Seeing with my ears!

So this past week we read "Functional specialization for auditory--spatial processing in the occipital cortex of congenitally blind humans" by Collignon et al published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.

This was a very cool paper. They took eleven congenitally blind and eleven sighted individuals. They blindfolded the subjects, put them in an MRI machine, and played auditory signals at them from various locations around their head. The subjects had to push buttons indicating whether the sound was of a higher or lower pitch from the previous sound or whether the sound was more to the right or left than the previous sound. The MRI would show which parts of the brain were being used during the various tests.

The paper showed that the parts of the brain generally known as the "visual cortex" would light up in the congenitally blind during the experiment regarding location (not the one regarding pitch). These parts did not light up in the sighted individuals, in fact, they had "negative activity" (we believe that this is in comparison to activity in the rest of the brain).

The main point of this article is working to reorganize the way we think about the brain. Previously we had labeled things by what they gain input from, ie. the visual cortex, the auditory cortex. This paper is showing that instead of the important thing about x part of the brain is the function that it performs, not what its input is. This makes a huge amount of sense to me. The parts of the brain used for motor activity will take input from the eyes to figure out where your body is in relation to what it wants to be doing. But if the brain does not have visual input to work with, then it will use auditory input to help figure out where your body is spatially. WHOAH! This is something that I feel like it should have been obvious, but is in reality, probably changing how we look at the brain.

I think it would be awesome to test this out with various sensory disorders. See if there is someone who can't smell, for example, and see what parts of the brain light up when accessing memories or while they are eating. Alternatively, trying this experiment with someone who is congenitally deaf and see if their auditory cortex gets input from their eyes.