寻找勇气之源英语作文

　　勇气是人类文明亘古不变的主题，但是对勇气的系统性研究却是最近才开始的。什么是勇气？勇气从何而来？它在身体和大脑中是如何体现的？为何我们会对它如此之挚爱？没有恐惧感是不是件好事情呢？本文将一一予以解答。

　　In his 20 years as a firefighter and paramedic in Colorado Springs, Bruce Monson, 43, has had his little fist-bumps with death: a burning roof collapsing on top of him, toxic fumes nearly suffocating him.

　　在其作为科罗拉多斯普林斯（Colorado Springs）市消防员和急救人员的20年生涯里，43岁的布鲁斯·蒙逊（Bruce Monson）跟死神有过小小的亲密接触：一座燃烧的屋顶从他头顶坍塌，有毒气体几乎令其窒息。

　　Yet far more terrifying than any personal threats are what Mr. Monson describes as the "bad kid calls," like the one from a mother who had put her 18-month-old son down in his crib right next to a window with a Venetian blind and its old-fashioned cord.

　　但是比所有的个人威胁都要恐怖得多的，是被蒙逊先生描述为"捣蛋鬼电话"的，就像是一位妈妈打过来的电话一样，这位母亲把自己18个月大的孩子放到了婴儿床上，而婴儿床则正好靠近一个带有软百叶窗和老式绳索的窗户。

　　"The kid had grabbed the cord and gotten it twisted around his neck, and the mother came in and found him hanging there," said Mr. Monson. "I'm the first one in the door, she's in a panic, and she shoves the kid into my arms, crying, 'Please save him, please save him!' "

　　"小孩抓住了那条绳子，然后被绳子绕住了自己的脖子，接着母亲进来就发现他悬在那里了"，蒙逊先生说："我是第一个上门的，她还在恐慌之中，一把就将孩子塞到我手臂里，哭着说，'请救救他，快救救他！'"。

　　The child's body was blue, but Mr. Monson and his fellows met parental despair with professional focus and did everything they could. "We worked on him for over an hour," said Mr. Monson. "It's like a state of calm. You're so tuned in to what you're doing, you're not thinking about the reality of the situation."

　　孩子的身体都已经发紫了，但蒙逊先生和同伴的职业素养遭遇了父母的绝望眼神，他们竭尽所能。"我们在孩子身上努力了一个多钟头"，蒙逊先生说："那就好像是进入了一种入定的状态。你对自己的正在做的事情是如此的全神贯注，以至于到了弃现实情况于不顾的地步"。

　　Their best was not enough, however, and later, at the hospital, the terrible sadness settled in.

　　然而，尽其所能仍回天乏力，随后在医院里传来了噩耗。

　　As Mr. Monson filled out his report, the mother sat in the trauma room's designated "bereavement rocking chair," rocking her dead son, saying her goodbyes, while family members filed in and wailed at the sight.

　　正如蒙逊在报告中所写的那样，那位母亲坐在创伤室指定的"丧亲摇摇椅"上，不断摇晃着她死去的孩子，喃喃着自己的告别，此情此景，一旁的家庭成员也哀嚎不已。

　　An image of that mother in her rocking chair comes to Mr. Monson's mind every time he answers another "bad kid" call, spurring him to keep going, to never give up or grow sloppy or cynical, to simply do his job; and through doing his job, he has saved far more lives than he has lost.

　　每次接到一个又一个的"捣蛋鬼"电话时，蒙逊先生的脑海总会浮现出那位母亲坐在摇摇椅上的景象，激励着他不断前进，永不放弃，永远都不能麻痹大意或者是愤世嫉俗，只想着做好自己的.工作；通过他的努力，他所救活的生命远远超过了失去的。

　　Only once did he allow the furniture connection to spook him — when his own wife was at the same hospital having emergency surgery for a ruptured ectopic pregnancy, and his young daughter happened to climb onto the bereavement seat. "I knew it was a totally irrational thing to do," he said, "but I made her get out of that chair."

　　这种联想只有一次让他被吓到了—— 当他自己的妻子因为宫外孕破裂在同一家医院接受急救手术的时候，他年轻的女儿恰巧爬上了那张丧亲之椅。"我知道，这完全是一件荒谬的事情"，他说："但是我把她从椅子上弄下来了"。

　　Courage is something that we want for ourselves in gluttonous portions and adore in others without qualification. Yet for all the longstanding centrality of courage to any standard narrative of human greatness, only lately have researchers begun to study it systematically, to try to define what it is and is not, where it comes from, how it manifests itself in the body and brain, who we might share it with among nonhuman animals, and why we love it so much.

　　勇气是某种我们希望自己富有并无保留地仰慕别人拥有的东西。在人类文明的任何标准记叙当中，勇气的中心地位一直是屹立不倒的，尽管如此，但是研究者也只是最近才开始对它进行系统性的研究，试图去定义什么是勇气，什么不是勇气，勇气从何而来，它在身体和大脑中是如何体现的，在非人类的动物里面我们会跟谁分享勇气，以及为何我们会对它如此之挚爱。

　　A new report in the journal Current Biology describes the case of a woman whose rare congenital syndrome has left her completely, outrageously fearless, raising the question of whether it's better to conquer one's fears, or to never feel them in the first place.

　　《现代生物学》杂志的一份新报告描述了一个案例，一位患有罕见的先天性综合症的女人，在全然无所畏惧的情况下彻底痊愈，报告向我们提出了一个问题，是否说克服恐惧，或者永远不把恐惧摆在首位是不是会更好？

　　In another recent study, neuroscientists scanned the brains of subjects as they struggled successfully to overcome their terror of snakes, identifying regions of the brain that may be key to our everyday heroics.

　　在另一份最新研究中，神经系统科学家扫描了成功克服了对蛇的恐惧感的研究对象的大脑，确定了有可能是我们平常英雄事迹的关键的大脑区域。

　　Researchers in the Netherlands are exploring courage among children, to see when the urge for courage first arises, and what children mean when they call themselves brave.

　　荷兰的研究者正在探索儿童的勇气之源，试图找出什么时候会催生出勇气来，以及孩子们自称勇敢时其意思是什么。

　　The theme of courage claims a long and gilded ancestry. Plato included courage among the four cardinal or principal virtues, along with wisdom, justice and moderation.

　　勇气这个主题有着久远而辉煌的历史。柏拉图把勇气与智慧、正义及节制一起，列为四种体液或称之为四美德。

　　"As a major virtue, courage helps to define the excellent person and is no mere optional trait," writes George Kateb, a political theorist and emeritus professor at Princeton University. "One of the worst reproaches in the world is to be called a coward."

　　"作为一项主要美德，勇气帮助我们定义优秀之人，它不是可有可无的选项"，普林斯顿大学的政治理论家和名誉教授乔治·卡泰（George Kateb）说："这个世界上最糟糕的指责之一就是被称为懦夫"。

　　Yet defining what it means to be courageous has often proved as thistly as distinguishing the wise ones from the fools. For Plato and many other authorities, courage is above all a martial art, most readily displayed on the battlefield — the iconic brave solder running into the line of fire to retrieve an injured comrade.

　　但是，要界定什么是勇敢，往往被证明跟在愚者中区分出智者一样的棘手。对于柏拉图和许多其他的权威来说，勇气首先是一种搏击术，最容易在战场上展示出来——标志性的铁血战士冲破火线救出受伤的战友。

　　But Dr. Kateb points out that if courage finds its highest expression in war, then the trait paradoxically becomes an immoral virtue, ennobling war and carnage by insisting that only in battle can men — and it usually is men — discover the depths of their nobility.

　　但是卡泰博士指出，如果说勇敢在战争中有最高表现的话，那么其特点就自相矛盾地成为不道德的美德，强调人们，通常是指男人，只有通过战争才能发掘其灵魂深处的高贵，从而把战争和屠杀高尚化。

　　Marilynne Robinson, the novelist and social critic, has observed that courage is "dependent on cultural definition" and "rarely expressed except where there is sufficient consensus to support it." Where religious martyrdom is lionized, there will be martyrs; where social or political protest is seen as glorious warfare in civvies, there will be a rash of red-faced declaimers, soapboxes on every street.

　　玛丽琳·罗宾逊（Marilynne Robinson），小说家和社会评论家，她已经注意到勇气"依赖于文化定义"，"很少被表达出来，除了在得到足够的舆论支持的场合"。在为宗教而罹难者被奉为圣人的地方，就会有殉道者；在社会或政治抗议被视为光荣的平民斗争的地方，每一条街道临时搭建的演讲台上就都会充斥着面红耳赤、激昂陈词的演说家。

　　In pioneering work from 1970s and beyond, Stanley J. Rachman of the University of British Columbia and others studied the physiology and behavior of paratroopers as they prepared for their first parachute jump.

　　在上世纪70年代及之后的开创性工作中，不列颠哥伦比亚大学的斯坦利.J.拉赫曼（Stanley J.Rachman）等人在其首次跳伞准备的过程中研究了伞兵的生理及行为特征。

　　The work revealed three basic groups: the preternaturally fearless, who displayed scant signs of the racing heart, sweaty palms, spike in blood pressure and other fight-or-flight responses associated with ordinary fear, and who jumped without hesitation; the handwringers, whose powerful fear response at the critical moment kept them from jumping; and finally, the ones who reacted physiologically like the handwringers but who acted like the fearless leapers, and, down the hatch.

　　这项工作发现了三个基本组别：超乎寻常的大无畏者，很少表现出心跳加速、血压升高、手心出汗及其他的与平常恐惧有关的战或逃反应，在跳伞的时候总是毫不犹豫；踌躇紧张者，在关键时刻其强大的恐惧反应令其不敢跳下；以及最后一组，在生理反应上与踌躇紧张者一致，但却像无畏的跳伞者一样行动、最终跳下舱口的人。

　　These last Dr. Rachman deemed courageous, defining courage as "behavioral approach in spite of the experience of fear." By that expansive definition, courage becomes democratized and demilitarized, the property of any wallflower who manages to give the convention speech, or the math phobe who decides to take calculus.

　　其中最后一组被拉赫曼博士视为勇敢，即"弃恐惧体验于不顾的行为方式"。按照这种扩展性定义，勇气变得民主化和非军事化，它是任何一位设法进行提名演讲的局外人的专属，或者是一位对数学恐惧的人决定去学微积分。

　　Through interviews with some 320 children aged 8 to 13, Peter Muris of Erasmus University Rotterdam and his colleagues found that children also equate courage with the conquering of one's fears, and more than 70 percent of the respondents claimed they had performed one or more brave acts, including rescuing a little brother who'd fallen in the swimming pool, saving a cat from a tree, biking home through the woods at night, and stealing money from one's mother's purse — yes, that will make the heart race, all right.

　　通过对大概320位年龄在8岁到3岁之间的小孩的采访，鹿特丹大学（Erasmus University Rotterdam）的彼得·缪里斯（Peter Muris）及其同事发现，孩子们也把克服恐惧等同视为勇敢的表现，超过70%的调查对象声称自己进行了一或多项勇敢的行为，包括搭救跌落泳池的小弟弟，拯救树上的一个小猫咪，晚上穿越树林骑车回家，以及从妈妈钱包里偷东西——是的，这些都会令心跳加速，好吧。

　　Joel Berger, a biologist with the Wildlife Conservation Society and the University of Montana, also distinguishes between animals that behave boldly for lack of experience — like mockingbirds unfamiliar with humans that will alight on the rim of a person's cup to take a drink — and those that are aware of a danger but proceed in the face of it.

　　乔尔·博格（Joel Berger），野生动物保护协会及蒙大拿大学的一位生物学家，也把缺乏经验而行为大胆的动物区分出来——像不熟悉人类的嘲鸟会飞落到某人杯子的边缘喝上一口——而那些意识到危险的则会弃之不顾继续飞行。

　　He cited the time he and his colleagues had immobilized a young bison in preparation for taking blood samples, and when they returned, an unrelated adult male bison was standing guard over the yearling, refusing to let the scientists approach.

　　他举了一个例子，某次自己和同事固定住一头年轻的野牛，准备采血样，当他们回来的时候，一头不相干的成年雄性野牛却守卫在小牛的周围，拒绝让科学家靠近。

　　"He knew that he could be attacked by us, and there was no genetic kinship involved," said Dr. Berger. "Courage may be a human construct, but I'd call this a courageous, even heroic act."

　　"它知道自己有可能被我们攻击，而且它们之间也没有遗传的亲缘关系"，博格说："勇敢也许是人类行为，但是我会把这一举动称为有胆量、甚至是英勇行为"。

　　Seeking to capture the sensation of courage in real time, Yadin Dudai, a neurobiologist at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, and his colleagues scanned the brains of people with a known phobia toward snakes as they were confronted with a live, large, harmless but indubitably serpentine corn snake.

　　为了能实时捕捉到勇敢的体验，以色列雷霍沃特魏茨曼科学研究所的也丁·杜代（Yadin Dudai）及其同事，在一个放有一条大型的、活体的、无害的但是的确是蛇无疑的玉米锦蛇的现场扫描了一位已知对蛇有恐惧感的人的大脑。

　　Lying in the scanner, the subjects could choose either to allow a box holding the snake to come closer, or to keep it away. As reported last June in the journal Neuron, the participants who squelched their terror and pressed the "snake approach" button showed activation of a brain region called the subgenual anterior cingulate cortex.

　　躺在扫描仪里，受试者可以选择让装有蛇的箱体靠近自己，或把它拿开。根据去年6月《神经元》杂志的报导，克服了自己恐惧感、按下"让蛇靠近"按钮的受试者，在一个被称为亚属前扣带皮质的大脑区域发现有活动。

　　Located toward the front of the brain, the structure has been implicated in depression and, intriguingly, altruistic behavior, and is thought to help negotiate between emotion and cognition, impulse and calculation.

　　该结构位于大脑的前部，与抑郁、魅力及利他行为有关联，被认为是在情感和认知、冲动和考量之间起到帮助的部分。

　　The thumb-size bundle of neurons acknowledges the yellow belly within but then moves to stanch its quivering power. And it does this in large part by dialing down the activity of the amygdala, long known as the brain's central headquarters of fear.

　　这个拇指大小的神经元束能认知内在的懦弱，但是随后会转移到平息颤抖的能量。它会在很大程度上降低黄杏体的活动，长久以来那都被认为是恐惧的中枢。

　　For the serious cowards among us, the chronic need to conquer fear can get tedious. Why not just skip the anterior cingulate reveille and muzzle the brain's fear response for good? The story of SM, a 44-year-old woman whose rare genetic condition has selectively destroyed the brain's twinned set of amygdala, shows the clear downside of a life without fear.

　　对于我们当中具有严重胆怯的人来说，习惯性的克服恐惧的需要会变得乏味起来。何不干脆一劳永逸地无视大脑前扣带的起床号，让大脑对恐惧的反应缄默呢？那个SM的故事，一位患有罕见遗传病的44岁女人选择性地破坏其大脑孪生杏黄体集之后的结果，表明了缺乏恐惧的生活的明显缺陷。

　　As Justin Feinstein, a clinical neuropsychologist at the University of Iowa, and his colleagues describe in Current Biology, the otherwise normal SM is incapable of being spooked.

　　正如衣阿华大学的临床神经心理学家贾斯汀·范士丹（Justin Feinstein）及其同事在《当代生物学》杂志中所描述的那样，在其他方面正常的SM对受惊吓已无反应。

　　She claimed to fear snakes and spiders, and maybe she did in her pre-disease childhood, but when the researchers took her to an exotic pet store, they were astonished to see that not only did she not avoid the snakes and spiders, she was desperate to hold them close.

　　她宣称害怕蛇和蜘蛛，也许她在患病前的儿童时期的确如此，但是当她被研究人员带到一个国外的宠物店的时候，他们惊奇地发现，她不仅不回避蛇和蜘蛛，而且还拼命抓起它们套近乎。

　　The researchers took SM to a haunted house, and she laughed at the scary parts and blithely made the monster-suited employees jump. She was shown clips from famous horror films like "The Silence of Lambs" and "Halloween," and she showed no flickers of fright.

　　研究人员把SM带到鬼屋，她却冲着可怕的地方大笑，还快活地让穿着怪物服装的工作人员乱跳不已。给她看著名的恐怖片像《沉默的羔羊》和《万圣节》的电影剪辑时，她都没有表现出丝毫的恐惧感。

　　This fearlessness may be fine in the safety of one's living room, but it turns out that SM makes her own horror films in real life. She walks through bad neighborhoods alone at night, approaches shady strangers without guile, and has been repeatedly threatened with death.

　　这种大无畏也许在一个人的客厅里面是安全的，但是事实证明，SM在现实生活中制造了她自己的恐怖电影。她晚上独自一人穿过其恶邻的屋子，毫不保留地接近名声不好的陌生人，并以多次受到死亡的威胁。

　　"We have an individual who's constantly putting herself into harm's way," said Mr. Feinstein. "If we had a million SMs walking around, the world would be a total mess."

　　"这里我们看到了一个不断将自己置身于伤害方式的个体"，范士丹先生说："如果我们周围有一百万个SM在游荡的话，整个世界都将变得一团糟"。

　　The bad calls would keep coming, and the rocking chairs never stop.

　　捣蛋鬼电话仍在不断打进来，而摇摇椅则永远也不会停止摇摆。