We hear it over and over again : As people go blind , their other senses compound . But there has been growing grounds that the brain is indeed far more plastic in its handling of data than was ever believed . This seems to be corroborate by a new study , which found that in blind people , parts of the mastermind usually associated with sight have beenrepurposed to process sound rather .
The enquiry , currently in pre - print onbioRxiv , highlights this incredible flexibility within the neural circuits that make up the brain . They test both blind people and sight the great unwashed by make them listen to three unlike recordings of human speech . The first clip was entirely understandable , the second was slightly strain but the words could still be recognize , while the third was altered beyond credit .
The player were then played the three dissimilar tracks while their brains were being mapped using magnetoencephalography ( MEG ) , which record the charismatic fields produced by the brain so as to build up a picture of activity . While both group of masses evidently indicate sign of brain activeness in the auditory section of the brain , the research worker found that in the brains of the unreasoning people , there was unclouded activity in the visual cortex too .
This is not actually the first clip researchers have found that region of the psyche can be repurposed in unsighted citizenry in order of magnitude to process audio . A discipline published in 2015 , for model , report how the visual lobes in the genius of blind minor were used to decode noise .
What is new about this in style survey , however , is the fact that the researcher were able-bodied to observe how the visual parts of the mind modulate their response when exposed to sound . As the scientists played the player the speech recordings , the neurons in the visual cortex of the blind people seemed to fire in synch with that of the voices , but only when it was intelligible . This , they argue , present that the optical part of the brain is being used to realize language .
The work clearly manifest the staggering ability of the brain to accommodate , but the researchers suspect that there is a demarcation line . They guess that while the processing of a new input can be altered , the rudimentary architecture of that region of the mentality is unlikely to exchange .
It is hop , however , that if scientists can read the change that do go on , it could lead to new handling for blind people .
[ H / T : New Scientist ]
