You’re walking down a quiet street and suddenly you hear some footsteps. Undoubtedly, it means that there’s someone around. But have you ever wonder why it occurs to us that it’s someone else’s footsteps, not ours?
According to a new study published in the journal Nature in September, this phenomenon arises from a function in our brain to ignore the noise we make ourselves.
In order to explore how our brain does this, a group of scientists carried out an experiment with mice at Duke University. The research entered on an intuition(直觉)—that we are usually unaware of the sound of our own footsteps—as a vehicle for understanding larger neural(神经系统的) phenomena; how this behavior reveals the ability to monitor, recognize, and remember the sound of one’s own movements in relation to those of their larger environments.
In the experiment, research controlled the sounds of a group of mice could hear, reported Science Daily. During the first several days, the mice would hear the same sound each time they took a step. This was just like “running on a tiny piano with each key playing exactly the same note”, senior study author Richard Mooney, a professor of neurobiology at Duke University, told Live Science.
Scientists found that their auditory cortex (听觉皮层) – the area of the brain that processes sound – became active at first but decreased its response to the sound after two or three minutes when the mice became familiar with it.
“ It’s almost like they were wearing special headphones that could filter(过滤) out the sound of their own movements.” David Schneider, an assistant professor at the Center for Neutral Science at New York University, told HuffPost.
But once the sound changed, their auditory cortex became active again. This suggests that the “sensory filter” in a mouse’s brain could help it detect new sounds or abnormal noise in the environment easily after tuning out familiar sounds.
“For mice, this is really important,” said Schneider. “They are prey animals, so they really need to be able to listen for a cat creeping up on them, even when they’re walking and making noise.
Being able to ignore the sounds of one’s own movements is likely important for humans as well. But the ability to predict the sounds of our own actions is also important for more complex human behaviors such as speaking or playing an instrument.
“When we learn to speak or to play music, we predict what sounds we are going to hear – such as when we prepare to strike keys on a piano – and we compare this to what we actually hear, ”explains Schneider. “We use mismatches between expectation and experience to change how we play – and we get better over time because our brain is trying to minimize these errors.”
【小题1】What can be discovered about mice in the experiment?| A．Their brain responds inactively to the familiar sounds |
| B．They are able to detect sounds other animals don’t notice. |
| C．They cannot identify different sounds except their own footsteps. |
| D．Different areas of their brain are responsible for different sounds. |
| A．Getting used to abnormal or unfamiliar sounds. |
| B．Ignoring the sounds made by our companions. |
| C．Identifying the sounds from a larger environment. |
| D．Being sensitive to the sounds of our own movement. |
| A．He has the ability to match the wrong note with the instrument player. |
| B．He has an intuition that he should ignore the sound of his own movement. |
| C．He has a low expectation and knows where players are likely to make errors. |
| D．He has a good prediction of how each note should be played in the orchestra. |
| A．Noise-filtering ability ensures us a quiet and undisturbed environment. |
| B．The ability to ignore familiar noises helps to detect potential dangers. |
| C．The activeness of auditory cortex determines our activity performance. |
| D．Sound-predicting ability seems not so important for humans as for animals. |
Benefits of Personality Tests
Can identifying one’s personality type using the MBTI and other personality assessments really help? They may.
Better understand others
After taking a personality test and seeing our results, we can gain a better understanding of all the different perceptions and reactions that others might have to the same situation.
Identify our likes and dislikes
Maybe we’ve always hated talking on the phone but never really understood why.
Learning more about our personality type can also help us discover new ways to approach challenges. Knowing what might work best for our personality type can give us new ideas on how to solve problems, deal with stress, cope with conflict, and manage our work habits.
Recognize our strengths and weaknesses
Knowing what we are good at can be important in a wide variety of situations, whether we are picking a college major or thinking about running for a seat on our local school board. For example, if we know that we are an ISTJ (introverted, sensing, thinking, and judging) on the MBTI, we might recognize that certain aspects of our personality might qualify as strengths in some situations and weaknesses in others.
| A．Know which situations are ideal for us |
| B．Hold on to ideas about who we are |
| C．While they reveal truth that showcases different aspects of personality |
| D．Here’s an overview of the many benefits of personality tests |
| E．This is important because we all have different ways of seeing and interacting with the world |
| F．While our organizational skills and carefulness can be a major strength in our work |
| G．Or perhaps we’ve always needed much time to think about a problem before making a decision |
Have you ever noticed that your fingertips are wrinkled (起皱的) when you’ve just finished swimming or washing dishes? It seems as if your hands have aged 30 years in a second. But is this an accident? Or is it something that nature has built into our bodies?
“If your finger’s wrinkling up had no use at all, it wouldn’t need to.” Professor Tom Smulders from Newcastle University UK told BBC News. By studying wet fingers closely, Smulders and his partners found that the wrinkles looked a bit like the patterns on the car tire or the bottom of the running shoes. So they made a guess that wrinkles on fingers might be able to help the hand hold things more tightly.
To test this, researchers asked 20 people to pick up marbles (大理石) from water with their hands. But before they started, some of the people had to keep their hands in water for half an hour. The researchers found that the people with wrinkled fingers completed the task faster than those with dry hands. But when they were asked to move dry marbles, all the people performed equally well no matter they had the wrinkled fingers or not. Researchers said our ancestors might not have played with marbles but wrinkled fingers could have made it easier for them to climb around in the wet forests and catch fish from rivers. Similarly, our toes also get wrinkled in water. This may have developed from our ancestors need to run on wet ground.
But the question is if wrinkled fingers are so helpful, why don’t our hands just stay that way all the time? Researchers explained that wrinkling had its disadvantage: wet fingertips are far less sensitive than smooth ones, reducing our sense of touch.
【小题1】What does the underlined word “this” in the third paragraph refer to?| A．Whether fingers have wrinkles after they are put in water. |
| B．Whether wrinkled fingers can hold things more tightly. |
| C．Why keeping things in water makes them wrinkled. |
| D．Why wrinkles help hands hold things more tightly. |
| A．wrinkled hands hold dry things more tightly than dry hands do |
| B．dry hands hold dry things more tightly than wrinkled hands do |
| C．wrinkled hands hold wet things more tightly than dry hands do |
| D．dry hands hold wet things more tightly than wrinkled hands do |
| A．They are too sensitive to be touched. |
| B．They might be more likely to get hurt. |
| C．They cannot hold things tightly enough. |
| D．They are not so sensitive as dry fingers. |
Why do some people have many friends while others do not?
The first experiment is called the “Hawthorne effect” after Hawthorne, Illinois, where the experiment took place. A group of psychologists examined the work patterns of two groups of workers in the Western Electric Company.
She divided the class into two groups: one with blue eyes and the other with brown eyes. Other eye colours such as hazel or green were excluded from his exercise. Then she told the class that brown-eyed people were cleverer than blue-eyed ones because of an agent for brown color found in their blood. Blue-eyed people were stupid, lazy and not to be trusted. Jane Elliott did not need to say any more. The brown-eyed students quickly got used to their new role as the leaders of the class. The blue-eyed students became quiet and withdrawn. Then she discovered something very interesting. Four poor brown-eyed readers began to read fluently in a way they had never done before.
| A．Before the experiment the management talked to both groups of workers and explained that they wanted to find the best working environment for them. |
| B．The second experiment tells us what teachers said has a great effect on the students. |
| C．The second experiment shows what happens to personal relations if you are rude to or ignore others. |
| D．The ones who have more friends usually are those who care about others. |
| E．Jane Elliott had shown that the way people are treated affects not only their behaviour but also their confidence and their performance. |
| F．You may even imagine that this ability was something they were born with because it seems so effortless to them. |
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