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This past thanksgiving, I asked my mother how old she was in her head. [qh]
在过去的感恩节，我问妈妈在她心里她多大年纪了。[qh]
She didn’t pause, didn’t look up, didn’t even ask me to repeat the question, which would have been natural, given that it was both syntactically awkward and a little odd. [qh]
她没有停顿，没有抬头，甚至没有要求我重复这个问题。要求我再说一遍很正常，因为这个问题在语法上既难受又略显奇怪。[qh]
We were in my brother’s dining room, setting the table. [qh]
我们在我哥哥的饭厅里摆桌子。[qh]
My mother folded another napkin. “Forty-five,” she said.[qh]
妈妈又叠了一张餐巾纸。“四十五，”她说。[qh]
She is 76.[qh]
她今年七十六了。[qh]
Why do so many people have an immediate, intuitive grasp of this highly abstract concept—“subjective age,” it’s called—when randomly presented with it? [qh]
为什么这么多人在随机面对这个高度抽象的概念——“主观年龄”时，能马上凭直觉理解它?[qh]
It’s bizarre, if you think about it. [qh]
如果你仔细想想，就会觉得很奇怪。[qh]
Certainly most of us don’t believe ourselves to be shorter or taller than we actually are. [qh]
当然，我们大多数人都不相信自己比实际身高高或矮。[qh]
We don’t think of ourselves as having smaller ears or longer noses or curlier hair.[qh]
我们并不认为自己的耳朵小，鼻子长，头发卷。[qh]
Most of us also know where our bodies are in space, what physiologists call “proprioception.”[qh]
我们大多数人知道我们的身体在空间中的位置，生理学家称之为“本体感觉”。[qh]
Yet we seem to have an awfully rough go of locating ourselves in time. [qh]
然而，我们似乎很难及时定位自己的位置。[qh]
A friend, nearing 60, recently told me that whenever he looks in the mirror, he’s not so much unhappy with his appearance as startled by it—“as if there’s been some sort of error” were his exact words. [qh]
一位年近六十的朋友最近告诉我，每当他照镜子时，与其说他对自己的外表不满意，不如说他对自己的外表感到吃惊，“好像出了什么差错”是他的原话。[qh]
(High-school reunions can have this same confusing effect. [qh]
(高中同学聚会也会产生同样令人困惑的效果。[qh]
You look around at your lined and thickened classmates, wondering how they could have so violently capitulated to age; then you see photographs of yourself from that same event and realize: Oh.) [qh]
你环顾四周，看着那些满脸皱纹、发福的同学，诧异他们怎么向年龄屈服得那么狠; 然后你看到自己在同学聚会上的照片，意识到: 哦，我也一样。)[qh]
The gulf between how old we are and how old we believe ourselves to be can often be measured in light-years.[qh]
我们有多大年龄与我们认为自己有多大年龄之间的差距通常可以用光年来衡量。[qh]
As one might suspect, there are studies that examine this phenomenon. [qh]
有人可能会怀疑，也有研究调查了这一现象。[qh]
(There’s a study for everything.)[qh]
(方方面面都有研究)[qh]
As one might also suspect, most of them are pretty unimaginative. [qh]
有人可能会怀疑，大多研究都毫无创意。[qh]
Many have their origins in the field of gerontology, designed primarily with an eye toward health outcomes, which means they ask participants how old they feel, which those participants generally take to mean how old do you feel physically, which then leads to the rather unsurprising conclusion that if you feel older, you probably are, in the sense that you’re aging faster.[qh]
诸多研究都起源于老年医学，主要着眼于健康结果，这意味着他们会问参与者他们感觉自己多大年龄了，这些参与者通常会理解为你在身体上感觉自己多大了，这就会导致一个相当不足为奇的结论: 如果你感觉自己老了，你可能真的老了，从某种意义上说，你衰老得更快了。[qh]
