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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.
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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: 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.