more calmly to rewards regardless of when they arrive. The first system is impulsive and emotional; the second is deliberative and far-sighted. Dopamine, the chemical of anticipation and reward, tilts the balance sharply toward the present, because the small, sure pleasure of distraction releases it immediately whereas the distant satisfaction of finishing a task does not. This is why sheer willpower so often fails: it asks the deliberative network to outshout a louder, faster, ancient voice that was built for a world of immediate threats and immediate meals. The two networks do not argue once and settle; they renegotiate, in effect, every time a tempting alternative appears on the screen.

D. There is a further twist that neuroscientists have only recently pinned down: the brain does not treat the future you as the same person as the present you. When people imagine their current desires, regions associated with self-referential thought light up strongly. When they imagine how they will feel months from now, those same regions activate more weakly, as though the future self were a stranger rather than a continuation. Researchers call this "temporal myopia" — a blurring of the distant future that makes tomorrow's stress feel less urgent than today's comfort. People who perceive time in a compressed, logarithmic way, squeezing next year's events into a small subjective space, discount rewards more steeply and procrastinate more. The implication is unsettling: the part of you that starts the essay at the last minute and the part that suffers for it the next morning are, neurologically, only imperfectly the same person. Therapy that treats procrastination as a whole-life problem, rather than a momentary weakness, aims to make that future self more vivid — a face, a deadline, a consequence the mind can almost see.

E. If procrastination is built into the architecture of choice, can it be undone? Researchers offer a set of levers that work with, rather than against, the brain's bias. One is shrinking the task into a tiny first step small enough that the unpleasant feeling never has time to crystallise. Another is making future rewards feel vivid and concrete — a picture, a date, a face — so that the brain's weak future-self response is boosted. A third is structuring choice so that an immediate, pleasurable alternative is simply unavailable when work needs to happen, removing the contest altogether rather than fighting it. The deeper lesson is that the time-biased brain is not a bug to be scolded but a feature to be designed around. A society that understands this will stop demanding heroic self-control from its members and instead build environments — deadlines made tangible, distractions put out of reach, small wins engineered — in which acting now feels, for once, as attractive as doing nothing. The writer who cannot begin at nine may write fluently at nine-thirty in a quiet café; the student who cannot revise at home may revise in a library where the phone cannot be reached. Procrastination, on this view, is less a flaw to be beaten than a signal that the task and the moment do not yet match.

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 shape of human preference for now over later ii. Why scolding procrastinators is pointless iii. Two brain networks locked in competition iv. The future self feels surprisingly like a stranger v. Designing around, rather than fighting, the bias vi. The role of education in raising children vii. How dopamine was discovered in the 1950s

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. According to the writer, procrastination is best understood as A. a clear sign of laziness and weak character. B. an attempt to escape an unpleasant feeling. C. a disorder that requires medication. D. a purely genetic condition.

6. What does "hyperbolic" discounting describe? A. The flat value of all rewards over time. B. A steep collapse in the value of delayed rewards once they are pushed into the future. C. The equal weighting of all choices. D. A preference for risky gambles.

7. What happens in the brain when an immediate reward is on offer? A. The limbic network responds more strongly to the immediate reward. B. The prefrontal cortex shuts down completely. C. Dopamine stops being released. D. Both networks respond identically.

8. Why does the writer say the future self feels "like a stranger"? A. People forget their own names. B. Brain regions for self-referential thought activate weakly when imagining the future. C. The future self is physically a different person. D. People cannot remember the past.

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. Most people given ten dollars today and fifteen next week will choose the larger, later amount.
10. The lateral prefrontal network responds more calmly to rewards regardless of timing.
11. People who perceive time in a compressed way discount rewards less steeply.
12. A 2024 study found that discounting steepness predicts real-world procrastination.
13. Procrastination can usually be cured within one week of treatment.

Questions 14-15

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

Researchers call the blurring of the distant future "temporal (14) __________", which makes tomorrow's stress feel less urgent than today's comfort; it explains why people who compress time perceive the future self as almost (15) __________.

答案与解析

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