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This story is from the category The Brain
Date posted: 29/05/2007 Our ability to perceive the visual aspects of the environment around us, may actually depend a lot less on eyesight than we thought. When an object?s shape is identified in your mind, a part of your brain called the LOtv becomes very active. At first this area was thought to be purely visual, but several years ago Amir Amedi, now at Harvard Medical School, showed that it was activated equally as well by touch. Amedi has now gone even further than this and shown that hearing tones to outline a shape also makes the LOtv active in the exact same way. Amir and team taught seven sighted volunteers to use a device called The vOICe, which converts visual details into sound, using pitch to represent up and down, and volume to reflect brightness. The team then performed fMRI scans of the volunteers' brains, plus those of two expert blind users of the device, as they listened to these soundscapes. They also scanned seven control subjects, each of whom had been taught to associate specific soundscapes with certain shapes, but not how to interpret them. The LOtv only lit up in the skilled users who were actually decoding the soundscapes, not in those just associating them with shapes, showing that perception of the visual environment is in now way a purely visual or tactile sense and can potentially be linked to any sensory feedback vector. "It was a huge activation," says Amedi. "I think they're seeing." See the full Story via external site: www.newscientisttech.com Most recent stories in this category (The Brain): 04/02/2017: HKU scientists utilise innovative neuroimaging approach to unravel complex brain networks |
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