----- Original Message ----- From: "Peter Meijer" <feedback@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <seeingwithsound@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> Sent: Friday, February 18, 2011 11:37 AM Subject: [The vOICe] Sight through sound with neuroscience Hi All, For your information. Appended is an article that appeared last week on the Hebrew University website. Best wishes, Peter Meijer Seeing with Sound - The vOICe http://www.seeingwithsound.com/winvoice.htm Hi All, For your information. Appended is an article that appeared last week on the Hebrew University website. Best wishes, Peter Meijer Seeing with Sound - The vOICe http://www.seeingwithsound.com/winvoice.htm Sight through sound with neuroscience. Most people know that different areas of the human brain control differentactions. However, most people don’t know that fully one-quarter of our neural “real estate” is devoted to the processing of visual perception. Together with his collaborators in the US and the Netherlands, Institute for Medical Research Israel-Canada (IMRIC) researcher Dr. Amir Amedi asked himself what happens to this vast “vision” area of the brain when — as in the case of blind people — no
visual data is received. The answer to this question opened his eyes — to a whole new theory of brain organization.“Our studies indicate that, in blind people, unused areas of the visual cortex are co-opted for other functions, particularly those related to verbal memory,” says Dr. Amedi, a Hebrew University-trained scientist who returned to Jerusalem after conducting postdoctoral research and teaching at Harvard Medical School,
and currently is a member of the Edmond and Lily Safra Center for BrainSciences. “Interestingly, this is something that the rabbis in the time of the Mishna already knew — in the Talmud, the rabbis suggested that rote memorization of the oral law should be entrusted to a blind person — because the blind were
known to have better memories than sighted individuals.”According to Amedi, this blurring of the lines separating various areas of the brain could have important implications for the development of technologies and treatment for the vision impaired. “Enormous amounts of money have been invested
in attempts to create a visual retinal prosthesis — a therapeutic system in which an electrical stimulus is applied directly to the visual cortex tosimulate the neural activity associated with sight,” Amedi says. “However, these
efforts have been largely unsuccessful so far — at least in part because thearea of the brain we’re trying to stimulate is already busy doing something else!”
Amedi proposes another paradigm for teaching the blind to see — one based on the well-documented fact that visual perception and memory improves when the visual stimulus is accompanied with simultaneous stimulation in the form of touch or sound. Working with both sighted and blind individuals, Amedi has demonstrated how people can learn to extract shape and localization information from visual
images converted into sounds — what Amedi calls “soundscapes”. “Our soundscapes vary according to three variables — frequency, time, and amplitude or loudness,” Amedi explains, adding that these sound patterns are generated automatically, as a mathematical representation of an object’sthree-dimensional characteristics. “With training, our subjects learn to crack the code, and can use these sounds to identify the visual constructs on which
they are based.” Interestingly, he further demonstrated that this cognitiveprocess takes place in the visual cortex’s area devoted to the identification of
objects, even in people who are congenitally blind. Eventually, Amedi says, this phenomenon could be used in a medical appliancethat would employ echolocation to help the blind see. “Theoretically, it could be possible to create high-tech audio ‘glasses’ that convert visual information
into audio signals that the blind can interpret,” he says. “Instead of being‘blind as a bat,’ he would effectively ‘see’ like a bat — using sound instead of
vision to guide him on his way.” Source URL: http://support.huji.ac.il/HeaderMenu/campaign-priorities-2/medical-research/Sight-Through-Sound/ ---------- To send a message to the list, send any message to blindza@xxxxxxxxxxxxx ---------- To unsubscribe from this list, send a message to blindza-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with 'unsubscribe' in the subject line --- The 'homepage' for this list is at http://www.blindza.co.za
