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This past Thanksgiving, I asked my mother how old she was in her head. 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.
在刚刚过去的感恩节，我问母亲在她心里她多大年纪了。她没有停顿，没有抬头，甚至没有让我重复这个问题。她要是让我再说一遍倒是很正常，因为这个问题在语法上有些别扭，而且也略显奇怪。
We were in my brother’s dining room, setting the table. My mother folded another napkin. “Forty-five,” she said. She is 76.
当时我们在我哥哥家的餐厅里往桌子上摆餐具，母亲又叠了一张餐巾纸，说：“四十五岁。”而实际上她今年七十六岁了。
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? It’s bizarre, if you think about it.
为什么当随便提出这个高度抽象的概念——被称为“主观年龄”——时，这么多人能立刻凭直觉理解它?如果你仔细想想，就会觉得很奇怪。
Certainly most of us don’t believe ourselves to be shorter or taller than we actually are. We don’t think of ourselves as having smaller ears or longer noses or curlier hair.
当然，我们大多数人都不认为自己比实际身高更高或更矮。我们也不认为自己的耳朵比实际更小，鼻梁更高，或头发更卷。
Most of us also know where our bodies are in space, what physiologists call “proprioception.” Yet we seem to have an awfully rough go of locating ourselves in time.
我们大多数人知道我们的身体位于空间中的什么位置，生理学家称之为“本体感觉”。然而，我们似乎很难确定自己在时间中处于什么位置。
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.
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，他的原话是“好像出了什么差错”。
(High-school reunions can have this same confusing effect. 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.)
(高中同学聚会也会产生同样令人困惑的效果。你环顾四周，看着那些满脸皱纹、身材发福的同学，诧异他们怎么在年龄面前一败涂地，然后你看到自己在同学聚会上的照片，意识到: 哦，我也一样。)
The gulf between how old we are and how old we believe ourselves to be can often be measured in light-years. As one might suspect, there are studies that examine this phenomenon. (There’s a study for everything.)
我们的实际年龄与我们心目中的年龄之间的鸿沟通常可以用光年来衡量。正如有些人可能会怀疑的，有研究调查了这一现象。(无论什么现象都有相关的研究。)
As one might also suspect, most of them are pretty unimaginative.
正如有些人同样可能会怀疑的，大多数研究都毫无创意。
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.
许多研究都源自老年医学，主要着眼于健康结果，这意味着研究者会问参与者他们感觉自己多大年龄了，而这些参与者通常会把问题理解为“你在身体上感觉自己有多大年龄”，这就会导致一个相当不足为奇的结论: 如果你感觉自己比实际年龄更大，那么你可能确实年龄更大，这里指的是你衰老得更快。
