托福阅读：clean your mind

你是否曾有过转眼就忘事经历?是不是有时会忽然脑子一片空白?这些都属于“大脑短路”的情况，在下面的新托福考试阅读资料里科学家会教你如何减少“大脑短路”情况的发生。

If you struggle to remember names and numbers or frequently fail to follow the plot of a film, help could be at hand.

Scientists say the problem is that you know too much – and you need to declutter, or spring-clean your mind.

Experiments show that the memory lapses that come with age are not simply due to brain slowing down.

Instead, they can be blamed on the well-used brain finding it more and more difficult to stop irrelevant information interfering with the task in hand.

The first step in the study was to compare the working memory of the young and old. Working memory involves holding information in mind while manipulating it mentally.

In the context of the study, it involved giving the volunteers groups of sentences and asking them to work out whether each line made sense – and to remember the last word of each sentence.

Overall, the younger people, who had an average age of 23, did better, the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology reports.

The Canadian researchers then did a second experiment to see what was hindering the older volunteers, who had an average age of 67.

This involved being shown a picture of eight animals and being asked to memorise the order in which the creatures appeared.

The volunteers were then shown dozens of the pictures and asked to click on their computer mouse when the first animal in their memorised sequence occurred, then the second and so on.

The older adults found it more difficult to progress, suggesting the previous picture was stuck in their mind.

Mervin Blair, of Montreal’s Concordia University, said: ‘We found that the older adults had more difficulty in getting rid of previous information.’

Previous research has found that the part of the brain that keeps embarrassing thoughts in check also weakens with age, leading to people losing some of their inhibitions.

In other words, outspoken old people aren't being rude - they just can't hold their tongues.

以上就是这篇托福阅读材料，同学们可以积累其中的词汇及优美句式，找到托福阅读段的主题句，了解托福阅读的几个出题点。托福阅读训练是个长期的过程。大家如果每天做几篇阅读，坚持下来，一定会有不小的进步。预祝大家能有一个好的阅读成绩。