TED | 有压力时如何保持镇静

演讲精彩片段（节选）欣赏

So I started thinking about that, but my thoughts didn’t crystallize until about a month later. I was having dinner with my colleague, Danny Kahneman, the Nobel Prize winner, and I somewhat embarrassedly told him about having broken my window, and, you know, forgotten my passport, and Danny shared with me that he’d been practicing something called prospective hindsight.

所以，我开始思考这个问题，但我没有想出来，直到一个月后，我和同事，也是诺贝尔奖获得者DannyKahneman去吃晚餐，我有点尴尬地告诉他，我打破窗户爬进屋里，还有忘记拿护照的事，而Danny和我分享了他一直在练习的称为“预测后见之明”的东西。

It’s something that he had gotten from the psychologist Gary Klein,who had written about it a few years before, also called the pre-mortem. Now, you all know what the postmortem is. Whenever there’s a disaster, a team of experts come in and they try to figure out what went wrong, right? Well, in the pre-mortem, Danny explained, you look ahead and you try to figure out all the things that could go wrong, and then you try to figure out what you can do to prevent those things from happening, or to minimize the damage.

这是他从心理学家Gary Klein那里学到的。Gary前几年已经写了这个理论，也称为“事前剖析”。你们都知道事后剖析是什么意思。每当有灾难， 一个专家小组就会前去调查，尝试找出导致灾难的原因，对吧？而Danny解释，在事前剖析中，你要预测，尝试想出可能出错的所有事情，然后你要尝试可能的方法来防止这些错误发生，或将损失降到最小。

So what I want to talk to you about today are some of the things we can do in the form of a pre-mortem. Some of them are obvious, some of them are not so obvious. I’ll start with the obvious ones.

所以，今天我想和你们谈谈关于在事前剖析中，我们能做的一些事情。有些方式是显而易见的， 而有些则不那么明显。我先谈显而易见的方式。

Around the home, designate a place for things that are easily lost. Now, this sounds like common sense, and it is, but there’s a lot of science to back this up, based on the way our spatial memory works.There’s a structure in the brain called the hippocampus, that evolved over tens of thousands of years, to keep track of the locations of important things - where the well is, where fish can be found, that stand of fruit trees, where the friendly and enemy tribes live.

在家里，指定一个地方，放容易丢失的东西。这听起来就像是常识，也的确是，但这符合我们空间记忆的工作原理，有很多科学依据支持这一点。在我们大脑里，有一个叫海马体的结构，已经进化超过数万年了，它可以追踪重要东西的位置——例如，水井的位置、能够发现鱼的地方、果树的位置，以及友好物种和敌对物种分别居住在哪里。

The hippo campus is the part of the brain that in London taxicab drivers becomes enlarged. It’s the part of the brain that allows squirrels to find their nuts. And if you’re wondering,somebody actually did the experiment where they cut off the olfactory sense of the squirrels, and they could still find their nuts. They weren’t using smell, they were using the hippo campus,this exquisitely evolved mechanism in the brain for finding things.But it’s really good for things that don’t move around much, not so good for things that move around.

海马体是大脑的一部分，伦敦出租车司机的海马体结构通常比常人要大。松鼠能找到坚果，也要归功于它们大脑的海马体。你们可能对这点感到疑惑，但有人的确做了一个实验。他们切掉了松鼠的嗅觉器官，松鼠仍然能找到它们的坚果。它们不是用嗅觉，而是用大脑的海马体，这个进化完美的大脑机制是用来找东西的。但只是对找固定的东西比较有效，找会移动的东西却不是很管用。

So this is why we lose car keys and reading glasses and passports. So in the home, designate a spot for your keys - a hook by the door, maybe a decorative bowl. For your passport, a particular drawer. For your reading glasses, a particular table. If you designate a spot and you’re scrupulous about it, your things will always be there when you look for them.

这就是为什么我们会常常找不到车钥匙、老花镜和护照。所以，在家里指定一个地点存放你的钥匙——门上的挂钩，或是一个装饰碗。在一个特定的抽屉存放你的护照。你的老花镜要放在特定的桌子上。 如果你指定了特定的地方，并且一丝不苟地做这些事，当你寻找它们时， 这些东西总是会在那里。

What about travel? Take a cell phone picture of your credit cards,your driver’s license, your passport, mail it to yourself so it’s in the cloud. If these things are lost or stolen, you can facilitate replacement.

关于旅行呢？用手机拍下你信用卡的照片，还有你的驾照和护照，把这些照片发到你的电子邮箱，储存在数据云端。如果一旦丢失或被盗了，你可以很方便地用电子件代替它们。

Now these are some rather obvious things. Remember, when you’re under stress, the brain releases cortisol. Cortisol is toxic, and it causes cloudy thinking. So part of the practice of the pre-mortem is to recognize that under stress you’re not going to beat your best, and you should put systems in place.

这些是一些显而易见的事前剖析方法。记住，当你有压力时，大脑会释放皮质醇。皮质醇是有毒的，它会导致思维不清晰。所以，做事前剖析的练习，是要认识到在压力下，你不是在最佳状态，你还应该把事情做到井然有序。