Sensory Substitution

[Michael Oberdorfer]

The current New Yorker includes a story on sensory substitution defined as “…a non-invasive technique for circumventing the loss of one sense by feeding its information through another channel.”

The article features Erik Weihenmayer, a blind man who has climbed Mt. Everest and otherwise learned to navigate his environment. He uses a sensory substitution device, developed by Brainport and based on research by the late Paul Bach-y-Rita, which uses electro-tactile stimulation of the tongue.

The article also describes another sensory substitution approach called the vOICe. This technique, developed by Israeli scientists Ella Striem-Amit and Amir Amedi, relies on an image-to-sound mapping approach.

Another neuroscientist, David Eagleman, has developed a device to assist the deaf. Called the Versatile Extra-Sensory Transducer or the VEST, it translates sound frequencies into tactile stimuli.

All these approaches raise interesting questions about the intrinsic organization of sensory cortices and their neuroplasticity.