Brain doesn’t sort by visual cues alone
Blind and sighted subjects sort the living from the nonliving in the same way
The bird and the feather apparently do not flock together, at least not in the visual processing centers of the brain. That holds true even in blind people, new research indicates.
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A functional MRI study shows that congenitally blind people’s brains distinguish between living and nonliving things in the same visual areas that sighted people use, researchers report August 13 in Neuron.
“I think the results are clear and [the researchers] make a good case,” says cognitive neuroscientist Irving Biederman from the University of Southern California, who was not involved in the study. The results imply that people’s brains may be hard-wired to tell living things from nonliving things without visual cues, he says.