All this happened, more or less.

nutlet

бывают люди неотвязные будто ангина, после их ухода становится прохладно и на языке свинцовый привкус, бывают жаркие и быстрые как прилив крови к голове – после них тело липкое и перед глазами танцуют цветные полосы, бывают люди, поговорив с которыми, хочешь закрыть глаза, сесть по-турецки и долго раскачиваться из стороны в сторону.
одна моя подруга была похожа на корь – от нее у меня слезились глаза и поднималась температура, один мой виртуальный знакомый похож на тревожный просвет в облаках, другой похож на совершенного читателя, но это наверняка неправда, третий же пишет о чужих книгах, как о немытых упрямых сожителях, и похож на лилового замученного быка на деревенской корриде

nature_wonder

In a series of elegant experiments, starting in the early 1980s, Nottebohm and his colleagues
showed that , indeed, thousands of new neurons are added every day to the avian brain. They did so by, first, showing the production of new cells with thymidine labelling42; second, producing ultrastructural evidence that the new cells were neurons receiving synapses43; and last, in a technical tour de force, showing that the putative neurons responded to sound with action potentials44.In subsequent studies, they showed that the
axons of new neurons extended over long distances, that neuronal birth and death proceeded in parallel, that in both singing and nonsinging species neurogenesis was widespread throughout the avian forebrain — including
the hippocampus — and that in the latter structure it was modulated by environmental complexity and learning experience39–47. Charles G. Gross. Neurogenesis in the adult brain: death of a dogma. Science. Volume 1. Oct. 2000. http://www.nature.com/nrn/journal/v1/n1/pdf/nrn1000_067a.pdf

Iain McGregor and colleagues from the University of Sydney, Australia, found that rats would stop reacting to the smell of a cat that they had been exposed to repeatedly. Yet when they sniffed a new cat, the rats bolted back into their burrows and became extra vigilant.

Dissecting the rats' brains showed that the part that responds to cat pheromones became less active the more familiar they became with each cat. However, the brains of rats presented with the odour of a new cat became more active, confirming that the rodents reacted differently to the smells of individual cats (Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews, vol 32, p 1209).

You might call it our circadian eye. A handful of retina cells sense light, not for vision, but instead to reset our body clocks each day. Killing off these cells in mice leaves their sight unharmed, but throws their clocks out of whack, two new studies show.

Jolting these cells back into action might offer salvation to insomniacs, whose circadian cycles are slightly off, says Satchidananda Panda, a molecular biologist at the Salk Institute in San Diego, who led one study. Natural degeneration of these cells could also explain why insomnia often strikes the elderly. ( Read more... )

By deliberately scrambling a person's visual and tactile senses, it is now possible to give them an "out-of-body" experience.

Two procedures – which are the first to imitate an out-of-body experience artificially – use cameras to fool people into thinking they are standing or sitting somewhere else in a room. They provide the strongest proof yet that people only imagine floating out of their bodies during surgery or near-death experiences.
New Scientist, Aug 23, 2007.

Although the difference was slight, high-income children outperformed their less wealthy peers on both IQ tests and an exam designed to replicate achievement in various academic subjects. Lower income kids performed at a lower level than others in reading comprehension and mathematical calculations but were competitive in basic cognition, memory and reading skills, indicating that poverty may affect development at the level where different abilities must be combined, such as verbal skills and memory, in the case of reading comprehension. SciAm, May 18, 2007.

The increase in attention to unfamiliar events toward the end of the first year, which is now an established fact, implies a maturational change in brain organization and a parallel change in the ability to relate the representations acquired in the past to the present moment. This ability is called working memory. We now know that one component of the maturation involves the establishment of connections between structures in the temporal lobe and the prefrontal cortex.... The more mature brain enables eight-month-olds to hold in a working memory ciruit the schema of the objects they saw moments earlier.
...
A few years latr Nathan Fox and Sally Weiskopf affirmed this conclusion by repeatedly administering twelve problems requiring working memory to eight infants across the period from five to fourteen months of age. The results were beautiful. The robustness of working memory improved most between seven and ten months in each of the eight infants. The evidence from more than a hundred studies in different labs pints to the same conclusion. Sometime between six and ten months infants begin to "think" for the first time because brain sites that were unconnected in the young brain have become connected. The more mature brain permits the infant to find the representations relevant to a current experience and to keep the tow schemata active until they can be combined. If the cannot, the infant turs away. ibid. p. 77.

A fundamental principle governing the brain is that neurons respond to change. Changes in illumination or motion automatically activate circuits and provoke attention to the site of change, for that is where information is likely to reside. A reward, therefore, does not have to be something the animal needs, such as food, water, a mate, or relief from pain. Essintially, many events called "rewards" are punctiation marks that, like a white streak in a blue sky, interrupt the stream of experience and, through activation of many brain structures, facilitate the establishment of assosiations. ibid. 21