Posts Tagged ‘blindness’

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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A European study published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition has shown that eating oily fish reduces the risk of wet age-related macular degeneration (AMD), the major cause of blindness and poor vision in adults in Western countries. Those who consistently ate oily fish at least once a week are 50% less likely to have wet AMD. The common nutrient that are found in oily fish are the omega-3 fatty acids. Researchers emphasize that they are not endorsing omega-3 supplements since this study only investigated consumption of dietary fish. Full story.