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posted by janrinok on Thursday October 03 2019, @10:28PM   Printer-friendly
from the didn't-hear-that-coming dept.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

The brain has a way of repurposing unused real estate. When a sense like sight is missing, corresponding brain regions can adapt to process new input, including sound or touch. Now, a study of blind people who use echolocation—making clicks with their mouths to judge the location of objects when sound bounces back—reveals a degree of neural repurposing never before documented. The research shows that a brain area normally devoted to the earliest stages of visual processing can use the same organizing principles to interpret echoes as it would to interpret signals from the eye.

[...] The researchers asked blind and sighted people to listen to recordings of a clicking sound bouncing off an object placed at different locations in a room while they lay in a functional magnetic resonance imaging scanner. The researchers found that expert echolocators—unlike sighted people and blind people who don't use echolocation—showed activation in the primary visual cortex similar to that of sighted people looking at visual stimuli.

That means, the "visual" cortex seems to have applied its spatial mapping ability to a different sense, the researchers report today in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. And the more a participant's brain activity aligned with this spatial map during listening, the better they were at guessing the location of the object in the recording from its echo. The finding reveals unrecognized neural flexibility, the authors say, and suggests the brain can be trained to make expert use of spatial information, even if it doesn't come through the eyes.

doi:10.1126/science.aaz7018

-- submitted from IRC


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 03 2019, @11:09PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 03 2019, @11:09PM (#902466)

    These robot subs are crap. So much so that I would prefer "a quality aristachu sub" (TM).

  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Thursday October 03 2019, @11:12PM (1 child)

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Thursday October 03 2019, @11:12PM (#902468)

    Back when I had good hearing, apparently I would unconsciously echolocate. It showed up places like walking along the back of an auditorium, when passing a sound absorbing panel the first time, I almost fell into it - apparently I had been unconsciously using the ambient noise echos off the wall to help maintain a constant distance from the curving wall as I walked along it and when they disappeared, that impromptu navigational aide turned against me.

    Similar things like "spidey sense" that someone is standing in a doorway behind you can come from hearing the ambient noise blocked by their body.

    Then old age and deafness sets in and all we can do is yell at the kids to stay off the lawn.

    --
    🌻🌻 [google.com]
    • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 04 2019, @12:57AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 04 2019, @12:57AM (#902494)

      I'm vision impaired, and while I can't do this, I know a handful of people who can. They literally walk around and do things while making various noises, depending on the environment. People have done it for decades, but Daniel Kish gets a lot of the credit for making it widely known for decades. Using noises, one of my good friends can describe solid objects across the room and navigate spaces without his animal, as long as it isn't too loud or has similar sounding noise. It an be quite surreal for people to watch him navigate spaces unable to see obstacles but avoiding them or to find out he is blind after watching him do so, especially given the idea of helplessness many people have for disabled people.

      Here is a demonstration: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mGgtRG2da1c [youtube.com]

  • (Score: 3, Informative) by c0lo on Friday October 04 2019, @12:20AM (1 child)

    by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Friday October 04 2019, @12:20AM (#902484) Journal

    The finding reveals unrecognized neural flexibility, the authors say

    Unrecognized, you say? What stone were those authors living under? That's evident for such a long time already!
    ...
    Take the example of the hindsight view, always accurate and using neurons which were used before for thinking a wrong thing (which is worse before than not using them at all)

    (large grin)

    --
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
    • (Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Friday October 04 2019, @01:54AM

      by barbara hudson (6443) <barbara.Jane.hudson@icloud.com> on Friday October 04 2019, @01:54AM (#902518) Journal
      Gotta agree. There are blind kids who taught themselves to echolocate, there are schools for the visually impaired that teach echolocation, and anyone can experience it with a bit of practice. Just stand on a sidewalk with buildings on both sides of the street, close your eyes, and start making loud clicks with your tongue against your upper palate as you turn your head.

      You'll quickly learn to distinguish the buildings closer to those further away, or to the street. Two minutes, 5 minutes tops.

      Same as walking along the street with your eyes closed - the ambient sounds, the echoes of traffic off buildings, etc, you'll have an overall picture of the area. The hard part is the nearest stuff - where's the edge of the sidewalk (on either side, or the corner). That's where a dog (even on a leash - no special harness needed) comes in.

      This works for both low vision and blind, and isn't lost when vision returns, so it's not correct to think that an area of the brain is repurposed only in the blind - or that its repurposed at all. That part of the brain builds a picture of the environment - whether the input is visual, audio, or both (audio input contributes even in sighed people).

      --
      SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
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