Sensory Substitution Devices Create 'Mental Images' for Blind Patients
From: Medical Design technology - 01/23/2015

Studying the brain activity of blind people, scientists at the Hebrew
University of Jerusalem are challenging the standard view of how the human
brain specializes to perform different kinds of tasks, and shedding new light
on how our brains can adapt to the rapid cultural and technological changes
of the 21st Century.

Blind people reading Braille using their fingers will still use their
"visual" brain areas.

A series of studies at the Hebrew University's Amedi Lab for Brain and
Multisensory Research challenges this view using unique tools known as
Sensory Substitution Devices (SSDs). Sensory Substitution Devices take
information from one sense and present it in another, for example enabling
blind people to "see" by using other senses such as touching or hearing. By
using a smartphone or webcam to translate a visual image into a distinct
soundscape, SSDs enable blind users to create a mental image of objects, such
as their physical dimensions and color. With intense training, blind users
can even "read" letters by identifying their distinct soundscape.

In a new paper published today in Nature Communications as "A number-form
area in the blind," Sami Abboud and colleagues in the Amedi Lab show that
these same "visual" brain regions are used by blind subjects who are actually
"seeing" through sound. According to lead researcher Sami Abboud, "These
regions are preserved and functional even among the congenitally blind who
have never experienced vision."

Read the entire article at:
http://www.mdtmag.com/news/2015/01/sensory-substitution-devices-create-mental-images-blind-patients

Links:
Amedi Lab (with video 17:16)
http://www.amedilab.com

Evolution of Reading Machines for the Blind
http://www.haskins.yale.edu/Reprints/HL0455.pdf