外语好的还是用外文便捷

科学家研究虚拟现实有了新的发现，科学网有报道，并且可以在《自然》的网站上阅读原文。

理解一个人的科学思想，还是使用原文效用高。无论口头还是书面交流，直接地用同一种语言交流还是效果好些。虽然，某种级别的人可以有学术秘书或者翻译，但是直接的交流总是比经过了“二传手”的传递要紧凑许多。一句十分幽默的话语，本来可以在瞬间得到回应的；可是翻译的时间差，削若或者损失了那种效果。口头翻译的时间差，一般比书面翻译要短些。但是，由于是面对面的交流，时间差应以秒钟计算；而书面翻译可以延迟若干小时、天、月甚至年。

我的英语水平不高，中文水平也不高。但是在阅读一些翻译过来的名著时发现，其表达非常别扭，像吃米饭总吃到沙子一样让人窝火。还不如偶尔翻看字典看原著舒服。故此，愿意在中英文上都下些工夫，使用它们，善待它们，争取在自己熟悉的专业范围内，尽量准确地表达自己的想法，理解别人的想法。

外语好的人在研究中自然有优势，语言优势；掌握外语的种类多的人，自然视野更开阔。一种语言就是一种思维方式，“大语种”有好文章，“小语种”也有，不同语种的研究者可能角度、思维方式、兴趣点不同。视野开阔者，自然受益更多、更快。

在保证可以使用一门外语交流的前提下，适当拓展自己掌握的语种数量，语言这种“虚拟”的创造工具，在“现实”中的确会产生神奇的效能。它们不仅可以让一个人在“虚拟”中看到自己，还可以在“虚拟”中看到若干个自己、甚至若干个他人的“灵魂”

参考文献：

《科学》：欺骗大脑如此容易

科学家利用虚拟现实技术让参与者体验到“灵魂出窍”

 作者：任霄鹏 来源：科学网 www.sciencenet.cn 发布时间：2007-8-24 13:24:45

以下为《自然》在线报道全文：（http://www.nature.com/news/2007/070820/full/070820-9.html）

News

Published online: 23 August 2007; | doi:10.1038/news070820-9

Illusion mimics out-of-body experiences

Camera trickery shows how easy it is to fool the mind.

Michael Hopkin

Scientists have deliberately fooled people into feeling they are watching themselves from outside their own bodies, using virtual-reality technology. The achievement reveals how the brain can be confused as it struggles to integrate confusing information from the different senses.

People who claim to have had out-of-body experiences (OBEs) — most famously patients on the operating table or those who have narrowly avoided death — describe a sensation of having floated out of themselves, for example towards the ceiling of an operating theatre. From there they watch their body and activities surrounding it.

Such experiences have been claimed by spiritualists to represent evidence of a soul. But the new research shows that it is possible to create a similar sensation simply by tricking the mind.

Understanding how the mind sometimes perceives itself as journeying out of the body could help with the development of more realistic computer games or remote robotic systems, or even help to understand the brains of those who claim to experience the phenomenon naturally, such as schizophrenics or epileptics.

You, me, me, you

The effect was created in two separate experiments described in Science this week, both of which used a simple method to fool volunteers into thinking that their minds had been displaced outside their bodies. In each case, participants wore virtual-reality goggles hooked up to cameras trained on their own bodies.

In one study, carried out by Henrik Ehrsson at University College London, volunteers were then prodded in the chest at precisely the same moment that an object approached the camera. In this scenario, the volunteers identified strongly with the location of the camera, thinking that this is where their true self was — the view of their body was like a view of someone else.

In the other experiment, led by Olaf Blanke of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, patients viewed a camera image of their own back being stroked, while their own back was stroked too. In this instance, volunteers identified strongly with the picture of their back, thinking that this was their location - again outside their own body.

Too much information

The bizarre effect happens because, although we usually perceive ourselves to be within our bodies, the experimental set-up meant that the sensory information being supplied to the brain did not fit with this idea, Ehrsson explains. "The brain can trick itself internally because it is always trying to make sense of information — if that information is flawed or erroneous, it could come up with the wrong interpretation."

The method does not recreate the 'classical' OBE — most strikingly because in the real-world setting, there's no obvious way for a person to 'see' themselves. But people could perhaps draw on their own mental body image to create the effect, says Ehrsson. "In the operating theatre there is no mirror on the ceiling, but there could be a 'mirror' in the head," he says. Ehrsson and Blanke suspect that this illusion might involve some sort of malfunction in brain regions such as the tempoparietal cortex that integrate sensory information.

Nevertheless, "this new experiment has at last brought OBEs into the lab and tested one of the main theories of how they occur", comments Susan Blackmore, a psychologist at the University of the West of England in Bristol. "Finding out that OBEs are a perfectly natural phenomenon does not prove there is not astral body, or soul, or spirit, but it certainly makes their invention superfluous."

Suspended disbelief

The effect even works for plastic mannequins, as Blanke's team discovered when they replaced the subject's own image with that of a female dummy purchased for just 100 Swiss francs (US$83) (see video). But when they used a simple square of metal as the image, the OBE effect did not materialize, showing that the trick can only be stretched so far.

 

转载本文请联系原作者获取授权，同时请注明本文来自籍利平科学网博客。
链接地址：https://m.sciencenet.cn/blog-255-6445.html

上一篇：何必追寻逝去的时光
下一篇：弱势个体——伽利略的古稀生活