Seeing with your ears

[munchen]

I heard an intresting program on the cbc today about a program that aloows people to see images with their ears. the link is here the sections about 20 minutes

http://www.cbc.ca/quirks/archives/04-05/apr02.html

It raises the issue that brain may not even have cortex specialized for visual or auditory information but that it just has pecial areas designed to to intrept information regardless of the sensory input it receives.

[CSflim]

Originally Posted by munchen

I heard an intresting program on the cbc today about a program that aloows people to see images with their ears. the link is here the sections about 20 minutes

http://www.cbc.ca/quirks/archives/04-05/apr02.html

It raises the issue that brain may not even have cortex specialized for visual or auditory information but that it just has pecial areas designed to to intrept information regardless of the sensory input it receives.

I haven't yet listened to the broadcast, but it is important to bear in mind that the brain is not a homogeneous lump of general-problem-solving stuff. The brain does have specific areas to process visual information. The point is that information is just that - information. There is nothing intrinsically "visual" about visual information, or intrinsically "aural" about audio informaion. What fixes the form of information is its structure - i.e. its actual content.

Analogously, on your computer, you could open an .mp3 file and look at it as text if you so desired.

So visual information gets processed by the brain's visual cortex (which is a region specifically designed to do this), but it does this regardless of how the visual information happens to find its way into the organ; either by the eyes as is usual, or by the ears in this case, or by the skin on the back or arms or by the tongue (other devices do this).

But I could be wrong on this. I haven't listened to it yet.


EDIT: Listened to it. Very interesting, thanks for posting the link. I had read about this woman before, but it was interesting to hear what she had to say.

I also see that I misread what you wrote; you weren't saying what I thought you were saying.