Livewired Brain #3: Sensory Substitution
In his book on the remarkable change’ability of the brain, Livewired , David Eagleman asks: how flexible is the brain? Can it even learn to make sense of an altogether new format of data it receives? “Would a small electronic chip, speaking the dialect of Silicon Valley instead of the language of our natural biological sense organs, be understood by the rest of the brain?” If that sounded like a question for the future, you’d be wrong. For people whose inner ear isn’t working, no amount of amplification will help. Instead, they’ve had the option of cochlear implants since 1982: “This tiny device circumvents the broken hardware of the inner ear to speak directly to the functioning nerve just beyond it… (The implanted microcomputer) receives sound from the outside world and passes the information to the auditory nerve by means of tiny electrodes.” A recipient of the implant said it took some time for the brain to be able to make sense of the new format of data, but soon h...