Non-Visual Processing in the Visual Cortex

Are there areas of the cerebral cortex purely devoted to vision? Or can the "visual" cortex, under some conditions, respond to sounds? Two papers published recently address this question. First off, Micah Murray and colleagues of Switzerland discuss The multisensory function of primary visual cortex in humans in a review paper published in Neuropsychologia. They criticize the conventional view that the primary visual cortex (in the occipital lobe) is little more than a reception point for signals coming from the eyes, via the optic nerve and thalamus. Instead, Murray et al. say, these parts of the brain also receive input from other sensory modalities - e.g. from the auditory cortex: