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Journalism of Courage
Certain regions of the human brain are dedicated to the various senses. The visual cortex handles vision while the auditory cortex processes sound.
But what happens if one of the senses is lost? Do the neurons in the auditory cortex of a deaf person atrophy and go to waste or are they put to work processing vision and other senses? Scientists have shown when one sense is lost,the corresponding brain region can be recruited for other tasks. Researchers learned this by studying the blind. Brain imaging studies have found that blind subjects can locate sounds using the auditory cortex and the occipital lobe,the brains visual processing centre.
But recently a similar phenomenon was discovered in the deaf. In a study financed by the National Institutes of Health and published in The Journal of Neuroscience,researchers recruited 13 deaf volunteers and a dozen volunteers with normal hearing and looked at what happened in their brains when touch and vision responses were stimulated. They found both senses were processed in Heschls gyrus,where the auditory cortex is situated,suggesting that this part of the brain had been dedicated to other senses.
