[Nfbf-l] {Disarmed} Fw: [Blind-SF] Fw: processing reading Braille

[Sherri]

Fascinating!
----- Original Message ----- 
From: Ed Meskys
Sent: Sunday, March 13, 2011 4:47 PM
Subject: [Blind-SF] Fw: processing reading Braille




Subject: processing reading Braille


      'Visual reading does not require vision'
            By JUDY SIEGEL-ITZKOVICH
            JERUSALEM POST 13/03/2011

      Health Scan: Blind people use the same brain region as sighted people 
when reading words in Braille.

      The part of the brain responsible for visual reading doesn't require 
vision at all, according to a new study by researchers from the Hebrew 
University of Jerusalem and France. Brain imaging studies of blind people as 
they read words in Braille show activity in exactly the same brain region 
that lights up when sighted people read. The researchers said their findings 
challenge the textbook notion that the brain is divided into regions that 
are specialized for processing information coming in via one sense or 
another.

      "The brain is not a sensory machine, although it often looks like one; 
it is a task machine," explained HU brain scientist and research team leader 
Dr. Amir Amedi, whose work on the topic is reported in the latest issue of 
Current Biology. "A particular area fulfills a unique function, in this case 
reading, regardless of sensory input modality,"he said. Amedi is affiliated 
with the university's Institute for Medical Research Israel-Canada and the 
Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Brain Sciences.

      Unlike other tasks the brain performs, reading is a recent invention - 
only about 5,400 years old, and Braille has been in use for less than two 
centuries. "That's not enough time for evolution to have shaped a brain 
module for reading," Amedi said.

      Nevertheless, brain scans have shown that a very specific part of the 
brain known as the Visual Word Form Area (VWFA) - first discovered in 
sighted people by co-author Dr. Laurent Cohen of Paris - has been coopted 
for this purpose. But no one knew what might happen in the brains of blind 
people who learn to read despite the fact that they've had no visual 
experience.

      In the new study, Amedi's team, which included doctoral student Lior 
Reich, used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure the 
neural activity in eight people who had been blind since birth while they 
read Braille words or nonsense Braille. If the brain were organized around 
processing sensory information, one might expect that Braille reading would 
depend on regions dedicated to processing tactile information, Amedi 
explained. If instead the brain is task-oriented, you'd expect to find the 
peak of activity across the entire brain in the VWFA, right where it occurs 
in sighted readers - and that is what the researchers saw.

      Further comparison of brain activity in the blind and sighted readers 
showed that the patterns in the VWFA were indistinguishable between the two.

      "The main functional properties of the VWFA as identified in sighted 
are present as well in the blind, and are thus independent of the 
sensory-modality of reading and even more surprisingly do not require any 
visual experience,"the researchers wrote. "To the best of our judgment, this 
provides the strongest support so far for the metamodal theory of brain 
function," which suggests that brain regions are defined by the computations 
they perform. The researchers suggest that the VWFA is a multisensory 
integration area that binds simple features into more elaborate shape 
descriptions, making it ideal for the relatively new task of reading. Amedi 
said he and his research team will study brain activity in people while they 
learn to read Braille to find out how rapidly this takeover happens. "What 
we want to find out is how does the brain change to process information in 
words and is it instantaneous."

      Older people who suffer from hearing loss are significantly more 
likely to develop dementia over time than those who retain their hearing, 
according to a study by Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and US 
National Institute on Aging researchers. The findings could lead to new ways 
to combat dementia - a condition that affects millions of people worldwide, 
the scientists said.

      Although the reason for the link between the two conditions is 
unknown, the investigators suggest that a common pathology may underlie 
both, or that the strain of decoding sounds over the years may overwhelm the 
brains of people with hearing loss, leaving them more vulnerable to 
dementia. They also speculate that hearing loss could lead to dementia by 
making individuals more socially isolated - a known risk factor for 
cognitive disorders. Whatever the cause, the scientists report, their 
finding may offer a starting point for interventions - even as simple as 
hearing aids - that could delay or prevent dementia.

      "Researchers have looked at what affects hearing loss, but few have 
looked at how hearing loss affects cognitive brain function," said study 
leader Prof. Frank Lin of the otology division at Johns Hopkins.

      "There hasn't been much crosstalk between otologists and 
geriatricians, so it's been unclear whether hearing loss and dementia are 
related."

      To make the connection, Lin and his colleagues used data from the 
Baltimore Longitudinal Study on Aging, launched 52 years ago by the national 
institute and which has tracked various health factors in thousands of men 
and women over decades.

      The new study, published in the February Archives of Neurology, 
included 639 people whose hearing and cognitive abilities were tested 
between 1990 and 1994. While about a quarter of the volunteers had some 
hearing loss at the start of the study, none had dementia. These volunteers 
were then closely followed with repeat examinations every one to two years, 
and by 2008, 58 of them had developed dementia.

      The researchers found that study participants with hearing loss at the 
beginning of the study were much more likely to develop dementia by the end.

      Compared with volunteers who had normal hearing, those with mild, 
moderate, and severe hearing loss had twofold, threefold, and fivefold risk 
of developing dementia over time. Even after the researchers took into 
account other factors that are associated with risk of dementia, including 
diabetes, high blood pressure, age, sex and race, Lin explains, hearing loss 
and dementia were still strongly connected.

      "A lot of people ignore hearing loss because it's such a slow and 
insidious process," Lin said."Even if people feel as if they are not 
affected, we're showing that it may well be a more serious problem."


____________________________________________________________
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