雙語·存儲：把記憶保存在大腦中

Storage: Keeping memories in the brain
存儲：把記憶保存在大腦中

Once you've encoded information, you now need to store it. Unfortunately, forgetting is a major part of how our brains work. Most of us can't remember what we had for dinner Tuesday, three weeks ago. However, we can all remember our first kiss.
一旦完成了信息的編碼，現在就需要存儲了。不幸的是，遺忘是我們大腦運作的一個主要部分。大多數人都記不住三個星期前的星期二晚飯吃了什么，但我們都記得自己的初吻。

Forgetting can be caused by two different processes. The first is a failure of storage—the information might be forgotten because our brain loses it over time. The second is a failure of retrieval—the information might be “in” there, but we can't access it. Experimentally, it's very difficult to tell these two apart, but since they are separate processes, we'll consider each separately as we look at how memory works.
遺忘可能由兩個不同的過程造成。第一個是存儲失敗——隨著時間的流逝，大腦弄丟了相關信息，從而導致遺忘。第二個是檢索失敗——信息可能就“在”那里，但是我們無法訪問。在實驗中，區(qū)分這兩個過程非常困難，但鑒于它們是不同的過程，我們將在考察記憶的工作原理時分別考慮它們。

The progression of forgetting was originally studied by the famous experimental psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus. Ebbinghaus discovered that forgetting follows an exponential decay function. Whereas in the first hours after study there is a rapid drop in the number of items successfully remembered, there is relatively little forgetting from the 2nd day onwards.
最早研究遺忘的發(fā)展的，是著名實驗心理學家赫爾曼·艾賓浩斯（Hermann Ebbinghaus）。艾賓浩斯發(fā)現，遺忘符合指數衰減函數。在學習之后的最初幾個小時，成功記住的內容迅速減少，從第二天往后，遺忘的就相對很少了。

Although the exact shape of the forgetting curve is likely individual and depends on many factors related to the study material (e.g. how easy/difficult/interesting the material is or how well it was encoded), it approximates an exponential curve, with rapid forgetting in the beginning and less forgetting in later periods of time.
盡管確切的遺忘曲線可能因人而異，而且取決于與學習材料有關的很多因素（例如材料有多容易/困難/有趣，或者編碼得好不好），但它近似是一個指數函數曲線，一開始遺忘速度很快，之后遺忘的速度減慢。

Why do we forget information in the first place? What can we do counteract the process of forgetting?
為什么我們一開始會遺忘信息？我們可以做什么來克服這個遺忘過程？

——節(jié)選自《記憶的科學》