Early Blindness Sharpens Sense of Sound

squidfrog writes "Canadian researchers (articles here, here, and here) have released findings that 'compare the hearing perception of people who lost their sight by age 2, individuals who went blind between the ages 5 and 45, and people with normal vision. The test involved listening to a series of two tones. For each set of tones, subjects had to determine whether the pitch was rising or falling.' 'It has long been known that blind people are far better than their sighted counterparts at orientating themselves by sound... this latest research has found that blind people are also up to 10 times better at discerning pitch changes than the sighted, but only when they went blind before the age of two.'"

Comments

"Face Sense"

[SeanDuggan]

Some congenitally blind subjects can develop a "face sense" that allows them to hear and process the sound of their own movements echoing off nearby objects, and thus detect their presence and general location. Music practice certainly won't change that either.
^_^ And as I understand it, seeing people can also manage this mystic "face sense" if they put a little time into it. Try it some time. Stand in a relatively quiet room and clap your hands. Take a step forward and clap again. Notice the difference? After that, it's practice. Yes, it's probably easier if learned from an early age where the brain is more plastic, but basically anyone with decent hearing can learn it.

As for your comment about music practice, that's one of those things I find interesting. I'm missing a cite here, but I remember reading a study that experimented with teaching children in their first few years, everything from flashcards to music. They found that the knowledge did not seem to stick enough to influence future learning except for music. Supposedly, children who started music at an early age consistently tested higher in that area later in life. Also missing a cite for the one study I read talking about how raising a child around music at a very early age tends to lead to a child with extremely good to perfect pitch, with a corollary that cultures with a pitch-sensitive language such as Vietnamese tended to produce children with perfect pitch, even if the child was originally of another nationality.