SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
By early childhood, the sight regions of a blind person's brain respond to sound, especially spoken language, a neuroscientist has found. Working with individuals who are blind offers cognitive researchers an opportunity to discover how nature and nurture, or a person's genes and their experience, sculpt brain function, the researcher says.
...
Bedny, an assistant professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, studied 19 blind and 40 sighted children, ages 4 to 17, along with Massachusetts Institute of Technology cognitive scientists Hilary Richardson and Rebecca Saxe. All but one of the blind children were blind since birth.They monitored the children's brain activity with functional magnetic resonance imaging while the children listened to stories, music or the sound of someone speaking an unfamiliar language. The blind children's vision portion of the brain, the left lateral occipital area, responded to spoken language, music and foreign speech -- but most strongly to stories they could understand. In sighted children and sighted children wearing blindfolds, that same area of the brain didn't respond.
The researchers concluded that blind children's 'visual' cortex is involved in understanding language.
The neuroplasticity this demonstrates bodes well for our future ability to accommodate and control cybernetic implants. Perhaps we can implant lab-grown mini-brains to supplement what our natural brains can't...
(Score: 3, Interesting) by RedBear on Friday August 21 2015, @05:09AM
Amusing anecdote, of total relevance:
I noticed each time I got a new pair of glasses that there would be a warping effect around the edges of the glasses, and my eyes would feel funny for a while, maybe a day or two, but then everything would go back to normal. Moving to an older or backup pair of glasses caused a similar effect, even if the prescription was pretty much identical. It was always around the edges mostly, which is why for a long time I preferred very large roundish frames.
I am prone to pondering on such things, so every now and then I pondered. I knew there was no known way of actually changing the eye to fix flawed vision (besides those new surgery options), nor did the retina change just because you changed your glasses.
Then one day, while driving with my wife in the car, I very suddenly blurted out, "It's your brain that gets used to new glasses, not your eyes!"
I had finally understood what I should have known all along, that it is the visual cortex that has this amazing ability to adapt to new visual conditions and translate what your eyes "see" into something in your brain that actually that gives you an accurate picture of the world. Every new pair of glasses is slightly different in shape and curvature, even if the prescription is the same. But after two or three days, the visual cortex is able to completely adapt, even to the point where I don't really see warping of things between wearing the glasses and taking them off. I know that warpage occurs, because I saw it when the glasses were new. But the visual cortex filters and hides that effect from my perception now.
Of course this was no genius revelation, since I'd already read about things like people getting used to seeing things literally upside down [theguardian.com] within a few days. I'm sure any neurologist or even an optometrist could have explained it to me quite easily if I'd asked. But it's always fun to figure something out on your own.
Yes, the visual cortex is extremely powerful and adaptable to different tasks. Apparently the visual cortex is also what allows someone to learn to "see" Braille dots with their fingertips, at least in people born blind. This link seems relevant: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8606771 [nih.gov]
¯\_ʕ◔.◔ʔ_/¯ LOL. I dunno. I'm just a bear.
... Peace out. Got bear stuff to do. 彡ʕ⌐■.■ʔ
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Francis on Friday August 21 2015, @09:55AM
People use the visual cortex for a lot of things.
I'm probably an extreme example, but I can't touch things and look at the same time and I have a huge problem trying to hear and look at the same time as well. I'm not sure why, but that never separated out correctly.
And good luck if I need to remember something at the same time that I'm looking at something.
To this day, whenever there's a loud noise, I get a brief flash of white before I get my vision back. Which is a relatively minor annoyance as opposed to in the past when I'd become functionally blind at random points when there were too many sounds and too much light.