Brains of blind people adapt to sharpen sense of hearing: study

Now, a pair of research papers published the week of April 22 from the University of Washington—one in the Journal of Neuroscience, the other in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences—use functional MRI to identify two differences in the brains of blind individuals that might be responsible for their abilities to make better use of auditory information. That study found that in the auditory cortex, individuals who are blind showed narrower neural “tuning” than sighted subjects in discerning small differences in sound frequency. The research team showed that an area of the brain called the hMT+—which in sighted individuals is responsible for tracking moving visual objects—shows neural responses that reflect both the motion and the frequency of auditory signals in blind individuals.

Source: medicalxpress.com