NACS Seminar: Ione Fine (U of Washington)

I can hear what you see

Abstract: Almost one-quarter of the brain is normally devoted to processing visual information: reading text, recognizing faces, following the Sunday football match, and much more. The brain’s visual cortex contains specialized regions devoted to processing motion, text, faces etc. In congenitally blind individuals, much of the ‘visual’ cortex responds strongly to auditory and tactile input rather than to visual stimuli, a phenomenon known as cross-modal plasticity. Here I will discuss what our laboratory has discovered about the representation of sound in early blind individuals, and what this reveals about the plasticity of the human brain.

Below are links to papers relevant to Dr. Fine’s talk.
Blindness and Human Brain Plasticity - PubMed (nih.gov) 
Responses in area hMT+ reflect tuning for both auditory frequency and motion after blindness early in life | PNAS

This seminar will not be recorded. 

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