Word: herons
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...head of the Technical Information Division at Brookhaven National Laboratory and a member of two panels of the Atomic Energy Commission, Puleston lives at marsh's edge in the Long Island village of Brookhaven. From the window he can see his 34-ft. yawl, the Heron, or look across Great South Bay to waterfowl feeding grounds. Bird painting is strictly a hobby, pursued in a corner of his dining alcove, usually amid the clatter and commotion set up by four children (aged five to 14) and an assortment of pets...
...Spanish proverb does not work out if doing nothing is carried too far. In a small attic office at McGill University in Montreal, Psychologist Woodburn Heron pays students $20 a day to lie on a soft bed in a soundproofed, air-conditioned cubicle. The students' eyes are covered by translucent goggles so that they see only a foggy glow. On their hands they wear cardboard gauntlets over thick gloves to deaden their sense of touch...
...Heron's purpose is to find out by experiment how the brain behaves when deprived of fresh and varying stimulation from the senses. The problem is a practical one. Men watching radar screens on which nothing changes for hours often fail to see a strange blip when one appears. Many auto drivers are "hypnotized" into crackups by long hours behind the wheel on monotonous highways...
...Heron is doing a specific and limited experiment, and he does not intend to speculate. But it has occurred to many observers that his technique of confusing and dimming the brain by starving it of sensation might be used, with proper modification, for darker purposes. It might explain the Communists' success in getting untrue but apparently willing "confessions" out of prisoners led into a courtroom right out of isolated cells...
Samuel Songo, a Mashona tribesman of Southern Rhodesia, has a left arm that is like a magnificent piece of ebony sculpture. But the rest of his body is stunted and crippled; his reedy heron's legs are too frail to carry him, and he can use only two fingers at the end of his wizened right arm. When Africa was darkest, such human culls as Sam Songo were staked out for the leopards to rid them from the tribe. But Sam was allowed to live and to learn to carve living figures in stone with those two fingers...