Unit-8-Time新编大学英语第二版第四册课文翻译

Unit 8 Time

How to Take Your Time

Dr. Larry Dossey has two antique clocks. "One fast, the other slow," says Dr Dossey. "They remind me that my life is not ruled by clocks, that I can choose the time I live by."

How a person thinks about time can kill him, according to Dossey, a pioneer in the emerging science of chronobiology, the study of how time interacts with life. One of the most common ills in our society, he says, is "time sickness", a sense of time pressure and hurry that causes anxiety and tension. These symptoms can contribute to heart disease and strokes, two of our most frequent causes of death.

Dossey has discovered that these and other stress-induced ills can often be successfully treated by using simple techniques to change how a person thinks about time.

Dr Dossey became interested in time and health when he noticed how many patients insisted on having watches with them in the hospital, even though they had no schedules to keep. They were all time addicts, taught since childhood to schedule their lives by society's clock, and all felt lost without the security of a timepiece. Time seems to rule our lives. Time is money, to be saved and spent wisely, not wasted or lost.

Almost all living things in our world carry their own biological clocks synchronised with the rhythms of nature. A crab can sense when the tide is about to change. A mouse wakes when night nears. A squirrel knows when to prepare for its long winter nap. These living clocks are not accurate in any robot-like mechanical sense. They adjust to changes in the environment.

Light is the most powerful synchroniser in most living things. But in humans there is another powerful synchroniser: other people. Pioneering studies in Germany reported that when people were put together in groups isolated from external time cues of light, temperature and humidity, their own complex internal timekeeping rhythms became desynchronised; then they resynchronised in unison. Even body temperatures started to rise and fall together, a sign that subtle biochemical changes in each body were now happening together. These experiments may have discovered one of the mysterious forces that reshape individuals into members of a team, cult or mob.

The mind can alter rhythms of time in various ways. People brought back from the brink of death often recall their entire lives flashing before them in an instant. Those who have been in a serious accident often report that, as it occurred, everything happened in slow motion; apparently this is a survival tool built into the brain, an ability to accelerate