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posted by martyb on Friday August 21 2015, @03:39AM   Printer-friendly
from the do-you-see-what-I-hear? dept.

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...


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  • (Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Friday August 21 2015, @06:58PM

    by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Friday August 21 2015, @06:58PM (#225978) Journal

    That is a possibility. I've just chalked it up to some deficiency on my part.

    I could make a list of my deficiencies - but there is already a list of people who have declared themselves to be my enemies here, LOL! No point in giving ammunition to those people who have no deficiencies, right?

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  • (Score: 2) by mhajicek on Friday August 21 2015, @09:25PM

    by mhajicek (51) on Friday August 21 2015, @09:25PM (#226040)

    I think it's like G.U.R.P.S. You have so many points to allocate; how would you like to spend them? People who are extraordinarily good at something often show a lacking in another area.

    --
    The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek