http://discovermagazine.com/2003/jun/fea...:int=0&-C=

Quote:I'm sitting at a table draped in black, surrounded by black curtains. Candles, spheres, and unfamiliar symbols have been placed before me. My right hand, arms, and head are strapped with wires, and my mouth is filled with electrodes. I'm blindfolded.

Although this may sound like a scene for a Black Mass, it's even stranger than that: I'm trying to see with my tongue....

"We don't see with our eyes," Bach-y-Rita is fond of saying. "we see with our brains." The ears, eyes, nose, tongue, and skin are just inputs that provide information. When the brain processes this data, we experience the five senses, but where the data come from may not be so important. "Clearly, there are connections to certain parts of the brain, but you can modify that," Bach-y-Rita says. "You can do so much more with a sensory organ than what Mother Nature does with it...."

She has also been blind since birth. Until she met Bach-y-Rita, she never knew how a conductor gestures to keep time, but by wearing the electrodes, she learned the gestures in half an hour. If she eventually learns to "see" these movements across a room, and to understand their meaning, is it useful to call this anything other than sight?

I've been dabbling in nuerology lately, and this is one of the more remarkable things I've come accross. Any experts out there?