【英语时差8,16】当你的手臂脱落

 If you put extended pressure on your arm, by leaning or sleeping on it, it might go numb¹ and then give you a tingling² feeling. Your arm falls asleep like this because prolonged pressure on a nerve, or on a nerve’s blood supply, can temporarily damage it.

    Nerves allow you to sense feeling by sending messages to the brain describing sensory³ input⁴. If you touch a hot burner, you pull your hand back because the nerves in your hand have sent the message to your brain that your hand is in pain.

   When a nerve is compressed or when the blood supply to a nerve is compromised, the normal messages nerves send to the brain are stopped or altered. At this point, when the nerve is no longer functioning appropriately, numbness⁵ occurs.

    When the nerve begins to recover, you may feel a tingling sensation. This feeling of pins and needles is due to the fact that at the early stages of the nerves’ recovery, it functions inappropriately, giving your brain misinformation.

    To understand why nerves work this way, we need to think about the anatomy⁶ of a nerve. Each nerve is filled with thousands of nerve fibers⁷, each carrying specific information to the brain.

    Some of these fibers are large, others are small, and all recover at different rates. Because the thousands of fibers that make up a damaged nerve recover at different speeds, the message they collectively send the brain as they are recovering is inaccurate⁸.

    So though your arm isn’t actually tingling at all, the way it would if you received a mild electric shock, your brain believes that it’s tingling because the brain always believes messages that nerves send–whether those messages are accurate or not.

1 numb   

adj.麻木的，失去感觉的；v.使麻木

参考例句：

• His fingers were numb with cold.他的手冻得发麻。
• Numb with cold,we urged the weary horses forward.我们冻得发僵，催着疲惫的马继续往前走。

2 tingling   

v.有刺痛感( tingle的现在分词 )

参考例句：

• My ears are tingling [humming; ringing; singing]. 我耳鸣。 来自《现代汉英综合大词典》
• My tongue is tingling. 舌头发麻。 来自《现代汉英综合大词典》

3 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。

4 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。

5 numbness   

n.无感觉，麻木，惊呆

参考例句：

• She was fighting off the numbness of frostbite. 她在竭力摆脱冻僵的感觉。 来自《简明英汉词典》
• Sometimes they stay dead, causing' only numbness. 有时，它们没有任何反应，只会造成麻木。 来自时文部分

6 anatomy   

n.解剖学，解剖；功能，结构，组织

参考例句：

• He found out a great deal about the anatomy of animals.在动物解剖学方面，他有过许多发现。
• The hurricane's anatomy was powerful and complex.对飓风的剖析是一项庞大而复杂的工作。

7 fibers   

光纤( fiber的名词复数 )； （织物的）质地； 纤维，纤维物质

参考例句：

• Thesolution of collagen-PVA was wet spined with the sodium sulfate as coagulant and collagen-PVA composite fibers were prepared. 在此基础上，以硫酸钠为凝固剂，对胶原-PVA共混溶液进行湿法纺丝，制备了胶原-PVA复合纤维。
• Sympathetic fibers are distributed to all regions of the heart. 交感神经纤维分布于心脏的所有部分。

8 inaccurate   

adj.错误的，不正确的，不准确的

参考例句：

• The book is both inaccurate and exaggerated.这本书不但不准确，而且夸大其词。
• She never knows the right time because her watch is inaccurate.她从来不知道准确的时间因为她的表不准。