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Sensory systems

Do you hear what I see?

Nature volume 508, pages 461–462 (2014)Cite this article

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Researchers have found evidence that the representation of auditory and tactile information in the brains of blind people shows strong similarities to the way in which visual information is represented in sighted people.

Almost one-quarter of the brain is normally devoted to processing visual information: reading text, recognizing faces, following the Sunday match, and much more. The brain's visual cortex contains specialized regions devoted to processing motion, text, faces, scenes, objects and even the position and movement of bodies. In congenitally blind individuals, much of the 'visual' cortex responds strongly to auditory and tactile input rather than to visual stimuli, a phenomenon known as cross-modal plasticity. Writing in Current Biology, Striem-Amit and Amedi1 shed light on how these cross-modal responses are organized.

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Figure 1: Using sound instead of sight.

Clive Rose/Getty

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  1. Ione Fine is in the Department of Psychology, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington 98195, USA.,

    Ione Fine

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  1. Ione Fine
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Correspondence to Ione Fine.

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Fine, I. Do you hear what I see?. Nature 508, 461–462 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1038/508461a

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