Neural correlates of natural human echolocation in early and late blind echolocation experts.

ABSTRACT:

Background

A small number of blind people are adept at echolocating silent objects simply by producing mouth clicks and listening to the returning echoes. Yet the neural architecture underlying this type of aid-free human echolocation has not been investigated. To tackle this question, we recruited echolocation experts, one early- and one late-blind, and measured functional brain activity in each of them while they listened to their own echolocation sounds.

Results

When we compared brain activity for sounds that contained both clicks and the returning echoes with brain activity for control sounds that did not contain the echoes, but were otherwise acoustically matched, we found activity in calcarine cortex in both individuals. Importantly, for the same comparison, we did not

SUBMITTER: Thaler L 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3102086 | biostudies-literature | 2011

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature