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A comment on Deaf girl is cured in world first gene therapy trial. Parent comment

Re:Deaf girl is cured in world first gene therapy trial by trebligdivad on Thursday May 09, 2024 @01:45PM (#40310776)
The 'though it'd probably take a while for the brain to understand the new information' is an interesting question; on one hand people say you need to fix stuff early in development while the brain is still very plastic (so great for this kid); but then again there is that demo of people getting used to vertically flipped vision with weird glasses; so perhaps something is flexible?
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Re:Deaf girl is cured in world first gene therapy trial by wizzwizz4 on Thursday May 09, 2024 @02:11PM (#40311111)
The brain is good at re-mapping things where it can make a distinction, but it seems to only learn distinctions in so-called "critical periods". See doi:10.1038/228477a0 for a famous 1970s experiment on the subject.
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Re:Deaf girl is cured in world first gene therapy trial by lupire on Thursday May 09, 2024 @04:27PM (#40312622)
There are lots of examples. Phonemes for language and are a very common example of things that can't be learned easily or at all later in life.

But huge changes like a major color might overcome that. Humans learn to recognize new major objects they've never seen before.

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Re:Deaf girl is cured in world first gene therapy trial by wizzwizz4 on Thursday May 09, 2024 @08:04PM (#40314212)
Humans can learn to recognise new sensory modalities, too (see paragraph 4 of doi:10.3389/fnhum.2019.00443's introduction) – but only if there's hardware that responds to them. The question is whether the visual cortex is capable of making the distinctions.

If colourblindness glasses (e.g. EnChroma®) work for you, then I suppose the answer is trivially "yes, because it already does" – and we should expect gene therapy to be useful. If there are people for whom those glasses don't do anything at all, I'd be more cautious.

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Re:Deaf girl is cured in world first gene therapy trial by adgjlsfhk1 on Thursday May 09, 2024 @01:53PM (#40310877)
yeah I'd be pretty surprised if your brain didn't figure it out in a week.
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