Saturday, August 20, 2011

by Gerd Schwerhoff (In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung vom 10.08.2011. S.N5)

"A scientific text has often hardly more reader than authors. The anthologies to conferences bind the energy of the scientist and shorten its view. A suggestion on the delimitation of the publication illusion."
read the whole article at FAZ.net (in German)
read a short wrap-up at iuwis (in German)

Tuesday, July 12, 2011

Media Coverage about Tactile Maps

This entry is supposed to function as a list of links to ressources and blog reports about tactile maps on the web.

In a broader sense tactile maps could be everything material that is explored with the fingers and that holds an analogy to the spatial world, for example

Some radio reports, like this and this (from 2008), have investigated the topic of tactile maps and how they could help in navigating as well. Sometimes you can find a newspaper article on the topic (from 2006). Some papers I have read as well are introduced in ajfowler's blog. Jonathan Crowe's blog about maps featured several articles on tactile maps: most notably A View of Prague for the Blind and Maps for the Visually Impaired (from 2007). Some universities have founded research groups and report about it.

Friday, June 17, 2011

Follow-up on Echolocation

As follow-up to my last post about echolocation and the plasticity of the brain the topic 'echolocation' seems to be a hot one right now. Apart from the scientific article mentioned already in that post, there are main stream media like the German Spiegel that report about those findings and their implications. Three articles and one video might be interesting to read for those how speak German:

Akustisches Sehen - Forscher bringt Menschen Echo-Ortung bei

Hirnforschung - Wie sich Blinde per Echoortung orientieren

Wahrnehmung - Die Fledermausmädchen

Fledermauseffekt - Wie Blinde mit den Ohren sehen

Auf dem Hintergrund meiner eigenen Arbeiten zu taktilen Karten kann ich eine Beobachtung, die auch in den Artikeln geschildert wird, bestätigen: die menschliche Wahrnehmung und Interpretation der Umwelt stellt sich auf die Sinne um, die zur Verfügung stehen, so dass man auch als Sehender erstaunlich schnell lernen kann, seinem z.B. Tastsinn zu vertrauen. Physiologisch ist der Tastsinn eines Sehenden und eines Blinden vergleichbar gut (bei Blinden entwickeln sich nicht auf einmal mehr Rezeptoren in der Haut), allein die kortikalen Strukturen zur Verarbeitung der Sinnesreize sind verändert. Das zeigen die o.g. Erfahrungsberichte über Echolokalisation und die Untersuchungen zur neuronalen Plastizität des Gehirns sehr anschaulich.

Auch die Interpretation von Geruchsempfindungen kann ein Niveau erreichen, das Menschen, die ganz von visuellen Reize eingenommen werden, ungewöhnlich erscheint.

Friday, May 27, 2011

Neuro-physiological plasticity: New study on echolocation

A small number of blind people are adept at echolocating silent objects simply by producing mouth clicks and listening to the returning echoes. The neural architecture underlying the ability of aid-free human echolocation has been recently investigated in a study published in PLoS ONE. The authors conclude that "the findings suggest that processing of click-echoes recruits brain regions typically devoted to vision rather than audition in both early and late blind echolocation experts." "The study is a first step in understanding how the brain processes an ability that seemingly melds sound and sight." (Source: Article "Blind People 'See' Shapes, Navigate Using Echoes" on livescience.com)

The study is another brick in the foundation to the concept of brainplasticity or neuro(nal)plasticity (aka neuro-physiological plasticity). It basically says that the brain is able to reorganize itself on the physiological level to assign particular brain areas to functions for which they were not used before or for which they are not used for in other humans. In 2009 and in 2010 fantastic documentaries picturing the ideas from Norman Doidge's book were aired on German Arte TV respectively on Canadian CBC ("Neustart im Kopf" and "Changing your mind"/"The brain that changes itself") that showed how powerful that concept is and what it can mean to disabled people, both in terms of overcoming physical and mental disabilities. It takes a lot of training but you can teach your brain to build up neural connections that eventually can overtake the function of some damaged area or strengthen the function of existing areas.

For more information get Norman Doidge's book or have a look into the Google Scholar for papers on the topic.