In an article published by PLoS One, researchers used brain imaging to study blind people who have begun to use echolocation to navigate their environments. Echolocation, most commonly associated with bats, is the use of sounds to detect objects. By interpreting the way sounds are reflected from the surrounding environment, some blind people can traverse their surroundings simply by producing mouth clicks and listening to the echoes. This different type of “sight” has become the target of researchers to see how this phenomenon is realized in the brain.
The study focused on two blind echolocators, and using an fMRI machine, they recorded the participants’ brain activity while they listened to their own pre-recorded clicks and echoes. The blind participants exhibited activation in the primary visual of their brains, whereas sighted echolocators under the same testing conditions did not. While these results support ideas of reorganized brain processing that blind people usually exhibit, more research is necessary to determine how the brain combines sound and sight.
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