Ong, as I’ve argued before, was way ahead of his time when it came to cognitive studies, applying the theory of embodied cognition decades before it was introduced by Lakoff, Johnson, Turner, et. al. Today, I learned of another vindication of Ong’s work on cognition, this time his pairing the visual with the tactile. (( Ong connects the visual and the tactile. Consider, for instance, this passage from “A Dialectic of Aural and Objective Correlatives,” first published in 1958:

Despite his own recent disavowal, Mr. Eliot’s “objective correlative” is deservedly famous, for it provides support for a whole state of mind fixed ona world of space and surfaces. it is noteworthy that by the time of The Confidential Clerk, the symbol for artistic performance is even more committed to the visual and the tactile. (The Barbarian Within, 27)

or this passage from “‘I See What You Say’: Sense Analogues for Intellect”:

A second remark about this list of terms might be that the dominant visualism it evinces is often complemented by tactility. Tactility asserts itself in two ways. First, alongside the visualist repetoire is another, perhaps not quite so large, but sizable repetoire of tactile terms: deduce (lead out), induce (lead in or up), and so on. Secondly, many visualist terms themselves include a tactile element; for example, insight, intution–for the concepts “in” and “out” are tactiley based, deriving from our sense, kinesthetic and otherwise tactile, of our own body. The association of visual and tactile, so we shall see, is due to the fact that sight and touch are at opposite extremes in the economy of the sensorium and thus make up for each other’s grossest deficiencies. (Interfaces of the Word, 135) ))

Today, on NPR’s Morning Edition broadcast a story on research which has found that the visual cortex plays a role in tactile processing:

One interesting experiment with brain stimulation involved blind people reading Braille. Pascual-Leone says their brain scans show activity in places that usually process information from the eyes.

“The question was, is this activity in the visual areas really contributing to the ability of these subjects to read?” he says.

Brain scans couldn’t answer that question. So Pascual-Leone and other scientists tried brain stimulation.

“If you use magnetic stimulation to block the activity in the visual areas of the brain in these congenitally blind subjects,” he says, “they make more errors when reading Braille by touch.

That meant the visual areas were critical.

To find out why, the team did another experiment. It involved waiting until just after a blind volunteer’s finger touched a Braille symbol.

Then, Pascual-Leone’s team blocked activity in the brain’s visual area.

“The subject knows that they have touched the finger, but can’t come up with the Braille symbol that was presented,” he says, “suggesting that the activity in the visual cortex was contributing to the decoding of the Braille symbol.” [Read or listen to the whole story.]