2024届高三英语一轮复习外刊阅读语篇精选 （一）

高中英语外刊阅读语篇精选 （一） 选材世界知名报刊 对接国家最新课标 一线老师特约撰稿 Rats can use imagination to mentally recreate places they've visited Just like someone may look back on a treasured holiday, wishing they were still there, rats can also imagine being in places they’ve visited before. A region of the brain called the hippocampus（海马体）, which plays a big role in memory, is very consistent across mammals. This led scientists to suspect that non-human animals are similarly able to imagining places they have been to before, but it is difficult to prove that such a brain process occurs. “You can’t talk to animals and ask them to imagine something,” says Albert Lee at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, Massachusetts. He and his colleagues hoped that advances in technology could overcome this by creating an interface between the animals’ brains and a machine, allowing them to communicate. To put the idea to the test, the researchers devised a 360-degree virtual reality (VR) arena. They had three rats walk on a treadmill （跑步车）within this, but the VR made it look to the animal like it was moving through a space resembling a dark tunnel. The rats were trained to find certain shapes within the VR for a reward of sugary water. While they looked for these shapes, electrical signals were recorded from their hippocampus. The researchers used this data to produce a brain-machine interface that reverse engineered the signals produced by the rats into images that were then displayed in the VR arena. They also wondered if a rat imagining a certain location within the VR, which involves the activation of certain hippocampal cells, would similarly cause it to appear in the arena. In a second experiment, the researchers tested this idea by getting the rats to do two tasks. These both involved the rats being placed on a treadmill, but, unlike before, moving didn’t affect what they saw. In the first task, the rats had to imagine navigating to a particular shape they had already seen, for instanc