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Human Brain Not So Stupid: A New Study Reveals Something Fascinating About Its Ability

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How do we know that a dog is a dog if we have never heard one barking?

Our brain must interpret and integrate data from all of our senses, including vision and hearing, in order to create a picture of the outside world that makes sense.

However, it is still up for question as to whether “multisensory processing” is inherent and present in the human brain from birth or rather dependent on experience.

An Italian team of neuroscientists from the IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca and the University of Turin has published a new study that demonstrates that the brain’s ability to integrate information across senses is primarily based on an innate functional architecture in specific regions of the brain cortex that operate independently of any sensory experience obtained after birth.

The new research, which was just published in the most recent edition of Nature Human Behaviour, contributes to the age-old argument of “nature versus nurture” and lends more credence to the idea that the architecture of the brain may grow independently from one’s sensory experiences.

Emiliano Ricciardi, professor of psychobiology and psychophysiology at the IMT School, who oversaw the study, says, “We hypothesized that some areas of the cortex, known to process more than one sensory input, may possess a predetermined structure that aids perception of sensory events by matching coherent inputs across sensory modalities.” 

Since this hypothesis is difficult to test at birth, researchers focused on adults who had been born deaf or blind. Any similar brain activity among these people, whose postnatal circumstances always vary, would be evidence of an intrinsic computation.

In order to perform the study, the researchers analyzed the brain activity in three separate populations of people: those with usual development, those who are blind from birth, and those who are deaf from birth.

The particular brain response was measured using Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) as the individuals watched or listened to the same edited version of Walt Disney’s “101 Dalmatians” film.

The study specifically looked at brain responses of blind individuals who listened to the auditory version of a movie, compared to deaf individuals who watched the visual version. The same experiment was conducted with individuals who had typical vision and hearing. The brain responses were then compared

“By measuring brain synchronization between individuals who were watching the movie and those who were listening to the narrative,” as explained by the first author Francesca Setti, they “identified the regions in the brain which coupled information across sensory modalities.”

They showed “that a specific patch of cortex, the superior temporal cortex, endorses a representation of the external world that is shared across modalities and is independent from any visual or acoustic experience since birth, as the same representation is present in blind and deaf participants as well”.

In their study, the researchers offered evidence that this region of the cerebral cortex stores diverse stimulus features and links information from the visual and audio channels.

“In simple words, this is the area where the visual image of a ‘dog’ is coupled with the acoustic signal of the dog barking, making clear to our brain that the two stimuli coming through two different senses refer to the same ‘object’ in the world,” points out Setti. 

How do we know that a dog is a dog if we have never heard one barking? Two cartoon characters play a card game consisting in finding the right match between an auditory and a visual stimulus that are associated with the same object (for instance the muzzle of a dog and its sound represented through the onomatopoeic word “woof”). On the wall, a picture of the brain, in pixel art style, depicts the areas associated with the processing of auditory and visual stimuli (in yellow and blue respectively) and highlight the role of the superior temporal cortex in binding information across senses (blue and yellow). The experimental paradigm is represented in the foreground. One character is blindfolded while the other wears a bandage on the ears to represent the experimental samples and the conditions of the study (congenitally blind and deaf participants; typically developed presented with audio-only or visual only stimulation). The two cards that are flipped artistically illustrate the stimulation used in the study which is the action movie “101 Dalmatians”. Image Credit: Francesca Setti, IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca

“Overall,” according to Ricciardi, “these data show that basic visual and auditory features are responsible for the neural synchronization between blind and deaf individuals.”

This new study “extends results from previous studies by several labs including ours that consistently indicate that most of the large-scale morphological and functional architecture in the human brain can develop and function independently from any sensory experience,” according to co-autho Pietro Pietrini. 

In the conclusion, Pietrini says, “the wider implications are that we should promote more inclusive educational strategies and social policies for individuals with sensory disabilities, as their brains are the same.”

Source: 10.1038/s41562-022-01507-3

Image Credit: Getty

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