MYSTERY OF MEDICINE A BLIND ARTIST BLIND SINCE BIRTH DRAWS AND PAINTS WITH PERSPECTIVE AND SCALE VISUAL CENTERS IN HIS BRAIN ARE ACTIVE

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So he painted Bill Clinton so what? Well for one thing, he has never and I mean never seen him. Because this artist, this painter has been blind since birth! Watch this video of "the blind artist", Esref Armagan as he draws and paints pictures. On the face of it this doesn't seem to make sense. A man who has been blind from birth is able to paint pictures, art works with perspective and scale. Since he has never "seen" a sailboat, trees, etc how can he draw them? Apparently he can "see" with his other senses like touch. As the video depicts, scientists in the Neurology Department at Harvard Medical School have investigated Esref Armagan, the blind artist. The Harvard scientists did an MRI of Armagan's brain and they were amazed to discover that visual centers in his brain became activated when he is painting. In this video you can watch as they give Armagan a test to see if he can capture the perspective in a building that he has examined for the first time with his hands.






"In July of 2004, at the Center for Noninvasive Brain Stimulation at Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital in Boston, Armagan agreed to have his brain imaged in a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machine while he drew with a pencil on a sheet of paper. He explored a set of objects by touch-a coffee cup, a toy elephant, a toothbrush-and then was told to imagine them and draw them all from memory. Each time, his drawings hit the mark.



The blind artist Armagan draws Click the arrow






''What we saw in the scan was quite amazing," says Dr. Alvaro Pascual-Leone, an associate professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School and director of the center. He and two colleagues in Beth Israel Deaconess's neurology department, Amir Amedi, PhD, and Dr. Lotfi Merabet, conducted a series of scans, each time challenging Armagan with more complex tasks. ''Esref's visual cortex lit up during the drawing tasks as if he were actually seeing," says Pascual-Leone. ''His scan, to the untrained eye, might look like the brain of a sighted person."

Old brain, new tricks New research on the blind is revealing the brain's ability to adapt and may lead to new therapies for everything from strokes to chronic pain