It's 3 pm on a regular Tuesday, and your recusant brain is blanking out and deserting you despite your constant effort to bring it back from its slack.
这是一个正常的星期二下午3点，尽管你一直努力让自己从松弛状态中恢复过来，但你的大脑却在不断地走神
Why is it still Tuesday? Why does time pass so slowly?
为什么现在还是星期二？为什么时间过得这么慢？
As psychologists have verified it as a common phenomenon among folks with nine-to-five jobs, and are unraveling the reasons behind this strange misperception of time on Tuesdays.
心理学家已经证实这是在有九到五份工作的人中普遍存在的现象，并且正在揭示周二这种奇怪的时间错觉背后的原因。
Some mainstream hypotheses are already available while experiments to confirm them are currently under way.
一些主流假设已经存在，而确认它们的实验目前正在进行中。
1
The Time Gap
Research shows that the brain "time stamps" events using contextual clues.
研究表明，大脑利用上下文线索“标记”事件。
And things that happen in the same context (e.g., while you're at a party) get grouped together in your memory -- separate from things that happen in other contexts (e.g., while you're in a cab going home). The end result is that we tend to remember like-moments as having occurred more closely together in time.
在同一环境中发生的事情（例如，当你在聚会时）会在你的记忆中组合在一起——与在其他环境中发生的事情（例如，当你坐出租车回家时）分开。最终的结果是，我们倾向于记住相似的时刻，因为它们在时间上更紧密地发生在一起。
When applied to Tuesdays, the hypothesis works like this: Going into the office on Monday is such a jolt, such a change from your weekend routine, that by Tuesday the previous weekend feels further away than it actually is.
当应用于周二时，这个假设是这样的：周一上班是一个巨大的冲击，与你的周末惯例相比有着如此大的改变，以至于到了周二，前一个周末感觉比实际情况更遥远。
You see, on Monday, you can still easily tap into your weekend memories because you're still in the process of making that contextual shift from "weekend mode" to "weekday mode."
你看，在周一，你仍然可以很容易地挖掘你的周末记忆，因为你仍然在从“周末模式”到“工作日模式”的上下文转换过程中
By Tuesday, however, the shift is complete, and you now have your Monday memories -- the beginning of your weekday memories -- blocking the way back to your weekend memories. And this could explain, as Gholipour wrote, why we feel "a vague sensation of a time gap" on Tuesday mornings.
然而，到了周二，这个转变就完成了，你现在有了周一的记忆——工作日记忆的开始——阻碍了你回到周末的记忆。正如戈利普尔所写，这可以解释为什么我们在周二早上感觉到“时间间隔的模糊感觉”。
This explanation is a bit dense. It is hard to get the full picture of it without throwing in a bunch of jargon.
这个解释有点难懂。如果不加上一大堆行话，很难了解它的全貌。
However, the basic idea is that the way our memory works inclines us to believe that experiences similar to each other are also close to each other in time, even if they could be weeks apart.
然而，基本的想法是，我们的记忆工作方式使我们倾向于相信，彼此相似的经历在时间上也彼此接近，即使它们可能相隔数周。
Along the same vein, events of dissimilar natures become separate in our memory.
同理，性质不同的事件在我们的记忆中也会分离。
It is usually quite efficient of our brains to organize events by categorizing them according to their contexts.
通常，我们的大脑通过根据上下文对事件进行分类来组织事件是非常有效的。
However, when it comes to the case with the Tuesdays, it tricks us into thinking that the last weekend is further back.
然而，当谈到周二的情况时，它欺骗了我们，使我们认为最后一个周末又回来了。
In other words, we are likely to believe that it's been such a long time since we last took a break, even though we just spent a relaxing Sunday the day before yesterday.
换言之，我们可能会认为，虽然前天我们刚刚度过了一个轻松的周日，但我们已经很久没有休息了。
2
Memory Overload
A second hypothesis explaining why time seems to move more slowly on Tuesdays: Our brains simply have more stuff to process during the workweek than on the weekend, and all that processing uses up a disproportionate amount of space in our memories.
第二个假说解释了为什么时间在周二移动得更慢：我们的大脑在工作周要处理的东西比周末要多，所有这些处理都会占用我们记忆中不成比例的空间。
In comparison to a reposeful (restful)weekend, more information and activities are crammed into a weekday.
与宁静的周末相比，更多的信息和活动被塞进了工作日。
During the weekend, we tend to engage in relaxing, predictable behavior (e.g., watching TV, going out to dinner, and so on). During the work week, on the other hand, our schedules tend to become more complex and less predictable. We have emails to read. Emails to write. Assignments to complete. Meetings to attend.
在周末，我们倾向于从事放松、可预测的行为（例如，看电视、出去吃饭等等）。另一方面，在工作周，我们的日程安排往往变得更复杂，更难预测。我们有电子邮件要看,要写。要完成的作业, 要参加的会议.
On Mondays, we're just getting caught up. On Tuesdays, we're in the thick of it.
在星期一，我们只是缠得脱不开身。每周二，我们都忙得不可开交。
When your short-term memory is crowded with information, you tend to have a distorted perception of the amount of time that has passed.
当你的短期记忆中充斥着信息时，你往往会对过去的时间有一种扭曲的感觉。
Hence, it's possible that our brains generate more discreet memories on Tuesdays, making Tuesdays seem as though they're longer than other days.
因此，我们的大脑有可能在周二产生更谨慎的记忆，使周二看起来比其他日子长。
One of the most dramatic examples in healthy minds is when people come face to face with death or the possibility of death — situations like a car crash, skydiving, or a physical attack. Of course, this near-death time distortion is subjective and, therefore, hard to measure. But scientists have signed off on its universality by putting people in terrifying new situations. In one experiment, for instance, volunteers who took their first-ever sky dives tended to overestimate how long the jump lasted. And the more fear they reported before and during the jump, the longer it felt to them.
最引人注目的例子之一是当人们面对死亡或死亡的可能性时——比如车祸、跳伞或身体攻击。当然，这种濒死时间失真是主观的，因此很难测量。但是科学家们已经通过将人们置于可怕的新环境中来证明它的普遍性。例如，在一项实验中，第一次跳伞的志愿者往往高估了跳伞的持续时间。他们在跳跃前和跳跃过程中报告的恐惧越多，他们感觉到的时间就越长。
One theory holds that perhaps, in life-threatening situations, our heightened senses give us a higher temporal resolution. This term refers to the idea that when we’re on alert, we may be able to absorb more information than we normally would, as if we’re seeing the world in slow motion. But this doesn’t seem to be the case, as shown by neuroscientist David Eagleman and colleagues and their brave students who jumped from a 31-meter tower in Dallas, Texas. (They jumped onto a safety net, but still.) The volunteer jumpers did feel as if the fall lasted forever, but they didn’t get any better at reading information from their wristwatches as they fell. In other words, it seemed their time warp was more of a retrospective assessment — a memory, in other words.
一种理论认为，也许在危及生命的情况下，我们高度的感官会给我们更高的时间分辨率。这个术语指的是当我们处于警觉状态时，我们可以吸收比平时更多的信息，就好像我们看到的是慢动作的世界。但事实似乎并非如此，神经学家大卫·伊格尔曼（David Eagleman）及其同事和他们勇敢的学生从德克萨斯州达拉斯的一座31米高的塔楼上跳下时就证明了这一点。（他们跳到了安全网上，但仍然如此。）志愿者跳伞者确实感觉到好像跌倒会永远持续下去，但他们在跌倒时并没有更好地阅读手表上的信息。换句话说，他们的时间偏差似乎更多的是一种回顾性评估——换句话说，是一种记忆。
It’s tempting to complain about Tuesdays, not to mention the brain’s apparent vulnerability to time distortion.
人们很容易抱怨周二，更不用说大脑明显容易受到时间扭曲的影响。
But to do so is to neglect the fact that the brain actually does an amazing job keeping track of time down to milliseconds, something central to all of its vital functions.
但这样做就忽略了一个事实，即大脑实际上做了一项惊人的工作，将时间保持在毫秒以下，这是它所有重要功能的核心。
“You can think of the brain as a time machine. The fundamental structure of brain function is very dynamic, but it has specific time constants that you just can’t violate. The extent to which information can be encoded is not going to be widely variable,” van Wassenhove said. “But your apprehension of this information in moments, surrounded by emotions and attention, can vary a lot.”
van Wassenhove说：“你可以把大脑看作一台时间机器。大脑功能的基本结构是动态的，但它有特定的时间常数，你不能违背。信息编码的程度不会有很大的变化。”。“但是你在不同情绪和注意力下对这些信息的理解可能会有很大的不同。”
Since Tuesdays are so dreadful(foul), is there anything we can do to assuage this negative experience?
既然星期二如此可怕，我们能做些什么来缓和这种消极的经历吗？
Experts recommend that we play down the negativity by becoming more mindful of the fact that time doesn't slow down even if we might feel otherwise.
专家建议我们淡化消极情绪，要更加注意这样一个事实：时间不会变慢，即使我们可能会有不同的感觉
Merely pacing ourselves at work could help since it avoids jam-packing our brains with an overload of information.
仅仅在工作中调整自己的步调可能会有所帮助，因为它可以避免让我们的大脑充斥着过多的信息。
You might also arrange some fun activities after work on Tuesday and turn it into a ritual. That can make this day a little less miserable than it already is
你也可以在周二下班后安排一些有趣的活动，把它变成一种仪式。这可以让今天比现在少一点痛苦
So there you have it: Two possible explanations for why Tuesday feels like the longest day of the week. What's a marketer to do with this information?
这就是为什么周二感觉像是一周中最长的一天的原因：两种可能的解释。生意人如何处理这些信息？
Well, knowledge is power. And while we can't offer you an insta-cure for the Tuesday blues, the hope is that this insight will help you focus less on the passing of time, and more on the work that needs to get done.
知识就是力量。虽然我们无法为您提供帮助，但我们希望这一见解能帮助您减少对时间流逝的关注，更多地关注需要完成的工作。
Happy Tuesday!
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