Introducing the brain: deaf blind brain person's scan (Introduction)

by David Turell , Sunday, March 20, 2022, 22:16 (977 days ago) @ David Turell

Helen Keller never was studied:

https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2022/03/07/what_did_helen_kellers_brain_look_like...

"In her new book, Sentient: How Animals Illuminate the Wonder of Our Human Senses, veteran science communicator Jackie Higgins dedicates a section to Keller's story, focusing specifically on Keller's remarkable sense of touch.

"Touch, after all, was how Keller interacted with the world. Bereft of vision and hearing, "Keller experienced and connected with reality through her fingertips," Higgins wrote.

"'I let [Helen] see, by putting her hand on my face, how we talked with our mouths," Sullivan explained in 1928. "The thumb resting on the throat, right at the larynx, the first finger on the lips, the second on the nose, we found that she could feel the vibrations of the spoken word.

"Keller's sense of touch must have been remarkable for her to learn language solely through feeling it. McMaster University neuroscientist Daniel Goldreich, who studies how touch is interpreted by the brain, has repeatedly found that blind people outperform sighted people in tests of tactile acuity. Lacking one sense, their ability to touch seems to strengthen. Deprived of two senses, Keller's sense of touch must have been even stronger.

"Goldreich told Higgins that when the regions of the brain that process visual and auditory stimuli go unused, they can gradually be co-opted to process tactile stimuli, hence boosting a person's touch 'resolution'.

"It's a pity that functional MRI brain-scanning technology wasn't invented until 1991, well after Keller's death.

"'A scan of Keller's brain would be fascinating," Alvaro Pascual-Leone, a professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School, told Higgins. "Her visual cortex must surely have been taken over, and perhaps her auditory cortex too."

"A brain scan study of one deafblind person conducted in 2004 found that his brain activation greatly differed from that of healthy volunteers when presented with tactile stimuli, making use of the auditory cortex, among many other regions. Fascinatingly, after he received a cochlear implant two years later, which restored his hearing, his brain's auditory cortex stopped being activated in response to touch, just like healthy control subjects."

Comment: the brain can make amazing accommodations following God's DNA instructions.