[Todos] [Fwd: Conferencia Martes 4]

[Delorenzi]

---------------------------- Mensaje original ----------------------------
Asunto: Conferencia Martes 4
De:     "Delorenzi" <delorenzi en fbmc.fcen.uba.ar>
Fecha:  Mar, 3 de Abril de 2007, 8:37 pm
Para:   todos en fbmc.fcen.uba.ar
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Tenemos el agrado de invitarlos a la conferencia:
"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





Alejandro Delorenzi Ph. D.

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