PEOPLE blinded early in life often develop better hearing than sighted people. Now it seems they do it by selectively taking over the parts of the visual system that are easiest to adapt.
In sighted people, an area of the brain called the medial occipital plays a crucial role in registering visual signals, by setting the threshold at which they are noticed by the brain. Now Alexander Stevens at Oregon Health & Science University has found that people blinded early in life co-opt this brain region to help detect sounds.
He played a series of sounds to blind subjects, each preceded…
