时差N小时:似曾相识的感觉

Many people at one time or another haveexperienced déjà vu. French for “already seen,” déjàvu is a sudden strong feeling that a momentidentical to the present one has occurred at someearlier time.

许多人都曾经有过记忆幻觉的经历。déjà vu 一词是法语，意为“似曾相识的感觉”，表示人们突然间强烈感到现在发生的事在以前同样发生过。

To a cognitive psychologist, déjà vu is proof of theimmense amount of knowledge and experience westore in our brains. When we experience déjà vu,what actually happens is that, in a fraction of a second, we retrieve bits of many differentmemory fragments and piece them together, producing what seems to be a complete memory.

对于一个认知心理学家来说，记忆幻觉是积累在我们大脑中的大量知识和经验的证明。似曾相识的感觉来袭时，实际上发生的是，大脑在一瞬间搜索出许多不同的、零碎的记忆片段，然后将其拼凑在一起，伪造出一个看似完整的记忆。

So, if you experience déjà vu in a mall restaurant while waiting for a pepperoni pizza with yourbest friend, your mind has taken perhaps hundreds of stored memories of various experiences,and put together fragments from those memories to give you the sensation of having beenthere before, even though you haven't been there before at all.

所以，如果你对在一家小餐馆里与最好的朋友等腊肠披萨的场景似曾相识的话，那么你的脑海里也许储存着数百个不同经历的记忆，然后大脑将这些记忆片段拼凑起来，让你感觉之前来过这里，即使你之前根本没有来过这里。

Cognitive psychologists who study how we use language are not surprised at the brain's abilityto create déjà vu. Actually, language comprehension and déjà vu have many parallels. Whenyou hear someone speak, you usually understand them even though you've probably neverheard their words presented in exactly the same way.

研究人类如何使用语言的认知科学家们对大脑的这种能力并不感到奇怪。实际上，语言的理解能力和记忆幻觉有许多相似之处。当你听到有人说话时，通常你能够听懂他们的话，即使你从未听过此种表达方式。

You understand these sentences because your brain is able to remember the individualmeanings of words, based on hundreds of past experiences with those words. Your brain takesthe meanings of individual words and splices them together to comprehend their meaning as awhole. As with déjà vu, this entire process happens in a split second.

你能明白这些句子是因为大脑能够根据之前数百次的经历，记起单词的意思。然后你的大脑译出每个单词的意思，并把它们拼接在一起，去理解整个句子的意思。对于记忆幻觉来讲，这整个过程都是在一瞬间发生的。