In:
eLife, eLife Sciences Publications, Ltd, Vol. 5 ( 2016-03-15)
Kurzfassung:
According to most textbooks, our brain is divided into separate areas that are dedicated to specific senses. We have a visual cortex for vision, a tactile cortex for touch, and so on. However, researchers suspect that this division might not be as fixed as the textbooks say. For example, blind people can switch their 'leftover' visual cortex to non-visual purposes, such as reading Braille – a tactile alphabet. Can this switch in functional organization also happen in healthy people with normal vision? To investigate this, Siuda-Krzywicka, Bola et al. taught a group of healthy, sighted people to read Braille by touch, and monitored the changes in brain activity that this caused using a technique called functional magnetic resonance imaging. According to textbooks, tactile reading should engage the tactile cortex. Yet, the experiment revealed that the brain activity critical for reading Braille by touch did not occur in the volunteers’ tactile cortex, but in their visual cortex. Further experiments used a technique called transcranial magnetic stimulation to suppress the activity of the visual cortex of the volunteers. This impaired their ability to read Braille by touch. This is a clear-cut proof that sighted adults can re-program their visual cortex for non-visual, tactile purposes. These results show that intensive training in a complex task can overcome the sensory division-of-labor of our brain. This indicates that our brain is much more flexible than previously thought, and that such flexibility might occur when we learn everyday, complex skills such as driving a car or playing a musical instrument. The next question that follows from this work is: what enables the brain’s activity to change after learning to read Braille? To understand this, Siuda-Krzywicka, Bola et al. are currently exploring how the physical structure of the brain changes as a result of a person acquiring the ability to read Braille by touch.
Materialart:
Online-Ressource
ISSN:
2050-084X
DOI:
10.7554/eLife.10762.001
DOI:
10.7554/eLife.10762.002
DOI:
10.7554/eLife.10762.003
DOI:
10.7554/eLife.10762.007
DOI:
10.7554/eLife.10762.008
DOI:
10.7554/eLife.10762.009
DOI:
10.7554/eLife.10762.004
DOI:
10.7554/eLife.10762.005
DOI:
10.7554/eLife.10762.006
DOI:
10.7554/eLife.10762.010
DOI:
10.7554/eLife.10762.011
DOI:
10.7554/eLife.10762.012
DOI:
10.7554/eLife.10762.013
DOI:
10.7554/eLife.10762.019
DOI:
10.7554/eLife.10762.020
DOI:
10.7554/eLife.10762.014
DOI:
10.7554/eLife.10762.015
DOI:
10.7554/eLife.10762.016
DOI:
10.7554/eLife.10762.017
DOI:
10.7554/eLife.10762.018
Sprache:
Englisch
Verlag:
eLife Sciences Publications, Ltd
Publikationsdatum:
2016
ZDB Id:
2687154-3
