When Blind People Do Algebra, The Brain's Visual Areas Light Up

September 19, 2016 2:08 PM ET

Heard on All Things Considered

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When a person is born without sight, it changes their brain. Areas that usually process information from the eyes get rewired to do other jobs. And now there's evidence that blind people even use these visual areas to do math. NPR's Jon Hamilton reports.

JON HAMILTON, BYLINE: Marina Bedny of Johns Hopkins University[约翰·霍普金斯大学] wants to know how experience shapes the human brain, so Bedny's been studying people who have no experience with vision.

MARINA BEDNY: About a quarter of your brain is devoted to visual perception[视知觉;视觉感知]. And so what we can ask by working with people who are born blind is, what happens to this large part of the brain when it doesn't get its typical experience?

HAMILTON: Earlier studies found that in blind people, visual areas can be rewired to process information from other senses like hearing and touch. That's a pretty minor change, and Bedny says those studies lead to a view of the brain that assumes it can be rewired a little but not a lot.

BEDNY: It thinks of the brain as a toolkit[工具包/箱] with very particular functions, like - these are scissors; they cut, right?

HAMILTON: Bedny wasn't so sure. She wanted to know whether visual areas of the brain could do something radically different, something that had nothing to do with the senses, so she picked math.

Bedny in a team of researchers studied the brains of 17 blind people and 19 sighted people. The team used functional MRI to measure brain activity while participants were asked to solve algebra problems[求解代数问题] in their heads.

BEDNY: So they would hear something like, 12 minus three equals X. And then they would hear another equation, like four minus two equals X. And they'd have to say whether X had the same value in those two equations.

HAMILTON: Both blind and sighted people had lots of activity in two brain areas known to be involved in math, but Bedny says only the blind people also had activity in areas usually reserved for vision.

BEDNY: As the equations get harder and harder, activity in these areas goes up in a blind person. And that really suggests, yes, blind individuals appear to be doing math with their visual cortex[视觉皮层].

HAMILTON: The results appear in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and Bedny says they suggest the brain can rewire some areas to do just about anything. She says if that's true, it might lead to new treatments for people with injured brains.

BEDNY: So if you can't use this part of your brain 'cause you've had a stroke[中风] there, can we help you to use a different part of your brain to do the same function? And that would be really exciting.

HAMILTON: Other scientists who study brain development were surprised by the results. Melissa Libertus at the University of Pittsburgh[匹兹堡大学] says she never expected to see visual cortex doing algebra.

MELISSA LIBERTUS: It shows us how plastic our brain is, how flexible it is. And to see that this structure can be re-used for something very different is very surprising.

HAMILTON: Libertus says now she'd like to know precisely when a blind child's brain starts rewiring visual cortex.

LIBERTUS: In a sense, how long does the brain wait for input to come before it gives up and says, OK, let's figure out something else that we can do with as part of the brain.

HAMILTON: Libertus says knowing that could improve care for babies born with cataracts[白内障] and other vision problems that can be corrected with surgery. Operating on a newborn is risky, but if surgeons wait too long, a child's visual system may not develop normally. Jon Hamilton, NPR News.