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When Blind People Do Algebra, the Brain's Visual Areas Light Up (npr.org)
People born without sight appear to solve math problems using visual areas of the brain. NPR has a fascinating report on this: A functional MRI study of 17 people blind since birth found that areas of visual cortex became active when the participants were asked to solve algebra problems, a team from Johns Hopkins reports in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "And as the equations get harder and harder, activity in these areas goes up in a blind person," says Marina Bedny, an author of the study and an assistant professor in the department of psychological and brain sciences at Johns Hopkins University. In 19 sighted people doing the same problems, visual areas of the brain showed no increase in activity. "That really suggests that yes, blind individuals appear to be doing math with their visual cortex," Bedny says. The findings, published online Friday, challenge the idea that brain tissue intended for one function is limited to tasks that are closely related.
So they're using their GPU to accelerate math processing?
Do they support CUDA or OpenCL?
Algebra calls for pattern recognition... and the visual cortex is VERY good at pattern recognition.
Blind people use the visual cortex for things like echo-location, etc., as well as to "visualize" the layout of their surroundings, which makes sense - the visual cortex is for spatial relationships. Changing the input source shouldn't make much of a difference - it's not like the brain isn't somewhat plastic.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
I'm surprised it's not lighting up for everyone.
Then again, maybe it is too busy processing input from the optic nerves so the brain had to use some other area to do the algebra.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Back in the 1970s I was an undergraduate at a highly-ranked math department. One of the professors there had no eyes. (It was a birth defect - they had not formed, and his face was slightly collapsed where they should have been.)
When a student would try to skip doing some part of a rigorous proof by substituting a geometric drawing, the other profs would ask "How would you explain it to [him]?".
This guy was VERY good. But he had a "blind spot" occasionally when a graphic analogy would have pointed him to some existing proof that would apply. (I recall once when he was discussing some bottleneck in what he was working on and another professor pointed out that the troublesome piece of the problem was equivalent to an angle trisection with compass and ruler.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
So they're using their GPU to accelerate math processing?
Perhaps, or perhaps not. Given the usual submission to publication lead times on journals I suspect they have some debugging to do.
I am curious if you compared with normal population. Determine if they are Visual, Auditory, Tactile learners, Have them do the work, and see what parts of the brain they use, and compare that against the blind person.
Just because they are blind, it doesn't mean that they cannot be a Visual Learner. It is just harder for them because they don't get the visual stimula.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
A bug in fMRI software could invalidate 15 years of brain research
Let's hope this study used the latest patch?
No, it has not. It was shown fairly recently that a certain fairly common statistical error in the software could mislocate whet activity is occurring and perhaps as much as 10% of the some 40,000 or so research papers in existence that use results from fmri as the basis for a conclusion may in fact be faulty. However, the premise behind fmri is still entirely valid, and software bugs notwithstanding is continually getting better.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
I don't think any such study has been performed... perhaps you should get on that yourself, since it seems to interest you so much as to bring political stance into a matter where it had not previously been brought up.
Of course, if you'd rather just make shit up because doing actual research to support your opinions is too hard, at least everyone should know what to think of what you just said.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
If we really want to get serious, let's talk about the scientific evidence behind the idea that there is a difference between "Visual, Auditory, Tactile learners". To my knowledge, there is none when it comes to learning. At least, there is no serious evidence supporting the existence of learning styles in a meaningful way.
People do differ in their abilities within certain domains, but they do not learn better if taught in that domain. People learn better when the content drives which modality dominates the training, not their quote, preferred learning style, unquote.
As an instructional designer, this (and other commonly shared, unsupported training myths) tends to get my knickers in a twist.
"Anything you say can and will be used against you in a targeted advertisement" - Adam Harvey
most people are idiots
Simple Statistical analysis*: Think about how stupid the average** person is. Now realize that 1/2 the people are even more stupid than this.
*It is a joke, don't ruin it
**Average being statistical median, for the pedantic people who would ruin the joke anyways.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
I visualize all kinds of logical problems, which conflicts with my navigational abilities. I have a hard time thinking and walking. Sometimes my balance is thrown off because what I'm "seeing" and what I'm feeling don't match. I would not describe what I see as normal 3d images. I see "n dimensional" images where "n" is the number of variables.
If I'm thinking really hard, even my hearing and touch gets hijacked and I can experience strange sensations. An example would be when thinking about how network flows interfere with each other. The rate of packets being sent can be thought of as "sound", then all of the "sound frequencies" of the network flows converge on a single point, and then I visualize the resulting sound of these overlapping frequencies and can "see" where peaks get too spiky, resulting in jitter or packetloss. I've done this several times when trying to visualize why I was getting incredibly rare transient packetloss. Effectively microbusts of roughly synchronized senders. Where the "n" dimensional comes in is I can see multiple versions of these at the same time, like many steady flows, many starting flows, etc etc. I can think of the corner cases ahead of time and see all of these cases concurrently without having to rethink of the issue for each case.
I just used networking as an example, but i'm a programmer and do this same thing to pretty much all problems.
Well, it doesn't have anything else better to do.
Since their visual cortex is now reassigned to other functions like solving algebra, I wonder what they would see if they suddenly got their sight back?
That's how Ron Burgundy rolls.
Oh really?
Obviously it is easy to claim other people are making stuff up, when you can't be bothered to search for it.
It was even reported here on /. just a couple of months ago.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Damn, where is the delete button, when you need it?
I was mislead by the way posts are hidden. My apologies to Mark-t.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
I've had a life-long interest in writing systems. IMO Japanese being the most complex and Georgian the most beautiful.
BTW I HATE emoji but I love unicode.
No worries... I realized as soon as I as your lmgtfy link what the misunderstanding was.
The report by the PNAS that said that fmri reports are invalidwas actually retracted shortly thereafter as they realized that the flaw was within a software bug that would not affect all of the results in the same way:
So in fact, all that the study that found the software bug proved is that we need to double-check findings when they are made by a computer.... it doesn't mean that the findings are wrong, only that we should be rightly skeptical. Further, it means that fmri studies done *since* this discovery are actually more likely to have correct conclusions than ever before.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Unless this article is mistaken, this sounds like an extension of a known phenomenon. And I can't remember where I read it, but I also remember reading another article years ago theorizing that in some cases this effect could be the brain sort of "redistributing" its load to areas that are underutilized and can handle it. There was no proof, but I thought it was an interesting theory.
In short, just because you don't have a functioning sensory organ, that doesn't mean the brain will completely stop using the main area the organ would have used to interpret its input.
Neuroscientists have known for years that the brain has few "dedicated" areas for any particular function, such as math. Instead, many collections of neurons can accomplish the same function. This is called degeneracy. (Terrible name, I know... let the jokes about degenerate mathematicians begin....)
Also, the brain doesn't "light up" as if were sitting around idle and suddenly leaps into action. The whole brain is active all the time. This is called intrinsic brain activity.
Anyone who talks about brain areas "lighting up," or believes that each region of the brain has a dedicated function, is at least a decade behind modern neuroscience.
Seems u hv developed dedicated hardware (neuron complex) to do fourier decomposition of a signal. That is given a function f, find a way to decompose/construct back f using fundamental frequencies. Essentially a way to decompose a complex object to its fundamental orthogonal building blocks; like say factor a number into its prime factors (fundamental theorem of arithmetic) or decompose a music piece into the notes/structure of notes; spoken language to basic phonemes [compressions like jpeg/mp3 work the same way.. keep the important n drop the fluff]. It's like finding the basis-set in linear algebra and figuring out their linear combination to get any given vector. I think you should be able to use this to do some cool things like very rapid learning of a new language/art (like singing or dance or any other art form) because all these involved finding the fundamental basis set and just doing linear combination of these.