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That could explain the errors in Melanie’s memory of 9/11.
这点或许可以解释梅勒妮对9/11的记忆为什么会出错。
"My mom worked in New York City growing up all my life. So, of course, she was in the city. "
“在我成长的岁月，我妈妈一直在纽约工作，所以她当时肯定在纽约的。”
And after 9/11, maybe Melanie saw billowing smoke on TV - and that’s how it entered her memory.
或许是9/11事件之后，梅勒妮在电视上看到了滚滚浓烟的画面，那些画面又进入了她的记忆。
"So, the fact that we reconstruct our episodic memory so we piece them back together means that our episodic memories are actually very flexible."
“事实上，我们会重建情景记忆，并将它们重新拼接起来，这就意味着我们的情景记忆其实是非常灵活的。”
Scientists have been able to exploit this flexibility to plant false childhood memories
科学家已经能够利用这种灵活性，为受试者植入虚假的童年记忆，
of being left at a shopping mall, taking a hot air balloon ride, even having tea with Prince Charles.
比如被独自留在商场，乘坐热气球，甚至是和查尔斯王子喝茶。
In one study, young adults were asked to try and remember a crime they had supposedly committed in their teens.
某研究的研究人员让一群年轻人记住据说是他们在青少年时期犯下的罪行。
Even though these crimes were completely fake, made up by the researchers,
尽管那些罪行完全是假的，由研究人员虚构的，
after a couple of interviews full of leading questions,
经过几轮充满引导性问题的问答之后，
70% of the subjects accepted that they had committed those crimes
有七成实验对象都接受了他们曾犯下的罪行，
and many came up with rich, detailed memories that were completely false.
不少人还有很详尽的记忆，尽管那些记忆明明是虚假的记忆。
One of the places where this plays out that is unfortunate is things like eyewitness identifications.
这一问题会造成不幸，比如目击证人指证的时候。
"They said we’re going to take you into a room, we’re going to have seven men, …
“他们说我们会带你去一个房间，房间里会有7个人，……
And if I saw the suspect, I was to write a number on his piece of paper and hand it over to the detective”
如果我看到嫌疑犯，就在他给我的纸上写上那个人的编号，交给警察。”
More than two decades after she was raped,
遭到强暴的二十年后，
Jennifer Thompson appeared television with the man she had identified as her attacker.
詹妮弗·汤普森和被她指认为袭击者的男人一起上了电视。
"After I picked out Ronald Cotton’s photograph, that’s when they said to me we thought that was him."
“我拿起罗纳德·科顿的照片后，他们对我说，我们就觉得是他。”
"We can boost the confidence in a false memory by confirming it or by at least repeating it multiple times."
“我们可以通过证实或者多次重复错误的记忆来加强我们对那段记忆的信心。”
"By now, Ronald’s image had completely contaminated, so to speak, the original memory of that night,
“到现在为止，可以说，罗纳德的形象已经彻底污染了我对当晚的原始记忆，
and so the face of my rapist had become Ronald Cotton,
所以，强奸我的那个人的脸就变成了罗纳德的脸，
so much so that seeing the actual perpetrator, right there, I didn’t have one memory of it."
严重到就算真正的罪犯就在我面前，我也完全想不起是他干的。”
Years after Ronald was imprisoned, DNA evidence proved that Jennifer had been raped by another man.
罗纳德入狱数年后，DNA证据显示，强奸詹妮弗的罪犯另有其人。
In the US, DNA has helped overturn hundreds of convictions, and 70% of those involved eye-witness testimony.
在美国，DNA帮助推翻了数百项定罪，其中七成案件都有目击证人的证词。
It’s not just our memories of crimes that can become “contaminated”, it’s the memories that tell us who we are and where we came from.
不止我们对犯罪的记忆可能被“污染”，就算是那些告诉我们我们的身份和来历的那些记忆也有可能被“污染”。
Researchers interviewed a group of 14 year-olds and then, decades later, asked them to recall their teenage years,
研究人员采访了一群14岁的孩子，几十年后再来让他们回忆自己的青少年时光，
what their relationship with their parents was like; how they had felt about sex and religion; what activities they had enjoyed.
与父母的关系是好是坏；他们对性和宗教的感觉以及他们喜欢什么样的活动。
Their memories, it turned out, were “uniformly poor” - for most memories, “no better than chance.
结果显示，他们的记忆“一律都很糟糕”，大多数记忆甚至还不如瞎猜准确。
"So this poses the question: Why would we have a memory system that is so unreliable and error prone if it was designed to remember the past?"
“那么，问题就来了：如果我们的记忆系统是为了记住我们的过往，那它为什么还如此不可靠，如此容易出错呢？”
That’s the big question.
这是个大问题。
And once again, those recordings of Henry Molaison point to a possible answer.
亨利·莫莱森的录音再次给出了可能的答案。
"What do you think you'll do tomorrow?"
“你觉得你明天会做什么？”
"Whatever is beneficial."
“只要是有益的事情我都会做。”
Henry often struggled to answer questions like these -
亨利经常很难回答这样的问题--
it seemed to scientists that he hadn’t just lost his past, he could no longer imagine the future."
在科学家们看来，他好像不只是失去了对过去的记忆，还失去了想象未来的能力。
Three decades after Henry’s surgery, another patient’s medial temporal lobe was severely damaged in a motorcycle accident.
亨利手术的30年后，一场摩托车事故造成了某当事人内侧颞叶严重受损。
In this interview from 1988, the patient was asked by his doctor: “Do you feel hopeful about the future?”
在1988年的这场采访中，医生向他问到：你对未来充满希望吗？”
"… … I guess so. I don’t really think much about the future." "You don’t think much about the future."
“……差不多吧。其实我不怎么考虑未来的事。”“不怎么考虑未来的事哈。”
That same patient once described thinking about the future as being asked to “find a chair” in an empty room.
这位病人曾用让他在一个空房间里“找一把椅子”来比喻让他思考未来这一要求。
The future and the past seemed to be somehow linked in the mind.
未来和过去似乎通过某种方式在我们的大脑里产生了联系。
"We decided to put people into the scanner and have them remember past experiences and imagined future experiences.
“我们决定将受试者放进扫描仪并让他们回忆过去的经历，同时对未来做出展望。
And we really didn't know what to expect. "
然后……我们也真的不知道会出现怎样的结果。”
When people remembered, a particular network lit up. And...
人们回忆的时候，大脑某个特定的网络就会被激活。而……
"That same network was engaged pretty much identically when people were having to imagine future events."
“这一网络在人们展望未来的时候也被激活了，几乎是一模一样的位置。”
When we let our minds wander, we switch back and forth all the time -- remembering and imagining.
我们神游的时候，我们其实是不停地在想象和回忆之间来回切换。
Your mind is a time machine.
你的大脑就是一台时光机。
In Lewis Caroll’s “Through The Looking Glass”,
红白棋王后在刘易斯·卡罗尔的《爱丽丝镜中奇遇记》中说道，
the Queen of Hearts remarks “It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards."
“只会重温过去的记忆算不上好的记忆。”
It turns out, she’s right.
事实表明，她说的对。
The same machinery that brings all those pieces together to relive the past
将所有记忆碎片拼凑起来重现过去的记忆机制
can bring some of those pieces together with other pieces to simulate possible futures.
也能将这些碎片和其他碎片结合起来模拟可能的未来。
Now, the flexibility that leads us to remember things that never happened that undermines the justice system, that corrupts our most vivid memories …
恰好是这一灵活性致使我们记住了原本从未发生的事情，削弱了我们的司法系统的公正性，侵蚀了我们最生动的记忆……
it can start to look like a superpower, the key to our success as a species.
然而，这一灵活性也能化身为超能力，化身为人类作为一个物种而取得成功的法宝。
"It allows us to troubleshoot upcoming experiences, to think through the ways in which events might unfold,
“让我们能够排除可能会面临的问题，了解事件可能朝着哪些方向发展，
potential obstacles that might come up in the ways in which we might deal with those obstacles."
并以实战的方式去应对那些潜在的障碍。”
And some scientists say this simulation engine between your ears does something even more profound:
一些科学家还表示，我们双耳之间的这个模拟引擎（即大脑）还能发挥意义更为深远的作用：
it weaves together memories of the past and dreams of the future to create your sense of self.
将过去的记忆和未来的梦想编织在一起，创造出你个人的自我意识。
