Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1984
Blind People Really Do Have More Sensitive Hearing, MRI Study Finds
A new study out Monday suggests that losing your sight early in life can lead to subtle alterations in the brain circuitry primarily responsible for hearing.
It's commonly believed that being born blind or losing your sight early in life can make hearing more sensitive. But while studies have consistently shown that blind people do seem to have more precise hearing in some ways, we don't know too much about how or where this heightened ability actually shows up in the brain.
The authors behind this latest study, published in the Journal of Neuroscience, say theirs is one of the first to look at what's happening in the auditory cortex of people living with blindness.
"Previous studies have really looked at the behavioral aspects of it, and we're one of the first to try to tackle it in a more modeled approach," lead author Kelly Chang, a vision and cognition researcher at the University of Washington, told Gizmodo.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by DannyB on Tuesday April 23 2019, @06:36PM (3 children)
I can't know or imagine what it would be like to be born blind. No sense of sight. You would only begin to learn to perceive your environment mostly through sound and touch, to a lesser degree smell and taste.
The visual cortex is a large specialized part of the brain. The vast majority of information you receive about the world is visual. Your brain builds a 3D model of the world around you.
This large amount of machinery for visual processing is demonstrated by the ease of manipulating sounds as a spectrogram. Convert a sound into a 2D image with Y-axis being frequency, and X-axis being time within the sound. By scrubbing the playback knob over certain portions for the sound you want, you can easily visually identify certain frequency components that you want to either isolate or erase or otherwise enhance. Using tools like The GIMP. You can easily "autotune" items by lasso-ing a burst of energy and sliding it up or down the Y-axis a bit to change its pitch. Then convert the spectrogram image back to sound again. My point here is that the visual cortex turns out to be a better way to understand and manipulate sounds.
So if you are born blind, what becomes of all this immense brain machinery?
The people who rely on government handouts and refuse to work should be kicked out of congress.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Tuesday April 23 2019, @08:14PM
Ironically, we are living in a time when blind people have an even bigger handicap because of screens and touch screens, yet the computing power behind these screens may soon really help them navigate the world better than any blind people ever have (Forget autonomous cars, we need cheap personal lidars).
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Wednesday April 24 2019, @08:22AM
If you are interested in that, I've recently found an interesting YouTube channel [youtube.com] covering exactly this, by someone born blind.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Wednesday April 24 2019, @05:49PM
One word, Benjamin, er, Danny... Neuroplastics [nih.gov].
This sig for rent.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 23 2019, @07:36PM
But iron fist season 1 is greatest thing ever.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 23 2019, @11:09PM (1 child)
Ya gotta speak up there, sonny!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 23 2019, @11:10PM
Or, "I see," said the blind man to his deaf friend, who signed back, "Huh?"
(Score: 2) by realDonaldTrump on Wednesday April 24 2019, @12:40AM
They say Hellen Keller had an incredibly sensitive Whatever.