>From:    Alison <[log in to unmask]>
>I am from Sanborn, Iowa.  On wednesday night I was watching a show on IPTV
>(Iowa Public Televison) called The Secret Life of the Brain.  It had to
>deal with babies and how their brian cells develop.  Near the end...
 
I saw that program too.  Very interesting show.  It seems that the ability
to see develops not only from within the brain, but also as a result of
the signals coming in from the eye as it begins to see things.  They
showed a baby who was born with a cataract in one eye.  If this cataract
wasn't removed very soon after birth, then, even if it was removed later
in life, that eye would be essentially useless.  So they removed the
cataract when she was 5 weeks old, and she wears an eye patch over the
other good eye most of the time, which forces the weaker eye to do all
the work and helps to develop it.  They said patching the other eye
wouldn't cause it to lose any of it's ability to see...
 
>showed a painting of a women and her Albino dark-eyed ferret.  I THINK the
>painter was DiVinci?  But they talked about how they did tests on ferrets
 
Yep, I think it was DaVinci.  It's been mentioned before on the list, so I
recognized the painting though I'd never seen it before.  It was a white,
obviously domestic, ferret being held by a woman and it was painted 500?
years ago.  Take THAT, CA F&G! ;-)
 
>with vision and how they percieve any certain thing.  Then they ?rewired?
>the ferrets brain so what they saw went to their auditory parts of the
>brain.
 
They wanted to see if "nature" or "nurture" played more of a part in the
development of sight.  So they "rewired" the ferrets brains so that any
visual signals would be rerouted to the parts of the brain that normally
just deal with auditory input.  Then after some time they looked at how
that part of the brain was reacting and processing incoming visual
information.  Turns out that the auditory-processing part of the brain
was able to learn to process visual signals, but not with quite the same
efficiency as the visual cortex.  So if a normal ferret could see "20/20",
the rewired ferrets would see "20/60", was how they explained it.
 
Karen
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Be Thou my vision, O Lord of my heart
Naught be all else to me, save that Thou art
Thou my best thought, by day or by night
Waking or sleeping, Thy presence my light
                        -- 8th century Irish hymn
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If you love ferrets, check out:
http://www.ferretwise.org
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[Posted in FML issue 3675]