学进去

People who like traveling believe that traveling can help them expand their view. If they can make themselves travel with an open mind and try new things around them, they can see the world from a new view. Traveling helps us learn about different people and different places. People travel for different reasons. But one of the reasons is that a lot of tourists are interested in traditional culture (传统文化).

Tourism (旅游业) can be very good for traditional cultures. This is because when people travel to another country, they often want to learn more about that country’s traditions such as music, food and history. So the local (当地的) people in that country will wear traditional clothing and sell traditional food. They will also have shows for tourists. These shows can be dances, concerts, plays or something else.

Tourism also helps people respect each other. If you understand another culture well, you will probably respect that culture much more. You will probably want to protect (保护) that culture as well.

However, tourism isn’t always good for traditional culture. A lot of people say that tourism makes “not real traditional culture” happen. This means that the local people wear traditional clothing and do traditional dances only for tourists so that they can make money. But that isn’t their real lifestyle. Their real lifestyles are like the tourists’ lifestyles.

Another problem is that tourists may make trouble for the local people. For example, sometimes tourists come to watch local people praying (祷告) in temples (庙宇), tourists take photos and make noises. This often makes the local people angry.

Sometimes tourists may also do something bad to local places of interest. If five hundred people went into an old temple every day, they might do harm to that temple.

Anyway, more and more tourists want to learn about traditional cultures. Most local people want more tourism because tourists bring money and help local business. Tourists have to respect local culture and local places. Local governments try to protect places and lifestyles. If everyone tries his best, then tourism will be great for traditional cultures.

Memory professor Jemima Gryaznov answers some of the mast common questions about memory.

Why can I remember events in my childhood but not what happened last week? We remember things that have strong connections (联系) in our mind, especially emotional (情绪的) connections. Childhood memories are often very emotional. This is because when we experience things for the first time we often have strong feelings of fear or excitement. Also, interesting or funny stories from our childhood are often told again and again. As a result, we remember them much better, as retelling events helps fix experiences in our memories. So when remembering something new, try to connect it to our emotions. Also we can try to retell what we have learnt to a few others.

Do some people really have a photographic memory?

A person with a photographic memory could remember every detail of a picture, a book or an event many years later, but no one has proved that there are people who really have photographic memories. Yet, there are some people who do have amazing memories. For example, Daniel Tammet can remember the first 22,514 digits of pi (π) and Stephen Wiltshire can draw a detailed picture of a city from memory after flying over it in an airplane. They are both good at remembering things for a limited time. As most of us do not have amazing memories like them, an effective technique (技巧) to remember things is to group similar ideas or information together so that they can be easily connected to things that are already known.

Why do I forget the new words that I learnt yesterday?

Don’t worry. This is natural for many people. In 1885, Hermann Ebbinghaus published a book called Memory and presented a famous forgetting curve. According to him, the quick loss of memory happens during the very early period after learning. This means timely review during this period, with a few revisits to what is learnt, can help us to remember the information better. Therefore, one of the golden rules to increase how much we remember is to review the material periodically, especially during the first day after learning.

Studies have shown that humans have the ability to understand the gestures (手势) of apes. That is a little surprising, because most people haven’t spent much time with apes.

Humans use words to talk to each other. But we also point, nod, and use our hands to show what we mean. Apes have their own gestures to show what they mean. Chimpanzees and bonobos are two kinds of apes. They are closest to humans. They use about 80 different gestures to show what they mean.

Scientists have learned the meanings of these gestures by studying Chimpanzees and bonobos for years. They share over 90% of the same gestures. Scientists have studied how apes use gestures. But for the longest time, no one studied if humans could understand the gestures of apes.

Researchers Kirsty Graham and Catherine Hobaiter at the University of St. Andrews decided to test this idea. They wanted to see if humans with no training or experience could understand the gestures of apes.

The researchers made a game for people to play online. The game was simple. People watched short videos of apes making a gesture. Then they had to choose the correct meaning of the gesture out of four possible (可能的) answers. For the videos, the researchers chose ten of the most common gestures used by apes. Thousands of people played the game.

The researchers were surprised to find that for some of the gestures, people were able to choose the correct meaning about 80% of the time. One example of this was the gesture of touching the mouth. People correctly guessed it meant “give me that food”.

The scientists believe humans may have a natural (天生的) ability to understand the gestures of apes. But it’s not clear why. Humans and other apes all developed from an earlier kind of ape. One possibility is that the body language of these gestures has been passed down to all apes from the common ape ancestor. Another possibility is that the gestures are natural because humans and apes share similar (相似的) body shape and need to communicate similar ideas.