This is Dr. Lisa Randall, a Harvard scientist and world expert on cosmology and theoretical physics. She was the first tenured female in the physics department at Princeton, Harvard and MIT, just in case you were wondering how awesome she really is. She works on one of the competing models of string theory (eeee, it is even named after her, called the Randall-Sundrum Model). She will be speaking at the Linus Pauling Memorial Series in Portland, OR this Tuesday evening.
Check out this New York Times article about her and her new book titled Knocking on Heaven’s Door: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/09/books/review/knocking-on-heavens-door-by-lisa-randall-book-review.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&ref=science
Congenitally blind people use the visual part of their brains (the occipital cortex) for language. It goes to show you how brain real estate is super valuable. One prediction that we can make from this finding is that “a blind individual would be more resilient to brain damage to classic language regions,” says Marina Bedny, a researcher at MIT.
SO, if you like to ride motorcycles and then crash and the injuries to your brain are primarily in the language regions, well let’s hope that you were blind to begin with so that you can still talk and put together sentences.
