Seeing with your tongue

Many of my friends, and possibly people I’ve met and conversed with, will have memories of me telling them that a blind person was once taught to see with their tongue. Needless to say, most of these people thought I was insane, and I could never find the paper that I read it from to back up my claims.

So imagine my surprise when just the other day on the Conversation Hour on ABC 702 radio, the topic of conversation was neuroplasticity, which is the phenomenon whereby the brain can compensate for deficiencies in certain regions, by re-allocating neurons to perform the affected function.

Just in case your interested, I managed by chance to stream the entire conversation hour¹ to an mp3 file, which you can listen to below.

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The bit that talks about blindness begins at about 13 minutes in, but the entire conversation is fascinating.

It’s actually only 52 minutes, but they couldn’t very well call it ‘The Conversation 52 Minutes’, could they? ↩

4 Responses to “ Seeing with your tongue ”

Comments:

Martin Walker - brain exercises says:
October 2nd, 2008 at 10:58 pm

Hello, Jangari.

I’m not sure whether this is mentioned in the radio episode, but the scientist who first devised a “tactile-vision device” was Paul Bach-y-Rita, back in 1969. His original implementation sent vision vibrations from a camera through stimulation of the skin on the subject’s back — the brain was able to decode the information from this visual-tactile map into images. Later refinements transformed this bulky device into a thin strip of electrodes on the tongue attached to a tiny camera.

Norman Doidge’s book — The Brain That Changes Itself — describes some of the history of these experiments. I’ve been blogging about this and other aspects of neuroplasticity here http://www.mindevolvesoftware.com and here http://mindsparkebrainfitnesspro.com.

Martin Walker
mind evolve, llc

David Nash says:
October 3rd, 2008 at 10:37 pm

Dr Norman Doidge’s talk has an 11.8MB MP3 linked from ABC Brisbane’s page.

jangari says:
October 4th, 2008 at 4:26 pm

Thanks David. I thought about relinking the audio file in the post to the one on that webpage, but I think my bootleg copy sounds ten times better, even if it misses the introduction.

Thanks for chiming in, Martin. That’s pretty much what’s covered in the interview, as well as some truly amazing quote from some of the participants, such as ‘can you move the vase so it’s halfway past the phone?’