What does brain flexibility and rapid cortical takeover have to do with dreaming? Perhaps more than previously thought. When blindfolded participants are continuously measured, touch-related activity shows up in the visual cortex in about an hour. After the blindfold was removed, the visual cortex returned to normal within a day, no longer responding to touch and sound.īut such changes don’t have to take five days that just happened to be when the measurement took place. In other words, the blindfolded participants performed better on the touch-related task because their visual cortex had been recruited to help. When activity in the visual cortex was temporarily disrupted, the Braille-reading advantage of the blindfolded participants went away. Even more remarkably, the blindfolded participants showed activation in visual brain regions in response to touch and sound. At the end of the five days, the participants who wore blindfolds could distinguish subtle differences between Braille characters much better than the participants who didn’t wear blindfolds. Half the participants were blindfolded throughout the experience.
USE GOOGLES DEEP DREAM ON LIVE VISUALS HOW TO
In one study, sighted participants intensively learned how to read Braille.
Brain circuits reorganize not only in the newly blind, but also in the sighted who have temporary blindness. Recent decades have yielded several revelations about livewiring, but perhaps the biggest surprise is its rapidity. Ben’s super-hearing demonstrates a more general rule: the more brain territory a particular sense has, the better it performs. As a result, Ben had more neurons available to deal with auditory information, and this increased processing power allowed Ben to interpret soundwaves in shocking detail. In Ben’s case, his brain’s flexible wiring repurposed his visual cortex for processing sound. The brain’s livewiring allows for learning, memory, and the ability to develop new skills. Just as sharp teeth and fast legs are useful for survival, so is the brain’s ability to reconfigure. Mother Nature imbued our brains with flexibility to adapt to circumstances. But in the sightless, these same neurons can rewire themselves to process other types of information. There is nothing special about neurons in the visual cortex: they are simply neurons that happen to be involved in processing shapes or colors in people who have functioning eyes. But that territory can be reassigned to a different task. One part of the brain may initially be assigned a specific task for instance, the back of our brain is called the “visual cortex” because it usually handles sight. But more recent discoveries have upended the old paradigm. Neuroscience used to think that different parts of the brain were predetermined to perform specific functions. To capture this, we refer to the brain’s plasticity as “livewiring” to spotlight how this vast system of 86 billion neurons and 0.2 quadrillion connections rewires itself every moment of your life. More recent discoveries in neuroscience suggest that the brain’s brand of flexibility is far more nuanced than holding onto a shape, though. The field of neuroscience calls this phenomenon “brain plasticity,” referring to the ability of the brain, like plastic, to assume new shapes and hold them. Neurons, the cells responsible for rapidly processing information in the brain, are interconnected by the thousands-but like friendships in a community, the connections between them constantly change: strengthening, weakening, and finding new partners. Whenever we learn something new, pick up a new skill, or modify our habits, the physical structure of our brain changes. How could blindness give rise to the stunning ability to understand the surroundings with one’s ears? The answer lies in a gift bestowed on the brain by evolution: tremendous adaptability. The phenomenon has been written about since at least the 1940s, when the word “echolocation” was first coined in a Science article titled “Echolocation by Blind Men, Bats, and Radar.” Echolocation may sound like an improbable feat for a human, but thousands of blind people have perfected this skill, just like Ben did.
0 kommentar(er)
