Rosa Kuleshova was born in 1941 in Nizhni Tagil, a town in the Urals, in the Soviet Union. Since several of her relatives were afflicted with congenital blindness, she began learning to read Braille with her fingers, in the evening, after she had finished her regular schoolwork. It soon became apparent that she had an extraordinary nervous and sensory system, because even though she had perfectly normal vision in her eyes, she could also see with her fingertips and every fibre of her skin.
Dr. Isaac Goldberg was astounded to discover that with her right middle finger she could read not only Braille characters, but also words written in ink or printed in a book or newspaper.
Under the supervision of the doctors at the Institute of Neurology in Moscow, experiments were made to determine whether she might be using some sort of deception. She was carefully blindfolded in such a way that she could not see through the space between the blindfold and her cheeks....Moving her finger along each line, she first read the headlines of a newspaper that was placed in front of her, and then, slowly but without hesitation, she read a whole article aloud.
The test was conclusive: there was no fraud. But most of those present thought that her finger was so sensitive that it was able to pick up faint tactile impressions from the printed letters. A sheet of glass was placed over the newspaper; she was unable to read the small print, but she read the headlines perfectly.
(From "One Hundred Thousand Years of Man's Unknown History" by Robert Charroux)
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