Retinotopic-like maps of spatial sound in primary 'visual' cortex of blind human echolocators.

ABSTRACT: The functional specializations of cortical sensory areas were traditionally viewed as being tied to specific modalities. A radically different emerging view is that the brain is organized by task rather than sensory modality, but it has not yet been shown that this applies to primary sensory cortices. Here, we report such evidence by showing that primary 'visual' cortex can be adapted to map spatial locations of sound in blind humans who regularly perceive space through sound echoes. Specifically, we objectively quantify the similarity between measured stimulus maps for sound eccentricity and predicted stimulus maps for visual eccentricity in primary 'visual' cortex (using a probabilistic atlas based on cortical anatomy) to find that stimulus maps for sound in expert echolocators are direc

SUBMITTER: Norman LJ 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6790759 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature