The ability to perceive different colors on the skin, as well as to read what is written is another secret and enigma of human consciousness.
Gift of Rosa Kuleshova
This phenomenon was most clearly manifested in Rosa Kuleshova (1940-1978). The unique abilities of R. Kuleshova have undergone the most thorough study by Soviet scientists. Numerous commissions did not make an unambiguous conclusion about the reality of the phenomenon.
However, it is impossible to explain all the manifestations of the phenomenon of Rosa Kuleshova with just one desire to become famous. Publications and reports about her were most often malevolent. Several publications described cases where the owner of rare abilities carried out direct peeping at objects that she had to identify with her skin.
Unfortunately, these exposing publications did not take into account the psychological circumstance that the possibility of performing from the stage, which opened up for Kuleshova, required a high level of work of the corresponding body systems. However, this level is known to fluctuate. And a person can go to primitive tricks to assert his prestige.
The world-famous Moscow specialist in the psychophysiology of color vision, Professor EB Rabkin, conducted an experiment that convincingly confirmed the ability of Rosa Kuleshova to distinguish colors with her fingertips.
A special device was created, into the viewing tube of which beams of any wavelength of the visible spectrum can be fed. The wavelength was changed using special knobs with corresponding marks. Moreover, the examination of color vision by means of EB Rabkin's spectroanomaloscope can be carried out in such a way that the subject does not know which wavelength the experimenter sets.
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The viewing tube of the spectroanomaloscope ends with an eyepiece, the diameter of which is so small that it can be completely covered by the pad of the index finger. In EB Rabkin's experiments with Rosa Kuleshova, instead of looking through the eyepiece, the subject covered it with her index finger.
Rosa's eyes were, of course, blindfolded, and it was possible to see the color supplied through the device only by directly pressing the eye to the eyepiece. Rabkin himself set different wavelengths on the handles outside the subject's vision zone and asked Rosa what color she perceived.
The result of this experiment was a protocol drawn up in such a way that one column contained the designation of the wavelengths in the sequence of their presentation, and the other - the visible colors called the Rose. There were no errors recorded in the protocol. This experiment left no doubt that the so-called "skin vision" really exists.
It is interesting that Rosa Kuleshova acquired her abilities deliberately. Basically, she was training. It happened in a boarding school for the blind, where she worked. She found the process of blind reading a special text interesting, and she decided to learn how to read an ordinary text with her fingers.
It can be assumed that she possessed some abilities in this regard and, in particular, high skin sensitivity, on the basis of which the mastery of the skill of “skin vision” was much faster than in other people.
Perhaps this was facilitated by those properties of the nervous system that were associated with its main disease - epilepsy. In any case, when Rosa Kuleshova fell into the hands of researchers, her phenomenal ability to “see with her skin” was formed by her at a high level and no special training was required to study this ability.
The phenomenon of “skin vision” is widely described - and not only in experiments with Rosa Kuleshova. Currently, psychologists work with blind people, teaching them to draw. Children show especially good results in creativity. According to their stories, each color carries its own amount of heat and energy.
Other unique
Long before the 60s of the last century in various countries there were cases when people could "see" not only with their eyes. There are also expert observations, and the results of these observations are widely known.
The first white people to land on the islands of Samoa were skeptical of the persistent stories of the natives that some of the blind "see" with their skin. As proof, the natives brought several blind people to the white, who described in detail the appearance of the aliens. “Just another trick of the treacherous natives,” the all-knowing whites decided for themselves.
The possibilities of the blind natives were recorded in the ship's logs, in memoranda to the Admiralty of France, in reports to the king, but no one paid special attention to this. Only reliable documents remained - ship logs, memoranda, written eyewitness accounts stored in the archives and testifying that some Samoans really could not "see" with their eyes.
In France, shortly after the end of the First World War, Dr. Jules Romain, who quite by chance managed to get acquainted with some evidence of people who could "see" without the help of their eyes, conducted a series of experiments to see for himself how true these documents are. The results of the experiments turned out to be so interesting that he decided to continue the experiments, which he did then for many years.
Patiently examining hundreds of blind people, Dr. Romain found that some of them could distinguish between light and shadow, some could distinguish the color of the objects they felt, and some could practically “see” their surroundings.
As a result of repeated experiments, Roman found out that some of the subjects had photosensitivity on small areas of the skin. Among them were those who had the greatest sensitivity to the tips of the fingers, there were those who "saw" the skin of the cheek, nose.
At the same time, the behavior of patients at sessions on different days was not the same - the next day after a brilliantly conducted experiment, the patient could either poorly distinguish colors, or completely ceased to "see"; everything depended on his emotional and physical condition.
Dr. Romain had occasion to carry out his experiments in the presence of such well-known (and extremely skeptical) witnesses as Anatole France, who, as he himself admitted, came to laugh and left stunned by what he saw.
Dr. Roman's explanation of what was happening was, of course, in the spirit of the scientific views of those years. He was sure that "seeing" without eyes is quite possible due to the presence of microscopic nerve endings in the skin - Ranvier's obscure discs. These nerve endings, Dr. Roman believed, could evolve into a complex form of pseudo-vision.
Romain finished his work in 1924. His scientific colleagues rejected his reports and research as "unscientific" and "incomprehensible" and took a wait-and-see attitude "wait and see."
Long-term experiments of Dr. Romain in no way, in turn, can be considered the first attempts of physicians to understand the ability of individuals to "see" with the skin. The famous neuropathologist and psychiatrist Cesare Lombroso also did not ignore this phenomenon. He wrote about his experiments on the study of this riddle in the book "What After Death?"
In this book, he described the case of a 14-year-old girl who was healthy and normal in every respect. Suddenly she developed and began to develop symptoms of hysteria. The treatment did not help, her condition deteriorated rapidly - from indigestion and vomiting to complete inability to eat, from rapid weight loss to convulsions.
Three months later, the girl went blind. At the same time, she developed an amazing ability to "see" without the help of her eyes. As a result of research carried out by Dr. Lombroso and the family doctor, it was found that the girl "sees" her nose and left earlobe. To exclude the possibility of peeping, doctors covered her eyes with a thick bandage and placed objects at an angle that completely excluded the possibility of seeing them with their eyes.
Despite this, the girl could read the texts shown to her, describe the objects presented to her, determine their color. Subsequently, thanks to the efforts of the doctors, the girl recovered and her amazing ability to “see” without the help of her eyes disappeared. Her eyesight, however, was not fully restored, she saw badly.
In 1808, in Lyon, a neuropathologist and psychiatrist, Dr. Petetan, published in the newspaper "Electricity Animal" a report on his observation of eight women who, to varying degrees, could "see" with the tips of their fingers, and one of them "saw" an area of the abdominal skin in the solar plexus area.
In 1956, in Scotland, neuropathologist Karp Koenig from Camghill observed a blind boy who could "see" objects, distinguish the color of the skin of his hands and face.
In 1957, the book "Face to Face" was published by Atlantic-Little Brown. Its author, a young Indian Ved Mehta, tells about himself. At the age of three, he fell ill with meningitis and went blind. But later he acquired and developed the ability to “see” his surroundings with the help of his face and forehead. At the same time, he "saw" quite well, so that he could safely ride a bicycle through the crowded streets of the city.
Then he becomes a student at a US college, where he often quarreled with the administration, insisting that he, like all blind people, carry with him a white cane, which, as he said, he did not need at all. It is known that he graduated from college, rode his bike all over America, went on hiking a lot without any help.
He was repeatedly subjected to medical examinations, and the fact of his complete blindness in both eyes was confirmed by various specialists, who determined that he "sees", in addition to the skin of his face and forehead, also the skin of his palms and fingertips.
In 1960, the medical board at the Veterans Administration Center in Ellerson, Virginia, was approached by Mr. Foos, a recycling worker at the local railroad company. He told doctors about his daughter, who could see while blindfolded.
He often watched children playing blindfolds, and he noticed that some blindfolded children were better oriented than others, successfully avoiding collisions with large objects, such as trees. His daughter Margaret, playing with other children, was so successful in avoiding obstacles while blindfolded and in finding her goal that at first Mr. Foos even suspected that she was peeping from under the blindfold or through it.
Then he personally put a tight bandage on her eyes, but Margaret still continued to “see” the environment, which greatly interested her father. Several other children seemed to have this ability as well, but not to the same extent as Margaret. And then his father, a railway worker, a person far from medicine, decided to further develop Margaret's ability to "see" without the help of his eyes.
He began to train his daughter: he blindfolded her and suggested that she would see everything anyway, and asked her to believe in her own abilities. After just three weeks of daily training, the girl learned to distinguish between large objects - tables, chairs, doors, and then small books, watches, hats, piles of paper. Soon she began to determine the color of objects, the pattern of fabrics, and then read texts.
True, she did not succeed in the latter for a long time, she could not “focus her vision” on the lines. Then the father resorted to a trick: he told her that the lines were obscured by the smoke, which should be "blown away." Margaret did just that, and, to the great amazement of the father and the girl herself, this problem was solved - she was able to read the newspaper text blindfolded.
To say that the doctors of the center immediately reacted to the story of Mr. Foos with suspicion and doubted the expediency of the research is to say nothing. To them this story seemed complete absurdity. But in the end, Mr. Foos managed to convince the doctors to look at the girl, and they offered their entire experimental conditions.
They themselves blindfolded Margaret as they saw fit. The blindfold on the eyes consisted not only of ordinary cotton swabs and bandages, but also of a special adhesive tape, applied over the blindfold in several rows to exclude any possibility of peeping.
And in these conditions, Margaret Foos incredibly surprised the experimenters. She read random Bible passages, newspaper and magazine passages, identified colors and described designs in various advertising brochures, played checkers, and named any items presented to her by doctors. The well-known observer Drew Pearson, who was present at the experiments, then wrote in the newspaper about how one of the expert doctors said that there seemed to be a need to revise the existing theory of vision. But, apparently, this time the scientists used the principle of "Occam's razor".
In 1964, Time magazine published an article by the American professor of psychology R. Yutz about the results of experiments with 28-year-old P. Stanley, who was able to determine the color of her fingers even through black rubber gloves worn on her hands. object with infrared rays.
In 1984, the Italian medical journal "General del Academici di Medici" published a report on the observation of a 14-year-old village girl by a group of doctors, with whom attacks of hysteria began to occur. After the attack, she fell into a somnambulistic state and could, with the help of the skin of her hands, with a blindfold, distinguish the colors of objects, cloth ribbons, and color reproductions.
In 1986, a documentary film "The Touch" about the blind and deaf Alexander Suvorov was shown on Central Television. The diagnosis is total deaf-blindness. Sounds scary. But A. Suvorov "sees" - not quite perfectly, but enough to be free to navigate in the environment. He began to "see" after several years of studying with Juna, although the doctors clearly confirm that he is blind, that is, he still does not see anything with his eyes.
There are many hypotheses with the help of which researchers are trying to explain the essence of the phenomenon of "skin vision". Among them there are purely physiological, explaining the ability to "see" without the help of the eyes by the sensors available in human skin, which in a certain situation take over the functions of the eye.
The telepathic hypothesis explains this phenomenon by the fact that a person who “sees” not with his eyes receives information about the world around him from other people by telepathic means. The clairvoyance hypothesis assumes the receipt of information directly from the general energy-informational field using an organ called the "third eye".
There is a hypothesis that explains this ability in some people with an existing or previous disease of the central nervous system. As a result of such a disease, a person begins to "see" through the eyes of his energetic double - that double, which at the moment of clinical death of a person separates from the physical body and gives the dying person the opportunity to see himself from the outside.
From the book "Secrets of the Human Psyche"
