The Science of the Senses: Sight

In Spring 2008, Canadian CBC Television broadcast a four-part series about the human senses, as part of the long-running science series "The Nature of Things" with David Suzuki. The last broadcast was titled "The Science of the Senses: Sight", and aired on Thursday, January 31, 2008, with a repeat broadcast on CBC Newsworld on Thursday, February 7, 2008.

A main part of the program reported about the long-term use of The vOICe by late-blind user Pat Fletcher, and covered the latest ground-breaking neuroscience experiments with her by neuroscientist Alvaro Pascual-Leone and his research group at Harvard Medical School. Specifically, the broadcast demonstrated for the very first time how the visual cortex of a proficient user of The vOICe is causally involved in processing the "soundscapes" generated by The vOICe. Through application of repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS), the functioning of the visual cortex of Pat Fletcher was temporarily disrupted, making that she could no longer interpret the live visual content of the soundscapes. This finding provides strong evidence for the idea that the visual cortex of experienced late-blind users of The vOICe is not just co-activated by soundscapes, but becomes really recruited and needed for processing and experiencing the live visual content as one would expect if they were truly seeing, via sound.

The following 11 minute video clip, excerpted from the CBC broadcast to exclude the parts that are not related to The vOICe, introduces Pat Fletcher, discusses neural plasticity, and demonstrates how application of rTMS to the occipital lobe (visual cortex) caused a temporary dramatic loss of vOICe-based "sight" for Pat Fletcher.

The Science of the Senses: Sight (640 x 360 pixel, 1000 Kbps streaming video)

The full video is nowadays available from Breakthrough Entertainment on YouTube at  "Science of the Senses: Sight" (main section on The vOICe starts at  t=1087). A further CBC video excerpt (not used in the television broadcast) showed Pat Fletcher riding a bicycle again for the first time in decades.

Credits:  CBC Television,  Breakthrough Entertainment; the CBC-TV broadcast was produced by The Nature of Things and Merit Motion Pictures, with Elizabeth Wilton, Michael Fuller and Michael Allder; the neuroscience experiments were performed at the  Center for Noninvasive Brain Stimulation (CNBS) at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School, Boston, USA; all material shown is based on or related to application of The vOICe technology, available free from the web (CBC 2008).

For more information check out the numerous scientific publications based on use of The vOICe, and concerning the above study in particular  ``Functional recruitment of visual cortex for sound encoded object identification in the blind,'' by L. B. Merabet, L. Battelli, S. Obretenova, S. Maguire, P. Meijer and A. Pascual-Leone, Neuroreport, Vol. 20, No. 2, pp. 132-138, January 2009.