Adapting to Blindness

In some blind people, brain areas usually associated with vision may become active in tasks requiring hearing. The purple circles to the left of the dotted line represent blind individuals with low error rates in a sound-localization task; those to the right represent blind individuals with high error rates. The graph shows that error rates for blind people—but not sighted ones—were correlated with changes in cerebral blood flow (CBF), and thus neural activity, in a visual area of the brain. The more accurate blind people were, the greater the activity in this region. (Adapted from Gougoux et al., 2005.)