[Todos] Invitación charla: See me, hear me, touch me, sensory-substitute me: multisensory interactions in sighted and blind people.

[Alejandro Delorenzi]

Tenemos el agrado de invitarlos a la charla:
"See me, hear me, touch me, sensory-substitute 
me: multisensory interactions in sighted and blind people."

El día Miércoles 4 de abril, 12:15 hs-
Aula 10, pabellon II, FCEyN-Cuidad Universitaria

dictada por     Amir Amedi, PhD

Research Faculty
Center for Noninvasive Brain Stimulation, Beth 
Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Harvard Medical School
Department of Physiology and Program of Cognitive 
Science, Hebrew University, Israel
http://tmslab.org/faculty/?id=15

Relevant Publications
    * Amedi A, Malach R, Pascual-Leone A. 
Negative BOLD differentiates visual imagery and 
perception. Neuron. 2005; Vol. 48:859-872.
    * Pascual-Leone A, Amedi A, Fregni F, Merabet 
L. The Plastic Human Brain Cortex. Annual Reviews 
Neuroscience. 2005; 28:377-401.
    * Amedi A, Floel A, Knecht S, Zohary E, 
Cohen, LG. Transcranial magnetic stimulation of 
the occipital pole interferes with verbal 
processing in blind subjects Nature Neuroscience 2004; 7:1266-70.
See me, hear me, touch me, sensory-substitute me: 
multisensory interactions in sighted and blind people.
Restoration of sight in a blind person imposes 
great clinical and scientific challenges. Despite 
intensive efforts, recovery of vision using 
neuroprostheses has not been achieved. A major 
reason for this failure might be that the brain 
in the blind undergoes profound plastic changes 
and we do not know enough about vision and about 
how to communicate with this altered cortex to 
generate meaningful visual perception. In this 
presentation, I will discuss new findings 
regarding the nature of sensory representations 
for visual (such as perception and imagery) and 
tactile information in sighted and week long 
blindfolded subjects. These studies show that 
interactions between sensory modalities are 
critical to our understanding of sensory 
representations in the brain, specifically the 
occipital cortex. Next, I will show functional 
evidence of robust plasticity for the 
representation of drawing objects in the visual 
cortex of an early blind painter. Here, I will 
highlight the role of Transcranial Magnetic 
Stimulation (TMS) as a tool to assess the 
functional relevance of these plastic changes. 
Finally, I will discuss the use of sensory 
substitution devices (SSD) and approaches in the 
context of blindness. In SSD, visual information 
captured by an artificial receptor is delivered 
to the brain of a blind person using non-visual 
sensory information via a human-machine 
interface. Here I will show that the use of an 
auditory-to-visual sensory substitution device 
called "The vOICe" yields successful performance 
on object recognition tasks, and specific 
recruitment of visual structures both in blind 
and sighted experts. I will close by discussing 
the importance of "The vOICe" as a device to be 
used for daily activities such as object 
recognition and localization and its potential 
use to ‘guide’ the visual cortex to ‘read’ and 
interpret visual information arriving from a retinal prosthesis.

Amir Amedi, PhD



Laboratorio de Neurobiologia de la Memoria,
Departamento de Fisiología y Biologia Molecular,
Pabellon II, FCEyN
Universidad de Buenos Aires,
Ciudad Universitaria
(C1428EHA)
Argentina.

delorenzi en fbmc.fcen.uba.ar
Phone: 54-11-4576-3348
Fax: 54-11-4576-3447


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