How Seeing Can Trump Listening, Mapped In the Brain

Posted by timothy on Saturday September 7, 2013 @01:26AM from the you're-just-envious-of-the-sensors dept.

cortex writes "University of Utah bioengineers discovered our understanding of language may depend more heavily on vision than previously thought: under the right conditions, what you see can override what you hear. In an article published in PLOS One, 'Seeing Is Believing: Neural Representations of Visual Stimuli in Human Auditory Cortex Correlate with Illusory Auditory Perceptions,' the authors showed that visual stimuli can influence neural signals in the auditory processing part of the brain and change what a person hears. In this study patients were shown videos of an auditory illusion called the McGurk Effect while electrical recordings were made from the surface of the cerebral cortex."

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Kind of expected this... by Thantik · 2013-09-07 01:37 · Score: 4, Interesting

Ever happen to be looking for a street in an unknown area, and you end up turning down your radio? This actually increases your visual acuity slightly even though many may question your sanity when doing it. Many blind people have increased auditory capacity, and this has been known for a very long time. It doesn't seem all that far fetched that one (or more) of those senses could override the other. Maybe that meal that you hate tastes absolutely amazing...but looks so terrible that you taste it differently.