.According to an article entitled "How the brain can hear shapes" in the 26
May issue of New Scientist, seeing may depend less on our eyes than we
thought. When you identify an object's shape, a particular part of your
brain called the lateral-occipital tactile-visual area (LOtv) "lights up."
At first this area was thought to be purely visual, but several years ago it
was shown that touch can also activate it. Now it has been discovered that
"hearing" a shape can also activate it (see following article in Nature
Neuroscience. Researchers taught seven sighted volunteers to use a device
called "The voice," which converts visual details into sound, using pitch to
represent up and down, and volume to reflect brightness. They then performed
MRI scans of the volunteers' brains, plus those of two expert blind users of
the device,

.The lateral-occipital tactile-visual area (LOtv) is activated when objects
are recognized by vision or touch. A paper in Nature Neuroscience, the LOtv
is also activated in sighted and blind humans who recognize objects by
extracting shape information from visual-to-auditory sensor substitution
soundscapes (see previous article in New Scientist). Recognizing objects by
their typical sounds or learning to associate specific soundscapes with
specific objects do not activate this region.


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