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(All the subjects in this study had lost their sight between two and 15 years of age.)īut how do brain regions connected to the ears get rewired to brain regions that are normally connected to the eyes? The fact is that most of our senses have some interacting circuitry between them, which is called cross modality. On the other hand, people who lose sight late in life are also less able to rewire their brains, because the critical period during which visual experience can influence this process is limited to earlier years in life. Younger people who lose sight after these connections formed, however, are able to reroute them to process auditory information after becoming blind. This region of the brain becomes functionally disconnected because visual input is necessary early in life to wire up visual brain circuitry properly. In people who are born blind the visual cortex is completely unresponsive to any auditory or visual stimulation. In blind people all this brain power would go to waste, but somehow an unsighted person's brain rewires itself to connect auditory regions of the brain to the visual cortex.Īckermann explained that the age at which a person loses sight is likely to be critical in rewiring brain regions controlling hearing to the region that normally processes vision. Vision is such an important sense for humans that a huge portion of the brain is devoted to visual processing-far more gray matter than is dedicated to any other sense. Normally, this brain region, situated at the back of the skull and called V1, only responds to light. No wonder blind people seem to have superhuman powers of high-speed listening comprehension. Examining brain regions activated by blind and sighted people while they listened to ultrafast speech and laid inside a (functional magnetic imaging, or MRI) brain scanner revealed that in blind people the part of the cerebral cortex that normally responds to vision was responding to speech. Hertrich and his colleagues Hermann Ackermann and Susanne Dietrich wanted to find out what was going on inside the brains of blind people that gives them this "superpower" to understand speech at ultrafast rates. "I can't understand anything…maybe it sounds like some strange foreign language spoken very rapidly." (To hear what speech at 16 syllables per second sounds like, listen to a sample recording the scientists used in their experiments.) "It sounds like noise," Ingo Hertrich, one of the scientists involved in the research told me. The scientists had to use a computerized synthesizer to generate speech at this speed. Blind people, however, can comprehend speech sped up to 25 syllables per second. That hyperactive radio announcer spewing fine print at the end of a commercial jabbers at 10 syllables per second, the absolute limit of comprehension for sighted people. When we speak rapidly we are verbalizing at about six syllables per second. Blind people can easily comprehend speech that is sped up far beyond the maximum rate that sighted people can understand. Researchers from the Hertie Institute for Clinical Brain Research at the University of Tübingen in Germany have found scientific support for this belief. Blind musicians, such as Stevie Wonder and Ray Charles, may excel in music because of their highly developed sense of hearing. Moreover, functional brain imaging now reveals how they achieve their extraordinary cerebral feats.Ī popular notion is that blind people sharpen their remaining senses to compensate for lost vision. Neuroscientists reported in November at the Society for Neuroscience's annual meeting in San Diego that they have found an interesting group of real individuals with such superhuman mental abilities-blind people. But it seems Superman isn't the only being with the gift of quickness.
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Superhuman mental powers, including his extraordinary sense of hearing and blazing speed-reading, are as vital to Superman as his bullet-beating velocity and steel-bending strength. SAN DIEGO-Books fly from the shelf as Superman fans the pages in a blur devouring the information at blinding speed.