Blind Children of India Helping Scientists See into the Brain
From: Boston Globe - 05/23/2011
By: Karen Weintraub 

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) researchers are working with more
than 300,000 blind children living in the Indian subcontinent to treat their
blindness and learn more about how the brain processes visual information and
what goes awry with that processing in autism and other disorders. The
research also is leading to advances in robotics, as computer scientists
develop new algorithms for how the human brain sees. "When people succeed in
combining that desire to learn and real health-provision service, that is
fantastic," says Harvard Medical School professor Alvaro Pascual-Leone. In
exchange for receiving treatment for the ailments that cause blindness, the
children are observed, given magnetic resonance imaging scans before and
after surgery, and questioned by the MIT researchers. "In our experience, the
children actually enjoy doing these tests and treat them like fun games,"
says MIT's Pawan Sinha, who is leading the research. Pascual-Leone says there
has, up to now, been no systematic analysis on a large group who all gained
sight after years of visual impairment. 

Read the entire article at:
http://articles.boston.com/2011-05-23/business/29574897_1_blind-children-research-grants-junaid

Links:
Sinha Laboratory for Vision Research at MIT
http://web.mit.edu/bcs/sinha/home.html

Pawan Sinha
http://bcs.mit.edu/people/sinha.html

Opening the Mind’s Eye: Learning to See (Lecture with video)
http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/694