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

cholecystokinin, for the same reason that Cletus learned how to play the violin.
Their love grew and mellowed, and at the age of 19, between his first doctorate
and his M.D., Cletus paused long enough for them to be married and have a
whirlwind honeymoon in Paris, where Cletus divided his time between the musky
charms of his beloved and the sterile cubicles of Institute Marey, learning how
squids learn things, which was by serotonin pushing adenylate cyclase to
catalyze the synthesis of cyclic adenosine monophosphate in just the right
place, but that's actually the main part of the story, which we have been trying
to ignore, because it gets pretty gruesome.
They returned to New York, where Cletus spent eight years becoming a pretty good
neurosurgeon. In his spare time he tucked away a doctorate in electrical
engineering. Things began to converge.
At the age of thirteen, Cletus had noted that the brain used more cells
collecting, handling, and storing visual images than it used for all the other
senses combined. "Why aren't all blind people geniuses?" was just a specific
case of the broader assertion, "The brain doesn't know how to make use of what
it's got." His investigations over the next fourteen years were more subtle and
complex than that initial question and statement, but he did wind up coming
right back around to them.
Because the key to the whole thing was the visual cortex.
When a baritone saxophone player has to transpose sheet music from cello, he
(few women are drawn to the instrument) merely pretends that the music is
written in treble clef rather than bass, eyeballs it up an octave, and then
plays without the octave key pressed down. It's so simple a child could do it,
if a child wanted to play such a huge, ungainly instrument. As his eye dances
along the little fenceposts of notes, his fingers automatically perform a
one-to-one transformation that is the theoretical equivalent of adding and
subtracting octaves, fifths, and thirds, but all of the actual mental work is
done when he looks up in the top right corner of the first page and says, "Aw
hell. Cello again." Cello parts aren't that interesting to saxophonists.
But the eye is the key, and the visual cortex is the lock. When blind Amy
"sight-reads" for the violin, she has to stop playing and feel the Braille notes
with her left hand. (Years of keeping the instrument in place while she does
this has made her neck muscles so strong that she can crack a walnut between her
chin and shoulder.) The visual cortex is not involved, of course; she "hears"
the mute notes of a phrase with her fingertips, temporarily memorizing them, and
then plays them over and over until she can add that phrase to the rest of the
piece.
Like most blind musicians, Amy had a very good "ear"; it actually took her less
time to memorize music by listening to it repeatedly, rather than reading, even
with fairly complex pieces. (She used Braille nevertheless for serious work, so
she could isolate the composer's intent from the performer's or conductor's
phrasing decisions.)
She didn't really miss being able to sight-read in a conventional way. She
wasn't even sure what it would be like, since she had never seen sheet music
before she lost her sight, and in fact had only a vague idea of what a printed
page of writing looked like.
So when her father came to her in her 33rd year and offered to buy her the
chance of a limited gift of sight, she didn't immediately jump at it. It was
expensive and risky and grossly deforming: implanting miniaturized video cameras