Brain Parts Otherwise Used For Vision Help the Blind Understand Languages

A new study claims that in blind people, the parts of brain that are used for processing vision, are recruited for language processing.

The find by MIT neuroscientists shows that the visual cortex can dramatically change its function and disproves that language processing can only occur in highly specialized brain regions that are genetically programmed for language tasks.

Why the Blind Have a Superior Sense of Touch
Scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences have discovered why blind people tend to have a superior sense of touch.

"Your brain is not a prepackaged kind of thing. It doesn't develop along a fixed trajectory, rather, it's a self-building toolkit. The building process is profoundly influenced by the experiences you have during your development," said Marina Bedny.

Bedny and her colleagues scanned blind subjects (using functional magnetic resonance imaging) as they performed a sentence comprehension task.

The researchers hypothesized that if the visual cortex was involved in language processing, those brain areas should show the same sensitivity to linguistic information as classic language areas such as Broca's and Wernicke's areas.

Blindness in Premature Babies can be Prevented With Drug Avastin
Premature babies who are born before their eyes develop fully carry a risk of blindness, like the case of famous singer, Stevie Wonder.

The results confirmed their theory.

"The idea that these brain regions could go from vision to language is just crazy. It suggests that the intrinsic function of a brain area is constrained only loosely, and that experience can have really a big impact on the function of a piece of brain tissue," said Bedny.

Key Mechanisms in Untreatable Blindness Disease Identified
A molecular mechanism implicated in geographic atrophy, the major cause of untreatable blindness in the industrialized world has been identified by researchers of the University of Kentucky.

She added that the research does not refute the idea that the human brain needs Broca's and Wernicke's areas for language.

"We haven't shown that every possible part of language can be supported by this part of the brain [the visual cortex]. It just suggests that a part of the brain can participate in language processing without having evolved to do so," she says.

Playing Bagpipes Increases Risk of Blindness
Playing bagpipes increases the risk of eye disorders which may lead to blindness.

The team now plans to find out why the visual cortex would be recruited for language processing, when the language processing areas of blind people already function normally.

The researchers are also working to pinpoint more precisely the visual cortex's role in language processing.

The study appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences the week of Feb. 28.

Source-ANI