Working in Movement

The Man Who Tasted Shapes was a fascinating book about synesthesia, condition in which people have difficulty distinguishing between various sensory inputs. For example, people with the condition might report seeing geometric shapes when listening to music, or feel vivid kinesthetic sensations when tasting food. Evidently, something is amis in the connection between the sensory apparatus and the brain tissue processing the sensory information. Seems like it just happens to some folks.

But what about purposely cross-wiring sensory information and brain areas? Not only could that produce some bizarre sensations, it might just be useful. Smart Mobs reports on an interesting attempt at using the tongue as a useful input for people whose visual sense has been compromised in Seeing with the Tongue.

An international team of neuropsychologists has improved a device named "Tongue Display Unit" (TDU) pioneered at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. The device consists of a grid of 144 gold-plated electrodes set in the mouth and able to activate the cerebral cortex, the area of brain normally used for vision, of blind people. In their experiments, blind people were able to "see letters with their tongue."

When you think about it, this is not all that surprising. The first sensory input we have comes from the tongue. The tongue is represented in a relatively large area of the body image representation schema in the brain.