<qa>  What is the term for cross-modal plasticity?Cross-modal plasticity refers to the concept that the cortex normally responsive to one sensory modality, when deprived of its usual input, becomes responsive to inputs from other sensory modalities. In blind subjects, the visual cortex processes somatosensory and auditory information. A recent functional imaging study found that verbal memory recall and verb generation significantly activated the primary visual cortex in early blind humans. The magnitude of occipital activation was positively correlated with subsequent performance on verbal memory and verb generation tasks. These results raised the untested hypothesis that the primary visual cortex may be the neural substrate mediating superior verbal memory performance in early blind individuals. The purpose of this protocol is to test this hypothesis. 