Alan probably did not know much in 1945 about the actual physiology of human brains:
1945年，艾伦大概还并不知道很多关于人类大脑的实际生理机能，
quite possibly no more than from jolly pictures of the brain as a humming telephone exchange in the Children's Encyclopaedia, or from the passage in Natural Wonders describing the 'small thinking place in the brain':
他可能只是看过一些不严肃的介绍，比如《儿童百科全书》里面的嗡嗡叫的电话系统，或者《自然奇迹》里面说的"大脑里面的小思维区"：
Directly over the ear, a place that you can almost cover with your thumb, lies the most important part of all, the place where we remember and handle words.
负责记忆和处理语言的区域，是最重要的部分，它就在耳朵的附近，你用拇指就几乎能覆盖它。
At the bottom of this word spot, we remember how words sound.
在语言区的下端，记录着词语的声音。
An inch farther up and toward the back, we remember how words look in print.
往后一英寸，记录那些词语写出来的样子。
A little farther up and forward lies the 'speech center' from which, when we want to talk, we direct the tongue and lips what to say.
往前上方移动一点，是说话中心，当我们说话时，这里就负责指挥舌头和嘴唇的运动。
Thus we get our word-hearing, our word-seeing, and our word-speaking centers close together, so that when we speak we have close by and handy our memory of what we have heard in words, and of what we have read.
我们的听、看、说的处理中心都挨在一起，以便我们在说话时，可以方便地使用那些听到的或读到的记忆。
But that would have been quite sufficient.
这些也许就已经足够了。
He would have seen pictures of nerve cells (there were a few in Natural Wonders), but at the level at which he was approaching the description of mind, the details were not important.
艾伦可能还看过神经细胞的图片（《自然奇迹》上面有几张），但在目前阶段，他还在研究如何描述思维，所以细节并不重要。
In speaking of 'building a brain' he did not mean that the components of his machine should resemble the components of a brain, or that their connections should imitate the manner in which the regions of the brain were connected.
说到建造一个大脑，并不是说机器的组件要与大脑的组件相似，也不是说机器组件之间的连接非要像脑区之间的连接一样。
That the brain stored words, pictures, skills in some definite way, connected with input signals from the senses and output signals to the muscles, was almost all he needed.
艾伦需要知道的，只是用一种机械化的方式来描述大脑如何存储文字、图片和技能，以及感官信号输入与肌肉信号输出之间的关系。
But ten years before, he had also had to fight his own way through to the crucial idea that Brewster glossed over;
然而在10年前，他还在用布鲁斯特的模糊想法，来与自己的想法斗争。
he had rejected the idea of a 'we' behind the brain that somehow 'did' this signalling and organising of the memory. The signalling and the organisation had to be all that there was.
当时他反对是大脑在传输和组织记忆，他认为记忆是本来就在那里的。