26
views
0
recommends
+1 Recommend
0 collections
    0
    shares
      • Record: found
      • Abstract: found
      • Article: not found

      Functional relevance of cross-modal plasticity in blind humans.

      Read this article at

      ScienceOpenPublisherPubMed
      Bookmark
          There is no author summary for this article yet. Authors can add summaries to their articles on ScienceOpen to make them more accessible to a non-specialist audience.

          Abstract

          Functional imaging studies of people who were blind from an early age have revealed that their primary visual cortex can be activated by Braille reading and other tactile discrimination tasks. Other studies have also shown that visual cortical areas can be activated by somatosensory input in blind subjects but not those with sight. The significance of this cross-modal plasticity is unclear, however, as it is not known whether the visual cortex can process somatosensory information in a functionally relevant way. To address this issue, we used transcranial magnetic stimulation to disrupt the function of different cortical areas in people who were blind from an early age as they identified Braille or embossed Roman letters. Transient stimulation of the occipital (visual) cortex induced errors in both tasks and distorted the tactile perceptions of blind subjects. In contrast, occipital stimulation had no effect on tactile performance in normal-sighted subjects, whereas similar stimulation is known to disrupt their visual performance. We conclude that blindness from an early age can cause the visual cortex to be recruited to a role in somatosensory processing. We propose that this cross-modal plasticity may account in part for the superior tactile perceptual abilities of blind subjects.

          Related collections

          Author and article information

          Journal
          Nature
          Nature
          Springer Science and Business Media LLC
          0028-0836
          0028-0836
          Sep 11 1997
          : 389
          : 6647
          Affiliations
          [1 ] Human Cortical Physiology Unit, National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland 20892-1428, USA. lcohen@codon.nih.gov
          Article
          10.1038/38278
          9296495
          93e7770c-f810-4a53-8161-f56624c1f3dc
          History

          Comments

          Comment on this article