Beiruting News

Researchers have designed a pair of glasses designed to take advantage of this by turning images into sounds that blind people can use to 'see' the world.   

They hope the glasses could make tasks that previously required hours of training to complete much easier, effectively allowing blind people to 'see' through hearing.

The device, called vOICe, is made up of a small computer connected to a camera that is attached to darkened glasses, allowing it to 'see' what a human eye would.

A computer algorithm scans each camera image from left to right, and for every column of pixels, generates an associated sound with a frequency and volume that depends upon the vertical location and brightness of the pixels.

The study was carried out by Shinsuke Shimojo, the Gertrude Baltimore Professor of Experimental Psychology and principal investigator on the study, and postdoctoral scholar Noelle Stiles - both from the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

Professor Shimojo said: 'Many neuroscience textbooks really only devote a few pages to multisensory interaction'

'But 99 per cent of our daily life depends on multisensory - also called multimodal -processing.'

As an example, he said, if you are talking on the phone with someone you know very well, and they are crying, you will not just hear the sound but will visualise their face in tears.

'This is an example of the way sensory causality is not unidirectional - vision can influence sound, and sound can influence vision.'