BRUSSELS. The portion of the brain responsible for visual readout does not require any vision, according to new research. Presented in the journal Current Biology, the study was partly funded by the project With Seeing Sounds ("Neural and behavioral correlates of seeing without visual input using auditory-to-visual sensory substitution in blind and sighted), funded by the EU. With Seeing Sounds has received funding Marie Curie IRG (International Reintegration Grant) of € 100,000 under the Seventh Framework Programme (FP7). Scientists have come to this conclusion after brain imaging studies of blind people as they read the words in Braille, revealed their brain activity in the same part of the brain that lights up when they read the sighted people. They said that their findings challenge the notion of manual according to which the brain is divided into regions specializing in the processing of information from different senses. "The brain is a machine senses, although often it seems to be, it is a 'machine of tasks'," said Dr. Amir Amed, a professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, who led the study. "An area of \u200b\u200bthe brain may play a unique function - in this case, reading - whatever form that takes sensory input." Unlike other tasks that the brain is running, the reading is a recent invention - only about 5,400 years - and the Braille is used by less than 200 years. "This is not enough time for the brain may have developed a module dedicated to reading," says Dr. Amed. Previous studies of the co-author Laurent Cohen of the University Pierre and Marie Curie in France had already shown in visually impaired readers, that a specific part of the brain known as the area of \u200b\u200bthe visual word form (visual word form area, Vwfa) was responsible for this purpose. But no one knew what was happening in the brains of blind people who learn to read without any visual experience. The team of Dr. Amed has used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure neural activity in eight people who were blind from birth as they read Braille or Braille words without meaning. If the brain was organized on the development of sensory information, reading Braille probably depend on the regions devoted to the processing of tactile information, according to Dr. Amed. If the brain was oriented tasks, the peak of activity should be through the entire brain Vwfa, just where it occurs in the blind readers. This is exactly what the researchers found. A further comparison of brain activity in blind and visually impaired readers showed that patterns of Vwfa were indistinguishable between the two groups. "The main functional characteristics of Vwfa as identified in the blind are also present in the blind, and are thus independent of the sensory modality of reading and - more surprisingly - do not require visual experience," the researchers wrote. "In our opinion, this provides the strongest support so far metamodale the theory [of brain function]," which suggests that brain regions are defined by the tasks they perform. "So, the Vwfa should also be shown as the area of form tactile word, or more generally as the word form area (metamodal). "The researchers suggest that the Vwfa is an area of \u200b\u200bmulti-sensory integration that links the characteristics of simple forms developed, making it ideal for the task relatively new reading. "His specific anatomical location and its connectivity to the strong language areas allow him to link the perceptual representation of the word at high level with the linguistic components of reading," they wrote. "It is therefore the most suitable region to be occupied while learning to read, even when the reading is learned through touch, without the prior viewing experience. "Dr.. Amed said that the researchers now plan to examine for the first time brain activity of people who learn to read Braille, to find out how fast learning occurs. "How does the brain to process information in words?" He asks. "It happens instantly?" For more information, visit: Contributions Marie Curie International Reintegration: http://cordis.Europa.eu/mariecurie-actions/irg/home.html Research in FP7: http://ec.Europa.eu/research/ fp7/index_en.cfm Current Biology: http://www.Cell.com/current-biology/
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