In the 60s of the last, twentieth century, the young American Margaret Foos was a very famous person in her homeland. She has appeared on television more than once in the popular program "Amusing People". Crowds of medical experts followed her, trying to somehow explain the inexplicable - Margaret's ability to see, read, play, walk, run blindfolded.
Until the age of 14, Margaret Foos lived in a small town in Virginia. Her father worked for a railway company. Margaret's father said that he quite often had to watch his daughter play blind man's buff with friends. Even then, he was struck by her amazing ability to navigate the area while blindfolded, successfully avoiding collisions with large objects, for example, trees. When asked how she succeeds, Margaret said that she just sees everything. The father did not believe her, he even thought that his daughter was peeping from under the bandage. Then he himself put a blindfold on her eyes, but Margaret continued to see everything around, which greatly interested her father.
In January 1960, Mr. Foos demonstrated his daughter's unusual abilities before a panel of medical experts, claiming that Margaret's abilities were developed and strengthened through a kind of training. The girl completely trusted her father and followed his instructions. Blindfolding her eyes, he convinced his daughter that she could see through the bandage even the smallest objects. Three weeks later, the girl had already learned to distinguish between a thimble, a piece of refined sugar, and a needle. Further more. She even started reading the newspaper!
However, there was a slight hitch with reading. The girl couldn't manage to concentrate her inner vision on the lines. Then the father decided to cheat - he said that the lines were obscured by the smoke, which should simply be “blown away”. Margaret did just that. To her father's great amazement, after a couple of days, his daughter was able to read him an editorial from the local newspaper.
Initially, the medical commission was skeptical of Mr. Foos's claim. She even doubted the advisability of the examination. After all, who is this Foos? A simple railroad worker, very far from medicine, who assured them that he had taught his daughter to read and distinguish colors without using the eyes. Is that possible? But nevertheless, professional interest prevailed - the doctors asked Foos to confirm his statement about the unusual abilities of his daughter during a medical examination, and on the conditions proposed by the doctors themselves. On that memorable day, 14-year-old Margaret Foos entered the office - where 25 medical experts were waiting for her. The doctors looked with curiosity and disbelief at what seemed to them to be a completely normal healthy girl. At first they asked her various questions, then moved on to experiments. Moreover, the doctors themselves tied Margaret's eyes - first with a gauze-cotton bandage, then with a thick cloth in several rows and, finally, with a special tape, which was applied over the bandage to exclude the full possibility of peeping. Margaret withstood all tests brilliantly! She read passages from books, taken at random, read articles from newspapers and magazines, played checkers, accurately indicated the colors of bright advertising publications, accurately named all the objects that doctors "showed" to her. The longer the experiment lasted, the more the experts became confused. Finally, four hours later, they were forced to admit - yes, Margaret saw everything, although by all laws she should not have seen anything! It sounded like mysticism. Although one of the psychiatrists present at the experiments timidly suggested: perhapsIs the girl able to see in this way thanks to some new, unexplored part of the brain?
The phenomenon of Margaret Foos - the ability to see with a blindfold - has not been fully explained by experts. Just like another phenomenon - the ability to see with the skin.
Around the same, sixties of the last century, a sensational message came from Scotland. A four-year-old blind boy was taken to the clinic of Dr. Karl Koenig. The child's tragedy was also that he spoke poorly, was physically weak and generally lagged behind in development from his peers. The doctors decided on an unusual experiment. Trying to determine whether in the future the boy will be able to at least distinguish between chiaroscuro and shadow, they hung the child's bed, in which he spent almost all the time, with white sheets on four sides, so that extraneous light would not penetrate into this enclosed space. Then they shone the bright spotlight on the sheets. The light changed colors - it could turn blue, red, yellow. The operating time of the searchlight also changed. Thanks to such daily light manipulations, doctors were convinced thatthat the boy began to react first to the intensity of light, then to certain colors. The longer the experiment lasted, the oddly enough, the better the child's well-being became. Gradually he got stronger, learned to speak well, sing, recite poetry. Surprisingly, the little patient's skin became completely different - pink, firm, smooth. But the sensation was different. After a couple of months, the boy could already distinguish objects that doctors showed him in the light of a searchlight. And six months later, he almost without errors determined everything that was brought to him at a distance of up to two meters. In addition, he was already well-versed in space, he could walk around the ward, the corridors of the clinic without assistance, walked on his own in the courtyard, even tried to play football. The doctors were shocked - how did the blind child manage to adapt so quickly, to adapt to the life around him? What organ replaces his blind eyes? Observing the child, or rather, what success he achieves every day, convinced the specialists - the boy sees with his skin! By the way, over time, "skin" vision allowed him to become almost a full-fledged person. The "seeing" blind man even wrote a book in which he spoke about his fate.
Another phenomenon of unusual vision is worth mentioning. Thirty years ago, the blind young Indian Ved Mehta was talked about not only in his native Calcutta, but also on another continent - in America, where he came to study at a prestigious college. Fate treated him cruelly - at the age of three, Veda Mehta fell ill with meningitis and went blind. The boy's parents were desperate. But they soon became convinced that blindness, oddly enough, does not bother their son at all. He walked freely, played with his peers, and when he grew up, rode a bicycle through the crowded streets of Calcutta. After leaving to study in the United States, he constantly clashed with the college administration, which demanded that he, like all blind people, walk with a white cane. Every day he had to prove that he did not need care at all. By the way, the most compelling argument was his multi-day tour of the northern states,in which he did without assistance. Well, when he traveled all over America on his own, even inveterate skeptics had to admit that Ved Mehta is not blind at all, he just sees in some unusual way. How? The phenomenon man himself claimed that he seemed to see with his whole face, or rather, with the skin of his face. But he cannot explain how he does it!
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