
When Blind People Do Algebra, the Brain's Visual Areas Light Up - happy-go-lucky
http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2016/09/19/494593600/when-blind-people-do-algebra-the-brain-s-visual-areas-light-up
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rvense
When people see, the brain's algebra area lights up.

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Practicality
Except that the article says sighted people do not have an increase in that
area when doing algebra.

I tend to agree with the premise of the article, which is brain areas can be
reapportioned for different tasks.

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rorykoehler
I'm pretty sure that I engage the visual part of my brain in those moments
when I truly understand algebra. It's very beautifully overwhelming and
understanding such complex mathematics through visualisation brings about one
of the few moments where I get naturally high through cognitive tasks.

I wouldn't consider myself a very visual person otherwise.

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JadeNB
> I'm pretty sure that I engage the visual part of my brain in those moments
> when I truly understand algebra.

With no offence meant to your self knowledge, and with the understanding that
you were probably not one of those tested and that our (meaning their, I
guess) understanding of the workings of the brain is imperfect, I think that
the point of brain imaging software is in large part so that we don't have to
rely on "I'm pretty sure", and indeed can have confidence even in unintuitive
conclusions.

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throwaway7767
> With no offence meant to your self knowledge, and with the understanding
> that you were probably not one of those tested and that our (meaning their,
> I guess) understanding of the workings of the brain is imperfect, I think
> that the point of brain imaging software is in large part so that we don't
> have to rely on "I'm pretty sure", and indeed can have confidence even in
> unintuitive conclusions.

Self-knowledge is not a good way to divine the functioning of the brain.
However, one could say fMRI is not a good way either, at the very least
studies based solely on fMRI data should be taken with a boatload of salt. See
for example:
[http://www.pnas.org/content/113/28/7900.full](http://www.pnas.org/content/113/28/7900.full)

> Functional MRI (fMRI) is 25 years old, yet surprisingly its most common
> statistical methods have not been validated using real data. Here, we used
> resting-state fMRI data from 499 healthy controls to conduct 3 million task
> group analyses. Using this null data with different experimental designs, we
> estimate the incidence of significant results. In theory, we should find 5%
> false positives (for a significance threshold of 5%), but instead we found
> that the most common software packages for fMRI analysis (SPM, FSL, AFNI)
> can result in false-positive rates of up to 70%. These results question the
> validity of a number of fMRI studies and may have a large impact on the
> interpretation of weakly significant neuroimaging results.

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OskarS
_A functional MRI study of 17 people blind since birth found that areas of
visual cortex became active when the participants were asked to solve algebra
problems, a team from Johns Hopkins reports in the Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences._

Yeah, I'm gonna take this study with a grain of salt. Too many "fMRI studies
of 17 people" have turned out to be barely disguised hooey.

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Ericson2314
I heard the visual areas were predetermine simply because the oculor nerved
terminates there. So if somebody was blind from birth they're claiming that
some specialization might be hardcoded after all.

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neolefty
Biological GPGPU?

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norea-armozel
So you're saying we can use blind people for BTC mining? :3 Sorry I couldn't
help myself.

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jakub_h
That sounds like Audio CAPTCHA.

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veidr
See? Offloading computation onto the GPU was inevitable...

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recurrent
This seems to provide once more evidence for the hypotheses that the cortex
implements some sort of general purpose algorithm. The visual cortex of a
blind person does not receive any sensory information, but just information
from other cortical areas. Perhaps it then simply learns (by reward
modulation) to augment the high-order association that occurs in the occipital
lobe. Interesting stuff.

~~~
aisofteng
>the cortex implements some kind of general purpose algorithm

That algorithm is really just the laws of physics being followed in a very,
very complex system.

Not to be overly pedantic, but when you say "some sort of general algorithm,"
what do you mean? Do you mean that there is some sort of information
processing in the cortex (everyone's cortex!) that could be written down and
named "the process of cognition"?

Perhaps by "some sort of general algorithm" you really mean the mechanisms
underlying neuroplasticity, which are what enable learning and memory and this
arguably the ability to have what we call consciousness?

I don't mean to nitpick (and I don't think I am) but this tendency among HN
comments to try to shoehorn principles of computing into an alleged
understanding of cognition seems to be both popular and, well, unsupported by
any existing science.

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mamon
There is nothing special about algebra in that regard. Ask blind person to
recall some visual memory (from before they went blind, obviously) and the
effect is exactly the same. Or ask any healthy person to close one's eyes and
do algebra - still the same effect.

The point is: our brain does not really tells apart reality from imagination.
The same areas are involved in processing real images comming from the eyes,
as well as internally "rendered" imaginary images.

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panglott
The study examined people blind since birth. But the article doesn't say much
about the degree of their visual impairment—there's a big difference even
between "no light perception" and "light perception only" (where people can
still get visual information useful for orientation), much less higher amounts
of vision.

If the study was restricted to people with no light perception since birth,
that's a very small population, getting a larger sample might be difficult.

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dominotw
Are we ever going to move past this 'what parts light up' stage of
neuroscience? one-trick-pony science.

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DenisM
It's a good question, I've been asking that myself.

I have recently befriended a post-doc in neuroscience and in one of his
lectures he referred to "part of brain lighting up" as a legitimate research
method. So it's not pop-science, it's how the actuals science is being done
today.

The brain is vast in it's complexity, so much so that we don't even grasp the
magnitude of the complexity itself. There are between 10^11 and 10^13 neurons,
depending on the method of approximation. There are 10^4 dendrites (inputs) to
each neuron, and one output (axon). The inputs are analogue and mediated by
chemistry. The output is binary, thankfully, however the axon is fairly long
and itself can go in/out of order based on certain chemical balance along its
entire length.

It's a heck of a job.

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aisofteng
As someone with a graduate degree in mathematics, I not only find the result
with blind people unsurprising but also doubt the veracity of the results with
sighted people. Let me elaborate.

Pure mathematics, at a high level, seeks for formalize some sort of
observable, intuitive behavior in an experientially accessible system and then
generalize it to an abstract degree that is no longer anything to do with
experience. For example, counting pebbles directly leads to the positive
integers, but you can construct the real numbers, almost all of which are
uncomputable and/or transcendental, starting entirely from the integers. When
doing high school algebra, we are reasoning about quantities and moving them
around, so it makes sense that an otherwise underutilized visual cortex would
be used for this purpose in a blind person, especially considering that he
would need to construct a more elaborate mental model as a consequence of
being unable to look at scratch paper.

I would not expect a random sample of sighted people to show activation of
visual or spatial reasoning areas just because math education is so poor and
so many people get through it by memorization rather than employing abstract
reasoning skills based on spatial reasoning - in fact, I would expect
increased activation of areas related to language. I would expect fMRI imaging
of mathematicians, in contrast, to show high activations of areas to do with
spatial reasoning, and perhaps even visual processing. See, for example, [1],
which provides evidence for this hypothesis.

Drawing on personal experience, I learned the basic concepts of linear algebra
by direct analogy to three-dimensional visualization, which is of course
experientially already present. However, as I progressed and studied
n-dimensional vector spaces, I no longer had an experiential analog - and yet
I still use some of the same spatial reasoning abstractions (in a different,
extended and/or generalized way) when reasoning in the N-dimensional case.

My opinion is that this study should have included an experimental group of
trained mathematicians (or at least advanced mathematics students with
demonstrated mathematical reasoning skills), and I again point to [1] for some
degree of justification for this stance.

[1]
[http://m.pnas.org/content/113/18/4909.abstract?sid=fae659df-...](http://m.pnas.org/content/113/18/4909.abstract?sid=fae659df-d2cf-4d4f-bf92-7ed163684721)

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dschiptsov
There is an old idea that the visual cortex involved when we visualize past
experiences or memorized material. It probably has a recall machinery.

With the blind subjects, perhaps, this activity (dealing with abstractions)
has been registered as a distinct (due to lack of sensory input), while in the
control group it is drowned in the noise of normally functioning visual
cortex.

So, it is interesting but inconclusive. Also fMRI can't be used as a method of
discovery, because it is based on very approximate statistical models.
Something is going on there. Well, there always something is going on.

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gedankespieler
If areas of the brain could have any purpose, why are the same purposes
allocated to the same areas in each person? This doesn't make any sense to me.
Of course, brains aren't totally uniform, but the fact that you can say "x
area is used for y activity in general" seems pretty absurd. Or maybe there is
a particular, most efficient arrangement of departments. But surely this can't
be achieved in every individual. I wish studies didn't try to be as general
sometimes - the anomalies are more interesting.

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aisofteng
This is an excellent question, and an unanswered one. I want to add that
functional areas of the brain are not 100% consistent and in fact vary not
only by handedness but also by enough that a neurosurgeon cannot confidently
operate on a specific location of the brain without first verifying what
functionality it exhibits.

That said, the remarkable consistency of the location of, say, Broca's area,
has always baffled me. Human DNA encodes signals that trigger the development
of the neural tube and later the nervous system; that much is understandable -
but how could it be possibly also encoding enough information to consistently
result in similar functionality in similar areas?

As someone that has done an undergraduate fellowship in mathematical modeling
of plasticity in large neural networks (and thus knows just enough to be
confident about being wrong without realizing it), my personal mental model
for this is that a functional area arises in an essentially deterministic
manner based on its inputs - the auditory nerves, optic nerves, sensory input,
and so on; the initial neural network must have no predetermined function and
instead must have its functionality arise as a consequence of recurrent
associations between input, output, and subsequent input, and so on.

That is, if a certain area receives visual input, it will adapt to
discriminate details in visual sensory information, and similarly with
auditory input, and so on - and eventually the only place that, say, Broca's
area for language _could_arise is at the intersection of a particular set of
sensory inputs.

As I said, this is essentially layman speculation. Furthermore, I try to
imagine the computational complexity of demonstrating such determinism using a
model, and it is staggering. There are on the order of 10^11 neurons, each of
which is not only a very complex biochemical unit on its own but also can be
modulated by or modulate up to something like 100,000 other neurons - let
alone simulating the input to such a model.

It truly is staggering. We know so little, and it isn't even clear where to
look to find out what we don't know we don't know.

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ahstro
Does this mean that, if blind people take some drug that has an effect on the
"visual areas", their math gets screwed up? What if you gave them a - for
sighted people - highly visual psychedelic, will their algebra be all weird
(or, weird in a different way than it would be for a sighted person)?

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DanBC
That's an interesting question. I don't know an answer, but I did find this
post about an old experiment: [https://mindhacks.com/2009/11/18/do-blind-
people-hallucinate...](https://mindhacks.com/2009/11/18/do-blind-people-
hallucinate-on-lsd/)

It's very unlikely that anything similar would be done today.

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Undertow_
I wonder if this would have the same conclusion when they're presented with
calculus or other forms of math.

~~~
chestervonwinch
or if, for example, the fear pathways light up when presented with analysis:
"Suppose ε > 0 ..."

~~~
buro9
Joo Janta 200 Super-Chromatic Calculus Sensitive Sunglasses have been
specially designed to help people develop a relaxed attitude to calculus. At
the first hint of calculus, they turn totally black and thus prevent you from
seeing anything that might alarm you.

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moovacha
This really doesn't tell us anything.

You could instead speculate that what we consider the "Visual Areas" of the
brain are more than that. Hence we have been wrong about those parts of the
brain.

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agumonkey
Maybe what they considered visual includes abstract spatial (mentioned) areas,
and abstract distances (n-dimensional differences) are the bread and butter of
reflection.

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pygy_
Also, transcranial magnetic stimulation of the visual cortex of blind braille
readers makes their fingers tingle.

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cee_el2
Would it be fair and/or relevant to say that all areas of math can be
represented geometrically

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thanatropism
I dunno.

There's a lot of conceptual metaphors and sometimes even structure from
geometry in higher maths, but this is sometimes very abstract and merely makes
reference to non-geometric ideas about geometry previously developed.

For example, in the kind of stochastic calculus quant finance people learn,
there's an isometry (like a transformation that preserves size in some sense)
between two very different kinds of continuous, non-enumerable spaces.
Geometric intuition is of no help there -- you did learn what an isometry was
in high school so you know the word, but you can't _see_ function spaces in
any way, shape or fashion.

OTOH what I'm working on for my dissertation is "geometric integrators" for
certain kinds of differential equations where the isometries and references to
geometry are more direct; basically, the most common numerical solvers for
initial value problems in ODEs preserve certain invariants and are useful for
many many problems, but sometimes you want computation to preserve some sense
of volume -- clasically, in mechanics. So even though many problems are too
abstract to be seen, the notion of volume conservation is the best way to
acquire the basic notions of the field.

~~~
cee_el2
[https://www.quantamagazine.org/20130917-a-jewel-at-the-
heart...](https://www.quantamagazine.org/20130917-a-jewel-at-the-heart-of-
quantum-physics/)

To even hint that the above breakthrough could possibly be relevant to this
thread's subject would qualify as a form of quantum mysticism, wouldn't it ?

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gcr
Do underused brain areas adapt to different tasks? If so, isn't this an
expected result?

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lotsoflumens
What happens when a dead salmon does algebra?

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disc1300
Didn't even mention if their performance was better/worse. What area of the
brain lit up when I read this article? The BS detector...

