Barone, head researcher of a discovery that was published last week in the journal BMC Neuroscience, believes that humans can hear light and see sound.
Barone believes it is the only explanation from his studies, which focused on two trained monkeys. The monkeys were trained to locate a light flash on a screen. When the light was especially bright, the monkeys had no problem in finding it, while when it was a dimmer flash of light, it took the monkeys longer. However when a brief noise accompanied the flash of light, the monkeys found it very quickly. Barone believes that they found it too quickly, if original thinking is correct.
For a long time now, scientists have believed that the visual system focused on sight, whereas the auditory system focused on recording sound. They believed that the two would never overlap, and that a higher cognitive producer like the superior colliculus would combine the two.
But Barone’s work suggests that at times, the two might actually work together.
What they found in their observations of the monkeys was proven in the recordings taken from neurons responsible for the visual processing at the earliest stage of stimulus. They found that, when the sound played, the neurons reacted as if the light flash had been stronger than it actually was, speaking to a direct connection between the ear and eye regions of the brain.
A discovery like this adds credence to watching an animal as it is stalked by an animal, picking up minimal visual cues but hearing the rustling of a branch.
Posted by Josh Hill.
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- MeganMcKenzie
- added this
- added August 21, 2008
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Blind people hear better because they've lost one sence and the others are taking on more of a work load to compensate smell, touch, taste, hearing. same thing with the deaf. as for the moneys and the light and the sound, if you saw a cricket and heard it, you could find it a hell of alot quicker than just hearing it. but as for seeing sound and hearing light, thats just silly. eyes refract light, ears reverberate sound waves, light doesnt make it to your eardrum and creates no audio frequency receognizable by humans. and sound in the eyes, yes sound waves will bounce off of anything, but the eyes have nothing to turn that into a signal that the brain would receognise. so um, might wanna study making prosthetic ears and eyes man, you're on a good subject, but you have everything all confuzzled and hellen-keller-ish.
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- jonny2times
- 5 months ago
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i remember being in the rain by a building with a bell, and when the bell went off you could actually see the waves through the mist. i wasnt the only one who saw it...
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- createfreely
- 5 months ago
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Your eyes and ears both interpret the vibrations of light and sound waves. It's almost the same.
I want to see the waves through the mist...
