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What do cheating on your diet, overreacting to a tantrum thrown by your child, and having a drink even though you decided to stop drinking have in common? They all involve failures of self-control.
不按时用餐、对孩子的错误反应过激、打算戒酒后却豪饮？这都属于失败的自我调控。
The ability to control unwanted behaviors is at the heart of what psychologists term executive control. Executive control is an umbrella term that refers to a collection of cognitive functions - such as attention, planning, memory, initiating actions and inhibiting them. When our impulses get the best of us, a failure in executive control is often to blame.
控制不必要的行为的能力处于心理学术语“执行控制”的核心位置。执行控制是个涵盖性术语，它指的是一系列的认知功能，比如注意力、计划、记忆、下意识的动作以及控制下意识动作。当我们冲动行事时，该受责备的常常是执行控制。
Fortunately, these failures are not inevitable. In fact, a paper published last week in the journal Psychological Science suggests that failures of executive control can be diminished by training our working memory.
幸运的是，这些失败是可以避免的。实际上，上周《心理科学》周刊发表了一篇论文，此论文认为通过训练工作记忆可以消除执行控制失误。
Working memory, housed in the prefrontal cortex, is strongly related to executive control. People with less working memory have poor executive functioning and training working memory improves executive control. Because of this, Katrijn Houben and her colleagues at Maastricht University in the Netherlands set out to test whether strengthening people's working memory might help them control their impulses.
大脑的工作记忆，位于前额皮质，它与执行控制有密切联系。人的大脑工作记忆越小，他的执行控制的能力就会越差，训练工作记忆会改善执行控制。由此，荷兰马斯特里赫特大学的Katrijn Houben及其同事决定测试一下，增强人民的工作记忆是否能帮助控制其冲动。
They decided to look at impulse control in heavy drinkers. So, they invited people who drank upwards of 30 drinks per week to complete a series of on-line working memory training sessions. There were 25 sessions in total spread out over roughly a month's time and folks took part in either a treatment or placebo training group.
他们决定观察酗酒者控制冲动的能力。所以，他们邀请一些每周喝30多次酒的人来完成一系列在线工作记忆训练项目。此项目共计包括25个子项目，共计耗时约为1个月。训练分为训练组和对比组。
In the treatment group, people went through an intensive working memory training program that involved a variety of verbal and spatial tasks designed to exercise working memory. In one task, the treatment group saw letters - one by one - on a computer screen. They were to remember the letters as they appeared and then to recall them in the exact opposite order in which they had been originally presented. This type of backwards memory task is quite hard because you have to keep track of what is presented to you and reverse it in your head. This reversing is the "working" part of working memory. Critically, as people got better and better at the backwards memory task, the difficulty - that is, how many items they had to remember and reverse in mind - increased. In essence, the training was always pushing people to work their working memory a bit more.
在实验组中，实验者们经历了一项集中性的工作记忆训练项目，此项目包括为了训练记忆里而设计的各种各样的口头和受空间控制的任务。在其中一项任务中，实验组观看了电脑屏幕所一一播放的字母。任务是让他们按倒序说出他们所收看到的字母。这种倒序记忆任务很难，原因是你要在大脑中记忆所播放事物的同时反向记忆之。而这个颠倒过程就是工作记忆的“工作”部分。然后，当人们在反向记忆中做得越来越好时，他们需在脑中记忆并反向记忆的项目的难度被增大。简而言之，这种训练迫使人们做得比工作记忆还要多一点。
Folks in the placebo group also performed a variety of activities on the computer that were similar to those done by those in the treatment group. However, when people in the placebo group performed the backwards memory task described above, they only had to remember a few items and the number of items never increased. The placebo group had much less of a working memory workout.
对比组也进行了与训练组相似的活动，只是当他们也进行上面所描述的反向记忆时，他们只需记住很少的项目，而且量不会增加。与训练组相比，对比组的工作记忆训练少多了。
Not surprisingly, people in the treatment group got better on the working memory tasks they trained on. But these folks also improved on other executive control tasks that they had not practiced. Even more impressive, people in the treatment group reduced their alcohol intake by about 10 glasses a week compared to what they drank before the study (with the biggest reductions for those with the strongest impulses to drink alcohol). People in the placebo group did not show a change in their drinking behavior.
不出人意料，在完成训练任务上，测试组的人做得好多了。并且这些人在他们未被训练的其他执行控制任务方面也得到了提高。更让人印象深刻的是，训练组的人减少了酒精的摄入量，与研究前相比，他们现在每周大约少喝10杯酒（对于那些饮酒量最大的、最想要喝酒的人来说）。而对比组中的人饮酒行为没发生变化。
A month after the training was over, study participants were invited back on-line and their working memory and alcohol intake was assessed once again. The training benefits remained - both in terms of the boost to working memory and the reduction in alcohol intake.
训练结束一个月后，实验参与者被邀请上线，对他们的工作记忆、酒精摄入量进行再次测量。（测量结果表明）训练的好处仍然存在，包括工作记忆的增长及酒精摄入量的减少。
Of course, more research is needed to figure out just how long these effects last and whether working memory training can help control alcohol use in clinical samples of alcohol abusers. Nonetheless, this work is exciting because it suggest that, just as you can build muscle through weight training, brain training can reduce alcohol abuse and likely a whole host of unhealthy behaviors.
当然，还得继续研究此训练的影响将持续多久，以及工作记忆训练师范有利于帮助临床案例中的嗜酒者控制酒精摄入量。尽管如此，这项工作仍是激动人心的，因为它认为，就像举重训练能构建肌肉一样，思维训练可以减少嗜酒者甚至可能减少全部不利于健康的行为。
原文链接：Training the Brain to Avoid Temptation
