Fact or fiction? Losing one’s ability to use a particular sense will heighten the other senses. Neuroscientists at McGill University, home of the world-renowned Montreal Neurological Institute, set out to test this idea and discovered that in certain circumstances blindness can, in fact, heighten the other senses. By testing blind and sighted subjects for pitch perception and their ability to locate sounds, researchers found that blind subjects generally scored higher, not surprisingly. However, they also discovered that those who were born blind performed the best, while those who became blind as young children were slightly worse, and those who lost their vision after age 10 did no better than the sighted subjects. The theory is that a young brain could be rewired so that visual-processing areas were used for other purposes. And sure enough, by looking at MRI scans of subjects’ brains, they discovered that blind subjects who performed the best were using both the visual and auditory regions of their brains. [via New York Times]
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Dr. Steven Chang, the author of DailyDose, is a staff physician with Kosmix RightHealth. Dr. Chang practices Family Medicine at the University of California Davis Medical Center, where his medical interests include both pediatric and geriatric care, public health, gay and lesbian health, and sleep medicine. Dr. Chang trained at the Stanford University affiliated O'Connor Hospital, and was a research fellow at the National Institute of Health. He holds an M.D. from McGill University and a BA in Public Health from Johns Hopkins University.