Question

Time on the brain: how you are always living in the past, and other quirks of perception
To investigate the perception of past and future in people without brain injuries, McDermott did MRI brain scans of 21 college students, asking them to recall a specific incident in their past and then envision themselves in a specific future scenario. Subjectively, the two feel very different. Yet the scans showed the same patterns of activity. Areas scattered all over the brain lit up; our temporal perception is distributed. As a control, McDermott also asked the students to remember events involving Bill Clinton (presumably, ones they were not personally involved in), and the patterns were very different. In a follow-up study, McDermott asked 27 students to anticipate an event in both a familiar and an unfamiliar place. The brain scan for the familiar one resembled the one for the act of remembering; the unfamiliar one was the odd man out.
The bottom line is that memory is essential to constructing scenarios for ourselves in the future. Anecdotal evidence backs this up. Our ability to project forward and to recollect the past both develop around age 5, and people who are good at remembering also report having vivid thoughts about the future.
MUSSER, G. Time on the brain: how you are always living in the past, and other quirks of perception. Scientific American. Disponível em: http://blogs.scientificamerican.com. Acesso em: 18 jun. 2015.
A expressão "The bottom line is" é uma forma linguística bastante comum na língua inglesa. No texto, ela é utilizada para
a) concluir o texto com uma ideia incontestável para prosseguir com a argumentação.
b) resumir a ideia central do parágrafo anterior no intuito de evitar equívocos de leitura.
c) retomar os dados citados no parágrafo anterior para calcular o saldo final da pesquisa.
d) revelar a ideia indispensável do texto a fim de destacar a base categórica argumentativa.
e) destacar a última linha do texto com o propósito de chamar atenção ao que está sendo dito.

Answer 1

d) revelar a ideia indispensável do texto a fim de destacar a base categórica argumentativa.