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Is it an old wives tale or can deaf people actually see better? Scientists have long thought that the structure of our brain is fixed. For instance, from birth the auditory cortex will receive only sound or the visual cortex will receive only visual input.
But in the last decade neuroscientists have overthrown this idea in favor of a more malleable brain.
New research published this week in the journal Nature Neuroscience supports that view. It helps explain why those who are congenitally deaf may have extraordinary sight.
Since the auditory cortex sits there, at birth, waiting for auditory inputs that never come, it starts receiving visual stimuli instead—in cats anyway. And the neural real estate devoted to vision increases.
Researchers compared congenitally deaf cats to hearing cats, and found that deaf cats have enhanced peripheral vision and motion detection.
They confirmed that the part of the auditory cortex that picks up peripheral sound switches to peripheral vision.
With the deaf it’s especially good to have increased peripheral vision. If you cannot hear a car approaching from the side, it'd be advantageous to actually see it.
—Christie Nicholson
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12 Comments
Add CommentI argue here http://philpapers.org/profile/11379 following Bavalier et al that the enhanced vision and hearing of the deaf and blind would have led to these sense impaired individuals to have been the first to create cave art (also a visual [written] language) and music (about 40000 years ago) because of their enhanced visual and sound related senses which would have led to the development of their artistic and sound related abilities so that they could express these abilities reflexively. (It is in particular the 'movement' portrayed in cave art which is captured by these first cave artists, which gives a clue that they were deaf)
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI argue that this happened 40000 years ago because it was the first time society had evolved sufficiently to support the deaf and blind. - giving rise simultaneously to a cultural explosion in separate isolated geographical locations.
Briefly, I think the development of cave art around the Mediterranean 40kya happens to have been the time and location that migrating Modern humans encountered Neanderthal humans.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt is more likely that exposure to alternative world views or simply the necessity of communications with a distinct intelligent group inspired humanity (and/or Neanderthals) to develop enhanced capabilities of symbolic communications.
The evidence is - that it was not Neanderthals who did the cave art. Rather homosapien sapien. Cave art is what makes us human as distinct from Neanderthal. Although Neanderthals produced some crude artefacts. So complex communication with them might not have been a possibility. (The earliest figurative art was of humans (eg venus figurines)) My comment was a bit simplistic..Symbolic communication in writing took 25000 years to develop. But I nevertheless contest that it grew out of cave art.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisPerhaps I failed in my effort to communicate, or perhaps you failed to comprehend. If you read my previous comment more carefully, you'll find that it asserts that modern humans developed enhanced communications capabilities as a result of their interactions with and efforts to communicate with Neanderthals. I make no mention of Neanderthals producing cave art.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBy the way, I agree that cave art likely represents symbolic communication. It's most likely that symbolic oral and demonstrative communication was in existence for tens of thousands of years before the development of formal written systems of symbolic communication, required to produce persistent evidence of same.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIs that like our ever increasing efforts to communicate with our pet dogs?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOr do we just give up and dress them in diamante collars. So really we accept the ESP side of the relationship and acknowledge the superior intelligence of Max and Fido.
So were Neanderthals our pets?
Hey! I _AM_ a Neanderthal!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI've been thinking about this one.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIf each sense established its own perspectival view. So each had a different perspective, then data or information which originated synesthetically would fix these perspectives with respect to each other and so allow the 'mental' restructuring or restructuring from memory of external stimuli.
The loci of such common information might describe a language as patterns from patterns of data that coincide so as to evoke a representation of an object or action in the external world. Any synesthetically connected data sets could stimulate representations derived primarilly from one sense in the cortical space occupied by another.
Those representations would appear ghostly because the primary sense involved in their perception might not have anything to do with their recall. Hence the phenomenon of 'mind'.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThinking some more ...... and the the newer optical processing pathways - or those that appear 'conscious' are those that have pronounced synesthetic connectivity such that these neural circuits resonate leading to the unconscious processes and their associated noisy neural activity to become transparent. Thus particular synesthetic connectivity would map out the locus of a language which would appear as separate from the none conscious process.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThinking some more ...... and the the newer optical processing pathways - or those that appear 'conscious' are those that have pronounced synesthetic connectivity such that these neural circuits resonate leading to the unconscious processes and their associated noisy neural activity to become transparent. Thus particular synesthetic connectivity would map out the locus of a language which would appear as separate from the none conscious process.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThinking some more ...... and the the newer optical processing pathways - or those that appear 'conscious' are those that have pronounced synesthetic connectivity such that these neural circuits resonate leading to the unconscious processes and their associated noisy neural activity to become transparent. Thus particular synesthetic connectivity would map out the locus of a language which would appear as separate from the none conscious process.
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