Brains can ‘see’, even without looking, say Leuven researchers

The researchers from KU Leuven’s Laboratory of Biological Psychology, who published their findings in the PNAS journal, focused on the area of the brain that categorises visual observations. Like a map, this area is divided into smaller parts, each of which recognises a particular category of observations: faces, body parts, scenes and objects.

To explore the role that sight plays in the development of this system, they asked people who had been blind all their lives to listen to sounds from four categories: laughing, kissing, and lip smacking for faces; hand clapping and footsteps for bodies; forest and beach sounds for scenes; and a clock, washing machine and car for objects.

As each person listened to the sounds, a scanner measured their brain activity. It found that the same regions were activated. “This means that blind people, too, use this part of the brain to differentiate between categories, even though they’ve never had any visual input,” said Hans Op de Beeck, who led the research.

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