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大学英语自学教程(下)电子版

occurs during REM sleep, a period when the eyeballs move rapidly beneath the closed lids. And whether they remember or not, all adults dream, usually four to six times a night.

Three types of mood are strongly related to some specific stage of sleep. Our friendly, aggressive, and sleepy feelings all relate to Stage 2 sleep, which accounts for most of our total sleep hours. Our friendly and sleepy feelings, but not our aggressive feelings, are affected as well by Stages 3 and 4, and by how long it takes us to fall asleep.

This means that if you get less sleep than normal ?and people vary a great deal in how much sleep they normally require -- you awake more friendly, more aggressive, and less sleepy.

At this point, the doctors found themselves puzzled. They knew from their earlier work that sleep determines if people feel happier. Yet when they studied the various sleep stages, they found no correlation between sleep physiology and the unhappy mood. Clearly sleep made a difference, but that difference didn't relate to how much time one spent in each of the various sleep stages.

The two researchers decided the key to whether we feel happy or unhappy after sleep must lie in sleep's psychological component -- our dreams. So they began studying dream content -- what dreamers dreamed and who appeared in their dreams -- to see how this affected mood.

Instead of sleeping through the night, volunteers now were awakened four times while in REM sleep. They were asked about such things as what their dreams were about; the sex, age, identity, and number of the people in their dreams; and what each person in a dream was doing.

Interestingly, Kramer and Roth found that being awakened four times a night didn't make a difference in the volunteers’ morning mood patterns. But they did find that who appears in a dream has afar greater influence on mood than what occurs in the dream. \moods,” Kramer says, \

Each of us, it turns out, has a special dream character, and if this type of character appears in our dreams, we are happier when we awake. \people in general, how unhappy you feel after sleep depends on who is in the dream,” Kramer says. \it is that makes you happier is different for you than for me.” For some it may be an older woman, for example; for others, a young man.

Who appears in your dream isn't the only important thing. The more people who appear in your dreams the happier you are on awakening. It's a case of the more the merrier. \dream is to be alone; you feel worse,” Kramer explains. \ou can relate this to wakening psychology, where being alone leads to more unhappiness. There is something about interacting with people that produces happiness.”

A number of researchers have examined the relationship of mood and performance. The doctors also checked into this relationship, and they have found some interesting correlations.

\found that the more friendly, more aggressive, more clear-thinking, less sleepy, and surprisingly, the more unhappy you are, the better you perform. That last one -- the unhappy -- I can't explain,” Kramer says. Moreover, the level of a person's moods and the level of his or her

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大学英语自学教程(下)电子版

performance rise and fall together throughout the day.

Initially the two VA researchers worked only with men, because the dreams of men are far easier to study. Men and women dream differently. Indeed, sex is the biggest factor in accounting for differences in the people, activities, locations and feelings that occur in dreams. Dr. Kramer says, \you compare, say, 20 and 60-year-olds, or black and white.”

Last year the VA researchers began studying the relationship of sleep, dreams, and mood in women. This work is continuing, but the initial findings reinforce what they had found in men. “Overall, the women are just like men,” Kramer says.

13-A. Work, Labor, and Play

So far as I know, Miss Hannah Arendt was the first person to define the essential difference between work and labor. To be happy, a man must feel, firstly, free and, secondly, important. He cannot be really happy if he is compelled by society to do what he does not enjoy doing, or if what he enjoys doing is ignored by society as of no value or importance. In a society where slavery in the strict sense has been abolished, the sign that what a man does is of social value is that he is paid money to do it, but a laborer today can rightly be called a wage slave. A man is a laborer if the job society offers him is of no interest to himself but he is compelled to take it by the necessity of earning a living and supporting his family.

The antithesis to labor is play. When we play a game, we enjoy what we are doing, otherwise we should not play it, but it is a purely private activity; society could not care less whether we play it or not.

Between labor and play stands work. A man is a worker if he is personally interested in the job which society pays him to do; what from the point of view of society is necessary labor is from his own point of view voluntary play. Whether a job is to be classified as labor or work depends, not on the job itself, but on the tastes of the individual who undertakes it. The difference does not, for example, coincide with the difference between a manual and a mental job; a gardener or a cobbler may be a worker, a bank clerk a laborer. Which a man is can be seen from his attitude toward leisure. To a worker, leisure means simply the hours he needs to relax and rest in order to work efficiently. He is therefore more likely to take too little leisure than too much; workers die of coronaries and forget their wives’ birthdays. To the laborer, on the other hand, leisure means freedom from compulsion, so that it is natural for him to imagine that the fewer hours he has to spend laboring, and the more hours he is free to play, the better.

What percentage of the population in a modern technological society are, like myself, in the fortunate position of being workers? At a guess I would say sixteen per cent, and I do not think that figure is likely to get bigger in the future.

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Technology and the division of labor have done two things: by eliminating in many fields the need for special strength or skill, they have made a very large number of paid occupations which formerly were enjoyable work into boring labor, and by increasing productivity they have reduced the number of necessary laboring hours. It is already possible to imagine a society in which the majority of the population, that is to say, its laborers, will have almost as much leisure as in earlier times was enjoyed by the aristocracy. When one recalls how aristocracies in the past actually behaved, the prospect is not cheerful. Indeed, the problem of dealing with boredom may be even more difficult for such a future mass society than it was for aristocracies. The latter, for example, ritualized their time; there was a season to shoot grouse, a season to spend in town, etc. The masses are more likely to replace an unchanging ritual by fashion which it will be in the economic interest of certain people to change as often as possible. Again, the masses cannot go in for hunting, for very soon there would be no animals left to hunt. For other aristocratic amusements like gambling, dueling, and warfare, it may be only too easy to find equivalents in dangerous driving, drug-taking, and senseless acts of violence. Workers seldom commit acts of violence, because they can put their aggression into their work, be it physical like the work of a smith, or mental like the work of a scientist or an artist. The role of aggression in mental work is aptly expressed by the phrase \

13-B. The Workman's Compensation

How can someone, hour after hour, day after day, year in and year out, tighten approximately the same nut to the same bolt and not go mad? That most working people do not, in fact, go mad is due in large measure to a phenomenon so common that it is found wherever people labor in industry: taking it easy. It would take some kind of real mental case to do all the work one could all day long. No one expects it. Taking it easy on the job while someone else covers your work, or \life.

Working on and off, however, has its limits. The rules are infinitely varied, subtle, and flexible, and, of course, they are always changing. Management, up to a certain level at least, is aware of the practice, and in some industries employs entire cadres of people to curtail or pat an end to it. Simultaneously, the workers are subtly doing their best to keep it going and to extend it wherever possible.

Every worker has a highly developed sense of how much work is expected of him. When he feels that the expectation is excessive, he tries to do something about it. This instinct has to do with the political nature of work itself, something every modern worker understands. The bosses want more from the worker than they are willing to give in return. The workers give work, and

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the bosses give money. The exchange is never quite equal, and the discrepancy is called profit. Since the bosses cannot do without profit, workers have an edge. A good worker in a key spot could, so long as he kept up production, take all the coffee breaks he wanted, and the bosses would very likely look the other way. He could also choose to cut down on the coffee breaks, apply himself, and increase production, and then ask for and get more money. But that would be self-defeating, and he knows it. It would also place him in competition with other workers, which would be playing into the bosses’ hands. What he would rather do is create some slack for himself and enjoy his job more.

At present on the West Coast, when a gang of longshoremen working on cargo start a shift, they often divide themselves into two equal groups and toss a coin. One group goes into the far reaches of the ship抯 hold and sits around. The other group starts loading cargo, usually working with a vengeance, since each one of them is doing the work of two men. An hour later, the groups change places. In other words, although my fellow longshoremen and I are getting paid for eight hours, on occasion we work only four. If someone reading this feels a sense of moral outrage because we are sitting down on the job, I am sorry. I have searched my mind in vain for a polite way to tell that reader to go to hell.

If you are that reader, I would recommend that you abandon your outrage and begin thinking about doing something similar for yourself. You probably already have, even if you won't admit it. White collar office workers, too, have come under criticism recently for robbing their bosses of their full-time services. Too much time is being spent around the Mr. Coffee machine, and some people (would you believe it?) have even been having personal conversations on company time. In fact, one office-system expert recently said that he had yet to encounter a business work place that was functioning at more than about 60 percent efficiency.

Management often struggles hard to set up a situation where work is done in series: a worker receives an article of manufacture, does something to it, and passes it on to another worker, who does something else to it and then passes it on to the next guy, and so on. The assembly line is a perfect example of this. Managers like this type of manufacture because it is more efficient ?that is, it achieves more production. They also like it for another reason, even if they will not admit it: it makes it very difficult for the worker to do anything other than work.

Frederick W. Taylor, the efficiency expert who early in this century conducted the time-and-motion studies that led to the assembly-line process, tried to reduce workers to robots, all in the name of greater production. His staff of experts, each armed with clipboard and stopwatch, studied individual workers with a view toward eliminating unnecessary movement. They soon found a great deal of opposition from the workers.

Most people not directly engaged in daily work express disapproval when they hear of people working on and off. A studied campaign with carefully chosen language -- \a full day's pay,?\-- has been pushed by certain employers to discredit the practice, and their success is such that I rarely discuss it except with other workers. My response

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