visual cortex
neurophilosophy | May 25, 2011WE all know that bats and dolphins use echolocation to navigate, by producing high frequency bursts of clicks and interpreting the sound waves that bounce off objects in their surroundings. Less well known is that humans can also learn to echolocate. With enough training, people can use this ability to do extraordinary things. Teenager Ben Underwood, who died of cancer in 2009, was one of a small number of blind people to master it. As the clip below shows, he could use echolocation not only to navigate and avoid obstacles, but also to identify objects, rollerskate and even play video games…
edyong | December 22, 2008
The video above seems completely unremarkable at first - man walks down a corridor, navigating his way around easily visible and conspicuous obstacles. But it's far from an easy task; in fact, it should be nigh-impossible. The man, known only as TN, is totally blind.
His inability to see stems from a failure in his brain rather than his eyes. Those work normally, but his visual cortex - the part of the brain that processes visual information - is inactive. As a result, TN is completely unaware of the ability to see and in his everyday life, he behaves like a blind person, using a stick to…
amillikan | December 20, 2008Today on ScienceBlogs.com, you will notice a new feature on the site. Instead of The Buzz, we have an embedded video from Bloggingheads.tv. This feature will appear every Saturday and can be viewed subsequently here on Page 3.14, the editorial blog of ScienceBlogs.com. This week, John Horgan from the Stevens Center for Science Writings and George Johnson, author of Fire in the Mind and The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments discuss recent attempts of scientists to use functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging technology to display graphic images on a computer screen directly from the visual cortex…
edyong | March 5, 2008Modern brain-scanning technology allows us to measure a person's brain activity on the fly and visualise the various parts of their brain as they switch on and off. But imagine being able to literally see what someone else is thinking - to be able to convert measurements of brain activity into actual images.
It's a scene reminiscent of the 'operators' in The Matrix, but this technology may soon stray from the realm of science-fiction into that of science-fact. Kendrick Kay and colleagues from the University of California, Berkeley have created a decoder that can accurately work out the one…