Brain Region for Recognizing Faces Found in Blind Individuals

Scientists at Georgetown University have identified the brain region responsible for recognizing basic faces in blind individuals, known as the fusiform face area. While blind people can compensate for their loss of vision by using other senses, the study tested the extent of this compensation by encoding visual patterns into auditory patterns using a sensory substitution device.
The researchers found that blind individuals could recognize basic faces, such as happy face emojis, through sounds. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) revealed that the fusiform face area, typically associated with visual face recognition, was activated in blind individuals. The study suggests that this brain region encodes the “concept” of a face regardless of the input channel or visual experience.
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