Actually studies have found that those who are totally blind, or who have lost vision at an early age do rewire those parts of the brain dedicated to vision into other tasks, and indeed the electrical activity is similar just triggered by other stimuli. I know that one of the studies was done at Western Michigan University and involved braille reading and MRIs.
Shelley L. Rhodes, M.A., VRT And Guinevere: Golden Lady Guide Dog guidinggolden@xxxxxxxxx Guide Dogs for the Blind Alumni Association www.guidedogs.comThe people who burned witches at the stake never for one moment thought of their act as violence;
rather they thought of it as an act of divinely mandated righteousness.The same can be said of most of the violence we humans have ever committed. -Gil Bailie, author and lecturer (b. 1944)
----- Original Message ----- From: "Estelnalissi" <airadil@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <bookshare-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> Sent: Thursday, February 19, 2009 8:39 PM Subject: [bookshare-discuss] OT Blindness and brain activity
Dear Booksharian Friends,I'm nearly finished proofreading and preparing a book called, The Brain Our Nervous System, for check in. It's an orderly, clear and brief description of its title and I think is designed to inform and tickle the curious bone of kids from about fourth to seventh grade.Some of the pictures are so organically complex, I can't imagine how to describe them meaningfully . For those I just wrote picture in brackets. Others I did my best to describe like saying something to the effect that the pons and medulla are shown in a shape like a two inch whole carrot standing on its tip. The pons is the bottom, thin part that goes down to a point and the medulla is the top, thicker half.The picture which grabbed my attention enough for me to write to you about it shows the electrical activity of the same brain with eyes open and closed. Red shows most activity and dark blue shows least. The pictures are both shaped like circles. In the brain with eyes closed, there's a little red at 10, 12, and 2 o'clock and lots of dark blue. In the brain with eyes open there's a large roughly rectangular blob of red with rounded corners that fills the space between 5 and 7 o'clock. The red at 10, 12 and 2 o'clock is much smaller in the eyes open brain and there's very little dark blue, although both brains are dark blue around the outward edges. . In general there's at least 5 times more electrical activity in the eyes open brain.I wonder what the pattern of electrical activity would look like in a blind person's brain. I know we transfer our activity to different parts of our brain than the visual receptors, as in touch while reading braille, and sound while travelling and listening to books and the environment. I wonder, though if the electrical activity in a blind person's brain, no matter how smart, ever equals that seen in a sighted person's brain, a person who merely has his eyes open.Yeah, I could google this, or research it, but I'm not all that curious. I was just wondering if any of you have ever learned about this or if you have comments.This is the kind of question Cindy Ro enjoys when we discuss. That's not why I brought it up, though. It just happened to jump out at me while working on this brain book. I can't wait to finish this book and get back to good old, easy, old, fiction, no pictures!Always with love, LissiTo unsubscribe from this list, send a blank Email to bookshare-discuss-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Put the word 'unsubscribe' by itself in the Subject line. To get a list of available commands, put the word 'help' by itself in the subject line.
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