Dick,

The first link I hit was *modularity* and well...

    *Modularity* is the uncontroversial belief that both
    the mind and the brain are divided into separate areas
    ('modules') each of which is specialised for use in
    specific kinds of thinking <#cognition>. This conclusion
    is inescapable and uncontroversial in general; everyone
    agrees that one part of our brain is specialised in
    handling visual input and cannot do anything else, and
    so on. (taken from the WG Encyclopedia)

This is misleading, I think (if not untrue!). The visual
cortex handles visual stimuli because that's where the
inputs go. My friend Oscar Vilarroya tells me that there
have been experiments on rewired ferrets so that the
auditory inputs go to the visual cortex and the visual
inputs go to the auditory cortex. Apparently, the animals
have no problems.

With regard to people, I remember seeing an article about
some blind readers of Braille who showed activation in
the visual cortex when reading. This is interesting because
Braille is obviously based on touch, not sight. So, a
proprioceptive process such as Braille can recruit the
visual cortex if there's no competition.

Moreover, in sighted individuals, the visual cortex is not
used only in visual perception. It gets activated when you
imagine visual stimuli. In other words, the visual cortex
is used in conception as well as perception.

Localization of function has not really fallen into place,
though the visual cortex comes pretty close. And certainly,
language is not obviously modular in the sense of
"phrenology/faculty psychology."

Surprisingly, even hardcore Chomskyans such Anderson and
Lightfoot (_The Language Organ_, CUP, 2002) agree that
localization of function is not panning out. (Of course,
they say it's no problem, because they still have
functional modularity to fall back on.)

Joe