My husband Jeff and I moved into our new home in Scottsbluff last year just before Christmas. I did not have the time or energy to carry out my traditional Christmas decorating and baking activities. What was the point, anyway? It was going to be a lonely Christmas after all.

    However, the neighborly nature of west Nebraska residents started to trickle (陆续来临) in.

    There was a knock on the door one evening. It was Jeff's new colleague, John Smith, and his wife, Phyllis. The Smiths had stopped by to welcome us to town with a loaf of homemade bread. They pointed out a package on the porch (门廊). Apparently the doorbell wasn't working in the cold snowy weather and we had missed a visit from the Browns, our across-the-street neighbors, who brought us a Christmas card and more Christmas cookies.

    Then, we received an invitation to share a Christmas Eve meal with our neighbors, Ernie and Nancy Sommer, and their guest—a 90-year-old lady, who also had no family in the immediate area with whom to spend the holiday.

    I was so grateful for these gestures of welcome, especially during the holidays.

    This year, we were again unable to be with our families for Christmas. The distance and work schedules just made things too difficult. Knowing that sense of Christmas isolation all too well, we decided to try to round up some other folks who were alone in the holidays.

    Lonely people are all around us, but most of us seldom notice them. Just take a look around you. Sometimes, the smallest kind gesture can make a world of difference.

    The US will have a new president this fall. Voters will decide between the Democratic candidate (候选人), Hillary Clinton, and Donald Trump of the Republicans.

    But the voting is not a must for each person in the US. So quite a lot of people choose not to vote, especially the young generation. According to Fox News, one-in-five young voters between the ages of 18 and 35 said clearly that they wouldn't vote for either of the two candidates. Just 12 percent of voters aged 35-54, and only nine percent of voters aged 55 and older said the same thing.

    This is not only because young people don't like Clinton or Trump, according to the Fortune magazine. The truth is that they are traditionally less likely to vote than their parents.

    “Young people are not at an age in their life when they think politics or government has anything to do with them,” said Rodd Freitag, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, US. “But for the older age groups, they have a home, they pay taxes (税), they care about schools and the community.”

    Many believe that the civic (公民的) education of an American youth is another reason why they don't vote.

    Students usually just do community services like cleaning the neighborhoods. This means they haven't learned how to link real life problems to politics through voting, according to Christopher Beem, a politics professor at the Pennsylvania State University.

    He said the country needs to help young people learn how to take part in politics and get them to see that they can make a difference.

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    Why do we dream? It's a question researchers have been studying for years. Now new research suggests that some dreams may result from the brain's effort to keep learning, even as we sleep.

In a study in Boston,100 volunteers were trained for an hour on a maze(迷宫). They tried to find their way through the difficult puzzle as quickly as possible. Then half of the volunteers were allowed to sleep for 90 minutes. The other half stayed awake, reading or relaxing. The ones who slept were asked to describe their dreams when they woke up.

    After the rest, the volunteers were asked again to solve the maze. Those who hadn't slept showed no improvement or did even worse after the break. Sleepers who didn't report any maze­related dreams did better but showed only a little improvement. However, four nap­takers who reported dreaming about the maze showed a surprising improvement. They scored 10 times higher after sleeping and dreaming about the maze.

    Even though the number of dreamers was small, the researchers noted that the gap in learning between the dreamers and non­dreamers was so wide that the finding was significant(有意义的).

The dreamers had all performed poorly on the test before dreaming about it. That suggests that struggling with a task might be the trigger that leads the sleeping brain to focus on it and work on how to deal with it.

    "It's almost as if your brain is going through everything that happened today," Dr Stickgold, a scientist at Harvard Medical School, said. "The things you're obsessed(迷住) with are the ones that your brain forces you to continue to do with."

    When Oliver Sacks, 82, died on Aug 30 at his home in New York City, the world was saddened by the loss of a brilliant neurologist (神经学者)and a truly beautiful mind.

     London-born Sacks was most famous for his writing. A Forbes obituary (讣告)calls him "one of the greatest writers of science of the past 50 years. Maybe the greatest".

    In his best-selling 1985 book The Man Who Mistook His Wife far a Hat, Sacks described man who could not tell the difference between his wife's face and his hat, because his brain had difficulty telling what he saw.

    In 2006, Discover magazine ranked it among the 25 greatest science books of all time, declaring, "Lots of neuroscientists now looking into the mysteries of the human brain cite (列举)this book as their greatest inspiration."

     His 1973 book. Awakenings, is about a group of patients who were frozen in a decades-long sleep until Sacks tried a new treatment The book led to a 1990 movie in which Sacks by Robin Williams. It was nominated (提名)for Academy Awards.

    Another book. An Anthropologist on Man、published in 1995, described cases like that of a painter who lost his color vision in a car accident but found new creative power in black-and-white images. Sacks also wrote the story of 50-year-old man who suddenly regained sight after nearly a lifetime of blindness. The experience was a disaster. The man's brain could not make sense of the visual world. After a full and rich life as a blind person, he became "a very disabled and miserable (悲惨的）sighted man," Sacks wrote. "When he went blind again, he was rather glad of it."

    Despite the drama and unusual stories. Sacks' books were not meant to be freak shows. "Oliver Sacks humanizes illness…he writes of body and mind, and from every one of his case studies there shows a feeling of respect for the patient and for the illness," Roald Hoffinann, a Nobel Prize-winning chemist, said in 2001.

     When Sacks received the Lewis Thomas Prize for science writing in 2002, the citation (荣誉状)declare, "presses us to follow him into unknown areas of human experience and forces us to realize, once there, that we are facing only oureclves."

    In 1973, I was teaching elementary school. Each day, 27 kids entered "The Thinking Laboratory." That was the name students voted for after deciding that "Room 104" was too dull.

    Freddy was an average student, but not an average person. He had the rare balance of fun and compassion(同情). He would laugh the loudest over fun and be the saddest over anyone's misfortune.

    Before the school year ended, I gave the kids a special gift, T-shirts with the words "Verbs Are Your friends" on them. I had advised the kids that while verbs may seem dull, most of the fun things they do throughout their lives will be verbs.

     Through the years, Pd run into former students who would provide updates on old classmates. I learned that Freddy did several jobs after his graduation from high school and remained the same caring person I met forty years before. Once, while working overnight at a store, he let a homeless man sleep in his truck. Another time, he lent a friend money to buy a house.

    Just last year, I was conducting a workshop when someone knocked at the classroom door. A woman excused the interruption and handed me an envelope. I stopped teaching and opened it up. Inside were the "Verbs" shirt and a note from Freddy's mother. "Freddy passed away on Thanksgiving. He wanted you to have this."

    I told the story to the class. As sad as it was, I couldn't help smiling. Although Freddy was taken from us, we all took something from Freddy.