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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Tags: blind, blindness, brain, mcgill, montreal, MRI, Neurology, senses
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.
October 1st, 2009 at 10:03 am
My son was born with very poor vision which we discovered when we would read to him and he literally put his whole head right on the pages to see the pictures. As soon as we could, we got him glasses, but we had already noticed that he could hear things and remember them almost word for word (songs, dialogs, etc.). He was an awesome student and is now an aerospace engineer. At the age of 25, he still amazes us at his recall of things he hears. I always said that he made up for his poor sight with his hearing and now this confirms it! I just thought I’d share!
October 1st, 2009 at 8:17 pm
Amazing! Thanks for sharing!
October 1st, 2009 at 8:18 pm
…very inspiring I might add.
October 1st, 2009 at 10:27 pm
Amusing how they ask for a website address above the commentary box; how I wish all could be so bold.
Of course it might embarrass MSNBC and FOX to allow knowledge of where to locate motivational writers…hmmm. We can’t have all been drunks and pain pill abusers with decent family ties…oh shame.
Of course we could simply have sexual relations with our volunteer assistants, deny it publicly, only to return and make public apology for being a habitual liar and an adulterer…and all of us can not be lucky enough to shoot our (V.P) duck hunting partner and fly away with 3 billion in oil profits 2 years afterdoing so completely scot free; all while packing the accounts of weapons building cronies over an 8 year (still going) retaliation for the dismal passage of 4 remote control airplanes…and they said this is a free country.
For a few it most certainly is! Tell me something…How long does it take to retaliate anyhow? Is anybody measuring this?
7 years ago I worked 7 days a week, most days working were no less than 10-13 hours…the trade was steel construction, fabrication, and repair. I worked with industrial coating, tensile cabling, various activities within communication tower, bridges, and steel superstructures in general. I many times was involved in the engineering of the work I later performed.
They say all good things must come to an end.
I was very busy to put it mildly. I gave up writing in my teens, and took up generating income. Then, one fine morning, August 2003, I awoke with ‘left peripheral numbness’…it was a Tuesday. I jogged, like usual the morning before; I since to never jog again…my running shoes are now on the platforms of a wheelchair.
This was later found to have been my first ‘clinical attack’ of Multiple Sclerosis. It took nearly 16 months to finally receive the written diagnosis…yep, on paper, University of MD. Hospital in Baltimore, MD.
Life as I’d known it was gone. What I didn’t know didn’t hurt me…hugh?
All of this is not to compose, or even attempt to compose some type of ‘moral pity’ by a group of spectators…and unlike Mr. Bush…you actually do ‘Have my word on it.’
I doubt he could have correctly written that line without his buckshot buddy. What became of him anyway? We see lots of the pedifile these days…oh shoot, that’s right, I’m a citizen…better not have an opinion! I might start to look like one of those mobsters at a tea-party!
You know, the ones who don’t hit one another with 4×4’s! Those pesky folks who work for a living and actually PAY their taxes.
Either way, don’t let me bore ya with fanaticism! The ‘myth’ about heightening sensory perception is ABSOLUTELY NOT A MYTH (!), it is 199 and 99/100% TRUE!
As I was structurally weakened by MS my mental faculties began an incline beyond any other I had ever recognized anywhere within the various engineering fields I was prior very coordinated within. It has been simply staggering, and incomprehensible, the gains in my IQ and comprehension/cognitive abilities. I picked up the pen, in hands that once worked a cathead, a welding rod, and a wrench. I climb 500 feet every day on my computer now.
Life took away my skis, my jogging, my dirtbike, my career…countless things by which I carelessly defined ME as. These THINGS were not me at all; they were what life accepted me as doing well at, therefore they BECAME me.
A ‘handicap’, or the loss of sensory perception (sight, touch, speech, hearing), even to have been born lacking a particular sense of perception are one and the same. Something was theived by most times a quite faceless marauder…heightened perception in all remaining faculties is general protection; an offset of the adrenal (fight or flight) system. Something will remain armed in any central system, handicapped or not, regardless of the species; if to be COMPLETELY unarmed, the next stop is death.
As humans, the factor of intelligence gives us fear…death is somewhere we simply (well most) fear to go!
This horrid fear, along with baseline intelligence (assuming we possess average IQ) is why, or mainly why, sensory perception tends to enhance in unaffected areas of our physical/psychological being.
This incredible phenomenom occured with me, I KNOW. I never use to think/write/research quite like I do today. I never analyzed people as well as I do now, NO WAY! Give me an hour and I see rite thru you; I easily provide countless variations for viewing multiple topics; I lost my rights to engineer metals, leaving me now to re-engineer me. I was not as abrupt and cleverly brutal in my past life; and I simply never read deception/reality this clear.
All now as it be today, Multiple Sclerosis took many things…but each ‘plant’ it pulled, it dropped a seed.
This is so NOT A MYTH!!