"Thomas A. Easton - Let There Be Light" - читать интересную книгу автора (Easton Thomas A)

Remember Evelyn Cyril Gordon? No? How about Scar Gordon? Or maybe you recall Oscar
Gordon better? By whatever name, the one his parents gave him, the one tacked on by his army buddies,
or the one given him by that beautiful stranger, he was the hero of Heinlein's "Glory Road. His adventures
made a fine tale, a fun tale, but without his "eyes behind"—one Rufo—and a certain hyper-dimensional
suitcase with all of Neiman-Marcus stuffed inside it, the story would have been proverbially nasty,
brutish, and short, as well as vastly less entertaining. But was it Rufo or the bag of tricks that brought him
through, successful in his quest, safe, and loved?
It wasn't the bag of tricks. That disappeared almost as soon as the trouble started. But Rufo? The
"eyes behind"? He helped in other ways too, but that was the way that mattered. Heinlein effectively gave
Oscar Gordon eyes in the back of his head in just the way that most of history's heroes have had them, in
just the way that an army patrol has them—a rear guard.
Would you believe a single hero? A one-man patrol? Maybe, but you wouldn't want to be that man.
He'd be too easily ambushed and killed. Now. But soon—five years? ten?—he may be possible.
Scientists now are working on vision replacements for the blind that could be used to give a man a third
eye.
Perhaps most reminiscent of science fiction is what might be called the "brain-jack" approach to the
problem. Put simply, nerve cells are known to communicate by electrical impulses.* (*Chemical
impulses, actually. But they're always accompanied by electrical pulses so the difference needn't concern
us.)
They can be activated .by electrical stimuli and their own activity may be used to electrical sensors.
And, accordingly, innumerable stories have been written in which the decision-making capability of the
human brain is combined with the prodigious calculating capacity of the digital computer by using
electrical stimulators and sensors to read in, formation into and out of the brain. Some of those stories
have actually used the notion of a plug, perhaps mounted in the forehead and looking rather like the
socket of a radio tube, to link a computer directly to the cells of the brain. Others have mentioned
induction fields such as might be set up between a set of small transformers implanted under the scalp and
another set in a helmet. Still others have suggested tendrils or needles that would penetrate the scalp or
skull and establish their connections with the nerve cells as the occasion demanded. These notions are
science fiction.
A few scientists, however, are working along these lines. Not that they're trying to mate man and
computer. So far they've done no more than apply small, square arrays of tiny electrodes to the surface
of the visual cortex (that portion of the cerebrum which processes visual data) and provide patterned
stimulation to the nerve cells there. In experiments on human beings they have been able to present letters
of the alphabet and have their subjects report that they could actually "see" them. The images were not
really clear—after all, the electrical stimuli were affecting vastly greater numbers of cells than are normally
stimulated by similar images falling on the retina of the eye—and the sensation was not precisely that of
vision, but a limited amount of information was getting through. The "brain-jack" works.
But not very well. Hook up that electrode array to a TV camera and maybe you could read. But you
wouldn't be able to appreciate a Playboy nude. For that it takes another sort of approach. One that,
although the information is still limited, can provide more visual information with less risk and fewer
technological problems. A group of scientists in San Francisco has developed a system using a TV
camera, some electronic circuitry, and a patch of skin on the belly or back or thigh, and though the
system is being tested for use on blind (and blindfolded) subjects, there is a distinct possibility that it
could be used to provide a "natural" sort of rear-view vision to a normally-sighted person.
Except for those researchers interested in implanting electrodes directly into the brain, most of the
scientists working on the problem of vision replacement are focusing on ways of using the skin as a
replacement or substitute for the retina. For instance, the Linville-Bliss Optacon uses photocells which,
when passed over a line of print such as this, drive 144 small vibrators fastened to the fingertips and
enable the blind to read. Another system uses a TV camera to drive an array of vibrators mounted on the
forehead.