【英语语言学习】为什么不能自己胳肢自己？

RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:

 

Now, let's talk about something deeply philosophical¹ - tickling²; more specifically, why you can tickle³ someone else, but you can't tickle yourself.

 

JAKOB HOHWY: It's a very basic kind of phenomenon that every child knows.

 

MARTIN: This is Jakob Hohwy. He's a professor of philosophy at Monash University, in Australia. He says the reason you can't tickle yourself is simple: You can't outsmart your body. It knows the tickle is coming. Hohwy and his colleagues, studying perception and the brain, wondered: If you thought you were someone else, could you tickle yourself then? - which led to their recent experiment.

 

HOHWY: So we wanted to swap⁴ people into other people's bodies.

 

MARTIN: Not literally⁵. But turns out, it is possible to trick people into thinking they are outside their own body. Hohwy says you can even do this at home.

 

HOHWY: So you have to sit at a table, put your hand up on the table, and cover the hand behind a tray or a towel - or something like that. And then visible to you, you put a rubber hand. It might be stuffed-up dishwashing glove or a real rubber hand or a mannequin hand, or something like that. So you can see that. And then you ask another person sitting across from you to tap the rubber hand and the hidden hand in synchrony - so at the same time. So what you feel on your hidden real hand is a touch. And you can see a rubber hand - which is clearly, not yours - being touched as well, in synchrony. And then after a while, you get this illusion that the touch you can feel is located on the rubber hand.

 

MARTIN: Does that mean that our sense of sight trumps⁶ our sense of feeling?

 

HOHWY: Exactly.

 

MARTIN: In his tickling experiment, Hohwy used his own version of the rubber hand trick. He made his subjects wear a pair of video goggles⁷ hooked up to a camera on another person's head. And with good, old-fashioned synchrony, he got them to feel, as if they were actually the person sitting across the table. And in that moment, he had them try to tickle their palm.

 

HOHWY: And then we ask, how ticklish⁸ is it? And it turns out that when they do it themselves, they still can't tickle themselves.

 

MARTIN: It seems to be even more impossible than we ever thought to tickle yourself. Except...

 

HOHWY: When you ask people with schizophrenia to tickle themselves, then they can.

 

MARTIN: Really?

 

HOHWY: So yeah. It's quite striking. So one theory there is that people with schizophrenia are relatively⁹ poor at predicting what the sensory¹⁰ consequences will be of their own movement.

 

MARTIN: Are you saying that the brain is always making predictions about what's going to happen, or how your body's going to respond to something?

 

HOHWY: Yep. So both for the body itself but also for, you know, things out in the world. So when you turn your head around and you get new sensory input¹¹, the brain's constantly trying to be a little ahead of yourself and predicting what's going to happen there.

 

MARTIN: So when we're surprised, then that's crazy. That means the brain has been totally duped.

 

HOHWY: Yep, exactly.

 

MARTIN: That surprise? That is a tickle. And this is NPR News.

1 philosophical   

adj.哲学家的，哲学上的，达观的

参考例句：

• The teacher couldn't answer the philosophical problem.老师不能解答这个哲学问题。
• She is very philosophical about her bad luck.她对自己的不幸看得很开。

2 tickling   

反馈，回授，自旋挠痒法

参考例句：

• Was It'spring tickling her senses? 是不是春意撩人呢？
• Its origin is in tickling and rough-and-tumble play, he says. 他说，笑的起源来自于挠痒痒以及杂乱无章的游戏。

3 tickle   

v.搔痒，胳肢；使高兴；发痒；n.搔痒，发痒

参考例句：

• Wilson was feeling restless. There was a tickle in his throat.威尔逊只觉得心神不定。嗓子眼里有些发痒。
• I am tickle pink at the news.听到这消息我高兴得要命。

4 swap   

n.交换；vt.交换，用...作交易

参考例句：

• I will swap you my bicycle for your radio.我想拿我的自行车换你的收音机。
• This comic was a swap that I got from Nick.这本漫画书是我从尼克那里换来的。

5 literally   

adv.照字面意义，逐字地；确实

参考例句：

• He translated the passage literally.他逐字逐句地翻译这段文字。
• Sometimes she would not sit down till she was literally faint.有时候，她不走到真正要昏厥了，决不肯坐下来。

6 trumps   

abbr.trumpets 喇叭；小号；喇叭形状的东西；喇叭筒v.（牌戏）出王牌赢（一牌或一墩）( trump的过去式 )；吹号公告，吹号庆祝；吹喇叭；捏造

参考例句：

• On the day of the match the team turned up trumps. 比赛那天该队出乎意料地获得胜利。 来自《简明英汉词典》
• Every time John is late getting home he trumps up some new excuse. 每次约翰晚回家都会编造个新借口。 来自《简明英汉词典》

7 goggles   

n.护目镜

参考例句：

• Skiers wear goggles to protect their eyes from the sun.滑雪者都戴上护目镜使眼睛不受阳光伤害。
• My swimming goggles keep steaming up so I can't see.我的护目镜一直有水雾，所以我看不见。

8 ticklish   

adj.怕痒的；问题棘手的；adv.怕痒地；n.怕痒，小心处理

参考例句：

• This massage method is not recommended for anyone who is very ticklish.这种按摩法不推荐给怕痒的人使用。
• The news is quite ticklish to the ear,这消息听起来使人觉得有些难办。

9 relatively   

adv.比较...地，相对地

参考例句：

• The rabbit is a relatively recent introduction in Australia.兔子是相对较新引入澳大利亚的物种。
• The operation was relatively painless.手术相对来说不痛。

10 sensory   

adj.知觉的，感觉的，知觉器官的

参考例句：

• Human powers of sensory discrimination are limited.人类感官分辨能力有限。
• The sensory system may undergo long-term adaptation in alien environments.感觉系统对陌生的环境可能经过长时期才能适应。

11 input   

n.输入(物)；投入；vt.把(数据等)输入计算机

参考例句：

• I will forever be grateful for his considerable input.我将永远感激他的大量投入。
• All this information had to be input onto the computer.所有这些信息都必须输入计算机。