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  3. Recovering Memory: Can a New Device Help Amnesia(健忘症)Patients? Claire Robertson was in the changing room at her local swimmi

Recovering Memory: Can a New Device Help Amnesia(健忘症)Patients? Claire Robertson was in the changing room at her local swimmi

admin2013-07-02  29
问题           Recovering Memory: Can a New Device Help Amnesia(健忘症)Patients?
    Claire Robertson was in the changing room at her local swimming pool when she glanced up to see a woman looking at her. The woman had a nice face — warm, searching blue eyes; a hesitant smile — but seemed unsure of what to say. This often happens to Claire, a 49-year-old former nurse who six years ago suffered brain damage due to a rare viral infection. Now an amnesiac(健忘症患者)who is unable to recognize faces, Claire lives in a world in which even her lifelong friends appear as strangers. Her husband Ed wears a distinct shark-tooth necklace at all times to help her identify him.

    Memory is so foundational to friendship that even those aware of Claire’s brain injury often wait a second or two upon seeing her before reintroducing themselves, hoping their presence might spark a flicker of recognition — which of course it never does. Claire assumed that was the case with the woman across from her in the changing room. But the woman continued to hover, not saying a word. Claire looked up again; this time the woman looked at her with an anxious expression. Claire decided to introduce herself. And that’s when she understood: she was walking toward a mirror. The anxious, unsure face that was staring at her was her own.
    There is no cure for Claire’s memory loss. The brain remains far too complex an organ for modern medicine to master, let alone reanimate(使复苏)after parts of it die off. Primitive memory aids — diaries, photo albums, reminder alerts on electronic devices — remain the most effective tools for helping amnesiacs like Claire cope with their condition. But the technology available to neuropsychologists is evolving fast, and Claire is among the first brain-injury patients to benefit from something as simple as a camera — though a very special one.
    The portions of Claire’s brain most damaged by the virus are known as the hipp-ocampi(海马). two deep, seahorse-shaped structures where new memories are formed and others are retrieved. Destruction of the hippocampi causes memory loss but only of a particular kind. Claire, like most such amnesiacs, retains a functioning procedural memory. She remembers, for instance, how to drive a car, and she could learn to play the piano if she wanted, although she would have little or no memory of receiving lessons. Likewise, Claire’s so-called semantic(语义的)memory remains largely intact; her brain has preserved previously learned facts(Paris is the capital of France; her husband’s name is Ed), and she can retain a limited amount of new information. But she can rarely remember the sensations of an experience — the sights, sounds and feel, what psychologists call her episodic memory.
    This is where the new memory-enhancing camera can help. Called the Sensecam, it hangs around a patient’s neck and automatically takes photos with a wide-angle lens every 30 seconds and when it senses movement or a change in lighting. The patient can download the pictures later and review them in sequence.
    But why should a two-dimensional image of, say, a museum Claire visited jog her memory when actually returning to the same museum a week later draws a blank? Neuropsychologist, Catherine Loveday of Westminster University, explains that the Sense-cam helps in two ways. First, it provides a record — rather like a jetliner’s black box — of Claire’s life that she can revisit as often as she pleases. As she scans the images, her memory can’t store most of the pictures in any lasting way, but her ability to retain facts(her semantic memory)at least allows her to know she has experienced something. Claire will often review images of days spent with friends before seeing them, allowing her to bond with them over common experiences.
    "It gives me a sense of belonging, " Claire says. "So many people know so many things about my life, and I haven’t any idea whatsoever. But I have these pictures now. "
    Of more interest to neuropsychologists is the fact that reviewing Sensecam images seems to stimulate what little remains of Claire’s episodic memory. Emma Berry, a neuropsychologist at Microsoft, the company that developed the camera, hypothesizes that Sensecam’s impromptu wide-angle photographs, which capture everything in Claire’s field of vision, provide much stronger memory cues than staged, traditionally proportioned pictures. Even in healthy brains, episodic memory often responds to bizarre, seemingly extraneous stimuli.
    Without recognition, Claire often passes over frames that include her close friends, but a tiny detail from a seemingly meaningless frame — a sign on a wall, perhaps, or the fact that a waiter was left-handed — triggers her memory of that moment. Function-al-MRI scans of Claire’s brain show that the areas associated with memory light up with far greater activity when she tries to remember experiences previously reviewed on Sensecam than when she attempts to recall events recorded in her diary or by traditional photographs.
    Microsoft has licensed British company Vicon to sell Sensecam as a medical device, but there may be a bigger market than just amnesiacs. Berry believes that since Alzheimer’s disease targets the hippocampi and nearby structures first, these cameras may provide a prophylactic(预防法)for people at risk of the disease by keeping their hippocampi healthy longer, though she says more research is needed.
    Not all experts share Berry’s enthusiasm. The University of Cambridge’s Barbara Wilson, a leading amnesia expert who has co-authored a study using a Sensecam, says that for brain-injury patients, the mantra must always be "rehabilitation is not synonymous with recovery. " The device "can help people cope," she says, "but there’s no evidence it can restore episodic memory. " Dr. Gregory O’ Shanick, national medical director for the Brain Injury Association of America, worries that if Microsoft "markets it as a cure-all, we are going to disappoint patients or, worse, make them feel as if there is something deficient in them. "
    For her part, Claire prizes her Sensecam and says she would feel bereft(丧失的)without it. When I met with her, she searched through dozens of Sensecam photos from a recent day out in London, her eyes scanning longingly for the familiar. Images that a healthy-brained individual would recognize immediately — like a direct shot of a close friend — passed by unnoted. But then suddenly Claire had one of what Martin Conway, a neuropsychologist at Leeds University who works with her, calls her "Proustian moments". Marcel Proust described memory as a "rope let down from heaven to draw one up from the abyss of unbeing". When Claire glanced at an otherwise unremarkable picture of her close friend Carole drinking at a pub in St. Pancras train station, whatever electrical impulse or neurotransmission that ties an individual to Claire coursed through her brain, and she sat up straight and started talking quickly about how, yes, she was texting her husband from the pub at the time! Texting him to say that she was sitting near the champagne bar at the station and that she remembered he took her there once for a surprise date and how happy it made her and that, yes, Ed! She remembers! As Claire’s gaze lingered on the screen, her eyes moistened, and it was clear that memory’s great gift — the cerebral shooting stars that illuminate the past out of darkness — had allowed her, for a few moments at least, to suddenly know herself.
Who was the woman that Claire saw in the changing room?
选项 A、One of her lifelong friends.
B、A stranger she had never met.
C、Herself in the mirror.
D、A nurse who cared for her.
答案C
解析 最后两句提到，Claire意识到自己正朝一面镜子走去，看到的那个人就是镜子中的自己。容易得出答案为[C]。
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