Flickr, grantlairdjrThe brains of deaf people reorganize not only to compensate for the loss of hearing, but also to process language from visual stimuli—sign language, according to a study published today (February 12) in Nature Communications. Despite this reorganization for interpreting visual language, however, language processing is still completed in the same brain region.
“The new paper really dissected the difference between hand movements being a visual stimulus, and cognitive components of language,” said Alex Meredith, a neurobiologist at Virginia Commonwealth University, who was not involved in the study.
The brain devotes different areas to interpreting various sensory stimuli, such as visual or auditory. When one sense is lost, the brain compensates by adapting to other stimuli, explained study author Velia Cardin of University College London and Linköping University in Sweden. In deaf people, for example, “the part of the brain that before was doing audition adapts to be doing something else, which is vision and somatosensation,” she said. However, deaf humans “don’t just have sensory deprivation,” she added—they also have to learn to process a visual, rather than ...
