Dermo-optical Perception: A Peek Down the Nose

Abstract

Science reporting in United States newspapers and mass-circulation mag-azines is more accurate and freer of sensationalism than ever before, with pseudoscience confined largely to books. A reverse situation holds in the Soviet Union. Except for the books that defended Lysenko's theories, Soviet books are singularly free of pseudoscience, and now that Lysenko is out of power, Western genetics is rapidly entering the new Russian biology textbooks. Meanwhile, Russian newspapers and popular magazines are sensationalizing science much as our Sunday supplements did in the 1920's. The Soviet citizen has recently been presented with accounts of fish brought back to life after having been frozen 5000 years, of deep-sea monsters that leave giant tracks across the ocean floor, of absurd perpetual-motion devices, of extraterrestrial scientists who have used a laser beam to blast an enormous crater in Siberia, and scores of similar stories.By and large, the press in the United States has not taken this genre of Soviet science writing seriously. But in 1963 and 1964 it gave serious attention to a sudden revival, in Russia's popular press, of ancient claims that certain persons are gifted with the ability to "see" with their fingers.The revival began with a report, in the summer of 1962, in the Sverdlovsk newspaper Uralsky Rabochy. Isaac Goldberg, of First City Hospital in Lower Tagil, had discovered that an epileptic patient, a 22-year-old girl named Rosa Kuleshova, could read

Vision in a Monkey without Striate Cortex: A Case Study

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Human Dermo-Optical Perception: Colors of Objects and of Projected Light Differentiated with Fingers

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