Research Shows How Deaf Cats' Brains Re-Purpose Auditory Centers 100
An anonymous reader writes "Deaf or blind people often report enhanced abilities in their remaining senses, but up until now, no one has explained how and why that could be. Researchers at the University of Western Ontario, led by Stephen Lomber of The Centre for Brain and Mind, have discovered there is a causal link between enhanced visual abilities and reorganization of the part of the brain that usually handles auditory input in congenitally deaf cats. The findings, published online in Nature Neuroscience, provide insight into the plasticity that may occur in the brains of deaf people."
that's not nice (Score:2, Informative)
Saying that deaf people have plastic brains is just plain rude! ;)
Re:that's not nice (Score:5, Informative)
Everybody has very plastic brains. I know you meant it as a joke but brain damage usually gets routed around by the body even relocating whole centers to a different part of the brain. This research is just showing that just like brain damage, the body tries to route around the no-input problem from one organ and enhances others to compensate.
The brain is like a really small Internet. It routes around problems and has plenty of failover, fallbacks and backups for just about any 'site'.
Re:My cat isn't deaf (Score:1, Informative)
Cats have much, much better hearing and smell than we do. Human hearing tops out around 20kHz, cats above 60kHz.
Re:God's no dummy (Score:2, Informative)
That's not right. The god's name is Yahweh. We capitalize its title because we capitalize ALL of its titles and pronouns. And He said, "Let there be light", for example.
Re:My cat isn't deaf (Score:3, Informative)
Use a can of food he wouldn't eat, or something that's not even food,
Bingo. My cat would come running everytime I used the can opener, regardless of what can.
Also, if I ran the stereo really loud in the room he was in, he would not react to the can opener in the kitchen.
There are deaf dogs (Score:4, Informative)
found this in two seconds
http://www.peteducation.com/article.cfm?c=2+1630&aid=857 [peteducation.com]
Up Until Now? (Score:5, Informative)
"Deaf or blind people often report enhanced abilities in their remaining senses, but up until now, no one has explained how and why that could be."
Up until now? Pfft.
There's been a lot of experiments done on the brain repurposing unused areas of the brain. For example, a school of the blind in France requires all of their teachers to spend some period of time living in perfect darkness inside a house so that they can better appreciate what their students are going through. Teachers that go through the program report being able to 'see sound', which is basically the result of their visual cortex being repurposed to process audio input, but which the brain is still taking as input into whatever it is that creates our visual senses in our sensorium.
Likewise, when they leave the darkness, they have a really hard time seeing for a few days, as the brain slowly adjusts back to using the visual cortex for what it was intended for.
I'd really recommend Dioge's book, The Brain that Changes Itself. It's a good summary of brain plasticity.
Re:There are deaf dogs (Score:3, Informative)
Still, it seems incredibly unlikely that only humans and cats are born deaf.