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Phoenix666 writes:

By early childhood, the sight regions of a blind person's brain respond to sound, especially spoken language, a neuroscientist has found. Working with individuals who are blind offers cognitive researchers an opportunity to discover how nature and nurture, or a person's genes and their experience, sculpt brain function, the researcher says.
...
Bedny, an assistant professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, studied 19 blind and 40 sighted children, ages 4 to 17, along with Massachusetts Institute of Technology cognitive scientists Hilary Richardson and Rebecca Saxe. All but one of the blind children were blind since birth.

They monitored the children's brain activity with functional magnetic resonance imaging while the children listened to stories, music or the sound of someone speaking an unfamiliar language. The blind children's vision portion of the brain, the left lateral occipital area, responded to spoken language, music and foreign speech -- but most strongly to stories they could understand. In sighted children and sighted children wearing blindfolds, that same area of the brain didn't respond.

The researchers concluded that blind children's 'visual' cortex is involved in understanding language.

The neuroplasticity this demonstrates bodes well for our future ability to accommodate and control cybernetic implants. Perhaps we can implant lab-grown mini-brains to supplement what our natural brains can't...

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