When she looked ahead，Florence Chadwick saw nothing but a solid wall of fog.Her body was numb (麻木的)．She had been swimming for nearly sixteen hours.

    Already she was the first woman to swim the English Channel in both directions.Now，at age 34，her goal was to become the first woman to swim from Catalina Island to the California coast.

    On the morning of July 4th，1952，the sea was like an ice bath and the fog was so thick that she could hardly see her support boats.The wind was strong and it was raining heavily.Against the cold water of the sea，she struggled on—hour after hour.Millions of people at home were watching her in front of the television.

    In one of the boats，her mother and her trainer tried their best to encourage her.They told her it wasn't much farther.But all she could see was fog.They urged her not to give up.She never had...until then.With only a half mile to go，she asked to be pulled out.

    After thawing her cold body several hours later，she told a reporter，“Look，I'm not excusing myself，but if I could have seen land I might have made it.” It was not tiredness or even the cold water that defeated her.It was the fog.She was unable to see her goal.

    Two months later，she tried again.This time，despite the same thick fog，she swam with all her strength and her goal clearly pictured in her mind.She knew that somewhere behind that fog was land and this time she made it! Florence Chadwick became the first woman to swim the Catalina Channel!  

    I remember my childhood summers fondly, as many of us do. Those golden days in which I would leave the house after a still sleepy, leisurely breakfast and come home only for lunch in the middle of a day spent entirely outdoors. We did not live in town and, thus, playmates were limited to siblings (兄弟姐妹) and the cousins who lived down the road.

    Our backyard became the playground in which our imaginations would run wild—turning those few acres into magical forests, the creek (小溪) into a violent river and our trusty dog, Rex, into the many roles of horse, monster and any other creature that we children did not want to play. By the end of the three months of summer break we were sunburned from our hours in the sun, full of the memories of a thousand magical moments and bonded to our siblings in a way that winter's forced hibernation (冬眠) never seemed to connect us.

    Today, I live on the same acreage that I did as a child. My children have the blessing of having the same grassy patches to scratch their bare feet as they run through it, the same creek to stomp(跺脚)through, and not the same dog—but their very own energetic pup to imagine away the days with.

    However, this is not the same world as it was twenty, thirty years ago. There are screens everywhere in the house to demand attention—televisions with hundreds of channels, computers with access to a thousand entertaining sites, tablets stocked with apps. There is also no longer the expectation of a stretch of an unscheduled three months. Their school friends tell competitive stories of carefully planned vacations, spending time traveling to all of the local attractions—various parks, the zoo, the science center, all of the festivals which come breezing through town. On the very first day of school they will be asked to list their favorite activities of the summer and no longer are these lists filled with things like finding wood to make a bridge over a creek or a day spent in imaginative play with their siblings. The lists are now full of trips, overscheduled days and “camps” that no longer offer a stay in nature.

    Our children have become used to being entertained every minute. In our house, we have limits on electronics and kick the kids outside on a nice day. Even as we try as parents to set limits and get our children out in nature, the new cry of childhood seems to be “I'm bored,” which is not really just meaning “I'm bored,” “but “Please find something to entertain me, as I no longer can entertain myself even for a short period of time.” Our children no longer know how to sit in silence, entertain themselves while even waiting for a few minutes and have lost the awe of nature as they have become addicted to screen time.

    We have made a choice in this household to do what is no longer expected of children in many households—we will ensure that there are days of “boredom.” We refuse to spend our days scheduling our children's every hour. There will be many days with no plans at all, when they will be sent outside with only the grass and the trees and their own imaginations to entertain them.

    The screens will be turned off and our children will find that times of quiet can be just as or even more entertaining. They will bond with their brother and sister, making memories that they will replay in their minds well into adulthood. Even though sunscreen will be religiously applied, they will leave summer with sunburned and scratches coming from climbing trees, stomping through creeks and chasing the dog in the field.

    This summer I will be giving my children the greatest gift of all—boredom. For inside boredom is the gift of getting to know your own mind, of finding comfort and joy in nature and in the realization that the greatest gifts are experience, not things.

    Few of us make money by losing sleep. But three graduate students at Brown University in Providence built a company around sleep deprivation(睡眠不足).

    Jason Donahue, Ben Rubin and Eric Shashoua were working late nights in Brown's business and engineering schools. They began thinking about ways to sleep better. They discovered they weren't alone in burning the midnight oil. Around 20% of Americans get less than six hours of rest a night.

    The friends imagined a smart alarm clock that could track how much time people spend in the most restorative(有恢复作用的) stages of the sleep cycle: REM (rapid eye movement) and deep sleep. What would it cost to design such a thing? Five years of research, 20 employees, $14 million and a whole lot of doubting from investors and scientists.

    Their company, Zeo, based in Newton, Mass, launched its product in June, 2009. The Zeo device uses a headband with tiny sensors(传感器) that scan your brain for signs of four sleep states-REM, light, deep and waking sleep. The smart alarm clock displays a graph of your sleep pattern and wakes you as you're not in REM sleep. In the morning you can upload the data to the company's Web site, and so track your sleep over time. Most of the feedback(反馈) comes in the form of Zeo's ZQ score showing how well you've slept.

    “Zeo allows people to unlock this black box of sleep,” says Dave Dickinson, a health-care CEO.

    Whether any of this actually improves sleep is up to the consumer, who will also need to make lifestyle changes like cutting out alcohol before bedtime or caffeine after 3 P.M.

    For now the company is selling Zeo online only. Dickinson also plans to spread it to countries such as Australia, where sleep deprivation approaches US levels.

    When asked about her childhood in the documentary Alive Inside, a 90-year-old woman with dementia(痴呆) replies, "I've forgotten so much." Filmmaker Michael Rossato-Bennett then plays music from her past for her. “That's Louis Armstrong,” she says. “He's singing When the Saints Go Marching In and it takes me back to my school days.” She then recalls exact details from her life.

Why does it happen? Music tends to accompany events that arouse emotions or otherwise make strong impressions on us — such as weddings and graduations. These kinds of experiences form strong memories, and the music and memories likely become intertwined(紧密相连) in our neural(神经的) networks, according to Julene Johnson, a professor at the University of California. Movements, such as dancing, also often pair with our experience of music, which can help form memories. Even many years later, hearing the music can bring back memories of these long-past events.

    As Alive Inside shows, music has this power even for many people with dementia. Researchers note that the brain areas that process and remember music are typically less damaged by dementia than other areas, and they think it may explain the phenomenon.

    They also pay attention to elderly people with dementia, especially those in nursing homes. "It's possible those long-term memories are still there," Johnson says, “but people just have a harder time accessing them because they're in a strange place and there are not a lot of circumstances in which someone could pull out those memories.”

    Johnson also notes that music is not universally useful for all people with dementia since there are some people with dementia whose brain area that recognizes music is damaged.

    Despite music's apparent benefits, few studies have explored its influence on memory recall in people with dementia. “It's really an untapped area,” Johnson says. Petr Janata is one researcher investigating the topic of music and memory. He says that scientists still do not have the answers for why and how music reawakens memories in people with dementia, but this phenomenon is real and it's just a matter of time before it's fully borne out by scientific research.

    When I was in primary school, I had an argument with a boy in my class. I thought that "I" was right and that "he" was wrong. But he thought "I" was wrong and "he" was right.

    The teacher asked him to stand on one side of her desk and me on the other. In the middle of her desk was a large and round ball. I could see it was black. She asked what color the ball was. "White," he answered.

    I couldn't believe the boy's answer, because from my side it was obviously black!

    The teacher told me to stand in the boy's place and told him to stand in my place. We changed our places, and then the teacher asked me what color the ball was. I had to answer, "White."

    It was a ball with two different colors. From his side it was white. Only from my side was it black.

    My teacher taught me a very important lesson that day: You must stand in other people's shoes and look at the situation through their eyes in order to truly understand their view.

    I had the meanest mother in the whole world. While other kids ate candy for breakfast, I had to have porridge, eggs or toast. When others had Coke and candy for lunch, I had to eat a sandwich. But at least I wasn't alone when I was sad. My sister and two brothers had the same mean mother as I did.

    My mother preferred to know where we were at all times. She had to know who our friends were and where we were going. We had to clean clothes and take a bath every day. The other kids got to wear the same clothes for days. We could not lie in bed "sick" in order to miss school.

    The worst is yet to come. We had to be in bed by nine each night and get up at eight the next morning. We couldn't sleep till noon like our friends. So while they slept, my mother was brave to break the Child Labour Laws. She made us work. We had to wash dishes, make beds, and learn to cook and all kinds of things at home. I believe she lay awake thinking up all things for us to do.

    My mother was a complete failure as a mother. Two of her children received higher education. None of us have ever been taken away by the police or divorced (离婚). She forced us to grow up into educated and honest adults. I am now trying to raise my three children this way. I am filled with pride when my children call me "mean". Why? Because now I thank God every day for giving me the meanest mother in the world.