Institute of Neuroscience and Pharmacology, Panum Institute, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark.
Prog Brain Res. 2011;192:17-31. doi: 10.1016/B978-0-444-53355-5.00002-6.
Vision plays a central role in how we represent and interact with the world around us. Roughly, one-third of the cortical surface in primates is involved in visual processes. The loss of vision, either at birth or later in life, must therefore have profound consequences on brain organization and on the way the world is perceived and acted upon. In this chapter, we formulate a number of critical questions. Do blind individuals indeed develop supra-normal capacities for the remaining senses in order to compensate for their loss of vision? Do brains from sighted and blind individuals differ, and how? How does the brain of someone who has never had any visual perception form an image of the external world? We discuss findings from animal research as well from recent psychophysical and functional brain imaging studies in sighted and blind individuals that shed some new light on the answers to these questions.
视觉在我们如何表示和与周围世界交互方面起着核心作用。大致来说，灵长类动物的皮质表面有大约三分之一涉及视觉过程。因此，无论是在出生时还是以后失去视力，都会对大脑组织以及对感知和应对世界的方式产生深远的影响。在本章中，我们提出了一些关键问题。盲人是否确实为了弥补视力丧失而发展出了超常的剩余感官能力？视力正常和失明个体的大脑是否存在差异，如果有，差异在哪里？从未有过任何视觉感知的人的大脑如何形成对外界的图像？我们讨论了来自动物研究以及最近对视力正常和失明个体进行的心理物理学和功能脑成像研究的发现，这些发现为这些问题的答案提供了一些新的线索。
