>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 [log in to unmask] =================================================== 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 =================================================== If you love ferrets, check out: http://www.ferretwise.org =================================================== [Posted in FML issue 3675]