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回复ls....那个不赖lz.... 我考古的时候....没贴上highlight= = 注意highlight的部分Interestingly— orunnervingly, depending on how you look at it — some researchers are uncovering evidencethat Stanovnik’s rule of thumb might be right. A spate ofrecent studies has contributed to growing support for the notion that theorigins and controls of fatigue lie partly, if not mostly, within thebrain and the central nervous system. The new research puts fresh weightto the hoary coaching cliché: you only think you’re tired.From the timeof Hippocrates, the limits of human exertion were thought to reside inthe muscles themselves, a hypothesis that was established in 1922 withthe Nobel Prize-winning work of Dr. A.V. Hill. The theory went like this:working muscles, pushed to their limit, accumulated lactic acid. When concentrations of lactic acid reached acertain level, so the argument went, the muscles could no longerfunction. Muscles contained an ‘‘automatic brake,’’ Hill wrote, ‘‘carefully adjusted by nature.’’Researchers, however, have long noted a linkbetween neurological disorders and athletic potential.’’Questions about the muscle-centered model came up again in 1989 when Canadian researchers published the results of an experiment called Operation Everest II, in which athletes did heavy exercise in altitudechambers. The athletes reached exhaustion despite the fact that theirlactic-acid concentrations remained comfortably low. Fatigue, it seemed,might be caused by something else.In 1999, three physiologists from theUniversity of Cape Town Medical School in South Africa took the nextstep. They worked a group of cyclists to exhaustion during a 62-milelaboratory ride and measured, via electrodes, the percentage of legmuscles they were using at the fatigue limit. If standard theories weretrue, they reasoned, the body should recruit more muscle fibers as itapproached exhaustion — a natural compensation for tired, weakeningmuscles.Instead, the researchers observed the opposite result. As theriders approached complete fatigue, the percentage of active musclefibers decreased, until they were using only about 30 percent. Even asthe athletes felt they were giving their all, the reality was thatmore of their muscles were at rest. Was the brain purposely holding back thebody?‘‘It was as ifthe brain was playing a trick on the body, to save it,’’ says Timothy Noakes, head of the Cape Towngroup. ‘‘Which makes a lot of sense, if you think about it.In fatigue, it only feels like we’re going to die. The actual physiological risks that fatigue represents are essentially trivial.’’From this, Noakes and his colleagues concluded that A.V. Hill had been right about the automatic brake, but wrong about its location. They postulated the existence of what they calleda central governor: aneural system that monitors carbohydrate stores, the levels of glucoseand oxygen in the blood, the rates of heat gain and loss, and work rates.The governor’s job is to hold our bodies safely back fromthe brink of collapse by creating painful sensations that we interpret asunendurable muscle fatigue.Fatigue, the researchers argue, is less anobjective event than a subjective emotion — the brain’s clever, self-interested attempt to scareyou into stopping. ‘‘It’s notthat they don’t feelthe pain; they just shift their brain dynamics and alter their perceptionof reality so the pain matters less. It’s basically a purposeful hallucination.’’Noakes and his colleagues speculate that the central governor theory holds the potential to explain not just feats of stamina but also theiropposite: chronic fatigue syndrome (a malfunctioning, overactivegovernor, in this view). Moreover,the governor theory makes evolutionary sense. Animals whose brainssafeguarded an emergency stash of physical reserves might well havesurvived at a higher rate than animals that could drain their fuel tanksat will.The theory would also seem to explain a sports landscape in which ultra-endurance events have gone from being considered medically hazardous to something perilously close to routine. The Ironman triathlonin Hawaii — a 2.4-mile swim, 112-mile bike ride and marathon-length run — was the ne plus ultra in endurance in the 1980’s, but hasnow been topped by the Ultraman, which is more than twice as long. Onceobscure, the genre known as adventure racing, which includes500-plus-mile wilderness races like Primal Quest, has grown to more than400 events each year. Ultramarathoners, defined as those who participatein running events exceeding the official marathon distance of 26.2 miles,now number some 15,000 in the United States alone. The underlying physicshave not changed, but rather our sense of possibility. Athletic culture,like Robic, has discovered a way to tweak its collective governor.-- by 会员 WuApril (2011/5/13 9:24:19)
谢谢小丸子 十分感激! |
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