What are you doing when you aren’t doing anything at all? If you said "nothing", then you have just passed a test in logic and f

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问题     What are you doing when you aren’t doing anything at all? If you said "nothing", then you have just passed a test in logic and failed in neuroscience. Researchers have recently discovered that while some areas of our brains light up when we perform mental tasks, other areas go dark. This dark network is off when we seem to be on, and on when we seem to be off. If you climbed into a MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) machine and lay there quietly, waiting for instructions from a technician, the dark network would be as active as a beehive. But the moment your instructions arrived and your task began, the bees would freeze and the network would fall silent.【B1】___________
    The human body moves forward in time at the rate of one second per second whether we like it or not. But the human mind can move through time in any direction and at any speed it chooses. Our ability to imagine the pleasures of Super Bowl Sunday or remember the excesses of Christmas Eve is a fairly recent evolutionary development. We are a race of time travelers, capable of visiting the future or revisiting the past whenever we wish. If our neural time machines are damaged by illness, age or accident, we may become trapped in the present.【B2】____________________
    Why did evolution design our brains to go wandering in time? Perhaps it’s because an experience is a terrible thing to waste.  Moving around in the world exposes organisms to danger, so as a rule they should have as few experiences as possible and learn as much from each as they can.【B3】_________________When we are busy having experiences—herding children, signing checks, battling traffic—the dark network is silent, but as soon as those experiences are over, the network is awakened, and we begin moving across the landscape of our history to see what we can learn—for free.
    【B4】_____________________Just as pilots practice flying in flight simulators, the rest of us practice living in life simulators, and our ability to simulate future courses of action and preview their consequences enables us to learn from mistakes without making them.
    Perhaps the most startling fact about the dark network isn’t what it does but how often it does it. Neuroscientists refer to it as the brain’s default mode, which is to say that we spend more of our time away from the present than in it.【B5】_______________________________We stay just long enough to take a message and then we slip off again to the land of other time, our dark networks come into active.
    [A]   Time travel allows us to pay for an experience once and then have it again and again at no additional charge, learning new lessons with each repetition.
    [B]   For decades, scientists have believed that the brain possesses an internal clock that allows it to keep track of time. Now a new study proposes a new model in which a series of physical changes to the brain’s cells helps the organ to monitor the passage of time.
    [C]   Traveling backward buys us many trials for the price of one, but traveling forward allows us to dispense with trials entirely.
    [D]   When we appear to be doing nothing, we are clearly doing something. But what? The answer, it seems, is time travel.
    [E]   People typically overestimate how often they are in the moment because they rarely take notice when they take leave. It is only when the environment demands our attention—a dog barks, a child cries, a telephone rings—that our mental time machines switch themselves off and deposit us with a bump in the here and now.
    [F]  For example, damage to a specific region within the brain can produce a memory deficit in which the patient loses knowledge about "living things" (e.g. dogs, lions, birds) but maintains knowledge about other categories (e.g. inanimate objects such as furniture and utensils).
    [G]  Alzheimer’s disease, for instance, specifically attacks the dark network, stranding many of its victims in an endless now, unable to remember their yesterdays or envision their tomorrows.
【B4】

选项

答案C

解析 本空位于第四段段首,空格前为第三段。第三段末尾讲的是大脑回溯过往经历的功能;而根据空格后的to simulate future…以及preview…,可知第四段的内容应该主要跟大脑“探访未来”这一功能的作用或意义有关。空格前后所述为不同的内容,可见空格处的内容应能起到承上启下的过渡作用,上承第三段末提到的“回溯过往”,下启本段关于“大脑探访未来”的话题。C中的Traveling backward…和traveling forward…正好是对空格前后两处内容的概括,能起承上启下的作用,故为本题答案。
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