Now if they could just wire his eyes up to a part of his brain that still works, like the auditory cortex, I wonder if he could "see" again... in the form of hearing colours. Which might be kind of monstrous. But, SCIENCE!
The extent they can shift around isn't unlimited, but yes, there's some wiggle room. Parts of the brain that already do pattern recognition of sensory information can adapt to handle the "wrong" sense, but never as well as the tissue that's dedicated to it.
They've successfully wired rats eyes to the audio processing parts of the brain, and the rats can see... badly. Their left-right discrimination was merely terrible, their up-down discrimination was even worse; they clearly had lower resolution "sight" with no real comprehension of colour any more (as opposed to the limited colour recognition prior).
The audio cortex uses somewhat similar methods for processing audio information as the visual cortex (no big surprise, the two areas probably arose from a DNA duplication event) - IIRC it "left right" axis for pitch and the "up down" axis for something I can't remember.
It's sort of like using a microphone as a speaker (or a speaker as a microphone). It works because there's related principles underlying both, but it doesn't work very well.
Conversely, the parts of your brain that co-ordinate your arms never take over visual processing. But if you're born without arms (or loose your arms in some way), they might "help" with co-ordinating your legs - they're pretty similar.
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(no subject)
Date: 2012-08-02 05:42 pm (UTC)-- Steve's wondering if this "blindsight" phenomenon is going to end up in a Nolan reboot of "Daredevil".
(no subject)
Date: 2012-08-02 10:32 pm (UTC)Brains are weird, man.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-08-02 10:34 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-08-03 12:19 am (UTC)Last thing I read indicated that there's a tendency for neural maps to form in certain places, but they can shift around when there's damage
(no subject)
Date: 2012-08-03 09:01 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-08-03 09:37 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-08-03 03:58 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-08-03 06:38 pm (UTC)They've successfully wired rats eyes to the audio processing parts of the brain, and the rats can see... badly. Their left-right discrimination was merely terrible, their up-down discrimination was even worse; they clearly had lower resolution "sight" with no real comprehension of colour any more (as opposed to the limited colour recognition prior).
The audio cortex uses somewhat similar methods for processing audio information as the visual cortex (no big surprise, the two areas probably arose from a DNA duplication event) - IIRC it "left right" axis for pitch and the "up down" axis for something I can't remember.
It's sort of like using a microphone as a speaker (or a speaker as a microphone). It works because there's related principles underlying both, but it doesn't work very well.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-08-03 06:41 pm (UTC)