Anyone can learn echolocation and reshape their brain in just 10 weeks

Anyone can learn echolocation and reshape their brain in just 10 weeks

Written by Simon Makin

Thanks to human echolocation, a child may be able to ride a bicycle or play basketball despite being completely blind from an early age. These echolocators typically perceive their environment by making sharp clicks with their tongues and listening for differences in sound reflected from objects.

Brain imaging study reveals echolocator experts respond to sound in primary visual areas of the brain, leading researchers to speculate that long-term input deprivation may lead to reuse of visual areas I am doing it. “There’s a strong tradition of thinking that visually impaired people’s brains are different, and that they need to experience sensory loss to gain this neuroplasticity,” says neuroscientist Lore of Durham University in the UK.・Saylor says.

Thaler co-led a 2021 study showing that both blind and sighted people can learn echolocation with just 10 weeks of training. For recent work on journals cerebral cortex, She and her colleagues investigated the brain changes underlying these abilities. After training, both blind and sighted subjects showed responses to echoes in the visual cortex, a finding that challenges the idea that primary sensory areas are entirely sensory-specific.

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The researchers trained 14 sighted and 12 visually impaired people for two to three hours twice a week for 10 weeks. They started by teaching participants how to make mouth click sounds, and then trained them on three tasks. The first two are to determine the size or orientation of the object. The third one involved navigating a virtual maze, in which participants navigated the maze with the help of simulated click and echo sounds associated with their location.

Both groups improved on all tasks. “This study adds to the growing evidence that this is a trainable and not uncommon skill available to both blind and sighted people,” said Santani Teng, a psychologist at the Smith Kettlewell Eye Institute in San Francisco. It will make a significant contribution to the I am researching echolocation and Braille.

During pre- and post-training brain scans, participants also performed a maze recognition task with and without click echoes. After training, both groups generally showed increased activation in the auditory cortex in response to sounds and increased gray matter density in the auditory cortex.

Most strikingly, after training, both blind and sighted participants showed activation of their visual cortex in response to audible echoes. “We weren’t sure if we could get these results in sighted people, so we were really happy to see these results,” says Saylor. She suspects that this brain region not only processes visual data, but also incorporates information from a variety of senses that aid in spatial understanding.

A three-month follow-up of the 2021 study found that 83% of visually impaired participants who learned echolocation reported improved independence and well-being. Researchers are working to make this training more widely available, Thaler said. “This is a powerful sensory tool for people with visual impairments.”