雅思阅读 24: Memories That Never Were（从未发生过的记忆）

改编自 University of Derby / Nature Reviews Neuroscience（经典综述）。雅思阅读 Section 3 难度，约 1050 词。 素材来源：https://www.derby.ac.uk/online/course-taster/forensic-psychology-masters-msc-online/issues-with-expert-witnessestestimony/lost-in-the-mall-false-memory.php

Reading Passage

A. For most of the twentieth century, memory was conceived of as a video recorder: an event was captured, stored intact, and replayed later more or less exactly as it had happened. A moment's introspection should have cast doubt on the metaphor. Ask people to describe what they ate for dinner last Tuesday and they flounder; ask them to describe a wedding or a bereavement and they confabulate with confidence, embroidering gaps with plausible detail. The modern science of memory has abandoned the recorder altogether. A memory, we now understand, is less a stored copy than a rebuilt construction, assembled afresh each time it is retrieved from fragments of sensory detail, prior expectation, social suggestion and prior knowledge about how the world works. This reconstruction has a price: it is permeable. Every time we recall something, we run the risk of altering it, because the act of remembering is not a passive reading but an active rewriting. The brain does not pull a file from a shelf; it reassembles the file from its parts, and any of those parts can be swapped, added or lost in the process.

B. The experimental demonstration of this permeability is indelibly associated with Elizabeth Loftus, whose work beginning in the 1970s transformed legal attitudes to eyewitness testimony. In a now-classic study published in 1995, Loftus and Jacqueline Pickrell recruited 24 participants and, with the help of their relatives, supplied each with four short narratives from childhood. Three were true, drawn from family records. The fourth was false: it described how the participant, at around the age of five, had been briefly separated from a parent in a busy shopping centre, grown distressed, and eventually been comforted by an elderly stranger who reunited them. Over repeated interviews, conducted over a few weeks, roughly a quarter of participants came to believe the fictitious event had genuinely happened, and many added vivid, emotionally coloured details of their own — the colour of the stranger's coat, the sound of their own crying, the relief of being found. Loftus called the process "imagination inflation": the more a participant imagined the scene, the more real it came to feel. False memories, it turned out, do not feel different from real ones. They carry the same conviction, the same sensory richness, the same quiet sense of ownership.

C. The mechanism that makes this possible is called reconsolidation. When a memory is first laid down, it is fragile; over hours it stabilises, or consolidates, into a durable trace that requires no further metabolic effort to maintain. For decades this was thought to be the end of the story. But work in the 2000s, first in animals and then in people, showed that retrieving a memory does not simply read it out — it returns the trace to a fragile state, as though the brain momentarily reopens the file to make a copy. Before the memory is re-stored, a process that takes hours, new information can be slipped in, edited out, or overwritten. A leading question from a lawyer, a photograph supplied by a therapist, a well-meaning relative's confirmation, even a film watched after the event — any of these can be woven into the reactivated trace, so that the next time the memory is recalled, it has been subtly rewritten. The original event is not destroyed; rather, it has been adulterated, and the person recalling it has no way of knowing which details are old and which are new.

D. The discovery is not only a problem. It is also an opportunity. Post-traumatic stress disorder, in which a single memory intrudes on a sufferer for decades, is a condition in which reconsolidation goes wrong. A traumatic event is remembered not merely as a narrative but as a body state — a racing heart, a cold sweat, a flash of the original scene — triggered by apparently innocuous cues such as a car backfiring or a doorway shadow. If reconsolidation is the window in which a memory can be rewritten, then interfering with that window might strip the traumatic memory of its emotional charge while leaving the narrative intact. Researchers at McGill University and elsewhere have tested this idea using propranolol, a cheap beta-blocker that dampens the body's stress response by blocking receptors for adrenaline. Patients are asked to write out their trauma in detail — reactivating the memory — and then take the drug. In several small trials, the intrusive imagery and physiological arousal faded over the following weeks, while the patients could still describe what had happened. No pill erased the memory; the meaning of the event remained, but its sting did not. Critics caution, however, that the effect sizes are modest and that not every patient responds, so the treatment is not yet a routine option.

E. The legal and ethical implications are uncomfortable. Eyitness identifications, once the gold standard of criminal evidence, are now known to be alarmingly fallible; Loftus's work contributed to a generation of wrongful convictions overturned by DNA testing, many of which had rested on a confident, detailed, utterly mistaken eyewitness. At the same time, the therapeutic use of reconsolidation editing raises its own questions. Is a memory that no longer hurts still the same memory? Does rewriting a traumatic recollection risk rewriting a patient's sense of who they are? And, more darkly, can the same permeability that allows a therapist to soften a nightmare be exploited by interrogators or propagandists for less benign ends — persuading a prisoner, over many sessions, that a confession they do not remember is the truth? The recorder metaphor, for all its faults, was reassuring. The rebuilt memory is not. It is fragile, social, and — whether in the witness box, the clinic or the interrogation room — profoundly open to influence.

Questions 1-4

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

List of Headings i. A metaphor that no longer holds ii. Planting a memory that never happened iii. Why video recorders are better than brains iv. The window in which memories can be rewritten v. Turning the flaw into a treatment vi. The legal and ethical questions that follow vii. The role of DNA evidence in solving crimes

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. In Loftus and Pickrell's study, how many of the four childhood stories given to each participant were false? A. None. B. One. C. Two. D. All four.

6. According to the passage, why do false memories feel convincing? A. Because they are identical to real memories at the neural level. B. Because they carry the same conviction, sensory detail and sense of ownership. C. Because participants are hypnotised. D. Because the researchers paid participants to lie.

7. What happens during reconsolidation? A. A memory is permanently deleted. B. A retrieved memory becomes fragile and can be modified before re-storage. C. New memories are written to video tape. D. The brain stops responding to stress.

8. How is propranolol used in PTSD treatment? A. It replaces the original traumatic memory with a false one. B. It is taken after memory reactivation to dampen the emotional charge. C. It erases the patient's knowledge of the event. D. It is given only to healthy volunteers.

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. Loftus and Pickrell's study was published in 1995.
10. Most participants in the study rejected the false story immediately.
11. Propranolol is a drug that blocks receptors for adrenaline.
12. Loftus's research was funded by the US Department of Justice.
13. Propranolol completely erases traumatic memories.

Questions 14-15

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

When a memory is retrieved, it enters a (14) __________ state before being re-stored; taking propranolol at this point can reduce the memory's emotional (15) __________.

答案与解析

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