Like inventive electricians rewiring a house, scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have reconfigured newborn ferret brains so that the animals' eyes are hooked up to brain regions where hearing normally develops. The surprising result is that the ferrets develop fully functioning visual pathways in the auditory portions of their brains.
New information can change specialized brain functions.
In other words, they see the world with brain tissue that was only thought capable of hearing sounds. The findings, reported by Dr. Mriganka Sur and his colleagues in the April 20 issue of Nature magazine, contradict popular theories on how animal brains develop specialized regions for seeing, hearing, sensing touch and, in humans, generating language and emotional states. Many scientists claim that genes operating before birth create these specialized regions or modules, arguing for example that the visual cortex is destined to process vision and little else. But the ferret experiments show that brain regions are not set in stone at birth. Rather, they develop specialized functions based on the kind of information flowing into them after birth.