Ankeeta Sharma1,
S. Senthil Kumaran1, Rohit Saxena2, Garima Shukla3,
Vishnu Sreenivas4, Naranamangalam R. Jagannathan1
1Department
of NMR, All India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi, Delhi, India; 2Department
of R.P.Centre for Ophthalmic Sciences, All India Institute of Medical
Sciences, New Delhi, Delhi, India; 3Department of Neurology, All
India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi, Delhi, India; 4Department
of Bio-Statistics, All India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi, Delhi,
India
Perceiving the world without any visual cue in total absence of vision must often be based on verbal descriptions of events (for instance, following cricket on the radio). Congenitally blind people are therefore likely to depend more on memory in general, and on verbal memory in particular, to interact with the world. Visual cortex in blind subjects is also recruited for auditory processing and for nonvisual cognitive functions, providing further demonstrations that visual cortices can be reorganized to mediate nonvisual functions in the blind.