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Neurons

People born without sight patently process math in their visual cortex. The findings come up from a newly published Johns Hopkins study, and add support to the thought that when it comes to "nature versus nurture," cortical development is generally "nurture."

Earlier research had shown that when 1 sense is dumb, the associated brain tissue could be "diverted" to handle input from other senses, a la Daredevil. When blind people read Braille, for example, their visual cortex becomes active, and deaf cats repurpose some auditory cortex to visually locate things in 3D infinite. But Marina Bedny, coauthor of the study and banana professor of psychological and brain sciences at Johns Hopkins, wanted to know how far the repurposing could go. She chose to look at something totally unrelated to the senses: algebra.

When researchers compared fMRI scans from 17 people bullheaded since nascence to those of 18 people born with sight, they observed both groups' occipital cortex lighting upwards when parsing sentences describing math problems. But then they discovered that in blind participants, their visual cortex lit upwards when asked to solve math problems, where sighted individuals' cortex didn't. And the activity scaled with the difficulty of the problems. "Every bit the equations get harder and harder, action in these areas goes up," explains Bedny.

Image: Kanjlia, Bedny et al

What the study suggests is that the brain is fifty-fifty more adaptable than we thought. "The number network develops totally independently of visual experience," said atomic number 82 writer Shipra Kanjlia, a graduate educatee in JHU'southward Section of Psychological and Brain Sciences. "These blind people have never seen anything in their lives, merely they accept the same number network as people who tin meet."

The study too demonstrates that the visual cortex develops completely in bullheaded people; information technology doesn't only sit at that place, let alone atrophy. The way it lights up in response to math problems shows that the visual cortex of blind people still gets specialized and partitioned by function, just similar any other function of the brain.

Bedny, who has been publishing her piece of work on the visual cortex for the better office of a decade, says when the findings here are taken together with before results, they propose the brain as a whole is adjustable and extensible, almost modular. It could someday be possible to reroute functions from a damaged area to a new spot in the brain.

"If we can make the visual cortex do math," Bedny said, "in principle we can make any part of the encephalon practise anything."