Expertsin the Netherlands Show That a Blind Man's Eyes Can Help Him Navigate - by Rob Stein
After two strokes, he was completely blind, dependent on his cane and his wife's arm to safely walk down the street. But researchers had a hunch: They suspected that, unconsciously, the man might be sensing the world around him through his eyes better than anyone realized. "We were so excited," said Beatrice de Gelder, a cognitive neuroscientist at Tilburg University in the Netherlands and Harvard Medical School, who reports the experiment today in the journal Current Biology. "It was really quite amazing to see."
The first-of-its-kind case is providing doctors with new insights into how vision works, suggesting that even when the brain's primary vision centers have been destroyed, signals entering the eyes are still registering. Although no one thinks the findings could help make the blind see, they do indicate some blind people may have hidden capabilities.
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