A GENTLE caress may help you see better, say scientists in London. Their finding suggests that regions of the brain dedicated to the individual senses communicate with each other in more sophisticated ways than anyone previously thought.
Emiliano Macaluso at University College London and colleagues there and at the Institute of Neurology asked 12 people to look out for a flash of light either near their right hand or near their left. At the very moment the light flashed some of the volunteers also felt a gentle vibration in their index finger. For some the vibration was in the same hand as the light flash, others felt it in the opposite hand. All the while, their brains were being monitored by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which measured activity in different regions.
The researchers found that when the hand was touched on the same side as the light appeared, the ...
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