Plasticity

Doctors can reinvent how a person sees, not with our eyes, but with our tongue. They realized that to do this they had to have the feeling of touch go through the nerves of your tongue, then up the spinal cord, up the medulla, past the pons, and then link up with the thalamus by a process of synapse. Then these sensations would not go to the parietal lobe, but would go to the occipital lobe where a person normally experiences vision. I'm not sure what this would look like to a person, it sounds almost like science fiction. But if our body basically allows this to happen, plasticity comes in to play so we get used to "seeing" things this way through our tongue. Our body is amazing for doing this, and it must be awesome to know this can happen if a person is blind, they could now possibly have the opportunity to see again!