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

Let's mention

[crmartin]

Ray Charles and Stevie Wonder, because someone has to.

Really, it's great to have a study that confirms the mechanism, but given the number of brilliant blind musicians, it's no surprise.

Re:Let's mention

[bcattwoo]

Really, it's great to have a study that confirms the mechanism, but given the number of brilliant blind musicians, it's no surprise.

I think that there would be some question as to whether it was an increased sense of hearing that made them great musicians or did their lack of sight motivate them to excel in the art of one of their remaining senses?

Not just early blindness

[baywulf]

I once saw a show on Discovery channel (I think it was National Geographic) where experiments were done of braille reading skills. A blind-folded person would asked to read some braille characters using their fingers while measuring activity in different parts of their brain. The part related to visual processing was "quiet" since they were blind-folded.

Then after many days remaining blindfolded, they were asked again to do some braille reading. The accuracy would improve and amazingly enough the part of the brain related to visual processing would show activity showing it was taking on some new tasks. After this the blindfolds were taken off and after a few hours of rest, the braille reading accuracy dropped and brain activity went back to normal.

Re:They are wrong!

[Elwood P Dowd]

If you never use your eyes, your occipital lobe ("visual cortex") is never dedicated to processing vision, and is instead used for other tasks.

Otherwise, your occipital lobe is almost exclusively used for processing visual information. Losing your eyesight later in life won't change that. Music practice certainly won't change that.

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.