"Haldeman, Joe - None So Blind" - читать интересную книгу автора (Haldeman Joe)

barbed wire quickly without hurting himself or the animals. So each partition
winds up marking a comfortable-sized space for each use. Your computer does
that, too, but instead of barbed wire you see little rectangles or windows or
file folders, depending on your computer's religion.
The brain has its own partitions, in a sense. Cletus knew that certain physical
areas of the brain were associated with certain mental abilities, but it wasn't
a simple matter of "music appreciation goes over there; long division in that
corner." The brain is mushier than that. For instance, there are pretty
well-defined partitions associated with linguistic functions, areas named after
French and German brain people. If one of those areas is destroyed, by stroke or
bullet or flung frying pan, the stricken person may lose the ability--reading or
speaking or writing coherently--associated with the lost area.
That's interesting, but what is more interesting is that the lost ability
sometimes comes back over time. Okay, you say, so the brain grew back--but it
doesn't! You're born with all the brain cells you'll ever have. (Ask any child.)
What evidently happens is that some other part of the brain has been sitting
around as a kind of back-up, and after a while the wiring gets rewired and
hooked into that back-up. The afflicted person can say his name, and then his
wife's name, and then "frying pan," and before you know it he's complaining
about hospital food and calling a divorce lawyer.
So on that evidence, it would appear that the brain has a shepherd like the
computer-meadow has, moving partitions around, but alas, no. Most of the time
when some part of the brain ceases to function, that's the end of it. There may
be acres and acres of fertile ground lying fallow right next door, but nobody in
charge to make use of it--at least not consistently. The fact that it sometimes
did work is what made Cletus ask "Why aren't all blind people geniuses?"
Of course there have always been great thinkers and writers and composers who
were blind (and in the twentieth century, some painters to whom eyesight was
irrelevant), and many of them, like Amy with her violin, felt that their talent
was a compensating gift. Cletus wondered whether there might be a literal truth
to that, in the micro-anatomy of the brain. It didn't happen every time, or else
all blind people would be geniuses. Perhaps it happened occasionally, through a
mechanism like the one that helped people recover from strokes. Perhaps it could
be made to happen.
Cletus had been offered scholarships at both Harvard and MIT, but he opted for
Columbia, in order to be near Amy while she was studying at Julliard. Columbia
reluctantly allowed him a triple major in physiology, electrical engineering,
and cognitive science, and he surprised everybody who knew him by doing only
moderately well. The reason, it turned out, was that he was treating
undergraduate work as a diversion at best; a necessary evil at worst. He was
racing ahead of his studies in the areas that were important to him.
If he had paid more attention in trivial classes like history, like philosophy,
things might have turned out differently. If he had paid attention to literature
he might have read the story of Pandora.
Our own story now descends into the dark recesses of the brain. For the next ten
years the main part of the story, which we will try to ignore after this
paragraph, will involve Cletus doing disturbing intellectual tasks like cutting
up dead brains, learning how to pronounce cholecystokinin, and sawing holes in
peoples' skulls and poking around inside with live electrodes.
In the other part of the story, Amy also learned how to pronounce