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Research Shows How Deaf Cats' Brains Re-Purpose Auditory Centers
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."
Because getting a hearing aid to fit in a cat's ear would be rather difficult.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
The rare intersection of cats, disabilities, abilities, and jokes:
What has 9 arms, and ROCKS?
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Saying that deaf people have plastic brains is just plain rude! ;)
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He just doesn't give a flying fuck about me unless he wants out, in, or food.
but up until now, no one has explained how and why that could be.
ok, I agree that it's interesting research, but have they really never heard the explanation that they use them more? Neuroplasticity is awesome, but there certainly have been explanations for it before now.....
Qxe4
kthxbi
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The real question is - why is this unexpected? It's what I would have expected, and I'm not even deaf!
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.
After all, I am strangely colored.
I read the summary, it's kind of interesting. The graphs in the actual article look pretty definitive. But a sentence stood out to me:
Does anyone know what that is? I've never heard this before. My natural assumption would be that most animals could be born deaf, and that it's just selected out of the population by natural selection. But if that were the case, we'd expect other animals (especially those without natural selection pressures, such as domesticated Dogs) to be born deaf.
But just cats and humans? What about other primates?
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It would take research, but I don't think that this is a matter of redistribution. It's a matter of portions of the brain having multiple purposes. For instance it's typical for ones vision to dim when one is really focused on listening to something. And since one can't hear anything there would be no competition between purposes.
a small ischemic stroke in the hippocampus took out my boyfriend's short-term memory, and despite plenty of healthy brain tissue in the neighborhood, his ability to form new memories was permanently shot.
Have you seen the film Memento? If so, does it accurately represent the condition?
found this in two seconds
http://www.peteducation.com/article.cfm?c=2+1630&aid=857
"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.
Adonai seems to be most commonly used at my place recently. Or was it Elohim... (and who knows how many / probably just names of many different ones coalesced into one character)
One that hath name thou can not otter
Hm, but how does it make sense for the brain to essentially self-destruct - while automatically trying to restart, at a reckless rate, oxygen cellular pathways after some period of its deprivation ...unless in severe hypothermia. Then it might be fine.
One that hath name thou can not otter
They didn't need to go to the trouble to "discover" that: they could have asked me. I lost my hearing at age 17 and, in response, my brain increased its abilities 10-fold, easily, so that I'm now the smartest man on the planet. Why, yes, I am wearing my underwear outside of my pants. Why do you ask...?
No, seriously, I did lose my hearing. I found that I compensated for it by paying way more attention to non-verbal cues. For example, I can tell before an interviewer even knows it, himself, that I'm not gonna get the job. I can also see it, clearly, when someone's trying to BS me. You also learn introspection, since you don't have the auditory distractions.
Truth, Justice. Or the American Way.
I've always relied very heavily on audio cues my whole life, and have exceptionally developed hearing (perfect pitch, good direction finding, instrument/voice separation, etc). I'm pretty seriously red/green colorblind (failed all the bubble wheels at the optometrist), and I've often wondered if this is related.
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
I for one welcome our deaf cat overlords.
I said "I welcome you"
I WELCOME YOU DEAF CATS!
while (true != false) process_more_stupid_code();
So...how did the scientist get so many deaf cat samples?
Some of the ways by which people chose to name something fits, in practice, the category of "names", I suppose... especially since all of them are like that, also "true" one (unless the true hidden one never strictly existed, in that sense it wouldn't fulfill the above criteria obviously)
One that hath name thou can not otter
It's pretty hubristic to think that you can in any way understand an entity that can create a universe.
Free Martian Whores!
Though if Obama would be called like that in a setting where there are no other presidents, never were, and never will be... (last one always interacting in a funny way with omnipotence and which of the two spheres (earthly vs. sublime) is really in control, BTW) Yup, damn fuzzy in such case.
Anyway, certainly in practice it is presented as a name, at least at my place in the folk version. Unfortunately the dynamics of those are somewhat neglected typically (but then, at least my local flavor is not very Abrahamic and indeed not very monotheistic if looking at it with any kind of rigor; seems fairly typical, too)
One that hath name thou can not otter