Page "learned" Paragraph 914

First of all, what is their evidence that the tactual apparatus was fundamentally undamaged??

( 1 ) When an object was placed in the patient's hand, he had no difficulty determining whether it was warm or cold, sharp or blunt, rough or smooth, flexible, soft, or hard ; ;

and he could tell, simply by the feel of it, whether it was made of wood, iron, cloth, rubber, and so on.

And he could recognize, by touch alone, articles which he had handled immediately before, even though they were altogether unfamiliar to him and could not be identified by him ; ;

that is, he was unaware what kind of objects they were or what their use was.

( 2 ) The patient attained an astonishing efficiency in a new trade.

Because of his brain injury and the extreme damage suffered to his sight, the patient had to train himself for a new line of work, that of a portfolio-maker, an occupation requiring a great deal of precision in the making of measurements and a fairly well-developed sense of form and contour.

It seems clear, when one takes into consideration the exceedingly defective eyesight of the patient ( we shall describe it in detail in connection with our second question, the one concerning the psychical blindness of the patient ), that he had to rely on his sense of touch much more than the usual portfolio-maker and that consequently that faculty was most probably more sensitive to shape and size than that of a person with normal vision.

And so the authors conclude: `` The conduct of the patient in his every-day life and in his work, even more than the foregoing facts ( mentioned above under 1 ), leave positively no room for doubt that the sense of touch, in the ordinary sense of the word, was unaffected ; ;

or, to put the same thing in physiological terms, that the performance-capacity of the tactual apparatus, from the periphery up to the tactual centers in the brain, -- that is, from one end to the other -- was unimpaired ''.