The main trouble lay in the fact that it was apparently impossible to
transmit a concept directly from Brain A to Brain B unless the basic
building blocks of the concept were already present in Brain B. Raphael
Poe, for instance, had spent a long time studying Russian, reading
Dostoevski, Tolstoy, and Turgenev in the original tongue, familiarizing
himself with modern Russian thought through the courtesy of _Izvestia_,
_Pravda_, and _Krokodil_, and, finally, spending time in the United
Nations building and near the Russian embassy in order to be sure that he
could understand the mental processes involved.
Now, science has a language of its own. Or, rather, a multiplicity of
languages, each derived partly from the native language of the various
scientific groups and partly of borrowings from other languages. In the
physical sciences especially, the language of mathematics is a further
addition.
More than that, the practice of the scientific method automatically
induces a thought pattern that is different from the type of thought
pattern that occurs in the mind of a person who is not scientifically
oriented.
Lenny's mind was a long way from being scientifically oriented. Worse, he
was a bigot. He not only didn't know why the light in his room went on
when he flipped the switch, he didn't _want_ to know. To him, science was
just so much flummery, and he didn't want his brain cluttered up with it.
Facts mean nothing to a bigot. He has already made up his mind, and he
doesn't intend to have his solid convictions disturbed by anything so
unimportant as a contradictory fact. Lenny was of the opinion that all
mathematics was arcane gobbledygook, and his precise knowledge of the
mathematical odds in poker and dice games didn't abate that opinion one
whit. Obviously, a mind like that is utterly incapable of understanding a
projected thought of scientific content; such a thought bounces off the
impregnable mind shield that the bigot has set up around his little area
of bigotry.
Colonel Spaulding had been aware of these circumstances since the
inception of the Operation Mapcase. Even though he, himself, had never
experienced telepathy more than half a dozen times in his life, he had
made a study of the subject and was pretty well aware of its limitations.
The colonel might have dismissed--as most men do--his own fleeting
experiences as "coincidence" or "imagination" if it had not been for the
things he had seen and felt in Africa during World War II. He had only
been a captain then, on detached duty with British Intelligence, under
crusty old Colonel Sir Cecil Haversham, who didn't believe a word of "all
that mystic nonsense." Colonel Haversham had made the mistake of
alienating one of the most powerful of the local witch doctors.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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