【听力资料】科学美国人听力原文——科学家或揭开人们追寻记忆味道的奥秘

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听力原文

In Marcel Proust's iconic Remembrance of ThingsPast, a taste of cake elicits a flood of memories.

Now a study finds that the stronger your memory ofa particular food, the more likely you are to chooseit again.

And it doesn't matter how objectively unattractivethe food may be—which perhaps explains why you may crave those peanut butter andmarshmallow sandwiches from your youth or can't break that fried chicken habit when trying todiet.

The food-memory study is in the journal Neuron.

Researchers asked 30 hungry young people to rate snacks such as potato chips and chocolate.

No actual food was presented.

The snacks were merely displayed on screens associated with locations.

Then the study participants were asked to choose between two locations, as proxies for thesnacks.

And the hungry subjects went with memory over taste preference—that is, they picked whatthey were better able to remember even if they had rated them lower in the first part of thetest.

And the researchers found that the exercise caused increased communication between thehippocampus, associated with memory, and the part of the frontal lobe home to decision-making.

Which may show why when we're making food decisions, familiarity often wins out over otherfactors—and why your shopping list looks virtually the same week after week.